Days of Tripe and Roses; the Daily Mirror Comics Page
- Dave Carey
- 1 day ago
- 10 min read
When I was growing up during the late 60's, 70's and 80's my parents' newspaper of choice was the Daily Mirror. If you were working class at that time it seemed to be pretty much a choice between that and the Sun; the Mail and the Express were both seen as something that were really for those aspiring to middle class status, while the broadsheets - the Times, the Guardian and the Telegraph - were seen as so far beyond our sphere of experience that I suspect they were not always even stocked by the local newsagents unless specifically ordered.
The Daily Mirror was, and still is, that rarest of birds, a left-leaning tabloid, having in 1960 acquired the organ of the Labour movement, the Daily Herald, but I'm not sure to what extent its political stance had any bearing on my parents' reading it. Mum was in fact a Tory right up until she gave up drinking in early 1983 and experienced a Damascene conversion that quickly propelled her to the leftmost edges of the Labour movement. Dad was, by contrast, a Labour voter all his life but not I think so committed that it would affect his day-to-day choices. He just thought that voting Labour was something you had to do if you were working class. A serious reader might have chosen the Mirror over the Sun because, although it was a tabloid, it employed writers with a respectable intellectual heft, the likes of Paul Foot and John Pilger (it was in a special issue of the Daily Mirror, in 1979, that Pilger first broke to the world the horrors perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, having been one of the first western journalists to enter the country after the regime's fall). By contrast the Sun appeared to aspire to nothing more serious than soft porn on Page 3 and monosyllabic editorials with lots of exclamation marks. But again, I don't know how deeply either Mum or Dad read the newspaper's columns or features before heading for the racing pages towards the back.
For my brother and me the main advantage of my parents' choice of newspaper was that it contained what was, far and away, the best selection of daily comic strips ever seen in a British newspaper. My brother Mike, always much more of a sci-fi fan than ever I was, used to enjoy reading every day the adventures of Garth, the time-travelling hero of an eponymous strip that started way back in 1943 and was inspired by contemporaneous space-age action comics such as Dan Dare, but Garth went mostly over my head. There are three comic strips I do remember very strongly from the period which all in their own way contributed something to my cultural development and helped to maintain an enthusiasm for the media of comics that first started with the Peanuts strip at a very early age.
The first was the Perishers strip, the first of which appeared on October 19th 1959, almost exactly nine years after Charlie Brown appeared in the first of the Peanuts strips. At first it must have seemed that The Perishers was so derivative of Peanuts that its aim was to be little more than a British equivalent. A strip whose main characters were all kids and where adults were rarely heard and never seen; the main character a boy and his dog, a dog who is fully sentient and given to flights of fancy; a supporting female character, Maisie, who is sassy, 'crabby', and bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain Lucy Van Pelt in the Peanuts strip. The clear Peanuts inspiration was something that would become something of a familiar trope among cartoonists, in the same way as Tolkein's Lord of the Rings for a long time became a template for aspiring writers of fantasy (I recall, even when reading the early Doonesbury strips of October 1970, noting that they often had a distinctly Schulze-esque feel to them..."I hate my roommate B.D." is the punchline to an early strip in which Mike Doonesbury has been talking about his new roommate B.D).
The thing is that just as good fantasy writers soon overcame any compulsion to rewrite Tolkein, good comic writers like the Perishers' Maurice Dodd and Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau overcame any tendency they might have had to rewrite Schulze.
Visually the Perishers quickly developed a very different look to that of Peanuts. Dodd and the artist Dennis Collins concentrated much more on background detail and created realistic - and geographically consistent - backdrops to his characters' interactions, and gave his setting, a grimy traffic-choked South London suburb, a name - Croynge, being a hybrid of Croydon and Penge. Many of the strips are polyptychs—a single continuous background image is divided into three or four panels and the characters move across it from panel to panel. The realism of the backdrop, with its many small details, make some of these polyptych strips very handsome indeed. Most summers the kids would go off on holiday together and the urban setting would be replaced by lovingly rendered backgrounds of fields and seashore. These settings make the strip unmistakeably English; and while for various reasons Peanuts will always be my favourite comic strip of all (as readers of the very first post in this blog will be aware), The Perishers, with its cosy immediacy, cannot fail to send my nostalgia meter into overdrive. I have walked and lived in locations that look exactly like those represented in the strip.
