Wait...I Am Back -Why?

 

Oddly, my mother used to ask the same question whenever I walked into the house. But my family is no ones business and I do not care what the police say.

But it is a good question. Why am I now re-opening this blog?

Someone contacted me and asked why I had npothing online about old UK or British comics and kids papers from the Platinum, Diamond and Golden Ages of comics. Seemed odd so asked why he was asking and got the response "Well everyone quotes you and you've been mentioned in a couple books on the subject as the expert!"

I know one book he is referring to and to be honest although he sent all thje links to the sites he had been on my eye can no longer take more strain on the computer (I was up until after 0300 hrs working on wildlife files!) so I left it at that.

After having gone through re-pricing books (the print on demand company is a pain) and a whole host of other stuff and there are just about 200 books on the online store I just got total energy drain when it came to comics and having a PC from 2009 that is constantly failing and a now dead scanner and no money to buy replacements I just sank back in the chair. I guess burn-out after 40 years is allowable?

But I then heard from matey-boy and found a few emails in spam that thanked me for keeping alive these brilliant old characters and not "rebooting" them.  I then realised that the people who steal info and other stuff from this blog are just losers. They want to lie and say its all 'their' work and get congratulated on it (making their readers look like idiots) then fair enough.

I have a couple hundred old Swan albums and other items that give me a smile when I open them up.

Am I going to be such an arschloch as to stop others getting that little smirk of joy?

Nah.

So I am back.

Please leave a comment so I know real people check the blog out and please check out the online store: https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/hoopercomicsuk

THANK YOU

interior of the old printing works of William Walker

1988 View of the interior of the old printing works of William Walker printers of the Wharfedale and Airedale Observer, before they closed down and the business moved to a new office in Boroughgate with modern printing equipment. This printing machine would have been built in Otley, which pioneered the printing machine industry from the mid-19th century.

Michael Kirby

Back in the early 70s I worked as a compositor, at William Walkers in Otley, they were in the main street. with a pub either side of the entrance into the backyard. A general printer and also printers and publishers of the Wharfedale Observer series of papers. They were a very old fashioned company even then,machines were driven by belts running from a shared power source, the typecasting machines had gas crucibles, rather than the more modern electric onesthat every other printer then had. 

They used to print 'magic painting', tracing and other toy books, with the little lad (striding across the globe, with a teddy orbook in his hand) logo on the back. They had hundreds of thousands of magic painting books in stock, unfortunately, it was a very old damp warehouse,and virtually all of the colours had run, making them worthless, but nobody seemed to mind. The boss's son, who was in his late fifties whould have preferedto be a pig farmer, so he did not have much interest in how things were being run. His dad, Ray Renwick, was in his early nineties, but he came in mostdays to see how things were going on. 

The composing room was on the top floor, and when things were quiet, we used to play a version of indoor cricket, using a slip galley and a rolled up ball of paper. One of us used to be stationed around the corner, near the lift, pretending to cut up lead spacing materials onthe antiquated electric saw. If Ray emerged from the lift, it would take him a minute or two to shuffle the 25 to 30 yards to the comp room. When he passed,the lookout would pull on a piece of string, that ran around the wall, into the comp room, where it was attached to a couple of empty tin cans, alerting the'cricketers'. When Ray eventually reached the comp room, he found a hive of industrious activity. 

I started there in January 1971, when there was quite a lot of snow, another game we played, I think during evening overtime, when we had a short break, involved one person standing out on the street, he would give a signal, and half a dozen or so of us, stationed in the back yard, would launch snowballs over the roof onto unsuspecting pedestrians in the main street.

 In the 80s or 90s the office entrance and shopfront featured in Emerdale, as the 'Otten Observer', where 'Amos Brierley' was one of the local community reporters. I was only there for about six weeks, once the overtime ran out I found a job back in Leeds, but it was a rather different an interesting experience, that still gives me happy memories. I wonder if they are still there?

15-Oct-2008

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H. L. Diamond....It's A Family Thing

  My brother and his partner are looking into the family history. As you might expect from Hoopers and Cases there are a few mysteries and odd goings on. However I was then told that there was an Olive Diamond related to my grandfather and that she was listed as "Childrens paper editor" -in the 1930s. She also lived in Bath.

I laughed and said that the only Childrens papers (comics) company I knew was Henry Louis Diamond who ran Target Publications from Bath.

Thought no more until I was informed that Iwas in fact related to Henry Louis Diamond! I got far too excited for a man of my age. Double and triple checked the documents supplied and, yes, it is true.

So, I guess comics editing, writing, drawing and getting ripped off by publishers is in the DNA.

I own some old Target publications and...well. I am chuffed but sadly never met the old boy who died in 1966 when I was still a youngster but a comic reading and drawing strips in old books.

'Micky's Christmas Day' (Merry Midget, 26 December 1931).

Henry Louis Diamond was a British comic artist, editor and publisher, who ran Target Publications in Bath. As a publisher he launched various comic magazines, including The Rattler, The Dazzler, Chuckler, Target, Rocket, Sunshine, The Bouncer and Ovaltiney's Own Comic. These were vital for offering various British comic artists career opportunities throughout the 1930s. But Diamond was also a rare example of a comic publisher who also wrote and drew for his own comic series and magazines.

