No.
Sorry, simple answer. Although the US and its supplies were vital to the UK at the time they didn’t supply us with paper to print comics!
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Robert Kennedy, following a comment on the GCD (Grand Comics Database) by someone who does not wish to be name (??), who wrote:
“It’s reckoned some UK publishers got their start with fly WWII paper allocations (miller for example), but no specific details here.”
Well, no. Mr ? is writing from lack of knowledge of the UK which, unlike the United States, suffered VERY severe shortages.
At one point the UK only had a few weeks food left and as my late acquaintance Air Vice Marshal Sir Victor Goddard pointed out: “We expected the German invasion any day. We knew it would be a very hard fight and our resources were limited.”
Food and armaments were the main thing the UK wanted during the war and just after. There was compulsory recyclying in the UK which is why UK Golden Age comics are so rare and obscure -kids recycled (voluntarily or otherwise) because we knew everything was needed.
There is, I’ve just found on Wikipedia, an entry that explains a few things:
“Newspapers were limited from September 1939, at first to 60% of their pre-war consumption of newsprint. Paper supply came under the No 48 Paper Control Order, September 4, 1942 and was controlled by the Ministry of Production. By 1945 newspapers were limited to 25% of their pre-war consumption. Wrapping paper for most goods was prohibited.
The paper shortage often made it more difficult than usual for authors to get work published. In 1944, the author George Orwell wrote:
During the paper rationing era A6 sized comics were not unknown and every type of paper was used to print on from brown wrapping paper to, incredibly, even silver paper (as used in wrapping gifts etc.). Publishers such as Gerald Swan had to find various crafty ways around this rationing.
The only US paper imports were from troop or supply ships. In a UK
documentary a few years back, Scottish actor Robbie Coltrane was talking
to fellow Scot and author/TV writer John Byrne in an old comic shop.
Byrne reminisced about going along the beach to pick up and dry out US
comics that were used as ballast on ships then jettisoned.
Ink was also a problem and blue, purple, orange, red, green were used instead of black on some books. Full colour was a fantasy! Right up until the 1950s UK comics tended to be 8 pagers and many were one-offs to beat rationing.
In Europe the economy needed fixing to help rebuild after the war. Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands having been our war time allies were THE main source for new paper -shipping bulks of paper from the US to the UK made little sense because the UK WANTED food!
With compulsory recycling the price of scrap paper was fixed at around £5 a ton for a mixed bundle (compared to 5 shillings –22 shillings to a pound then– before the war) and rising for higher grades, which in total contributed between £3 and £5m to the economy.
Official interest in enforcement of recycling paper tended to fluctuated and especially after 1947. What was termed “Compulsion” was then removed on the 30th June,1949, and the Office of Paper Control itself was wound up on 31st December, 1949. The UK Salvage Directorate was later abolished on 30th March,1950 and the price controls on 24th April, 1950.
It took a while but the scheme eventually died away and the UK paper mills were forced to import waste paper from Holland, Sweden and Norway which was cheaper and this only changed later when total rationing stopped and European economy and paper industry got back on its feet.
Ironically, some paper may have come from German paper mills BUT this would not be openly declared because of various anti-German feelings.
Certainly Miller etc., would have been rationed and reliant on the European waste paper and even Alan Class in 1959 had to go through licensing agreements not just to get rights to US books STILL not getting into the UK but also for paper resources.
If you look at comics (8 pagers) published after 1946 the paper quality is very poor. If you then look, after 1950, at the Miller books and those from other publishers the grade of paper is not good and would have been the recycled waste paper since books and most definitely comics, were not seen as any sort of priority.
Americans l;ike to think they gave us everything but paper? No. We were more interested in imported crates of SPAM and other materials.
Did I get long-winded? Sorry. Importing paper would take up whole ships -space for food.
*************************************************************
scans: Thanks to Ernesto Guevara and The British Golden Age Comics site
NB: It is a policy never to change a blog’s content just because someone gets uppity about something in it. Apparently, Robert Kennedy got a lot of flak from the person who suggested the UK comic publishers got old US paper.
WHY??
It was a legitimate suggestion so why insist that your name be removed -the name and quote are on the internet forever anyway? Silly behaviour by people on the internet never surprises me. But, as a favour to Robert Kennedy I’ve removed that person’s name.
Sorry, simple answer. Although the US and its supplies were vital to the UK at the time they didn’t supply us with paper to print comics!
Robert Kennedy, following a comment on the GCD (Grand Comics Database) by someone who does not wish to be name (??), who wrote:
“It’s reckoned some UK publishers got their start with fly WWII paper allocations (miller for example), but no specific details here.”
