Children’s Annuals Are A Golden Part of Childhood

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My Canadian boyhood was enriched by reading various children’s annuals (yearly) from Britain. Such a privilege. Recently I asked around, and found that few fellow Canadians had read them. Perhaps they were only available in bookstores: I suspect Mum bought them so we could know our British Heritage. My favourites were the annuals for Rupert, a young bear with a cool scarf which I envied, in a world with fairies and magic.

Children’s annuals, besides having prose and comics, fiction and nonfiction, always had a maze, “can you get to…?” I suppose they came out timed for the Christmas market, as The Rupert Annual did. From it I once copied, or traced, the plans for folding a standard sheet of paper into a frog that would jump after you pressed down. But alas, Canadian paper was not stiff enough.

Years later, as an adult, when I went to my first English “common,” (park) I thought of Rupert with his friend, Brock the badger, flying their kites. (Say, I found a dead badger off the bushy path: the commons are no longer “common pasture” for villagers to graze their cows, but may be well forested) Too bad I didn’t run into any of the fairies that Rupert always met. I suppose I have role modelled off him, because today, just as when Rupert meets someone, I never feel any need to go through a shy warm-up process: I just start conversing—hoping for magic.

While special features, such as a maze or pages you could paint with plain water, was purposely added to the Rupert Annual, the actual stories had run in the Daily Express newspaper. I don’t know about the newspaper, but in the annual there would be four colour panels on the top half of the page, with something no other annual had: denser prose, “the real story” under the panels, while poetry in italics, “the summary” ran right under the pictures. This is very relevant to me because I can apply it to the Doctor Who TV shows. My mother said the poetry was for younger children who couldn’t read the dense prose, so maybe I can imagine Doctor Who using the same principle:

Because sometimes I would watch the Doctor Who show kill off a beloved character—then very briefly, at the very end, demonstrate that they weren’t dead after all, just vanished, but still alive somewhere. To me the “very briefly” could be imagined as being the poetry for younger readers—I see no reason we older viewers can’t ignore it and be more serious about the character’s death—but that’s just me.

Naturally, there were Doctor Who Annuals. From one I learned the legend of the phoenix, who, like the doctor, would be reincarnated. From another, with a visage of Einstein, I learned “… there can be no space without time, and no time without space…” That line has boggled my mind for years.

I thrilled to a 1964 Science Annual having a picture inside of a young lady wearing space boots, “standing” upside down with a huge smile. This would have been a few years before the moon landings. (The next year I thrilled to an episode of The Avengers, on CBC, from Britain, where Mrs. Peel, wearing similar boots, battled a bad guy in an eagle mask who was also upside down)

The annual included an article, “The Mighty Transistor!” (About to replace vacuum tubes, and then teens would carry “transistor radios” to the beach) A mid-sixties TV show had a chief Engineer named Scott, in a red shirt, exploring an old spaceship, looking at some old wiring and saying, “Transistors, I think they called them.”

I devoured my family’s 1966 Tiger Annual with a cover of coloured cars roaring along a race track. Maybe it had an article on racing; it surely had one on “ring craft” to explain that boxing was more than just standing in one place, slugging it out. I recall, “But don’t try to (get closer to) show your opponent you are not groggy…” I remember feeling a pang that I did not have any earlier Tigers, because it had not one but two comic book style stories of Olac the Gladiator. (I liked the Romans, as did one of Doctor Who’s lady companions) One comic was Black and white, and one was on slick coloured paper where Olac goes to the Greek island of Ithaca. One comic strip story was about a moon base where the humans are attacked by robot vehicles. The men win, but… they never did see inside the machines to learn the mystery of who their attackers were.

Ah, sweet childhood. I can say who did not, in my day, have such annuals: The Americans! Poor guys. Pondering why, I call to mind the orange Penguin novels lying about my house: They always had a line at the bottom of the back cover, “For copyright reasons, this edition is not for sale in the U.S.A.” Perhaps the children’s annuals were copyrighted too.

If so, then I instantly think of the TV commercials for Red Rose tea, with the lawyer saying to the court in outrage, “And they say Red Rose tea (annuals) is sold only in Canada!” The judge repeats, “only in Canada?” The he takes a sip (flips open an annual) and remarks, “ …Such a dreadful pity.”

I was thrilled to learn where the strange 1960’s slang “groovy” evolved from, after reading of characters, such as teenage girl hanging around a clubhouse saying, “It’s in the groove.”

Of course the Wolf Cub Annual (“Cub Scouts” in the US) would have only the stories about Cubs. I remember them using their skills from outdoor night games to hide their pasty faces in the dark when they are foiling burglars. By day they would have an adventure going door to door, and telling an old lady, “We’re Wolf Cubs, doing ‘bob a job.’ I never knew how much a bob was; this was before money went metric.

In Canada, as in Britain, as Cubs we wore knee socks with garters, and our dark shorts were insulated with white gauze like in a sleeping bag. —It was just as warm as a kilt!— Our beanie style caps were like those worn by everyone at British boarding schools, back when bus drivers, milkmen, postmen and so forth all wore caps. Earning enough badges led to first one, then two, gold stars on the cap, as “the cub’s eyes opened.” The triangular scarfs we wore were useful for first aide and lashing poles together. A leather snap “woggle” held the ends together in front. I miss the old days.

