27 August 2017
A piece of artwork has recently been acquired by the Cartoon arts museum which was passed on to the Jeff Hawke club. It comes from the archive of the Bayly -Souster group for whom Sydney worked when he first arrived in London in 1952, and is the first of his original sci-fi strips which he created as a personal project in the early fifties with the hope of eventual syndication in a national newspaper. See the post of 20 December 2015 – ” The butterfly effect in Fleet street” for more about Sydney’s collaboration with Eric Souster and his agency. His original character was named Orion but the strip contains the same basic elements as the opening scenes in Space Rider into which it eventually evolved; an unknown craft approaching Earth and Jet fighters sent up to intercept it. The introductory text at the start of the strip is also characteristically Jordanesque, an example of Sydney’s perennially poetic response to the grandeur and magnificence of the universe, a theme continued throughout the Hawke stories. The Express offered syndication , but wanted the name changed to Jeff Hawke and more emphasis placed on the RAF presence in the story. This accomplished , Hawke launched into the stratosphere on 15th February 1954. Skipper Prossitt
It’s fascinating to see the early ‘Orion’ version of Hawke, after hearing about it for so long – and especially because the evolution from ‘Captain O’Ryan’ to ‘Orion’ has classical and traditional parallels.
Studying for Higher Latin at school in the early 1960s, I had to memorise the early lines of Ovid’s poem about Arion, the wonderful musician who was saved from drowning by a dolphin, commemorated in the stars as the constellation Delphinus. Via Welsh tradition and Chaucer, Arion enters British folk tradition as ‘Jack Orion’, ‘Glasgerion’ in the Scottish version. Just as in Ovid’s poem, after the opening line ‘Jack Orion was as fine a fiddler, as ever fiddled on a string’, the ballad continues with a list of the magical feats he could perform by the power of his music. The late A.L. Lloyd set the English version to a Scottish tune for his LP ‘First Person’ (Topic, 1966), and a dramatic arrangement of it by Bert Jansch and John Renbourn is the title track of their LP (Transatlantic, 1966), before they went on to form Pentangle the following year.
Also in 1966, I started the Irvine Folk Song Club in Ayrshire, and one of our regulars for the first four years was singer-songwriter Buff Wilson, who lived on Meadowhead Farm between Irvine and Troon, my home town. Several of Buff’s songs featured the Irish farmhand ‘Neilie’, who had lived on the farm for many years, and one night Buff announced that instead of singing, he would recite a folk tale he had learned from Neilie, allegedly the origin of the proverb, ‘Never trust Orangemen or fiddlers’. Buff had never heard ‘Jack Orion’ at the time, so I was amazed when he began, “Jake O’Reilly was the finest fiddler you could find anywhere…”
As regards Sydney Jordan’s ‘Captain O’Ryan’, it’s another coincidence that in my University vacations, again in the mid-60s, I was writing a series about a spaceline called ‘Terran-Astral’. It attracted the attention of the late John W. Campbell and he bought a story from it just before his death (‘Proud Guns to the Sea’, based on the ballad ‘Henry Martin’, Analog, January 1973). Terran-Astral was founded as an airline in the late 20th century, by two Irish brothers called Ryan. The first part of that has come true…