Well, no. Mr ? is writing from lack of knowledge of the UK which, unlike the United States, suffered VERY severe shortages.
At one point the UK only had a few weeks food left and as my late acquaintance Air Vice Marshal Sir Victor Goddard pointed out: “We expected the German invasion any day. We knew it would be a very hard fight and our resources were limited.”
Food and armaments were the main thing the UK wanted during the war and just after. There was compulsory recyclying in the UK which is why UK Golden Age comics are so rare and obscure -kids recycled (voluntarily or otherwise) because we knew everything was needed.
There is, I’ve just found on Wikipedia, an entry that explains a few things:
“Newspapers were limited from September 1939, at first to 60% of their pre-war consumption of newsprint. Paper supply came under the No 48 Paper Control Order, September 4, 1942 and was controlled by the Ministry of Production. By 1945 newspapers were limited to 25% of their pre-war consumption. Wrapping paper for most goods was prohibited.
The paper shortage often made it more difficult than usual for authors to get work published. In 1944, the author George Orwell wrote:
“In Mr Stanley Unwin’s recent pamphlet Publishing in Peace and War,
some interesting facts are given about the quantities of paper allotted
by the Government for various purposes. Here are the present figures:-
A particularly interesting detail is that out of the 100,000 tons
allotted to the Stationery Office, the War Office gets no less than
25,000 tons, or more than the whole of the book trade put together.
[...] At the same time paper for books is so short that even the most
hackneyed “classic” is liable to be out of print, many schools are short
of textbooks, new writers get no chance to start and even established
writers have to expect a gap of a year or two years between finishing a
book and seeing it published.”
—“As I Please”, George Orwell, The Tribune, 20th October, 1944| Newspapers | 250,000 tons | |
| H. M. Stationery Office | 200,000 “ | |
| Periodicals | (nearly) 50,000 “ | |
| Books | 22,000 “ |
During the paper rationing era A6 sized comics were not unknown and every type of paper was used to print on from brown wrapping paper to, incredibly, even silver paper (as used in wrapping gifts etc.). Publishers such as Gerald Swan had to find various crafty ways around this rationing.
Ink was also a problem and blue, purple, orange, red, green were used instead of black on some books. Full colour was a fantasy! Right up until the 1950s UK comics tended to be 8 pagers and many were one-offs to beat rationing.
In Europe the economy needed fixing to help rebuild after the war. Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands having been our war time allies were THE main source for new paper -shipping bulks of paper from the US to the UK made little sense because the UK WANTED food!
With compulsory recycling the price of scrap paper was fixed at around £5 a ton for a mixed bundle (compared to 5 shillings –22 shillings to a pound then– before the war) and rising for higher grades, which in total contributed between £3 and £5m to the economy.
Official interest in enforcement of recycling paper tended to fluctuated and especially after 1947. What was termed “Compulsion” was then removed on the 30th June,1949, and the Office of Paper Control itself was wound up on 31st December, 1949. The UK Salvage Directorate was later abolished on 30th March,1950 and the price controls on 24th April, 1950.
It took a while but the scheme eventually died away and the UK paper mills were forced to import waste paper from Holland, Sweden and Norway which was cheaper and this only changed later when total rationing stopped and European economy and paper industry got back on its feet.
Ironically, some paper may have come from German paper mills BUT this would not be openly declared because of various anti-German feelings.
Certainly Miller etc., would have been rationed and reliant on the European waste paper and even Alan Class in 1959 had to go through licensing agreements not just to get rights to US books STILL not getting into the UK but also for paper resources.
If you look at comics (8 pagers) published after 1946 the paper quality is very poor. If you then look, after 1950, at the Miller books and those from other publishers the grade of paper is not good and would have been the recycled waste paper since books and most definitely comics, were not seen as any sort of priority.
Americans l;ike to think they gave us everything but paper? No. We were more interested in imported crates of SPAM and other materials.
Did I get long-winded? Sorry. Importing paper would take up whole ships -space for food.
scans: Thanks to Ernesto Guevara and The British Golden Age Comics site
NB: It is a policy never to change a blog’s content just because someone gets uppity about something in it. Apparently, Robert Kennedy got a lot of flak from the person who suggested the UK comic publishers got old US paper.
WHY??
It was a legitimate suggestion so why insist that your name be removed -the name and quote are on the internet forever anyway? Silly behaviour by people on the internet never surprises me. But, as a favour to Robert Kennedy I’ve removed that person’s name.
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