One story began with a picture of a sooty man sitting in front of a fireplace. He had worked all night. Now, he explains, if one pushed the right brick, the fireplace would swing back to reveal a hiding place. He roamed England building such “priest holes” for clergymen to hide in when the (protestant) Kings guards came looking. I learned that “priest holes” are still being discovered in old mansions. In one, there was staircase, perfectly harmless if you ascended by even numbered stairs. But if you went by odd numbers… the whole edifice collapsed like a deck of cards! How children love secrets!

Perhaps there were no annuals in America because the Scouts had similar magazines: in Canada we had Canadian Boy, in the States they had Boys Life. I remember articles for photography (no poles growing out of heads) training your dog (‘stay!’) and how to build a survival kit (small, so you wouldn’t be tempted to leave it at home) A story of hitchhiking across Canada to Expo 67 in Montreal was called “(Thum)ting to Sing About”. A memorable story was “Terry’s Big Decision,” where a boy slowly comes to realize, in agony, that his older brother was a hit-and-run driver. At last Terry goes to the police station. The desk sergeant smiles and says, “Your brother was just here.”

I was surprised when my elementary school, built post-war, could finally afford brand new readers: (textbooks) many of the stories were from Canadian Boy. The “generation gap” of the time inspired one of the stories: A small navy ship has a problem with sea gulls crowding the masts and decks. A member of the younger generation saves the day by playing that crazy British Invasion rock music, real loud!

Some decades ago “Rupert Bear” made the jump to the TV screen, as so many children’s books have done, as society grows ever more affluent. Two beloved British puppet shows, Thunderbirds and Thomas the Tank Engine, have gone to CGI (computer generated images) and cartoon… such a pity, says I.

Why don’t North Americans produce such annuals? Copyright? American exceptionalism? A retired US English professor, Michael Leddy, had never heard of them, but he found a link to a British store, telling me, “I think I missed out.” (Footnote) The annuals from my boyhood (except Rupert) are not in second hand bookstores because they fall apart. But recently I found a repaired US annual. Now I can tell Professor Leddy that the US used to have annuals:

Before me is Chatterbox 1924, from Beacon Street, Boston, Mass, advertising that previous volumes, dating back to 1913, can be sent for.

QUOTE
“The acknowledged king of all Juvenile Books published in the English language. The publishers wish again to emphasize the fact that “Chatterbox” is not made up of “rehashed” or old material, but that the stories and illustrations are especially written for the volume, and the aim is to get the best regardless of cost. The annual grows in popular favour yearly and maintains its enviable position as the best Juvenile published.”
UNQUOTE

The front pages, allude to many “series” lost to time, including one about a circus girl, the doctor’s little girl series, and a Boy Scout series. There are eight colour plates listed in the contents, including the comical frontispiece, “An Interrupted Hike,” where scouts in their distinctive slouchy ‘smoky the bear’ hats are trying to escape over a fence, chased by a dog and a fearsome lady of the house, fast approaching and brandishing a broom. Slouchy? In my day we ironed our hat brims, as I’m sure soldiers did too.

The contents page also lists all the full page black and white illustrations, not chronologically but in alphabetical order by the caption at the bottom, such as “Who gave you leave to come into my garden?” (Page 18, a young matron addressing a girl, leaning back in apprehension, holding her big cat) Both are wearing bonnets: I guess ladies back then didn’t go outside bare headed, any more than men did. Poems are on the contents page too, 28 of them, in this book of 315 pages.

Nonfiction articles included the history of various sports such as archery, Harvesting the Forest in California and how to make an elaborate little dollhouse-sized stage.

The cover: Inset in green vine decorations is a white circle showing a boy carrying strange buckets through snow beside a low post with a snow cap. His elbow has a patch, he wears a tweed cap far too big, shorts and knee socks with a criss cross pattern, brown gloves, and a very long bright red scarf under his jacket.

The buckets are of a sort I’ve never seen. Silver, with swivel handles, lids, and little mini buckets, again with swivel handles, on the front of each bucket. I don’t get it.

The Chatterbox is from the year after my mother was born, when an “L.H.,” now lost to time, wrote a poem:

Seed, Indeed!
Tim says they’re dandelion seeds—
Of course, I don’t believe him—
If some one, some time, told him that,
They did so to deceive him.

If Tim would only wait and watch,
He’d find in twilight dimness
The goblins come to gather them
To sweep the fairies’ chimneys.

… …

… …

Sean Crawford
In the Dominion of Canada
(Dominion day was July 1st)
May
2025
Note: Of course our founders couldn’t say “Kingdom of Canada” because our US cousins, in the days before Donald Trump, were touchy about kings. “Realm of?” Technically, we are still a “dominion of,” but everybody just says “Canada.”

Footnotes:
~Here’s the link Michael Leddy, of the blog Orange Crate Art, found.

~Every time I go to London I visit the Who Shop, where the manager told her staff she remembers me. She hires actors: such a vibrancy everyone has!
~The common I visited was Horsell Common, where the first Martian cylinder landed (the sand pit is still there) in H.G.Wells’s War of the Worlds. I went as part of my Martian tour, an ambition since childhood.

~In a tavern, Canadian sf author Robert Sawyer and I once shouted in unison, “Thunderbirds are go!” Thunderbirds are a big part of British culture. The one —(Hey, a feature length puppet movie!)— where they go to Mars, for the ending credits, was filmed at an army base with the Royal Marine band. The music? The Thunderbirds March, of course, from the TV show. Those credits are fun to read…. (link)