December 06, 2019

More than Mere Ornament: Reclaiming 'Jane' (4 of 4) by Adam Twycross

December 06, 2019/ Henry Jenkins

Nudity was not the only development for Jane during the period of the Bartholomew revolution; as Rothermere’s influence receded and the Mirror increasingly aimed itself at working girls, the previous emphasis on Jane’s elevated social position was gradually replaced by a more down-to-earth characterisation that saw her take on a raft of paid employment. Between February and May 1936 alone, Jane tried her hand as a chorus girl, nurse, publican, rent collector, artists’ model, laundress, driving instructor and teacher.

A clear break with the past occurred on April 1st 1938, when a number of contemporaneous developments occurred for Jane. Behind the scenes, Don Freeman had been drafted in to help Norman Pett devise Jane’s scripts, and a young model named Chrystabel Leighton-Porter had become one of the series’ regular models (Fletcher 2011, p.84). Together the new creative team ushered in a raft of changes.

Visually, Jane was remodelled, her bobbed hair becoming longer and fuller, and her silhouette becoming less angular and austere than had previously been the case. The series’ title was shortened to simply Jane…, the ellipsis introduced to indicate the intentional omission of the Bright Young Things reference that no longer reflected the character or social positioning of the strip’s star now that Rothermere’s influence was in the past. The format of the series also dramatically changed; gone was the diary format and the self-contained daily ‘gag’, replaced instead with an ongoing continuity format that saw the storyline unfold day after day. Each episode was also now clearly broken into panels, and the first person narration that had been one of the hallmarks of the series was replaced with direct speech, although it took a further two weeks for Pett to settle into a full use of speech balloons. Finally, within the fictional world of the strip, Jane herself underwent a transformation; ignoring previous continuity, expository dialogue in the opening episodes established that Jane lived in a northern town, where a private fortune had inured her to a life without the need for paid employment. A serious stock market crash, however, necessitated a fresh start, and Jane travelled south the start a new life in London. Over the following weeks, a new supporting cast was established, and Jane was remodelled as a continuity romance series, enlivened with plenty of comedy and regular nude and semi-nude appearances by its female cast.

Elsewhere, the storm clouds of war were brewing; in the world of Jane, all the elements that would make the series one of the great icons of the war were already in place.

References

Andrews, M and McNamara, S, eds. 2014, Women and the Media: Feminism and Femininity in Britain, 1900 to the Present, London, Routledge

Bingham, A., 2011, Representing the People? The Daily Mirror, Class and Political Culture in Inter-war Britain, In: Beers, L., and Thomas, G., eds., 2012, Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain Between the Wars, London, Institute of Historical Studies, p. 115.

British Cartoon Archive, 2016, Harry Guy Bartholomew (Bart) [online], Kent, University of Kent. Available from: https://www.cartoons.ac.uk/cartoonist-biographies/a-b/HarryGuyBartholomew_Bart_.html [Accessed 07/11/2019].

Chapman, J., 2011, British Comics: A Cultural History, London, Reaction Books.

Conby, M., 2017, British Popular Newspaper traditions, In: Palander-Collin, M., Ratia, M., and Taavitsainen, I., eds. Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse, Amsterdam, John Banjamins Publishing Company, p.127.

Cudlipp, H., 1953, Publish and Be Damned: The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror, London, Dakers.

Daily Mirror, 1955, The New Paper By Jane, Daily Mirror, 18 January 1955, p.6(a).

Daily Mirror, 1934, Give the Blackshirts a Helping Hand!, Daily Mirror, 20 January 1934, p.6.

Daily Mirror, 1937, The Glory That Is Perfect Womanhood, Daily Mirror, 14 September 1937, p.14.

Daily Mail, 1994, D-Day: The Human Stories: Why I Stripped for the Boys: The Pin-Up Girl’s Story, The Daily Mail, 21 February 1994, p.33.

Fletcher, N., 2011. Jane, In: Gravett, P., ed., 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, London, Quintessence, p.84.

Gore, I.P., 1931, Cabaret: More Revelry, The Stage, 8 January 1931, p.17.

Horrie, C., 2003, Tabloid Nation: From the Birth of the Daily Mirror to the Death of the Tabloid, London, Andre Deutsch Ltd.

Irish Independent, 1994, The Pin-Up Girl’s Story, Irish Independent D-Day Supplement, 1 June 1994, p.4.

