Paul's Airfix and Dan Dare Kiosk

Hi Woodsy

Here is a bizarre little crumb of modelling trivia – a connection between Airfix and Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future. Not being an expert on Dan Dare, I do not know if this is already well known among DD fans, but it was new to me.

At the most recent Auckland fair, I spotted a box of built-up railway kiosk kits – mostly by Airfix. There were five kiosks (small shops), four of them from the Airfix Kiosks and Platform Steps kit.

This kit was first released in 1958, and it stayed in the Airfix range until the early 1980s, when the entire Airfix railway kit line was sold off to Dapol. It contained two kiosks – a newspaper stand, and a tobacconist; and a set of railway platform steps.

To decorate the two kiosks a number of colour signs were printed on the glossy paper header of the original plastic bag. Later kits, in the 1978 style box, had the signs on a separate piece of paper.

Most of the signs and magazine covers are too small to read, but some of the larger posters are for real publications. 

Among them are newspapers such as The Daily Mail, and The Observer – and one for the comic Eagle, and its lead feature Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future.

Eagle was a British weekly comic for boys, originally published between 1950 and 1969. It was founded by an English vicar named Marcus Morris, as a morally up-lifting alternative to all those dreadful American horror comics coming in to Britain at the time (and which would eventually be banned under the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955).

Eagle was most famous for the space-adventure picture strip Dan Dare, which graced the cover of the very first issue; and its magnificent double-page, full colour cut-away drawings of machinery.

Eagle is not a publication I ever read, but I was aware of its existence, and it has often been mentioned on Moonbase Central. So when I saw the Dan Dare poster on this Airfix railway magazine kiosk, I just had to get it.

The Eagle logo, of an Eagle in flight, was also used on the boxes of Eagle kits, made by Eaglewall Plastics Limited. The boxes saying 'By Permission Eagle'.

This range comprised a mix of 1/96th scale aircraft models, and 1/1200th WW2 warships. Even the display stand in the aircraft kits included the Eagle logo.

Towards the end of the company, Eaglewall Plastics dropped the Eagle name from its kit boxes, and used Eagle Wall instead. They also dropped the flying eagle logo.

(Eight photographs – three are mine, and five from Worthpoint)

Paul Adams from New Zealand