Early life and career
Henry Louis Diamond was born in 1904 in Bristol. His father was an iron moulder. Diamond's graphic career took off as a postcard designer. He worked for newspaper The Daily Herald and made his first comic strips for the magazines published by Fleetway Press from 1924 on. Among his earliest features were 'Sweet Hortense' (1924) in The Monster Comic and 'High Jinks at High School' (1924) on the front-page of The Golden Penny Comic. This was replaced in 1927 by 'Pot T. Pot and his Pet Patient, Piecan' (1927-1928), an oddball strip about an asylum keeper and an escaped lunatic. From 1926 on he also worked for the Amalgamated Press, drawing 'Ginjor the Turk' (1926) and 'Rose Budd' (1926) for Butterfly, and 'The Tomboy Two' (1926) and 'Wild West Wally' (1926) for Comic Cuts.

'Pot T. Pot and Piecan'.

Provincial Comics
In the 1930s he briefly drew picture strips like 'Oswald the Odd Job Man' (1931) for DC Thomson's illustrated boys' magazine The Rover, but was mostly involved in magazines published by the smaller publishing firm Provincial Comics, ran by Jack Long in Bath from 1931. Diamond drew the title comic 'Mickey Midge the Merry Midget' (1931) for the front-page of The Merry Midget. For that year's Christmas issue, Diamond drew himself and the magazine's staff as characters within the story. Diamond also drew 'Alfie, Auntie and Annabel' for Provincial's The Sparkler (not by be confused by the Amalgamated Press title of the same name, which started in 1934). Diamond eventually also served as editor on these titles, although Provincial already went out of business after a couple of months.

Target Publications
Diamond subsequently turned to publishing, starting with the weekly story libraries CID (Crime, Intrigue, Detection) (December 1932-July 1933) and Target Library (March-August 1933). In 1933 he established his own comics publishing company, Target Publications, in Bath's Lower Weston suburb. Diamond's former colleague from Provincial, Bert Hill, became one of his lead artists. Besides Hill and Diamond himself, Target's artist team consisted of S.K. Perkins, Harry Banger and G. Larkman. The magazines were worth their money, as they contained 12 to 16 pages, compared to the 8 pages of the Amalgamated Press titles.

Target's magazines
Over the decade, Target launched numerous magazines. August 1933 saw the publication of The Rattler (on pink paper) and The Dazzler (on yellow paper). Both comics ran 294 issues. Chuckler (on orange paper) hit the market in 1934, for which Diamond drew the characters 'Sammy Smile' (1934) and 'Harry Coe, Our Has Been' (1936) before Bert Hill took them over. In 1935 he published Target and drew the first issue entirely by himself. This included the feature 'Tom Tip and Tim Top the Tricky Toddlers', which was also taken over by Bert Hill from issue #2 on. The same year Rocket was launched as well. Diamond was also the man behind the Ovaltiney's Own Comic (1936-1939), a giveaway supplement magazine based on Harry Hemsley's popular radio show 'The Ovaltineys', which came with Rattler, Dazzler, Chuckler and Rocket. The latter featured Diamond's 'Bertie Bounce the Bonny Bounder' (1935-1939), a cheerful chap with big bow tie and little bowler hat. In 1938 Sunshine appeared in print, followed by The Bouncer (sixteen pages for a penny) in 1939. The Bouncer ran Diamond's own dramatic picture story 'Pauline's Peril'. Those efforts didn't last long, because in April 1939 Target Publications was bought out by the Amalgamated Press, who incorporated Dazzler, Sunshine and The Bouncer into Golden, Jingles and Jolly comics.

Later comics work
H. Louis Diamond was allegedly promised an editorial post at AP, but this never happened. He then returned to freelancing, and supplied Amalgamated Press titles like Crackers and Jester with artwork, including the feature 'Buster Button'. During the war he worked for the Admiralty at Lansdown, Bath, while making his first adventure strips for publisher A. Soloway, such as 'Caleb King's Mine' (1943) in Comic Capers. In the post-war period he served as editor for the comic titles produced by Martin & Reid, such as Jolly Western, and contributed to mostly smaller publishers until the early 1950s. Diamond for instance worked on celebrity comic strips for Fizz Comics (1949), the comic book edited by Denis Gifford and Bob Monkhouse. One of Diamond's final comic strips was 'Happy Hal' in Mick Anglo's British superhero comic 'Wonderman', published by Paget Publications. He additionally worked as an Income Tax officer. Henry Louis Diamond passed away in 1966, at the age of 62.

'Micky Midge'.

Let's Keep it in the Local Planetary System: Mars Man and Moon Man

I wanted to make another appeal to blog readers with a collection of old comics -I know, so far every appeal has failed but I'm too stupid to give up.

If anyone has scans of the Mars-man and the Moon Man strips and are willing to forward them to me then I would be very grateful because after 20 years I've still never seen a copy.

Thanks

 

Puzzle solved

I received a response from the British Library which told me what I already knew however one very tiny piece of info opened everything up so Renwick and Otley is now no longer a mystery.