Jones, M., 1982, Echo Woman: Jane in the Flesh, Liverpool Echo, 30 July, p.8

Levine, J., The Secret History of the Blitz, Available at www.amazon.co.uk/kindlestore.

Nicholson, V., 2011, Millions Like Us: Women’s Lives During the Second World War, New York, Viking Press.

Pett, N., and Freeman, D., Jane…, Daily Mirror, 7 June 1944, p.7.

Pett, N., 1933a, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 21 June 1933, p.7.

Pett, N., 1933b, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 1 May 1933, p.7.

Pett, N., 1933c, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 8 July 1933, p.7.

Pett, N., 1933d, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 8 December 1933, p.7.

Pett, N., 1934a, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 23 February 1934, p.7.

Pett, N., 1934b, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 21 December 1934, p.7.

Pett, N., 1934c, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 5 April 1934, p.7.

Pett, N., 1934d, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 10 April 1934, p.7.

Pett, N., 1934e, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 27 October 1934, p.7.

Pett, N., 1934f, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 16 January 1934, p.7.

Pett, N., 1935a, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 30 October 1935, p.7.

Pett, N., 1935b, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 25 October 1935, p.7.

Pett, N., 1936a, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 9 July 1936, p.7.

Pett, N., 1936b, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 11 November 1936, p.7.

Pett, N., 1937a, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 11 March 1937, p.7.

Pett, N., 1937b, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 28 August 1937, p.7.

Pett, N., 1938, Jane…, Daily Mirror, 1 April 1938, p.9.

Pilger, J., 1998, Hidden Agendas, New York, Vintage.

Radio Times, 1982. Jane’s Daily Strip, Radio Times, 31 July 1982, p.1

Ramsay-Kerr, J., Adventures Out Of My Own Set: No.III- The Dietists, The Sketch, 4 April 1928, p.4.

Saunders, A., 2004, Jane: A Pin-Up at War, Barnsley, Leo Cooper.

Shields Daily News, 1924, Bright Young People: Chasing Motor Clues at 50 Miles an Hour, Shields Daily News, 15 July 1924, p.3.

Smith, A.C.H., 1975, Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change, 1935-1965, London, Chatto and Windus.

Stanton, B., 1937, Blame it on the Moon: Extracts from the Diary of Jean Hunter, Daily Mirror, August 2 1937, p.17.

Taylor, D.J., Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940, Available at www.amazon.co.uk/kindlestore.

December 05, 2019

More than Mere Ornament: Reclaiming 'Jane' (3 of 4) by Adam Twycross

December 05, 2019/ Henry Jenkins

In late 1934, with plunging sales at last spurring the board of directors into decisive action, Bartholomew was given full control of the Daily Mirror. His revolution was slow to take hold, the gradual pace necessitated by the board’s continuing nervousness concerning the scope and scale of Bartholomew’s emerging plans (Horrie 2003, p.52). In incremental steps, however, the entirety of the Daily Mirror was transformed, and by 1937 the revolution was complete (Smith 1975, p.64). The transformation had brought bigger, blacker headlines, a more concise and colloquial style of English, and a brasher and more irreverent tone overall. The importance and frequency of human interest stories had grown, and perhaps most obviously the use of images, and in particular comic strips, had rocketed. When Jane had first appeared in 1932 it had been one of four such strips, sharing the Mirror with Haselden’s regular cartoon, a juvenile humour strip called Tich, and Pip, Squeak and Wilfred. By 1937 Jane had been joined by Beelzebub Jones (1937), Belinda Blue-Eyes (1935), Buck Ryan (1937), Ruggles (1935), Terror Keep (1936), Gordon Fife- Solider of Fortune (1936), Popeye (1937), Connie (1937), Love Me Forever (1937), and Camille and Her Boss (1937).

Within the wider paper, a spirit of youthful irreverence had replaced the tired dogmatism of the Rothermere years, and it was in this context that erotic imagery, and particular images of female nudity, began to become a key feature of the Mirror’s address. Whilst this might suggest a straightforward repositioning away from the declining female audience that had barely sustained the Mirror during the 1920s, closer analysis suggests a more complex picture. Instead of representing a straightforward co-option of the female body for the gratification of a newly-male audience, the Mirror’s strategy instead was to frame the female body as an iconic signifier for the themes of energy, confidence and youthful irreverence that, as a paper, it increasingly sought to embody. These themes, and their visual projection, seem to have resonated with audiences of both sexes, and the paper continued to appeal to strongly to women (Smith, 1975, p.83), although admittedly it was a different type of woman than had been the case in the recent past. Hugh Cudlipp would later write that one of Bartholomew’s key new demographics was

“a section of citizens much neglected by newspapers of the time. Girls- working girls; hundreds of thousands of them, toiling over typewriters and ledgers and reading in many cases nothing more enlightening than Peg’s Paper” (Cudlipp 1953, p.87).

