Moderator: AndyB
I think that's the crucial factor, though. Would you have been as excited by the bobbins gift if it put the comic's price up by two-thirds (possibly meaning you couldn't even have it that week)?PaulTwist wrote:And the gifts were genuinely free ...
Post-war free gifts were still in the future when, in the week ending 22 September 1951, Thomsons increased the price of all their four text story papers by 50%, only one week's warning being given. Their reasoning doesn't sound too bad now, the cost of paper had increased sevenfold since 1921 and the company had to pass some of this on to their young readers, but at the time it was nearly a disaster for me. With my sixpence pocket money I was able to buy three of the four papers the previous week, and if I successfully scrabbled together another 2d, perhaps out of my bus fare by walking to school, I could buy the other one. But obviously 6d would only buy two at 3d each. I'm quite sure that some children's thoughts would be turning to theft. For myself I walked up and down Market Street in Lancaster asking people for 1d for the toilet. The corporation used to charge that for the cubicles. Six kind adult strangers later I had enough money for the week. Other stratagems included going round with a trolley, collecting waste paper and taking it to some sort of mill on the quay, where we got paid by the weight of the paper. If you managed to make four or five trips a week, two of us could make 5/- a week each. We did work in pairs because somehow we had to get all the paper up about four flights of stairs before we could go over Carlisle Bridge [British Rail's London to Glasgow route] in order to get to the quay in the first place. I wouldn't have been that excited by any free gift at that age, even if there had been one. For me the important factor was the stories. The thought of missing a week's episodes of favourite serials certainly kept my mind active, necessity being the mother of invention, as they say.Raven wrote:Would you have been as excited by the bobbins gift if it put the comic's price up by two-thirds (possibly meaning you couldn't even have it that week)?
Phoenix wrote:For myself I walked up and down Market Street in Lancaster asking people for 1d for the toilet. The corporation used to charge that for the cubicles. Six kind adult strangers later I had enough money for the week. Other stratagems included going round with a trolley, collecting waste paper and taking it to some sort of mill on the quay, where we got paid by the weight of the paper. If you managed to make four or five trips a week, two of us could make 5/- a week each.
Without wartime rationing, that would've happened a few years earlier I'm sure, as I'm sure those titles would've had page count reductions during the war. That's also how the Beano and Dandy were able to keep their prices down to 2d until 1960 - because they'd shrunk from 28 pages to 12 during the war. At their original page counts, they'd have probably been at least 4d by 1960, maybe 5d.Phoenix wrote:Post-war free gifts were still in the future when, in the week ending 22 September 1951, Thomsons increased the price of all their four text story papers by 50%, only one week's warning being given. Their reasoning doesn't sound too bad now, the cost of paper had increased sevenfold since 1921 and the company had to pass some of this on to their young readersRaven wrote:Would you have been as excited by the bobbins gift if it put the comic's price up by two-thirds (possibly meaning you couldn't even have it that week)?
Well, waste paper was required regularly by the mill so that activity proved quite lucrative for a while but we were children of course so such a labour-intensive activity really required us to be on holiday from school in order to expand such tasks into the time available. Sometimes it was difficult to find any newspapers or magazines at all on the council tip so inevitably we got bored. Also there were other activities that demanded our presence, pick-up games of football or cricket on Ryelands Primary School playing field, depending on the time of year, indoor games like Shoot, Escalado, Trix trains etc, for rainy days, fireworks, carol singing, life didn't entirely revolve around the story papers. Sometimes we spent money on ice lollies or sweets from Woolworths so a decision had to made on which one or two of The Big Five we would do without that week. Fortunately, when we went to watch Lancashire Combination football or Ribblesdale League cricket at Lancaster I got extra money from my mother, which was certainly enough to get through the gate, buy a ginger beer and still have some left over. On an ad hoc basis we borrowed each other's papers. It wasn't always that satisfactory because in exchange for my copy of The Hotspur, for example, I might get to read Adventure, Radio Fun, The Champion and School Friend - that last didn't require a swop because Jean wasn't interested in boys' papers - but I soon learned one of life's fiscal rules - you can't have everything - plus the ability to figure out roughly what had been going on in the instalments I was forced to miss out on. Thomsons were often very helpful because they used the first few paragraphs of an instalment to give you the back story.Raven wrote:So did you keep up this level of industry every week thereafter?
The Big Four did actually go up to 4d near the beginning of 1960, but the page count still varied between 20 and 24 pages as opposed to the 28 across the board before the war. I think we must acknowledge, though, that we owe Thomsons our undying gratitude for the way they retained the bulk of their titles rather than shedding them as The Amalgamated Press did. The issue was never purely one of price but of the sensible use of their paper ration. Ultimately it was in their interest to keep as many titles in print as possible, and of course they had no idea how long the war would last. You are quite right, Digi, that the comics and story papers were reduced to 12 pages, and sometimes just 10, but children only lost one story paper, The Skipper, which was seen as the least successful, and one comic, The Magic. A price worth paying in my opinion for what we were left with and, naturally, what grew out of them.Digifiend wrote:Without wartime rationing, that would've happened a few years earlier I'm sure, as I'm sure those titles would've had page count reductions during the war. That's also how the Beano and Dandy were able to keep their prices down to 2d until 1960 - because they'd shrunk from 28 pages to 12 during the war. At their original page counts, they'd have probably been at least 4d by 1960, maybe 5d.
nigel says on his blog "And then, start saving up because NEXT week's BUMPER Dandy is £2.50 with EXTRA pages and a "free gift"!Lew Stringer wrote:I think it's worth pointing out that The Dandy isn't actually advertising it as a free gift. The ad just says "Prank your mates with our Gross Slime and Eerie Eyeballs".
Next week's cover (shown on Nigel's blog) bears the legend "Plus Loopy Toxic Slime & Squidgy Eyeballs Playset". Again, no mention of the words "free", "gift", or anything similar. They're trying to play fair, folks.
http://nigelparkinsoncartoons.blogspot. ... -like.html
We automatically think of "free gifts" because that's how things used to be done, but this is 2011. New rules apply. Where's me jetpack.
big bad bri wrote: nigel says on his blog "And then, start saving up because NEXT week's BUMPER Dandy is £2.50 with EXTRA pages and a "free gift"! ...
Exactly.Raven wrote:big bad bri wrote: nigel says on his blog "And then, start saving up because NEXT week's BUMPER Dandy is £2.50 with EXTRA pages and a "free gift"! ...
Speech marks presumably indicating irony, though.
Thanks, Lew.Lew Stringer wrote:Exactly.Raven wrote:big bad bri wrote: nigel says on his blog "And then, start saving up because NEXT week's BUMPER Dandy is £2.50 with EXTRA pages and a "free gift"! ...
Speech marks presumably indicating irony, though.
As I said, the comic itself does not call them free gifts, or anything similar.
DandyEd wrote: Just to put our point of view, we have not called the gift 'free', as it isn't. We could have spent more on covermounts, but chose instead to expand the content of the comic with new and original material as we believe this is the best way to build reader loyalty: by proving that we care about our content as much as our readers do.
Craig
