Front page of the first issue of The Boy’s Own Paper, dated Saturday January 18, 1879 Photo: Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The Boy’s Own Paper
Jill Allum reflects on a family connection with the first magazine produced for boys
How does an idea begin? I’m going back to 1879. My great grandfather, Ebenezer Henderson Smith, is twenty-eight. There are no comics for young people, but plenty of good storywriters.
Ebenezer is ten when his father, grandmother and baby brother die and three coffins leave his house on the same day. He has to leave school and work in his mother’s shop. At eleven he is offered a job with the Religious Tract Society on the retail counter. He moves up and, finally, becomes advertising manager in 1876, remaining so for thirty years and travelling widely.
Back to 1879, in Ebenezer’s office, he, with James Macaulay, famous editor of Leisure Hour and the Sunday at Home, and WHG Kingston, a popular writer of stories for boys, bring their idea to fruition and write the first draft of the first comic for boys, The Boy’s Own Paper (BOP). To be published weekly, the idea is that it will include sound moral instruction and Christian witness. Of course, it will have exciting stories for boys by some of the other best writers: Jules Verne, who has just written Around the World in Eighty Days, and RM Ballantyne of Black Ivory fame. Later, they will be joined by Arthur Conan Doyle, with WG Grace on cricket and Robert Baden-Powell on the outdoor life and many other excellent writers. The aim is to encourage boys ‘to live clean, manly and Christian lives’.
Well, the first draft has to go before the Committee of the Religious Tract Society, a body of clerics and laymen who meet each Tuesday morning for breakfast and business at 8am. Even with these top-notch writers, the first ‘dummy’ is rejected as being too revolutionary and because it is aimed at a wider market than the normal, narrow religious one. They try again and the second specimen is accepted.
GA Hutchinson is appointed as the first editor of The Boy’s Own Paper and circulation quickly mounts to 160,000. (In 1871 The Daily Telegraph has a circulation of 200,000, far outstripping The Times!) Ebenezer’s job, as advertising manager, is to promote the magazine.
As the BOP is having such success, a monthly bound edition is called for, with a colour frontispiece. To pay for this expense, Ebenezer suggests to the Religious Tract Society Committee that ‘outside’ advertisements should be accepted. This is regarded as an unheard of, and audacious, suggestion! But, as the BOP is so different from the usual run of Religious Tract Society publications, it is agreed that it could be an exception to the committee’s rule of refusing advertisements. So, in 1879, Ebenezer lets three pages of the BOP to outside advertising.
‘Why not give the girls a paper also?’ is the next natural question for these entrepreneurs. This time, instead of preparing their own dummy, they decide to first engage an editor and ask him to produce a specimen Girl’s Own Paper (GOP). Charles Peters, one of the founders of Trinity College of Music, is chosen. He has an extraordinary instinct for the type of paper that the girls and their mothers need. The GOP begins its life in 1882 and soon outdistances the BOP in its success. Both can be bought weekly or monthly. These are treasures of their time and are now collectors’ items.
Charles Peters dies in 1907 and, in 1908, Flora Klickmann takes over the editorship of the GOP. She is already a Fleet Street editor of The Foreign Field, a magazine about the work of the Methodist Missionary Society, and The Windsor Magazine, which is all about Royalty. Flora went to Trinity College of Music and teaches piano to the boys at Her Majesty’s Chapel Royal at St James’ Palace.
This turns into a love story. Ebenezer’s first wife, my great grandmother, dies in 1912 and he marries Flora in 1913 – Eb and Flo come together! Ebenezer buys Flora a cottage in the Wye Valley, so they can escape from London and the busyness of Fleet Street. She calls it ‘The Flower Patch’ and, from the cottage, writes the famous ‘Flower Patch’ novels. Today, they are also collectors’ items.
Comments
Beautiful!
I’ve been a fan of Flora Klickmann’s work for over a year.
Searching for her husband’s name, I found this.
Thank you Jill !
By Buena on 28th December 2016 - 10:27
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