AMONG THE MOST TREASURED POSSESSIONS in my study, gathering dust but re-read from time to time, are my bound volumes of The Captain magazine. They are a good selection, amounting to about a quarter of the total, of the output of the magazine during its existence between 1899 and 1923 and they’ve been around pretty well all my life.
The Captain was part of a stable of magazines founded in the 1890s by George Newnes who had made a fortune from Tit-Bits, arguably the first genuinely mass publication, which he unleashed in 1881. The most famous was The Strand Magazine which published most of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (though it did not introduce them). Because the two magazines looked alike and The Captain was aimed at a younger audience it was nicknamed “the Junior Strand”. It had a subtitle: a magazine for boys and “old boys”.
The Captain contained many kinds of feature for boys including articles on technology (cameras and engines in the early days, crystal sets towards the end) and worthy articles on potential careers. There was also a lot of sports coverage confined entirely to amateur and elite sport: the magazine claimed to have introduced the idea of the “athletic editor”, its first being C.B. Fry and its last Harold Abrahams.
But a
