Category:Boys Own Paper

1931: Make this Camping Sailing Boat, Boy's Own Paper (from Hobbies Weekly) [image info]

1932: Full-page ad in Meccano Magazine [image info]

1933: Grand Model-Making Competition, advert from Meccano Magazine [image info]

1952: "Let's Make Something!", from Hobbies Handbook [image info]

The Boy's Own Paper ("BOP") (1879 - 1967) was originally created in the Victorian era as a means of instilling what were considered to be "good Christian values" in boys, and is now chiefly remembered for its "ripping" stories designed to excite and inspire, and to promote allegiance to organisations that were considered to form the backbone of British society – public schools, the British military, and the British Empire.

Contemporary culture

Aimed more at boys than adults, the stories and articles published in the paper can be seen as representing a naive distillation of attitudes and values that seem to modern eyes to be painfully dated and almost comically archaic, and the paper probably played a part in inspiring Monty Python members Michael Palin and Terry Jones to write the spoof tv series "Ripping Yarns", which lampooned the "Inspiring British Empire stories for boys" genre.

"Making" articles

After World War One, a certain amount of advertising for the paper (in Hobbies Handbook and Meccano Magazine) promoted it as "The model paper for the model maker", a useful read for practically-minded boys who were interested in learning how to make and build things.