For those of us lucky enough to have been regular contributors to Punch magazine, April is a slightly crueller month than most, since it was on 8 April 32 years ago that the last edition collapsed, exhausted, on to the newspaper stands. By then it was way past its best, but in its day it had employed some of the very best brains in the business, led by some of the very best editors.
I was lucky enough to be around when Alan Coren was in his prime. He led the magazine from the front, literally, and set a standard that the rest of us did our hardest to emulate, but rarely achieved. If ever.
‘I know no work to equal the appalling, heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere’
One of Punch’s most famous writers was in no doubt about the effort required to succeed at the humorous coalface. ‘I know no work, manual or mental,’ confessed A.A. Milne in his 1939 autobiography It’s Too Late Now ‘to equal the appalling, heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.’
His assertion that being funny was harder that it looked did little to appease his schoolmaster father for whom his son’s choice of career had been a disappointment from the start. Milne had already upset him by leaving Cambridge in 1903 with a third-class degree. So much so that Milne senior didn’t speak to his youngest son for a week after the results were published. But he still harboured hopes that the boy might yet make it into the civil service, serve his country well and end up with a knighthood.
Milne, however, had been writing humorous stuff all through his time at Cambridge, ending up as editor of the student magazine Granta, and it had long been his ambition to write for Punch. Encouraged by his father’s old friend, H.G. Wells, who advised him never to accept a job on a newspaper and always to stick to the freelance life, he had scratched a living by sending light-hearted pieces to publications such as the St James’s Gazette, Black &White, the Bystander and the Express with varying success.
On 18 May 1904, his first piece appeared in Punch. It was a poem entitled The New Game which described the pleasures of a wonderfully eccentric-sounding Tibetan activity called ‘firing jingals from a jong’.
In an attempt to save money, Milne moved from Temple Chambers on the other side of the road from Punch in Bouverie Street to a flat in Wellington Square, Chelsea, where, encouraged by Wells and the humorist and poet Barry Pain, he began work on a little book called Lovers in London, featuring two young unmarried heroines: Lilian, a young woman for ever teetering on the brink of marriage, and an eager American tourist called Amelia.
Pain introduced him to his literary agent, J.B. Pinker, whose clients included Wells, Henry James, Conrad, Kipling, Arnold Bennett – and now Milne, for whom he acquired a publisher in the shape of Alston Rivers, and a £5 advance. Reviewers for this ‘shilling’ book included the theatre critic W.A. Darlington who called it ‘a new fresh form of humour’. After a year during which various Milne pieces were sent to Punch and returned a week later, the magazine started taking his work on a regular basis, including a regular series on the young heroines of Lovers in London which acquired an enthusiastic following.
Milne’s long-time champion, R.C. Lehmann, the influential founder of Granta and a regular Punch contributor, had an important part to play in his protégé’s next step on the ladder. In 1906, when the longstanding editor F.C. Burnand finally retired after 26 years in the chair, Owen Seaman was appointed and, at Lehmann’s urging, asked Milne if he would like to take over from him as assistant editor.
Milne wrote in his autobiography: ‘Much as it had seemed wonderful to be editing the Granta after so short a struggle, so it seemed wonderful now to be, at 24, Assistant Editor of Punch.’ It seemed slightly less wonderful when he discovered he was still expected to produce a weekly and ‘a gay (I hoped) article of 1,200 words with a smile in every paragraph and a laugh in every inch’.
It would take him a lot longer than he had imagined, though, before he was invited to join the famous Punch Table, around which members would gather every Wednesday evening, mainly to discuss the next week’s political cartoon. In May 1910, having written a column every week for the preceding four years, and five days after the funeral of King Edward VII, Milne was finally invited to carve his initials into the woodwork. By then, ‘A.A.M’ was widely known by the well-read and he always succeeded in coming up with the goods, despite his protestations of creative agony. ‘Ideas,’ he wrote, ‘may drift into other people’s minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them.’
And so it was that the man later to become a successful playwright (Mr Pim Passes By, The Dover Road, Toad of Toad Hall), described the process involved in sitting at home, turning out yet another whimsical sketch or humorous essay, almost as a theatrical monologue:
At 12, I was saying to myself: ‘Well, it’s not very good, but I may as well begin and see what happens.’ I began.
At 12.30 I was saying: ‘It’s not so bad.’
At 1.30 some variation of the idea came to me, and I began again. It was now definitely going to be good.
At 3.30 it was finished. I dashed to the Punch office, sent it down to the printers, and went out again in search of something to eat.
Reading such vignettes almost a century later in collections with such cheery titles as The Holiday Round, Once a Week and The Sunny Side could well – and very possibly will – prompt even the biggest Milne fan to shake his or her head in astonishment that anyone could have thought them funny.
Milne would look back on those years in Bouverie Street as the happiest of his life
Ann Thwaite has fewer misgivings. In her splendid 1990 biography – A.A. Milne: His Life – she gives a typical example of how an idea might occur to him. Heading up to the Punch office from the country one morning on a train due to arrive in London at noon, he was all too aware that he didn’t have the ghost of an idea for his weekly piece, due to be delivered that afternoon. Then ‘at Chislehurst or some such place, a girl got into my carriage. I whisked my dressing case off the seat. And… nothing happened.’
‘But,’ Mrs Thwaite concludes, ‘the article was assured. In that moment Milne had imagined the bag opening and its contents scattered over the carriage – dirty collars, crumpled pyjamas, and, worst of all, dirty socks with unmatching suspenders attached to them. Not very funny, but adequate. People smiled in dentists’ waiting rooms and as they buttered another piece of toast. Just the sort of thing that might happen, wasn’t it?’
Milne would look back on those years in Bouverie Street as the happiest of his life. In February 1915 he got a commission in the Warwickshire Regiment and after a year in France was invalided out with trench fever. During that time he wrote only three pieces for Punch but found little to be funny about, and from then on devoted his time to Pooh, Piglet and co. and to the theatre.
‘The most exciting form of writing,’ he declared, ‘is the writing of plays.’ But even this brought out the Eeyore in him. ‘There is, however, this to be said against it: that when the play is written, the author is never really happy until it has been taken off.’
He might possibly have become editor of Punch, but he knew from his earliest days in Bouverie Street that contributing regularly to the magazine was never going to be a cheerful prospect.
‘At 11.30 my brain in ruins, I was still searching,’ he wrote in his autobiography, remembering the despair he’d felt at failing once again to find a good idea for that week’s piece. ‘I was telling myself that even if I did find one, I had to find 51 more before the year was over: and that if I stayed at Punch until I was 70, as everybody seemed to do, then I should have to find 2,500 ideas before I died. Yet now, in my prime at 24, I couldn’t even find one. Why hadn’t I become a schoolmaster?’
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