The synergy between audience and text that emerged during this period is typified by Blame it On the Moon, a piece of Mirror prose fiction written by Barbara Stanton, and which was published on August 2nd 1937.

Neatly epitomising many of the elements of the new Daily Mirror address, this short story detailed a summer romance enjoyed by Jean, a young woman holidaying alone at an English seaside resort. In one passage Jean is enthusiastic about displaying as much of her body as possible, noting with satisfaction that her shorts are shorter than those of another girl of a similar age, and she later goes for a naked moonlit bathe with a man she has only just met. “What would mummy have said if she’d seen us bathing without a stitch!” thinks Jean, “Still, there was no harm in it- and I don’t care what anybody says or thinks.”. Blame it on the Moon ran alongside an illustration of Jean and her paramour enjoying their moonlit encounter, with art supplied by Arthur Ferrier, who would later create Spotlight on Sally, a Jane competitor, for the News of the World..

The Mirror’s use of female nudity as an iconic signifier of youth, vitality and the future potential of the nation was also in evidence in the paper’s photographic content. On 14th September 1937, for example, the Mirror ran a large photograph of an apparently naked young woman under the title “Perfect Womanhood”. The lighting conditions suggested that the photograph had been taken in brilliant sunshine, with a clear summer sky framing the subject as she readied herself to throw a beach ball to an unseen companion. The overall impression was one of youth, vitality, optimism and self-confidence, reinforced by the Mirror’s own accompanying commentary:

“vibrant with health in every tense and graceful line, this figure typifies the very essence of the girlhood of to-day”.

It was in this context, two years before the outbreak of war, and more than six years before the D-Day landings, that nudity arrived in Jane. Like the wider Bartholomew revolution of which it was part, the pace of change was gradual, and at first nudity in Jane was suggested more than it was seen. The Jane strip of 9th July 1936, for example, depicted a furtive crowd gathering in a park in the hope of catching a glimpse of a naked Jane. later the same month another strip saw an excited crowd of men rush to Jane’s house under the erroneous impression that she would be welcoming them inside, in the nude.

On 3rd December another strip used the potential for Jane’s nakedness as the central narrative conceit, when it appeared that she would be forced to hand the eiderdown with which she was covering herself to a courier. The closest that the strip came to an actual depiction of nudity during 1936 occurred on 11th November, when Jane was shown taking a bath. Only her upper back was visible, however, as she slipped out of a dressing gown, and once safely in the bath a profusion of bubbles hid her body from the neck down.

Four months later the strip was going just a little further; Jane was once again in the bath, but the bubbles had been dispensed with, and now only the positioning of her arm stopped Jane from appearing topless.

The spring and summer continued in a similar vein, when occasional trips to the beach were used as a pretext for Jane and her swimwear to either wholly or partially part company, although outright nudity was still avoided. By the late summer, however, the Mirror took the final step and Jane appeared entirely naked for the first time in August 1937.

Nor was this a one-off; having made the leap to outright nudity, numerous further examples appeared in the remaining pre-war period.

Adam Twycross is currently engaged in PhD research on the development and evolution of adult comics in Britain. Between 2012 and 2019 he was Programme Leader for the MA in 3D Computer Animation at Bournemouth University’s National Centre for Computer Animation, and has previously worked as a 3D modeller, with credits including the Xbox 360 title Disneyland Adventures and the Games Workshop graphic novel Macragge’s Honour. He is co-founder of BFX, the UK’s largest festival of animation, visual effects and games.