And it was clear from very early on that the strip would, like Peanuts, frequently enter the realm of the surreal in a way that rivals and even exceeds Peanuts' own flights of fancy, and often in a way that felt much edgier. The non-human characters in The Perishers include: Kilroy, a Teutonic tortoise in a Stahlhelm-shaped shell who believes he is Adolf Hitler reincarnated, has the hair and moustache of the original and holds distinctly unsettling views about world domination; his sometime minions, a Trotskyite beetle called Fred and a similarly hardline (Maoist) Caterpillar who has no name but whose constant smoking has prevented him from progressing to butterfly stage; and a very insalubrious, overly-amorous bassett hound called Tatty Oldbitt, the Sailors' Friend, who true to her nickname likes to chase sailors (though in the strip we only ever see her chasing other dogs). Apparently when Robert Maxwell, a Czech whose family had been murdered by Nazi German troops during the Second World War, took over Mirror Group newspapers in July 1984 Kilroy had to go, and he never appeared in the strip thereafter. It's hard indeed to imagine his character appearing in any strip today, even though we are much further from the horrors of the war.
The strip, like Peanuts, is unchanging, with the characters never aging - indeed, it toys with this convention in that Wellington, the main character, is sometimes heard to comment on their never growing older. Other comic strip conventions are also up for grabs: the kids' return to home and school after their holidays often occur over a number of strips - days or weeks of real time when the strip is daily - meaning that they often find themselves back weeks after the end of the holiday, without any explanation, but there never seem to be any consequences to this.
The last Perishers strip to appear in the Mirror was back in June 2006 but there are many books of reprints available and when I climb into my spa bath on a Sunday evening with a large glass of Scotch for a relaxing bubbly soak I will often be clutching one of said books. The very unchanging nature of the strip and those nostalgic hooks are a real comfort.
The second Daily Mirror strip of the same period that I recall very strongly was Bill Tidy's Fosdyke Saga. Based on John Galsworthy's trilogy of novels, the Forsyte Saga, it tells the story of tripe magnate Josiah Fosdyke and his family. The story opens in the early years of the twentieth century when a starving Fosdyke manages to land a job with tripe king Ben Ditchley whose wastrel son Roger soon manages to knock up Jos's daughter Victoria. Horrified by his son's behaviour Ben disinherits him, leaving the whole tripe business to the Fosdykes. The rest of the strip is mostly devoted to Roger's various schemes to get revenge on the Fosdykes and recover his father's tripe empire for himself.
(I had at the time never heard of tripe but its portrayal in the strip lead me to believe that it must be very tasty indeed. Mum used to occasionally eat it with onions as an evening snack and I remember being disconcerted when I was finally introduced to it. It was in truth less than delicious but I could still not find it in me to totally reject what The Fosdyke Saga had taught me about the stuff - it felt like a betrayal to turn my back on all that. Years later on a day trip to France I sampled something called an andouilette which, surprise surprise, turned out to be a warm tripe sausage. I would like to report that I experienced a conversion and understood suddenly the joy of tripe, but alas it was not so. I took my first bite and thought, with some interest "Hmm, it's a warm tripe sausage". By my third bite I was thinking, "Hmm, it's a warm tripe sausage" but with a rather different emphasis. It didn’t help at all that it resembled nothing so much as a horse’s willy).
The Fosdyke Saga was even more surreal than the Perishers, with the whole story set in a world where tripe was seen as almost a universal currency to be shared with the world no matter what the risks. In one sequence the Fosdykes try to sell tripe in the US during Prohibition but find themselves in trouble with the law when Ditchley floods the market with alcoholic tripe. In other stories they try to distribute their product in Hong Kong and fall foul of the Tripe Tongs there, or find themselves in a backwards, vampire-haunted principality in the Balkans where the lowly ignorant peasants are at the mercy of powerful supernatural entities whose powers can only be curbed by...tripe, which was duly banned on pain of death. It was a wonderfully odd set of stories that are perhaps not fully comprehensible to anyone born outside of Lancashire and its surrounding area.
