IN AND OUT OF THE EAGLE 7

WITH JIM DUCKETT

You don’t tend to bump into people called Horatio every day, but no less than three Horatios featured in their own strips in Eagle. First was John Ryan’s Captain Horatio Pugwash, who appeared from the first issue until the nineteenth in 1950. The next was the real life Horatio Nelson, who was featured in the back page serial The Great Sailor in 1956-57 and finally there was C.S. Forester’s fictional naval hero, Horatio Hornblower, whose adventures were adapted for Eagle in 1962-63. Of course all these Horatios are linked by the sea and all captained ships at some time in their lives. Nelson was one of Britain’s greatest heroes of the Napoleonic wars and Eagle included no less than three fictional strips set during this period. Only the wild west and contemporary times were featured more. First was Jack O’Lantern, about a young boy in the later years of the conflict, which ran in Eagle from 1955-60. Then came the already mentioned Hornblower stories and finally in 1964, Johnny Frog, about another young boy, this time set around the time of the Battle of Trafalgar. Both Jack O’Lantern and Johnny Frog were written by George Beardmore. 

Pugwash, created by John Ryan appeared in semi-animated cartoons made by Ryan himself for the BBC and became a television and literary success. He is soon to appear in a live action feature film starring Nick Frost as the popular pirate.  

Staying with the sea, Eagle forged strong links with the aircraft carrier H.M.S. Eagle, including featuring her as a cutaway drawing. H.M.S. Eagle was launched in 1946 and was the fifteenth Royal Navy ship to bear the name. Commissioned in 1951 she saw war service during the Suez Crisis of 1956. After service all over the world, she had an extensive refit in 1959 and another in 1966, finally being withdrawn from service in 1972. She was subsequently moored in the River Tamar, where she was held in reserve until 1976, although she was stripped for essential parts needed by H.M.S. Ark Royal. She was finally scrapped in 1978. I was lucky enough to see the ship’s brass name plate on a visit to the Royal Naval Dockyard Museum at Devonport a few years ago and one of her anchors can be seen at the entrance to the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton.

Eagle's cutaway drawings

Eagle's cutaway drawings feature ran from the very first issue, 14th April, 1950, until 19th April, 1969 (Vol 20, No 16). The run was not continuous - on about 40 occasions other features replaced it, such as 'Chicko's Christmas Party' (1954 Christmas issue) or, on 14 occasions, the results of painting competitions. Also, some features that are sometimes counted as part of the series are not strictly "cutaway" drawings. It was not headlined as 'An Eagle Cutaway Drawing' until 1963. It was however, the longest running feature in Eagle (since, apart from a four-episode original story which began at the end of Vol 18, 'Dan Dare' had gone into reprint at the beginning of Vol 18, and remained as such until Eagle's demise in 1969 (Vol 20 No 17).

From 1950, and for over a decade, "cutaways" filled the top half of the centre pages as a full colour centre-spread. Later the feature was moved, initially still in colour, to fill the back page and then back inside the magazine, but on a single page in black and white. There seemed no limit to the technologies covered: from the historic, to the contemporary, to the futuristic: trains, boats and planes, trams, hovercraft and rockets, spacecraft, cars, buses, motorways, underground railways, fighting vehicles, motor cycles, power stations - and the photocopier.

By far the most prolific artist was Leslie Ashwell Wood, an example of whose work is seen above*. Of the (depending how you count it) 946 issues of Eagle that included cutaways, 617 were by him, including the very first, and the last (in the penultimate issue of Eagle).

In all, around two dozen artists contributed to the feature, the most notable after Leslie Ashwell Wood being: J. Walkden Fisher, John Batchelor, Geoffrey Wheeler, Laurence Dunn, Hubert Redmill and Roy Cross. It is likely that in many cases authorship of the text that accompanied the drawings is attributable to the artists themselves. This is certainly the case for the leading artists, who would have done their own technical research, and may be true for many of the lesser-known artists too.

The following is an alphabetical list of all the artists who are known to have contributed to Eagle cutaways, together with the numbers of their contributions. In some cases only a single name (presumably the surname) is known. Around a dozen contributions are unattributed to any known author.

• P. J. Ashmore (1)
• John Batchelor (44)
• __? Blake (1)
• __? Bowyer ( 3)
• Bruce Cornwell (4)
• Roy Cross (23)
• Gordon Davies (10)
• Laurence Dunn (48)
• Eric Eden (3)
• Albert Charles Martin Ellis (3)
• Dennis Fairlie (2)
• Charles Hurford (4)
• R. Nicholl (1)
• Paul B. Mann (5)
• Gerald Palmer (19)
• Hubert Redmill (39)
• T. C. Renwick-Adams (1)
• John S. Smith (2)
• J. Walkden-Fisher (59)
• Brian Watson (1)
• Geoffrey Wheeler (44)
• Leslie Ashwell Wood (617)
  

Selected cutaway drawing from Eagle are reprinted in:

• The Eagle Book of Cutaways, Denis Gifford (Ed.) Webb & Bower, 1988. (Although credited with featuring exclusively L. Ashwell Wood drawings, one illustration, of Dan Dare's 'Anastasia' spacecraft, is by Eric Eden)
  
• The Eagle Annual of the Cutaways, Orion Books, September 2008.
  

*The cutaway drawing of the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle by Leslie Ashwell Wood appeared as the centrespread in Eagle's second birthday issue, Vol 3 No1 (10th April, 1952).