* With the Platinum Jubilee upon us, it’s time to look forward to the 70th anniversary of the Young Elizabethan, too.
Founded in 1948 as Collins Magazine for Boys & Girls, it was renamed the Young Elizabethan to celebrate the Queen’s Coronation. In 1958, it changed its name again, to the Elizabethan – also the name of Westminster School’s magazine, named in honour of its founder, Elizabeth I.
Interested oldies should seek out an old copy, for proof of quite how dramatic a transformation our Queen’s reign has seen in the young.
The magazine epitomised the aspirations of 1950s childhood. It was called ‘the magazine to grow up with’.
‘I think you should make the puzzles harder, ’ wrote one pious boy to the letters page. ‘I can do them much too easily.’
Readers of the (owned by John Grigg, the jovial Tory monarchist, who later wrote an incendiary article about Her Majesty, was thumped in the street and