When I was Ten

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• Your World of Adventure – in Living Colour!
• High culture and short tempers
• No girls allowed
• Cringeworthy blind spots
• Living in the Future
• Nineteen-sixty-eight (and all that)

Your World of Adventure – in Living Colour!

I am writing this on my eldest grandson’s 10th birthday. What was I doing when I was ten? One thing I am certain of: I was reading Tell Me Why magazine, which may be the source of most of the general knowledge that I have, together with an incomplete Edwardian Children’s encyclopedia my Dad accidentally bought at an auction. Sometimes I surprise even myself with an answer to a University Challenge question, which was seeded in my brain over 50 years ago! Issue No. 48 was published on Monday 26th July 1969, priced 1/6d. Here it is, right in front of me.

It was perfect for this hungry sponge of a ten-year-old brain, with history, science, art, nature, literature and even a page about postage stamps. Just flicking through it I am ten again! Somehow New York featured strongly in this one: NY was on the cover art (“The City that Died of Darkness”) and inside feature about the major power cuts that brought chaos to the city in November 1965 (in the Tales of the Twentieth Century slot); while on the back cover was a potted history of New York, from foundation by the Dutch to the building of the United Nations Headquarters.

High culture and short tempers

In The Lives of the Great Composers, George Frederick Handel first arrives in Venice to play at a masked ball, where the great Domenico Scarlatti is quoted as saying “Why, is it the Devil who is playing, or else the Saxon whom everyone is talking about?” You wouldn’t get “whom” in a kids magazine now, I’d guess, but I wonder if my inner pedant still silently ‘corrected’ that to read “… about whom everyone is talking”?! (This was before I knew about Descriptive versus Prescriptive Linguistics and was set free to enjoy how the English language has continually changed).

There was plenty more high culture to civilise us urchins: under Great Artists, it was part 3 of the story of Paul Gaugin (“The stockbroker who became a painter”), with a somewhat murky full page reproduction of his Landscape of Martinique. But I was probably more captivated by the illustration of Van Gogh throwing a glass at Gaugin’s head! There was a fair bit of violence in the magazine, with Handel chucking a kettle drum at the leader of the orchestra in a rehearsal of Messiah, as well as swords, splendid Ruritanian uniforms and horses charging about in Part 6 of The Prisoner of Zenda (in Great Books). The derring-do was tempered by the imposter Rassendyll visiting Princess Flavia:

… [he] was ushered into the Princess’s drawing room, and his heart gave a wayward lurch of emotion when he gazed once again upon her beauty.

No girls allowed

But looking through the 24 pages, there is a distinct lack of females, whether inducing lurches of emotion or not. Apart from the princess, there are a couple of Greek dancers, Madame Tussaud (“amazingly life-like figures”), a couple of exotic revellers in the background at Handel’s masked ball, Gaugin’s robed women fetching water on the beach, a couple of UNESCO translators with their notepads and pencils, and distressed girls in the New York black-out. And that’s it – oh except a walk-on appearance by Mary Tudor marrying Phillip II of Spain. Meanwhile the guys were wielding guns, spears, swords, hammers and paint brushes. Here are 6 burly blokes manning a lifeboat (in Man-Made Marvels). There are 2 intrepid guys conquering a mountain and 3 gladiatorial hunks killing each other in Stamps and their Stories. And in The Story of Man and his Civilisation apparently all the pioneers of photography were chaps. Julia Margaret Cameron never got a look-in. Oh yes – boys were tops in Tell Me Why.

Cringeworthy blind spots

And there are other blind spots of the 1960s which would certainly not pass a modern editor (I sincerely hope). All the achievements and adventures belonged not only to men, but white men. The few non-white faces were counting “moons” in feathered headdresses, looting on the dark streets of Harlem, seizing power in Egypt or pirating on the high seas in pursuit of “gallant” Captain Joshua Slocum. Admittedly, under Anniversaries of the Week, my birthday was remembered for the abolition of slavery in British colonies in 1833, but in the same breath there is mention of the foundation of Liberia (“a Negro republic…” oh dear). Worse was under Strange Facts with a paragraph starting “Progress has now also reached the darkest regions of Africa and is overtaking even the most primitive peoples.” Good grief! I feel angry now at how casually these racist ideas were presented without question. No wonder some of us grew up so unenlightened, when the words “Negro” and “native” peppered the stories we read and the ‘facts’ that filled our heads.

Living in the future

Alongside the lingering shadows of colonialism were also shiny visions of the future. Science Scrapbook featured the biggest radio telescope under construction in Cambridge, as well as the ion drive, which would revolutionise space rockets, and indeed were already operational in the 60s and 70s. The prospect of computers having “a vast worldwide use” was however confined to the Strange Facts page. But in so many ways even the projection of future technologies was very conservative: we had TV and newspapers of course, so what could be more visionary than a TV which prints its own newspaper on demand? At least they didn’t promise us hoverboards and time travel. There was already enough disappointment in 1968 Britain.

What should I make of all this? Amusement at the clumsy abridgements of great stories and the classic (but very tame) illustrations? Yes. Revulsion at the sexual and racial stereotyping? Yes. But also I am very glad that I was exposed to a wide range of ideas, literature, art, technology, human endeavour. And stamps: I always turned to the stamp page first, and then to the painting of the week. At least it was “better” (I thought) than the ghastly war comics, full of grenade-lobbing Tommies and yellow-livered enemies, or even the oddly body-dismorphic characters in The Beano and Dandy.

Nineteen-sixty-eight (and all that)

These half-remembered images from ten-year-old me have been stashed in a box for half a century. I’m glad to have revisited them and glad that young me got to read and expand his mind, even if there were many things that needed to be unlearned in the years to come. With the benefit of hindsight, history might sum up 1968 as the Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion, the Vietnam War, students protesting in Paris and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and JFK. Whereas for a 10-year-old boy on the Isle of Wight there was the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico to look forward to, and The Beatles’ Hey Jude was playing on the radio together with I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again on Sunday evenings (bath night!) and Thunderbirds was on telly. While I wasn’t timidly keeping my head down through Class 3 at Parkhurst County Junior School, I was probably alone, painting Airfix models and ruining my eyesight. (Don’t worry 10-year-old me, life does get better…)

Now I want to fish out the next instalment to find out what happened to Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda, while simultaneously shuddering at what Gaugin was going to get up to on Tahiti. At ten there was always a promise of adventure ahead, as well as the loss of innocence just around the corner.