IN AND OUT OF THE EAGLE 39

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Thanks to the ‘Eagle-eyed’ David Gould for this item. In Volume 4 no.28 (October 16^th 1953), a poem promoting the joys of Eagle, beginning with the phrase ‘Grand was the day when Eagle came…’ appeared in the Eagle Extra section. Written by a staff member, this poem reappeared in April 1958, sent in by a dishonest reader, who made a few minor updates, replacing Tommy Walls with Storm Nelson and PC 49 with Mark Question. The plagiarist failed to notice that the first letter of each line should read, downwards, ‘GOOD OLD EAGLE’. His change to the final line made it read ‘GOOD OLD EAGLH’! Remarkably this wasn’t the last time that the poem appeared. Another reader sent in his own modified version in December 1967! This time the reader replaced Harris Tweed with The Iron Man, Storm Nelson with Mike Lane and Mark Question with Grant C.I.D. This reader realised that the letters down should read ‘GOOD OLD EAGLE’, for he pointed it out at the end of the letter, leading me to suspect that he adapted it from the 1953 original and not the 1958 copy. The two chancers in Eagle won prizes of five and ten shillings, but their sins have found them out in the end. Above is the original version from 1953.

David, who worked as a letterer on Eagle in the 1960s, reports that the weekly itself was not averse to a little dishonesty in its later years, telling me that several jokes were published with staff members’ or fictitious names. Shades of Blue Peter’s notorious invention of a competition winner here!