December 03, 2019

More than Mere Ornament: Reclaiming 'Jane' (2 of 4) by Adam Twycross

December 03, 2019/ Henry Jenkins

For the time being, however, Rothermere’s long shadow still fell across the Mirror and its contents, and as such, at the time of its first appearance Jane was obliged to straddle two competing ideologies. On the one hand, like every other aspect of the paper, the series was shaped by Rothermere’s right-wing conservatism; on the other it was cut through with a bawdy irreverence that was more in keeping with the ideological leanings of both Bartholomew and Pett. To a significant degree, the split allegiance that this necessitated was enabled by the social positioning of Jane herself within the fictional world of the strip. Although today remembered chiefly in its truncated form of Jane, Pett’s original title was both more loquacious and more descriptive; for the first six years of its existence, the series appeared as Jane’s Journal- Or The Diary of a Bright Young Thing. This title, the nuance of which would be lost on many modern audiences, would at the time have immediately established Jane within an existing ideological system that perfectly suited to Jane’s needs.

Although in truth something of a spent force by 1932, for much of the previous decade the Bright Young Things had provided the popular press with a steady stream of stories revolving around increasingly extravagant examples of aristocratic intemperance. The group had entered the public consciousness around the summer of 1924, when the Honourable Lois Sturt, the daughter of Baron Alington, had been arrested for speeding through Regent’s Park in the early hours of the morning. Sturt claimed to have been taking part in a game called ‘Chasing Clues’ that had been arranged by the previously unknown “Society of Bright Young People” (Shields Daily News 1924, p.3). Within months the groups’ name had became synonymous with a carefree and somewhat debauched style of youthful aristocratic play, with activities centering around extravagant games, opulent themed parties and, it was widely assumed, a liberal attitude to sexual congress, alcohol and the use of stimulants in general. Although largely composed of individuals from privileged, moneyed and aristocratic backgrounds, the Bright Young Things self-consciously rejected much of the ritualised and rule-bound etiquette that their elevated social position would usually have imposed on them, and instead absorbed influences from parallel and overlapping social subcultures that were less obviously aristocratic in nature. The inherent iconoclasm of the Bright Young Things’ rejection of societal norms gave them a compatibility with alterity of all types, creating a space in which young aristocrats mixed freely with homosexuals, artists, poets, and “tribes of girls answering to the loose description of ‘model’” (Taylor, 2007, loc.2073). The group’s particular affinity with the bohemian lifestyle, which had also proved so alluring to Norman Pett, was reflected in the contemporary press, who on occasion referred to the Bright Young Things’ activities as those of “high bohemia” (Ramsay-Kerr 1928, p. 4). Press interest in the group’s activities reflected an enduring public fascination that was heightened by inaccessibility. As well as foregrounding Jane’s social position, therefore, the series’ title and its formal construction dovetailed to create an alluring, if entirely apocryphal, sense of intimacy. The strip’s diary format, backed by first-person, hand-written narration, suggested a level of privileged access to the Bright Young Things, and to a world that remained otherwise closed to all but a small band of well-connected individuals.

Over the first few years of Jane’s existence, numerous strips reinforced the link between Jane and the iconoclasm of the Bright Young Things. Several strips featured a positively Sturtian disregard for road safety as a central narrative conceit, and Jane’s social life was shown to be a heady mixture of high and low pursuits that was perfectly in keeping with the Bright Young Things’ public image.

Jane, and indeed her contemporaries, seemed equally at home in an after-hours nightclub as at more formal gathering.

Jane also attended numerous parties, including the Chelsea Arts Club Ball.

This new year’s eve celebration had, by the early 1930s, become notorious for its riotous behaviour, and was described in contemporary accounts as “the last notable event of the old year in Bohemian circles” (Gore 1931, p.17). Like Lois Sturt, Jane’s portrait hung in the Royal Academy,

Several strips made clear that she and her social circle regularly indulged in precisely the type of urban treasure hunts that had first propelled the Bright Young Things into the public consciousness in 1924.

Although nudity and erotica was not yet a feature of the strip, it was clear that Jane’s youth and glamour facilitated a satisfying and varied love life that put her at odds with the decorum and propriety expected by her social circles’ elder generation.

The youthful and rebellious nature of the Bright Young Things therefore allowed Jane’s early years to feature an irreverent streak that reflected the liberal and somewhat unorthodox worldviews of both Bartholomew and Pett. Yet the social elevation and undoubted prosperity of most of the group’s members gave it a natural alignment with the systems and structures that supported and perpetuated the dominance of the ruling classes, and for all the raucousness of its subtext, Jane’s early strips also exhibited a clear affinity with the right-wing conservatism and social elitism of Rothermere. Being moneyed and cultured, much of Jane’s leisure time was filled with the typical pastimes of the young aristocrat; she regularly holidayed abroad, enjoyed trips to Ascot and relaxed in punts during the Henley regatta .