Anyone here related to William Walker of Otley?

"That's a scary old man on the cover!"

When I took the package from the front doorstep the first thing that I noticed was that it was bulky. I felt around the package as I was not expecting anything large (old habits die hard) and after that I carefully undid the package to find that there was another sturdy layer of card....followed by more protection and then...a book!

It was sturdy enough in itself but lightweight. It turned out to be 25 Star Stories For Boys published by D. C. Thomson & Sons.  Now, normally I do not buy fiction books only technical ones or books covering subjects I am looking into so need references. I have no time to read a lot of text books. So why did I buy this one? Well, I thought one of the stories featured art by John McCail but iot did not -just the publisher re-using an old title. Not uncommon.

Here is the book -look how thick it is...

The book size is 11.5 inches x 8.25 inches and 1.25 inches thick (29.9 x 20.25 x 2.5 cms) and there are 190 pp and in those days this thickness of paper was not unusual and books looked bulky!

Cover not in bad shape but as my sister pointed out "That's a scary old man on the cover!" Ahem. A kid that lived a rough life I'd say!

The spine is missing its cloth binding. Nothing really that unusual because even 1950s and early 1960s annuals bound this way can lose the binding cloth. Remember these were books printed as disposable entertainment and the binding on other books read by careful adults might remain intact but, come on -kids!

The frontispiece is rather jolly and not scribbled on.

The dedication page...my camera needs shooting but it's all I have:

"This BOOK Belongs To-
Keith Parsons
with Love & best wishes
from Auntie Nance & Uncle Jack
Xmas 1939"

Below is the contents page

And I know what you are thinking: "He must have spent a fortune getting that book!"  Well, it is over 81 years old and there is the significance of it coming from the very year that the "unpleasantness" started with Germany (no, NOT Brexit! Honestly). My mind asks questions immediately knowing full well that I will never get the answers.  But here we have Aunt Nance and Uncle Jack giving nephew Keith a Christmas annual just as war was breaking out and you can only hope they all went through that safely.

It is not just a book but a connection to human beings 81 years ago.

Oh. Right. You wanted to know how much I spent on this book. Deep breath, with postage...£7.50 or Euro 8.19 and $9.23.  That about covers you for 1.5 US comics today. Bargain. I may read through it more when I get time as I've a lot of publishing work to do but for my collection I do not mind having this book -it all dovetails in with our favourite subject -comics!

No, before you ask, I do not sell on or even think about how I could mark up the price of the book.

Do You Know Anything About Renwick of Otley (no, this is not about Medieval heraldry!)

There are many problems when it comes to tracking down defunct publishers. Renwick of Otley, with an office in Fleet Street it says in the books (probably letter drops) is one such publisher. Nothing comic book related but I have some of their hard back boys' books and to be honest sellers and dealers know nothing about the company. It has taken a month of solid searching to piece together bits and pieces for an upcoming article in Comic Bits

Problems: apart from the printer and the Fleet Street address there is absolutely no information what-so-ever. No date. Also, I have only two that carry inscriptions and these are important in a number of ways.

Firstly: "To Jimmy. Happy Chistmas 1959" helps date it straight away. The owner writing "This book belongs to ---------, 1956" again dates it. Dating is an important aspect. However, knowing that Auntie Joan and Uncle Bert gave the book to Jimmy gives it a sort of connection with tghose people (do not panic -I am not now going to try to trace the former owners!).

One person I bought a book from told me that he had owned it over 50 years and that his gran had given it to him -she having been born in 1878.  Now that is an added bonus for a bibliophile: from printers to shop to purchaser and then on to child.

I had, as I wrote, found out a few small pieces of information from book and online research but wanted to find out more. I thought "Try the British Library!"  So off went an email (I am not travelling by two buses to post a letter under current circumstances):

"Hello. I have several hardback books/annuals for children published by Renwick of Otley. I can find no details of the company and their books are undated ranging from 1920s to mid 1950s. "Fleet Street, London EC4" is one address: therewas an office there likely a letter drop. The books were "Printed by William Walker & Sons (Otley) Limited" that in the books is followed by "Printerdom, Otley". Do you have any information on the company? If it helps their titles included Our Boys' Tip Top, Our Boys Tales and Our Boys Best of All -similar titles for Girls. Thanks in advance -Terry"

Well, when I wrote that email I thought that the books were rare but then realised I only thought so because sellers were saying that!  I felt a real ass when I realised that -falling for the biggest con selling line on Ebay!  As it turns out there are a lot of these books out there.  But today I received a reply from the British Library:

"Hello Terry Hooper,
Thanks for your enquiry.

Since the discussed books were published after 1914, your enquiry is under the subject area of Humanities so I'm transferring it to my colleagues in the Humanities Reference Service Team.

You will be contacted in due course.
Kind regards, "

Seriously. What the--- "undere the subject area of Humanities"??  Before you ask there are several Reference Service Teams but none really explain what they cover. I am guessing I will need to wait longer to be told "We know nothing"! 😁

Wait unless someone out there has any information?  If you have then please get in touch. Like I wrote; nothing comic related just a curiosity to find out more about the company.