Review by Frank Plowright
As with most other hardcovers to date combining perennial favourite Scottish Sunday newspaper strips The Broons and Oor Wullie, the selection is taken from the thirty plus years they were drawn by Dudley D. Watkins.
On all strips to the mid-1950s at least, the writer is probably R. D. Low, Robert Duncan to his friends, whose brief was to reflect the lives of most readers who were either crowded into tenement flats like the Broons, or lived in small houses like Oor Wullie. It means the Oor Wullie strips in particular very much reflect a byegone era, with the young Wullie and his mates allowed to roam around unaccompanied the entire day, yet well known in the local community where everyone looks out for him. There’s also a sense of community about the Broons, who may have their differences with people, but when push comes to shove are caring and involved. A really touching Christmas strip has the youngest child concerned about her parents’ elderly friends who live in a converted bus with a chimney too small for Santa to get down.
The strips have a gentle humour and gloriously parochial phrasing reflecting the Dundee publishers. For your homework look up bauchle, cuddie, gowk and puggled. As well as holidays celebrated throughout the country, the strips feature local events, such as children being let off school for a week for tattie picking. Accompanying photos and snippets of news articles show the children unearthing potatoes at the local farms, for which they were paid.
Watkins brings a glorious life to the characters, be they full of mischief like Wullie, or the types of old people seen around town like Grandpa Broon. His style develops considerably over the three decades, and the wonder is by the 1950s how he’s able to fit so many people into a panel without them ever seeming crowded. It’s an art he developed as the early strips are crowded, but even more amazing when there are strips with additional equivalents of the entire Broon family, which occurs twice here. The sample art shows them meeting English counterparts the Browns when on holiday, and a later strip features their neighbours the Blacks. In both cases Watkins designs similar, yet different variants of every family member.
In frequently turning a disadvantage to an advantage, Wullie’s strips are more formularised, but creative within that template, while with a family as the focus The Broons can steer just about anywhere. In both cases, characters are generally content with their lot, which possibly feeds into different times with lower expectations. When the Broons go on holiday the furthest they travel is Blackpool, and one 1950s strip features the astounding notion that Grandpa might be planning a holiday in Spain, although that is a possibility for Wullie’s mates in 1965. For the most part they end up at the But and Ben, a Scottish phrase for a two room holiday cottage in the countryside.
Fans interested in the detail might be surprised to learn this features a strip as late as 1941 not ending with Wullie on his pail. There have now been a dozen of these hardcover reprint collections, and allowing for the settling in during the early years, the consistency is astounding. There’s barely a disappointing strip among them.
