Remembering the Evening Times Bruin Club

Wednesday 20 February 2008


Other entertainment included the magic lantern show in the wee wooden church hall opposite the library, and the Evening Times Bruin club at the Burgh Hall. This was a spin off from the Bruin the Bear cartoon strip in the paper. Back then I believed Bruin when he cut down a tree to use as a keel, broke up some barrels and built a boat from them to sail on his adventures. Nowadays kids would get legal aid, hire a lawyer and sue the Times because they misled them!

Alex Saville remembering his Glasgow childhood.

In a previous post I wrote a little about Bruin, the Evening Times version of the Danish children’s strip Rasmus Klump. That post included the cover and first page of a scrapbook of Bruin strips from the early 1950s. Here are a few more pages continuing the story.










I’d like to contrast those last strips with the same scene in a later translation, Barnaby Bear builds a boat, published by Random House New York in 1979. The Random House version, apparently translated not from the Danish original, but from a German edition, loses much of the humour.


Rasmus Klump/Bruin/Barnaby Bear copyright © Egmont Serieforlaget.

See all my Rasmus Klump posts.