Dan Dare & the Birth of High-Tec Britain, at the Science Museum in South Kensington, with Eagle comic, Frank Hampson, 1950s, the post-blitz days of nationalisation, the post-war struggle to build houses and make appliances. Take your hat off to that big old (De Havilland Comet) jet airliner and the honourable pioneers who flew and fell. History of Computing. Exploring Space. Occasional grammatical let-downs. Again, why do we have all these irritating improvements? Oh yes, we like them. They are nice…
07h42-BST Wednesday 07 May 2008-CE
Dan Dare & the Birth of High-Tec Britain, at the Science Museum in South Kensington, was well-worth taking a good time about. I looked at them with happy approval, the panels reproducing Eagle comic pages from the 1950s of Frank Hampson’s fictional future space heroes, and I read every word of the story continuity panels and text-balloons of the character’s conversation. In any expanded expo: radio’s Jet Morgan from Charles Chiltern maybe?
For myself, as a war-baby and then teenager of the 1950s, there could not have been too much Eagle. For you, as a “future boy” or girl whose young days were spent after many thousands of bomb sites were cleared away, you and I both could still thrill as we saw new, real journeys, both robotic and human, into space (hardly any by Brits of course, mostly by citizens of USA and USSR). I am sure the Eagle comic content in the exhibition is just right.
I had to remove my baseball cap as I looked at the actual panel with two windows that blew out of one of the three failed comet jet airliners. It is there recovered from the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. It is part of UK’s being at the leading edge of technology spun-off from World War 2. We were the ones to cop it in the neck as it was proved that alloys had to be stronger for large, high-flying passenger planes than bombers and fighters.
But there was, I have always felt, one element of loony designer hubris. How else do you explain why the windows on the De Havilland Comet aircraft were square? The corners had a tiny bit of a curve but it was not enough (as my non-engineer lay-mind can easily see) to conduct the stress around supportably. Significantly, cracks led from the corners. Newspapers soon after mentioned it but this presentation does not specifically point to it.
I made my usual skitty self read every word of the texts tracing the birth of hi-tech UK. I thoroughly salute the approach of the exhibition conceivers. Technical progress forced during war is the same mechanism as peaceful Apollo spinoff. I noted the point made that mainland manufacturers raced ahead as they reconstructed. Our housing was mucho-blitzed but many old factories survived to be made an excuse, later, for our plodding decline.
This minor point is not original to me; it was made by Thatcherites. Today, aside from 2008’s post-privatisation woe where profit trumps service to a criminal degree, we suffer same-old, arty-design attitude. Post-war, as UK fell behind both war-tooled USA and recovering Continent, it was not only so-called ‘Contemporary’ artiness; it was surviving class-rooted dislike of speaking up against, not only management, but also State under Labour.
Even if you are not of the Eagle comic era, go to the Second Floor of the Science Museum, defy the offensive assault of the arty work that twitters endlessly from the great lit circle rising up through the mezzanine gulf from far below (being young you probably like it) and dig Dan Dare & the Birth of High-Tec Britain. After all, if you are a kid now, the fictional future of Dan Dare has still not happened; it is your life to take and make!
I spent longer in South Kensington than ever before. It is worth reading every word in the ‘galleries’ that interest one, rather than just seeing the gear. I saw some bad English grammar in the Exploring Space section. And to say that gravity is “diminished in space” is a level-down. Almost as much gravity holds us when we fall around Earth (forward momentum having put us and our spacecraft container in that state) as when on the surface.
History of Computing is just along from Dan Dare & the Birth of High-Tec Britain, on the same level. As I looked at the clunky contraptions, valves and frames, and read about why on Earth they came to be made, I felt love for the geeks-of-their-day who began it all. It made me ashamed to slag off that infuriating cell phone sitting within arm’s reach, and this dratted PC that I must use …and yet, still I muse: come back childhood, most is forgiven…
FIN 11h26