Although she was shown to be an attentive and generous friend, there was a sense that both she and her wider social circle looked down on the lower classes and their lack of sophistication. Some strips revolved around the ease with which their social inferiors could be seduced and manipulated into acting as Jane and her coterie desired.

Other strips reinforced a hierarchically encoded worldview in which England was emphasized as pre-eminent amongst the home nations, and London repeatedly affirmed as its social and cultural centre. As a result the humour of many strips were built around an oppositional structure in which Jane’s cultured, sophisticated and urban worldview collided with the unrefined coarseness of her social inferiors. Consequently farmers, labourers, Scotsmen, the working classes and ‘nasty looking tramps’ were all ripe for mockery and derision .

Strikingly, given the series later fame as a morale booster for allied servicemen, this same hierarchically aligned narrative structure was deployed to tacitly support Rothermere’s fascist leanings. In the early years of its existence, numerous Jane strips aligned fascism with Jane’s own cultured, sophisticated and ordered worldview whilst depicting the opponents of fascism as uncultivated, unsophisticated and brutal. In a series of strips focusing on the Abyssinian conflict, for example, Italian troops were depicted as well-equipped and glamorous; their Abyssinian counterparts were openly racist caricatures, depicted as primitive, dog-eating tribesmen who decorated themselves with discarded tin cans and deployed laughably inadequate military equipment (figs 13) .

Another strip saw Jane, resplendent in a new all-black outfit, mistaken for one of Mosely’s fascists by a braying mob of left-wing agitators. In the strip the mob appears likely to attack Jane, but their danger is nullified by the arrival of a Police Constable, narratively serving as an icon of law and order, who leads Jane to safety. The strips’ use of clothing as a storytelling device is telling. Pett’s choice of where to spot blacks provides an opportunity to link Jane and the Police Officer at a pictorial level, and serves to narratively associate the visual iconography of the Blackshirts with the unruffled composure of the British police force and with the sophisticated elegance of Jane herself. By contrast the undignified mass of left-wing protesters are depicted as a mass of lighter tones, their overweight and ageing members sporting either balding or unkempt hair and ill-fitting, baggy clothing which serves to accentuate their gracelessness. Other aspects of the Mirror’s address during this period echoed the gentle reinforcement of pro-fascist sentiment that this strip provided. The following month, for example, the Mirror’s sister paper the Sunday Pictorial ran an article by Rothermere eulogising the Blackshirts as a practical example of “patriotism and discipline”, and the Mirror ran prominent advertisements for the feature in the lead-up to its publication.

December 02, 2019

More than Mere Ornament: Reclaiming 'Jane' (1 of 4) by Adam Twycross

December 02, 2019/ Henry Jenkins

jane-comic-strip-5b23b2da-0d50-4c8e-92e6-42aed71ed73-resize-750.jpeg

Jane was a newspaper strip that first appeared in the Daily Mirror in December 1932. Created by Norman Pett, it was originally a daily gag strip, but was redeveloped as a continuity series in 1938. It developed an increasingly erotic edge, and became the most popular British comic strip of the Second World War (Chapman 2011, p.38), with its popularity boosted by republication in a series of forces newspapers and the arrival of spin-off publications and stage shows. In 1948 Mike Hubbard replaced Pett as principal artist, and the series continued for a further eleven years before Jane’s story finally concluded in October 1959.

In both popular and academic discourse, Jane is typically remembered in uncomplicated terms. The series is most commonly assumed to offer little more than a titillating glimpse at the erotic preoccupations of a bygone era, the original appeal of which can be credited to the lusty desires of its wartime audience. Decades after Jane’s heyday the Radio Times gave a sense of the character’s cultural positioning when it described Jane as the “scantily-clad cartoon heroine who cheered wartime Britain” (Radio Times 1982, p.1). In the same era, the Liverpool Echo recalled “Jane, of the lacy bra and snapping suspenders, the legendary strip cartoon heroine of Word War 2” (Jones 1982, p.8). More recently, from the realm of the popular historiography, authors such as Virginia Nicholson and Joshua Levine have continued to perpetuate a mythology that sees Jane’s primary function as being the facilitator of male sexual desire during the Second World War. Nicholson’s Millions Like Us describes Jane as a wartime “fantasy driven by lust and loneliness” (Nicholson 2012, p.226), whilst in The Secret History of the Blitz Levine dismisses Jane simply, and with striking inaccuracy, as “a character whose clothes fell off, in front of groups of men, for no apparent reason” (Levine 2015, loc.3063). The associative link that ties Jane so firmly to notions of erotic appeal and the gendered experience of the war are often framed within a wider wartime context, and in particular the perception that Jane’s body was used as a vehicle to both incentivise and reward male participation in the war effort. In 1994, for example, the Irish Independent published recollections of the wartime Jane, including the suggestion that

“they dropped a consignment of the papers to the troops near Caen at the Pegasus Bridge, and they made huge advances into France after that. The joke during the war was that the British Army always attacked when Jane stripped to her scanties” (Irish Independent 1994, p.4).

