Leader magazine, 1947–50
We recently received from John of Perth about sixty-five copies of the weekly magazine Leader. It was an altogether new title to us, and we now know it didn’t last long, expiring in 1950 after about eight years. We’ll come to why in a minute.
It was all black-and-white (apart from the covers), and outsize. Think Picture Post but far fewer photographs and far more words. Our copies run from 1947 to 1950, when the price went from 3d to 6d. Flicking through a random issue in 1949, there are articles on film censorship (asking, amongst other things, if Christ should ever be depicted on the screen), fishing, con-men, the regular column ‘One woman’s week’ (this one featuring a seaside landlady), fashion, health, nature, the arts, and whether the UN should recognise Spain (then under Franco, remember). So something for everyone.
The ads are generally confined to the beginnings and ends, with the occasional glorious full-colour rear page – I’m reproducing two here, one for Andrew’s Liver Salts, the other Hercules bicycles. The small ads, if there is any theme at all, latch onto health (asthma and liver bile shown here) but otherwise wallpaper, weaving looms, shoes, writing courses, cigarettes, Shredded Wheat and Tampax.
So why did it expire so quickly? For ideas I’m suggesting we look at one ad in particular, by Blue Cars of London and for a 16-day coach tour of Italy for £69 19s 6d. So, let’s say an even seventy quid. I calculate this was around three months’ pay for a regular guy – and who could have taken such a long holiday then anyway? And it’s seventy quid per person. This single ad probably does the most to pinpoint the reader: middle-class, bookish, serious – and with time to kill and a useful disposable income. Someone likely to turn up their nose at Picture Post, which would have sat on the same shelf at WH Smith’s, but which was full of photographs and very few words.
Funny old world, because before you know it, Picture Post absorbed Leader in 1950. At the time Leader had weekly sales of 200,000, yet even then the economics weren’t working. Four other similar magazines had expired that year already, so the market was brutal. An editorial in Leader’s final edition frankly admitted ‘we are not going to pretend that because you liked one you will necessarily like the other’. Likely very true, and I can’t see Leader readers transferring their allegiance to Picture Post in a hurry.
