KEN REID IN SUNDAY EXPRESS

In addition to his comics work for Britain’s major publishers of children’s funnies and Fudge the Elf strip in Manchester Evening News, Ken Reid illustrated weekly competitions for the Irish Edition of Sunday Express. 

He did four series between 1956 and 1970. They were Horse Pics, Horse Clues, Inn Signs and Titles (in order of appearance), a total of nearly 700 drawings. The printed version was only 2 ½ x 2 ½ inches, original drawings were 4 times larger. 

Here are some cut-outs of Inn Signs (the rusty staple mark shows how small they were in the paper):

The competitions were quite challenging – readers had to select five names out of eight provided (eleven in the case of the earlier competitions) and list them in correct order in the entry coupon. Ken had a completely free hand devising illustrations and thinking up names, sometimes as many as a couple of dozen of them, for the editor to choose from.

Here are some examples of Titles. I have quite a few more of those and can show them in another blogpost, if there’s enough interest, so do let me know :) The challenge was to select the most suitable titles for a book based on cover illustration:

There is something about the competitions that I don’t quite understand, perhaps some of my learned readers would be able to help me. Horse Pics and Horse Clues were usually humorous drawings with no horses. Why were they called Horse Pics and Horse Clues then? Does the word “horse” refer to something else other than the familiar domesticated mammal in this case?