So ubiquitous is this vision of Jane that it persists even in academic appraisals of British comics history and in books devoted entirely to Jane itself. James Chapman, in British Comics: A Cultural History, for example, discusses Jane firmly through a wartime lens (Chapman 2011, p.38-42). He describes the series as “the most popular comic strip of the war” with an audience composed largely of “schoolboys and servicemen”, drawn in by a basic motif of a heroine routinely shedding her clothes. Andy Saunders, in Jane: A Pin-Up at War, similarly frames Jane as an icon of wartime sexual fantasy, concluding that modern sensibilities would inevitably find the series “sexist, and certainly exploitative of women” (Saunders 2004, p.16) .

Despite the near universality of this mythology, however, there are compelling reasons to question its thoroughness, and ultimately its validity. Despite being widely assumed to have been aimed at male audiences, a more comprehensive engagement with the historical record reveals that Jane appealed as much to- indeed sometimes more to- women as it did to men. Smith (1975, p.83) notes that in the decade of Jane’s arrival, the Daily Mirror was considered to be a paper aimed primarily at women, with a readership that was around 70% female. An internal Mirror survey from 1937, meanwhile, found that of these 85% were regular readers of Jane. Despite the character’s subsequent fame as a ‘forces sweetheart’ in the war years that followed, a similar poll conducted in 1947 found that Jane’s appeal to women had remained consistent with the level recorded a decade earlier. This time the poll targeted female readers specifically, and again 85% reported that they were regular Jane readers (Cudlipp, 1953, p.75-76). The continued centrality of a female audience to Jane can be identified in other ways, too. Towards the end of the series’ life, for example, in January 1955, the Mirror Group launched a weekend companion to the Daily Mirror entitled the Women’s Sunday Mirror, and Jane was chosen to front much of the in-house publicity. The new Sunday edition was described as “the new paper by Jane”, and advertising reused images from the daily strip, with new speech balloons seeing Jane address female readers directly as she exhorted them to make contact so that the new paper could accurately reflect “what makes us girls tick!”

‘Jane,’ Daily Mirror (1955) — ‘Jane,’ *Daily Mirror* (1955)

Similarly, although Jane is usually considered synonymously with the Second World War, in truth the series was a long-lasting one. It appeared day after day, week after week for nearly thirty years, persisting through decades of huge social and cultural change for Britain and the wider world. Around 80% of Jane’s original output occurred during peacetime, and had no appreciable connection either to the Second World War or to wartime conditions. The persistence of Jane’s cultural association with the war, however, means that huge swathes of the strips’ history have been ignored and forgotten. Yet if, as Chapman (2012, p.42) suggests, Jane offers a “good reflection of wartime changes in British society”, it seems curious that so little attempt has been made to identify similar process at work in the strips’ wider history.

Even the oft-repeated suggestion that a clear causal link can be established between Jane’s nudity and the need to satisfy a male audience of armed forces personnel (see, for example, Andrews and McNamara 2014, p.187) does not stand up to much scrutiny. Reinforcing the conceit that Jane’s nudity was initiated as a spur to armed forces morale, it is often claimed that, after years of teasing, Jane’s first fully nude appearance occurred on or around D-Day, the 6th June 1944 (see, for example, Daily Mail 1994). Although on the day after D-Day the Daily Mirror did indeed run a strip in which Jane appeared in the nude (fig.2), this was far from a novelty. In fact, as this article will discuss in detail, such nude appearances pre-dated the war by some years, and resulted not from a desire to satisfy wartime troops, but from an unconnected revolution in the Mirror’s editorial style that occurred during the latter half of the 1930’s.

Much of the cultural memory surrounding Jane is, therefore, erroneous, and the story of Jane’s full history is both more complex and more interesting than popular legend allows for. This essay will begin the process of fleshing out in more detail the true story of Jane’s development, focussing in particular on the way in which the series developed during its early pre-war period.

