Great Britain. Finally both men issued virtually identical papers on the same day: Brett’s
Rovers of the Sea and Emmett’s Rover’s Log (1872).
Brett holds the distinction of publishing the first boys’ weekly printed in full colour.
This was the slightly fabulous Boys of the Empire, but after a year he had to revert to
standard monochrome printing. However, the paper led to another Brett battle. A rival,
Melrose, revived the Boys of the Empire title in 1900, seven years after Brett’s paper
collapsed. Immediately Brett rushed a Boys of the Empire (New Series) on to the
bookstalls, and beat Melrose by two weeks. The battle of the bloods ended with
surrender, and Melrose’s paper changed to Boys of Our Empire on 29 June 1901, while
Brett’s added the subtitle, ‘An Up-To-Date Journal’, as it incorporated another of his
failed weeklies.
The modern boys’ weekly was born in 1893 when Alfred Harmsworth, who had created
the boom in comics with his Comic Cuts (1890) now tackled the story paper field. He
used the same tactic, known as the ‘Harmsworth Touch’. He priced his paper as he did
his comic, at half the current market price: one halfpenny. The Halfpenny Marvel was
also launched on a spearhead of anti-Dreadful publicity. Number one carried the
slogan, ‘No more Penny Dreadfuls! These healthy stories of mystery, adventure, etc, will
kill them!’ An editorial exclaimed: ‘The Penny Dreadful makes thieves of the coming
generation and so helps fill our jails! If we can rid the world of even one of these vile
publications, our efforts will not have been in vain.’ Soon The Marvel (as it would later be
known when Harmsworth raised the price to one penny) proclaimed an unsolicited
tribute from the Revd C.N.Barham of Nottingham: ‘So pure and wholesome in tone’, said
the Revd. But on the cover of that issue was a picture of Greek bandits at work, with
this caption: ‘The gaoler screwed up the horrible machine until the brigand’s bones were
nearly broken and he shrieked aloud for mercy, though none was shown’. Small wonder
a contemporary critic wrote, ‘Harmsworth has killed the Penny Dreadful by inventing the
Ha’penny Dreadfuller!’
Although Harmsworth’s ha’porths revolutionised the market for cheap reading matter
for boys, with smaller hack publishers issuing halfpenny weeklies as fast as they were
able, it would not be until the turn of the century that the weeklies began to settle into
the formula still remembered by readers of what came to be popularly called ‘tuppenny
bloods’. These were the more sumptuous successors to the ha’penny (penny by the
1900s; penny-halfpenny by 1918) weeklies with more pages (leaping from eight to
sixteen to twenty-eight to thirty-two), coloured covers (from black on pink paper to
mixtures of red and blue, to four-colour photogravure), and very often a Grand Free Gift,
which might be anything from a booklet about pirates to a tin jumping frog. The formula
changed from one long story, or a serial or two, to ‘Seven Star Stories’, a favourite
headline of the ‘Big Five’.
These were the D.C.Thomson weeklies, which began issuing from Dundee, Scotland,
in 1921 with number one of Adventure. Instant success soon brought on Rover (1922),
Wizard (1922), Skipper (1930) and Hotspur (1933), with only Vanguard (1923) falling
quickly by the way. Each paper had a character of its own via its choice of heroes:
‘Dixon Hawke’ was Adventure’s answer to Harmsworth’s Sexton Blake; ‘The Wolf of
Kabul’ was Wizard’s empire-builder, and ‘The Chums of Red Circle’ was the innovative
school story in Hotspur. This rival to Magnets long-running Greyfriars, home of the
TYPES AND GENRES 261