The 1960s Post Office tower was futuristic enough to appear in a Dan Dare episode. But Dan Dare's future has actually been and gone.
I have recently been watching the two episodes of the BBC 4 program Jet! When Britain Ruled the Skies, a program that deals with the flurry of Jet aircraft development in the UK from the late 40s to the mid 60s. That title may well say more about how Britain saw itself in the heady optimistic days of the late forties and fifties than about the state of its flight technology. But then optimism has a way of forming a symbiotic coupling to a surge of material creativity.
In the forties and fifties the
invention of the jet powered flight had just opened up a very rich mine of
technological discovery*. The seams of this mine were being worked out by
numerous companies as they explored its myriad possibilities. In those early
days jet aircraft hadn't settled down into a standard pattern and so a
profusion of independent companies investigated a wide diversity of airframe configurations,
some perhaps even looking a little strange. The designers were very much at the experimental stage of finding out: The technology
was just getting started and was climbing that steep slope to a maturity which marks
optimum designs. Without building and trying out different configurations no
one really knew what worked well and what didn't. The market was another
unknown factor; it was not always clear what that market wanted, needed and/or
could use. Sometimes that market neither wanted nor needed the best technology (The
VC 10 airliner is a case in point)
Some strange looking aircraft emerged during the 1950s
In this highly experimental
environment the heroic test pilots came into their own. Many of these pilots
had war time experience of flying, experience which probably set them up well
for what was to prove a risky occupation. The glistening silver skins of their
speeding sky-steeds may well have evoked thoughts of the shining knights of old
and the age of chivalry. These brave and highly skilled men caught the imagination
of the pubic and they become household names. The break neck advances in jet
flight had generated an irresistible mix that the general public easily connected
with; viz: a visually attractive and ultra-modern looking technology, the
exhilarating dangers of speed, and of course the test pilots themselves some of whom as
war time heroes had saved Britain in its darkest hour. These pilots cut a
silver streak across a drab post war period of austerity. It is difficult to
understand where the money was coming from at that time, but the country was on
a collective ego trip so who cared about money? The feel good factor after the
dark days of war was palpable. But one didn't have to have experienced the war
to get caught up in all this: I remember going to the RAF Coltishall air show in the early
60s and seeing an English Electric Lightning taxi a short
way down the runway and then take off like a rocket at a near vertical angle; the noise and the sight
was hair raising.
English Electric Lightnings seeing off a Russian intruder in the 60s
As I watched When Britain Ruled the Skies I was sharply reminded of my favorite comic
character “Dan Dare;
Pilot of the Future” whose strip appeared in the boy’s magazine “The Eagle”. The original Dan Dare
stories ran from the 1950 until 1967. I was in my early teens
during the 1960s and I caught enough of the end of this period to pick up the
ethos behind the Dan Dare stories. When
Britain Ruled the Skies is a window into the late 1940s and 1950s and from
it is clear that the chivalrous Dan Dare and the fictional world he inhabited
is a reflection of the culture in which he was conceived.
Depersonalising the Enemy foot soldiers makes it easier to dispose of them
In spite of his strength and genius,
the Mekon was always ultimately foiled by the upright heroes of Spacefleet. They fought against the odds and yet won. As with the pilots of the Battle of Britain
Spacefleet were few in number, but like super heroes they saved millions. Dan
Dare was not actually supposed to be a super hero in the sense of having super
powers but his luck, his wit and above all his chivalry were super human and it is with these unfailing powers he defeated
his formidable foes.