Jane’s debut, in December 1932, occurred at a time of wider turmoil for its parent publication. Established in 1903, the Daily Mirror had survived a rocky start to become, by the end of the First World War, Britain’s best-selling daily paper with sales often in excess of two million. Throughout the 1920s, however, the Mirror had struggled under a gradual but seemingly inexorable decline that had seen its readership collapse to less than 800,000 by the early 1930s (Horrie 2003, p.45). Principally, this had been the result of chronic mismanagement and interference by the paper’s principal shareholder, Lord Rothermere, who had spent years neglecting the Mirror and siphoning off its financial resources in order to bolster other parts of his sprawling publishing empire (Horrie 2003, p.35). Like many newspaper proprietors, Rothermere was also adept at meddling in his paper’s editorial direction, which in his own case was particularly unfortunate, for he was a spectacularly poor reader of the moral and political tides of the early 1930s. Under his guidance the Daily Mirror became a vocal supporter of the ‘strong leaders’ of fascist Europe in general, and of Nazism in particular, as well as of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and their virulently anti-Semitic campaign to establish fascism in Britain. Compounding this highly questionable editorial direction, the Mirror was widely derided as a dull and anachronistic, regarded in some quarters as

“a silly, insignificant little Tory newspaper that ran quaint front-page pictures of ‘girls in pearls’, county cricket matches and brass bands playing music to caterpillars” (Horrie 2003, p.45).

Although the Daily Mirror’s future therefore looked bleak at the time of Jane’s arrival, the paper’s salvation lay close at hand. Although not yet obvious, in less than two years the Mirror’s pictures editor, Harry Guy Bartholomew, would be promoted to editorial director and would embark on a dramatic reconceptualization that would transform the Mirror into a brash, irreverent, working class newspaper (Bingham 2011, p. 115). The huge resurgence in popularity that would follow would irrevocably break Rothermere’s control over the paper and cast the newly invigorated Daily Mirror as “the model for popular journalism throughout much of the rest of the world for the rest of the century” (Horrie 2003, p.45). Bartholomew was a bombastic figure who was, in many ways, entirely the opposite of Rothermere. Irascible, foul-mouthed, and only semi-literate, he also harboured a particular, though for the time being carefully concealed, contempt for the pomposity and entitlement of the upper classes (Conby 2017, p.127). He was also almost preternaturally gifted at understanding the needs and nuances of modern news-craft, and he had a particular awareness of the power of the image as a driver of sales. Later he would be remembered as “simply and solely a picture man, who used pictures in a way they had never been used before” (Pilger 2010, p.381), but of all the visual arts it was perhaps cartoons and comics that were closest to Bartholomew’s heart. He was a sometime cartoonist himself, and occasionally had even ghosted for W.K. Haselden, the Mirror’s principal cartoonist who had been providing a daily dose of light social satire since the paper’s earliest days (British Cartoon Archive 2016). Although in 1932 Bartholomew had yet to gain control of the Mirror, as pictures editor he was able to commission new material. His power and influence within the paper’s hierarchy was also growing, and it was Bartholomew who employed Norman Pett to create Jane. Up until this point Pett’s cartooning career had been somewhat unremarkable; although he had been a regular contributor to Punch since the end of the First World War, he still supplemented his income with part-time work at the Birmingham School of Art. He enjoyed a somewhat unconventional life, and in his native Birmingham had cultivated a free-spirited lifestyle in which, despite having been married for more than ten years, he was almost permanently surrounded by young women, ostensibly to model. Given Bartholomew’s later strategy, which would make cartoons and comics a central feature of the new-look Daily Mirror, Jane can be understood as representing a ‘trial run’ for the wider revolution that would follow in its wake. Bartholomew also appears to have been using Jane as a means of verifying whether the existing audience for comics in the Mirror could be broadened and increased. Since 1919 the paper had published a juvenile strip called Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, which through the years of Rothermere-inspired decline had proved to be a rare Mirror success. As well as being a popular feature in its own right, it had provided crucial revenue from a dizzying array of spin-off merchandise that saw the central characters appear on everything from china plates to matchboxes. When commissioning Jane, several sources suggest that Bartholomew specifically tasked Pett with the creation of a series that would repeat this success with an older audiences (see, for example, Cudlipp, 1953, p.73).

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