Missing media

Media fragmentation is a fact of the PR landscape but makes people concentrate on cliques and miss the big picture. Take boys’ magazines – they don’t cover boys. But things weren’t always like this. A letter in the February 1964 edition of the Boy’s Own Paper (BOP) ends Do other readers leave their tortoises out during winter?

Sadly an energetic correspondence on pet hibernation strategy didn’t follow, which probably began the decline of the British tortoise, while the magazine died three years later as less arduous approaches to boyhood, involving beer, girls, rock music and radical politics, took hold.

BOP readers engaged in a constant rampage of bicycling, canoeing, and birds-nesting. In their improvised tents on Ben Nevis, they’d light fires, darn socks, scrutinise Ordnance Survey maps, whittle catapults and blow birds’ eggs.

BOP articles, therefore, were all about doing things: camping with a boat, racing model cars, grayling fishing and (yes) making diesel (You will have to do this in bulk), sending you down to the chemist for anaesthetic ether, nitromethane and amyl nitrate (If you explain what you want it for there should be no trouble in getting it).

Of course this was for model aircraft, not bombs. These were Great British Schoolboys, skinning their own rabbits, building bivouacs and radio sets, trainspotting and digging latrines at the slightest provocation.

This was an age when boys were not only expected to be polite and do well in exams but also to survive in the wild, arrest escaped convicts, expose international conspiracies and thwart rocket spies. Their dogs, meanwhile, would foil burglars and find the missing jewels.

Today the problem page would cover girls, skin complaints and fashion, whereas BOP focuses instead largely on legal matters, reflecting the hands-on approach of its readers: Did you realise that every time you threaten to give someone a good bashing, the chances are you are breaking the law?

The readers’ letters reveal a fellowship of taxonomists. One begins I collect weapons and I find it is a very expensive hobby, while others bring news of collected bones, nutcrackers, golf-balls and teeth. One pleads More Articles on Cycle Maintenance Please.

The fiction is 100 per cent adventure (Spotted Killer, Unseen Enemy), while the advertising has recruitment ads for the armed forces and banks among the tents, fishing tackle, cameras and gear (Save up the Libby’s milk labels and get a 4-inch blade sheath knife).

And while some boys who read BOP are now running our rabbit farms, blue-chip corporates and diesel supplies, others are our major criminals, rock dinosaurs and property tycoons. They helped to make The Dangerous Book for Boys by the Iggulden brothers a recent bestseller in the UK.

Great British Schoolboys are still out there, some of them in their sixties. Just because there isn’t a magazine for them, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.