Unlike the Perishers, and most other strips, the Fosdyke Saga was not unchanging - characters aged and time passed, with the strip running into the 1930's, Prohibition and the rise of Hitler, although it seemed that at some point after that Tidy might have forgotten that the strip was supposed to be set in the past and there ceased to be references to a historical context – the Second World War for example never arrived in the strip.
The Fosdykes had less longevity than the Perishers, running from 1971 to 1985. Apparently their discontinuation, like that of Kilroy the tortoise, was also a result of Robert Maxwell's takeover, in this case for the simple reason that he just didn't get it so clearly nobody else was allowed to either. Happily the whole run of the strip is available in reprints, although some of them are extremely hard to come by and hence very pricey if you can find them. When rereading them there is a noticeable decline towards the end of the run, so perhaps it's just as well Maxwell stopped it when he did rather than letting it run on to become something less than it had been (a fate that arguably befell Peanuts, with the last years really not up the glorious standard of its 60's/70's peak).
I will only comment briefly on the third of the big three Daily Mirror comic strips that I remember - Andy Capp. The strip was created by Hartlepool cartoonist Reg Smythe in 1957 and is still running today, although Smythe himself died back in 1998. The title character needs no introduction to English readers – the lazy, selfish, hard-drinking cap-wearing, working-class Northerner Andy is almost as familiar a figure as Charlie Brown and Snoopy. He’s a character whose vices have made him a more controversial figure than any in the other strips we have discussed; in particular his readiness to engage in fisticuffs with his long-suffering wife Flo, in scenes sanitized in the comic by being represented as a cloud of dust with fists, feet and rolling pins emerging from it, feels a lot more uncomfortable now than it seemed to us back then. The other major difference with the other strips is that there is no surreal component to it whatsoever – no non-human characters, sentient or otherwise, and never a single flight of fancy. Perhaps for this latter reason Andy Capp loomed less large on my horizon and it is my least favourite of the three, although like the Perishers its unchanging nature, the fact that you can read a sequence from 1978 and then one from 1973 and the characters are in exactly the same situation and saying and doing the same things, gives it that same comforting feel now. I suppose this is inevitable for me. Because of the dates of the strips’ origins and their mostly static nature, they always gave the feel of a time that was lost as society changed about them.
All of the three comics were popular enough to be adapted for TV. The Perishers appeared in an animated cartoon in 1979 with none other than Leonard 'Reggie Perrin' Rossiter providing the voice of Boot the Dog; The Fosdyke Saga inspired a stage show, a very underwhelming TV series and a radio series which starred Miriam 'Professor Sprout' Margolyes', and Andy Capp similarly was adapted for a 1988 live action TV show starring Likely Lad James Bolam (and with some of the themes - notably smoking, heavy drinking and domestic violence - somewhat muted).
By contrast, I can remember just two comic strips from the Sun for the same period. Wack, by Hugh Morren, had apparently started life at the Daily Express as Tommy Wack, a lazy factory worker who was in some ways Andy Capp-lite. In the Sun he became a workshy Scouser whose Liverpool context was so badly observed that I, as a Scouser, was completely unaware of it. Still, at least Wack tried to be funny. The only other Sun comic I remember, George and Lynn, was a bit of soft porn directed at anyone who had somehow missed or forgotten Page 3 that day, with most strips merely providing a context in which the eponymous Lynn could get her knockers out. And yet, there are still reprint books available. It's hard to imagine anyone wanting to adapt either of these nuggets from the past for TV.
The Sun's oddest comic was a single panel joke called Bear by Posy, and was about an anthropomorphic bear that was constantly trying to get his end away with human female characters who were drawn in a style that made them look disconcertingly young. It was so lame and so crude that even as kids my brother and I used to mercilessly mock the feature if we ever saw it. We were somewhat surprised to discover some years later that Bear's author, Posy Simmonds, was writing a very different, articulate and right-on strip for the Guardian about Wendy Weber, a liberal former nurse married to equally liberal and middle class polytechnic sociology lecturer George and dealing with the challenges of parenting a large brood of children, a strip for which she won Cartoonist of the Year in 1981. I guess you can't judge. Many of us do things we'd rather not look back upon, especially at the start of our careers, but blimey, talk about paying your dues.
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