PAULINE PERSPECTIVE
Folio – Boys’ Own Theo Hobson looks back at the magazine that embodied the spirit of St Paul’s
Folio was the longest running publication put together entirely by Paulines – and, for most of its life, Paulinas. It ran from 1954 to 1991. A delve in the archives offers a glimpse of the dramatic social changes of these years.
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or its first six years, it resembles a broadsheet newspaper of the day – lots of sober stories about school matters crammed together on large pages, with very few images. Gradually the outer world begins to intrude. In 1958 we are told that ‘On Wednesday mornings a calculated 48 per cent of all Pauline conversation somehow concerns [the radio comedy show] The Goons.’ But it only intrudes so far. The summer edition of 1959 has an article headed ’Tiddlywinks at St Paul’s’. ‘Pauline winking is run by two main bodies: the All-Plastic Tiddlywinks Club de St Paul’s and the Oblong Tiddlywink Club von St Paul.’ You can see why the sixties were needed. The format loosened up considerably in the next year or two: by 1961 there were more images, more (rather tentative) irreverence, less sport. And more serious journalism. In 1966, under the editorship of Richard Zorza (1963-67), the broadsheet format was replaced and Folio the magazine was born. The changes were continued by Julian Manyon (1964-67) over the next couple of years. And there was a new spirit of earnest political engagement. Political issues included race. In 1966 Julian Manyon wrote a thoughtful piece on racism. Many Britons look down on the recent immigrants, he says, so as a nation we have no claim to liberal superiority. ‘Let us remember that the Americans in Selma and the white Rhodesians are our cousins and we share their guilt – let us not share their sin.’
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Two years later Manyon interviewed Richard Neville, editor of the radical hippie magazine Oz. ‘Politicians to me are the most insidious, vile human beings one could contemplate’, said Neville, before being asked about drugs. They ‘show you a part of yourself that you didn’t know existed’. It is unlikely that the school would allow drugs to be puffed, so to speak, these days. In the same year, 1968, Jon Blair (1967-69) emerged as a socially conscious roving reporter, with echoes of Orwell. In an article on the Hammersmith Palais, then a popular dancehall, he argued that the gaudy hedonism was a necessary escape from difficult lives. He was surprised to see so many homosexuals and lesbians there: ‘one must certainly sympathise with their desire to achieve some degree of normality, be it only temporarily, and a night out at the Palais might well achieve this.’ Blair also reported on conditions at three local state schools. At Mortlake Boys School he found ‘an obvious lack of funds to buy, say a new carpet for the Headmaster’s office, or little items of maintenance that are so essential if a school is to have a decent appearance.’ At St. Hilda’s, a school for children with learning difficulties, he met a boy who had noticed St Paul’s’ ample playing fields and wondered if he could play football there. ‘How does one explain that he’ll probably never play football there, and that he will always be doomed to the asphalt of his state education?’ In the seventies, interviews with big names became more common. In 1972 Enoch Powell doubted that the British people really wanted to join the EEC: “It isn’t the price of
