HOWZAT

April 14, 1953: George responded swiftly and gave the character a working title: Booster. When the strip started in the Beano in October I found that character’s name had been determined by the needs of a rhyming couplet: Little Plum, Your Redskin Chum. (Curious about rhyming couplets in the Beano, I delved about and found they were part of a tradition that went back to the Middle Scots of Gavin Douglas and Sir David Lindsay in the 15th and 16th centuries.)

In production with Little Plum, I realised that my original concept of how to draw him wasn’t working. To present Plum as a creature of a putty-like consistency, by turns gormless conniver and disaster-prone bumbler, an infinitely malleable set of facial features was necessary. I discarded the Dennis stylised features and we were away.

September 3, and a letter from George Moonie. Wanted: a strip with a female character, The Minx. George asked me to send him several portrait sketches so he could choose one. I couldn’t be bothered with that; I thought up and pencilled the first strip and sent it to Dundee by return of post. George, too, responded by return of post, sending the strip back to me for inking; we were gathering speed.

I made an abrupt decision to create Minnie the Minx as a girl of boundless ambition, and an Amazonian warrior to boot (Minnie’s boot, as I got stuck into the development of the strip, turned out to play a vital role).

Six weeks later, another letter from George Moonie: “I shall be in Preston next Tuesday, 20th October, emerging from the Perth train around 2.51pm. Can you meet me at the station?”

George Moonie emerged from the Perth train around 2.51pm. I met him at the station. We walked to the Kardomah cafe in Fishergate and found a table by the window. Plum had started in the Beano two weeks before; Minnie would appear in December. Over a pot of tea, George asked me if I would create a third set, a two-thirds page, featuring a crowd of children pouring out of school. I told George this was what I had longed to do: what had made him think of it? George looked surprised and pulled from his briefcase the pencil sketch of The Kids of Bash Street School that I had sent to R.D. Low in January: “This gave us the idea. You sent it to us. Don’t you remember?”

I had a momentary feeling of foolishness (for in the nine months since my dispatch of the sketch to R.D. and his offhand response, it had indeed gone from my mind, part of detritus of the past). Instead of The Kids of Bash Street School, George suggested the title When the Bell Goes or School’s Out. My proposal to R.D. had been for a large single-pic series but George came up with a variant: two small intro pics each week of the 4pm exodus from Bash Street School, leading into a big scene.

I saw George off his train, noting that first-class travel was one of the perks of being editor of the Beano.

Starting the long walk along the length of the Fishergate, I had already begun working out the first Bash Street set in my mind. George had asked for a winter scene, since he meant to launch the feature in the Beano soon after Christmas. That meant snow and ice. As I strode, I decided on a frozen pond setting, to provide a common theme of gags and a closely bounded composition where I could place the characters either in the foreground of middle - distance. By the time I reached the other end of the Fishergate and my bus home, I had worked out the gags and comic sequences (but not the individual characters — that would come in the act of drawing). Arriving home, I started on the drawing at once, working on the dining room table. When my mother came to lay the table for the family tea I had to clear Bash Street away, impatient for the meal to be finished, so that I could carry on.

The Bash Street Kids was initially a whole school. When I had finished one of the first half-dozen sets — one was the Army Display, which had the Bash Street Kids defeating the British Army and carrying off the heavy weaponry as booty, with sundry kids machine-gunning fleeing teachers (this was 15 years before Lindsay Anderson’s If) — I thought, I could draw sets like this for years, and the readers would love them; but in the very moment of thinking that, I decided abruptly to change the structure of Bash Street fundamentally. I would get rid of the whole-school concept and replace it with a smaller group of characters, to bring them closer — closer to the readers.

George Moonie invited me to move to Dundee so that I could be nearer to the Beano. I went at the end of November 1953, to live and work in a flat in Broughty Ferry, a three-mile tram ride to the Beano office in Dundee. In the office I encountered Keepie-Up. I had not known of the game before: it was a Scottish cultural phenomenon.

I took my finished drawings to the office two or three times a week, timing my visits for late afternoon, when the working day of the Beano editor and subs was winding down.

At the remains of the day the office furniture was pushed back and we stood in a circle: George Moonie, five Beano sub-editors and me. The Keepie-Up ball was a scrunged up wodge of the Dundee Courier, stitched inside a piece of Scottish tweed.

It wasn’t just the Keepie-Up ball that flew about: ideas did too. As the score mounted and the metabolism rose, somebody would have a flash of inspiration for Bash Street and we would bounce the idea around, building it up until George would turn to me and say: “Have you got enough to go on there?”, or the chief sub would dash to his desk, scribble the outline of the plot on a bumf pad and hand it to me.

You normally expect that your offspring will outlive you. As I looked at my progeny of Little Plum, Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids in 1953, I was left with a conundrum: would they outlive me or would I outlive them? Fifty-six years on I still don’t have the answer.

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