The reason for the Bristow website is my love for this cartoon character. It started in the late 1960s when my father used to bring home the Evening Standard that he read on the train from work. There was just something so wonderfully subversive about a humble buying clerk who so often manages to emerge on top. Of course it is now looking dated but the humour, both of the clever drawings and the brilliant dialogue, is timeless.
During the 1970s I collected over 2200 of the strips. I have also read and annotated some 700 strips from 1962-4 from the British Newspaper Library and in 2006 was granted special permission to photograph them - I now have over 2100 photos of strips from 1964-71 and will be extending this collection as time permits. I own 11 of the collections published in book form and have also collected some 1300 strips published on Frank Dicken's website. All non-digital strips are scanned, and the whole digital collection is indexed on a database with references to date of publication, themes and characters.. Perhaps this is the best collection in the world other than Frank's own - I don't know but no comparable fan site exists on the Internet as far as I can tell.
Anyone new to Bristow will be amazed to see the early strips. They typically consisted of 5 or 6 drawings and the dialogue was almost always Bristow talking directly to the reader. Many of the now familiar characters were unknown - there was no Mrs Purdy the garrulous tea-lady, no scheming post-boy, no East Winchley railway station. The canteen was yet to be adorned by Mr. Gordon Blue. Temps were rarely employed. The rich supporting cast of people from outside the Chester-Perry organisation - Blondinis, Walters (and son), Park-keepers, school-leavers desperate to become buying clerks, shifty holiday agents and irritating traffic wardens - these were to arrive later on. Even Sir Reginald did not feature until the strip was about a year old.
In those early days the buying department is a battleground. Bristow is consumed by ambition and jealousy. He is oppressed and humiliated by Fudge (so nothing changes there). He conspires both with and against fellow clerks Hewitt and Pilkington as well as Jones. He is mortified when a youngster, Barker, is promoted to assistant buyer. He is keen to write for the House Journal (rejected, of course) and expects both pay rises and the occasional bonus (he doesn't get them but bitterly resents Pilkington getting a small increment). He is obsessed with a self help book - not Brain Surgery for Beginners but a manual for would-be executives called Space at the Summit. (Older readers may recall John Braine's novel Room at the Top enjoying some success at this time).
The other great early theme is romance - Bristow's unrequited lust for Miss Pretty of Kleenaphone, and Miss Sunman's sublimated affections for him. Dickens drew Sunman as distinctly ugly in those days - I think he has grown rather fond of her and she appears to have blossomed just a little since.
During the 1970s Dickens reduced the number of drawing per strip to four and then to three. Dialogue in speech bubbles replaces Bristow's musings and commentaries. And the latest strips take this tendency to an extreme, with two or even one frame drawings predominating. It is not for me to criticise Dickens who has given me so much pleasure. But I find that I do prefer the earlier strips. The range of expressions and emotions that Bristow conveys in those six frame drawings make him live in a way that the one or two frame strips cannot do. The dialogue itself is funnier, with much greater emphasis on word-play, including puns, mangled proverbs and the occasional literary quotation.
This website is not meant as literary criticism. It is an aide-memoire for fans who may not be so familiar with the world of Chester-Perrys, and an exploration of some of the enduring themes that Dickens exploits with such wonderful results. It is being researched and rewritten continually, especially as Dickens continues to publish 5 new strips a week on his website. And there are at least 6000 strips that exist only in newspaper libraries and which I will be gradually seeking out over the next 10? - 20? - years.
Time passes...
Some cartoon strips have their characters experience time - they grow up, age maybe even die off. Others exist in a "continuous present" where nothing ever really changes and events become assimilated into a rather unspecific and usually inconsistent background. Bristow is such a strip. He has always worked for C-Ps for 8 and a bit years. The Great Tea Trolley Disaster always happened about 6 years before the present. The post-boy is still a post-boy. And so on. There are major events that ought to create a history - such as Fudge's replacement for a while by a Lady Chief Buyer - but these don't really change the landscape.
The problem for the writer (me, that is) is how to write about these one-off events - Does one use the tone of the continuous present for something that happened in the recent past (as far as the internal logic of the strip is concerned) and may have been published thirty years ago (in real time)? Take the vexed case of Living Death in the Buying Department. Bristow is shown actually writing this wretched diatribe in 1962 (when he had been with the firm for about 8 years). Then some time later he apparently finds the manuscript and we are told that he started it just after he started work at C-Ps - 8 years previously. And during the 1970s we find him furiously writing stories, poems, works of reference - but he still has only been with C-Ps for 8 and 2/3 years. So which is the now of the strip?
Well I'm not going to try to answer this one. I just use the terms early and late to distinguish things that happened before and after each other but where relevant I will also give the date of publication and the strip number. Knowing when a particular strip was written can be helpful - otherwise jokes about Easter issues of the House Journal appearing in May or the Committee of the Sports and Social Club cunningly inviting Sir Reginald - in February - to attend the Annual Christmas Dinner and Dance don't work. Also Dickens likes putting in topical references. Comparing C-Ps to Guantanamo Bay has no meaning at all unless you know it was published in 2003, or that the startling promotion of Mrs Fletcher as Head of Accounts just happened to coincide with the election of Mrs Thatcher as leader of the Conservative Party in 1975.
Strip numbering
The strips in the Evening Standard were numbered from the start but not consistently. Sometimes they were published in a different order - usually making more sense than if they had been published in strict numeric order. The last strip in October 1962 was numbered 215 and the next one published was 534. Strips published on Frank Dickens' website in early 2001 had no particular numbering scheme - there was a group marked "na" ; others seem to be randomly numbered between 1 and 10 with many repeats, but from May 2001 onward they were numbered consecutively.
Strip numbers used throughout this website refer to the number as published in the Evening Standard, whether or not this was relevant to the order of publication. If I don't know the actual publication number then I have assigned a dummy number (typically these are in the range 2000-3000) and said so on the page that actually displays it. If a strip was also published in a book in the UK I have given the reference. The first three books were each called Bristow so these are distinguished by the dates of publication, being in 1966, 1970 and 1972. I have not referred to the books published elsewhere. A lot of early strip were published in Italy and some in Australia but I don't have any of these.