Comic: When the Bell Rings (aka Bash Street Kids)

 

Here’s a piece of history about the ever-popular Bash Street Kids from the Beano.

The Bash Street Kids centres on Class 2B of the aforesaid school. The strip started in 1954 and has been going in one form or another ever since.

The strip involves a large cast of characters including Erbert Hoover, Fatty Brown, Plug Plugsley, Aristotle Smiffy, and Spotty Cameron. They were kipt in control (Of a sort) by a cane-wielding schoolmaster simply called Teacher. You can read details of them and others (and much more besides on The Bash Street Kids on Wikipedia.

We met the Bash Street Kids before here.

Wikipedia reports the Bash Street Kids creator Leo Baxendale saying, “The catalyst for my creation of Bash Street was a Giles cartoon of January 1953: kids pouring out of school, heads flying off and sundry mayhems. Straight away, I pencilled a drawing of 'The Kids of Bash Street School' and posted it from my home in Preston to R. D. Low, the managing editor of D.C. Thomson's children's publications in Dundee. I received an offhand response, a dampener. It was only after I'd created Little Plum (April 1953) and Minnie the Minx (September 1953) that the Beano editor George Moonie travelled to Preston on 20 October 1953 and asked me to go ahead with Bash Street (he gave it the provisional title of ‘When The Bell Goes’; when it appeared in the Beano in February 1954, it was titled ‘When The Bell Rings’).”

And here’s a rarely seen strip from When the Bell Rings.

Picture credit: D. C. Thomson

For more on Comics or Story Papers, click here

Traditional School Discipline

Traditionalschooldiscipline@gmail.com