The Dan Dare stories depicted a
situation where space flight in the late twentieth century had become routine. In
the original comic strip Dare was supposed to have been born in 1967 (See the wiki article
on Dare). This would mean that Dan Dare would be 47 today; clearly the Dare stories projected a rather over optimistic view of the
development of space flight. But to be fair the very rapid advances in aircraft
since the Wright Brothers first "string bag" flight only fifty years before the jet age would
lend credence to the idea that the conquest of space was imminent. In fact given the sleek looking spacecraft of the Dan Dare
stories one could be forgiven for thinking that outer space was just an extension of the atmosphere and not a
whole new can of worms altogether. It took the excellent
sets of 2001 Space Odyssey to disabuse the popular mind of the view that space-ships need be sleek. A simple linear extrapolation of technology is seldom a good
predictor.**
Spacefleet rockets seeing off some intruders
In as much as Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future reflected the culture, ethos and technology of
the post war period Dan Dare was in fact very much a pilot of the 1950s rather
than the future. Coincidently, but very appropriately, the Dan Dare comic strip,
in its original form, wound up in 1967; so in a sense Dan Dare wasn't born in
1967 but actually died in that year. As a type for the pilots of the post war years we
see in the Dan Dare stories the indomitable spirit of war time Britain. During
the War there was a firm belief that the country would pull through in
spite of the odds. In fact my mother, who had been through the war and had been bombed out, once told me that no-one she knew thought
for one moment that Britain would be defeated and this was in the face of the set-backs the country had experienced; while there was life there was hope as Dan Dare himself used to say! Evidence of this dogged self-confident
spirit can be seen at the Farnborough airshow crash of 1952: In this crash a Sea Vixen Jet Fighter, an aircraft which at the time had a design fault,
broke up mid-air during its display, killing the pilots. One of the engines ploughed like a
missile into the spectators killing 29 of them and injuring 60. Today it is almost certain that an accident
of this severity would put a halt to all celebrations. But no, this was Dan
Dare’s Britain and so according to the wiki article:
Following the accident the air display programme continued once the
debris was cleared from the runway, with Neville Duke exhibiting the prototype
Hawker Hunter and taking it supersonic over the show later that day. (1952)
I suppose only for people who had
been through wartime and who had faced a rain of bombs, V1s and V2s, could
such a horrific event fail to quench their determination to keep going. For them disasters were almost routine. It’s worth comparing this disaster with a
recent event here in Britain: A half-marathon was called off because supplies of
water failed to arrive.. This action was no doubt taken because some
health and safety regulation was at stake and the organizers didn't want to
take the rap if anyone killed themselves by becoming dehydrated during the race. Of course this is no comparison to a flying engine killing and injuring 89 people, but to
their credit most of the competitors said go and hang to health and safety and
did the run anyway. So perhaps the flame of Dan Dare's 1950s Britain is not entirely
extinguished.
Dan Dare Pilot of the Future connects
with sublime themes and archetypes that are never far away in the back of our
imaginations. Stories of shining chivalrous knights whom the populace
loves to follow in their battle against evil intelligences will always inspire the
imagination. Moreover, in Britain there is the archetypical legend of King Arthur who, the legend says, will in times of need rise
to save his country; never mind that Arthur was probably a Saxon hating Celt! (The Anglo-Saxons
were invading the country at the time – no RAF to help out then!). The overriding
theme of the Arthurian legend is the savoir as a motif rather than as actual history.
This motif has the power to stir the imagination. Dan Dare stands in this
tradition.
Footnotea:
* I hold the view that invention being a kind of search, find, reject, and select operation is a way of discovering configuration.
** Technology often at first goes through an exponential period, which then levels out to a logarithmic period.
Relevant links:
http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/symbol-legend-and-destiny-at-sutton-hoo.html
** Technology often at first goes through an exponential period, which then levels out to a logarithmic period.
Relevant links:
http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/symbol-legend-and-destiny-at-sutton-hoo.html
http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/family-history.html
Addendum 01/11/14
Some things don't change:
This story broke today on Yahoo. See:
Addendum 01/11/14
Some things don't change:
This story broke today on Yahoo. See:
Fifty years later the Russian Bear Bomber is the same, but this time it's intercepted by the UK's Typhoon euro fighter.
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