Odd this day
Dennis the Menace first appeared in the UK on this day after being created in Dundee by a man called David Law.
He was 10 years old, the “world’s wildest boy”, and lived, of course, in the pages of The Beano. (The image above is from a 1956 annual.) Later the same year, he acquired a red and black striped jumper, and never took it off again, and in 1968 he got a dog as disciplined as its owner: Gnasher.
Then, of course, the Americans got hold of the idea and ruined it, creating a five-year-old in Kansas with a blond mop, a skateboard, and a dog called — oh dear god — Ruff.
Except they didn’t. Steal the idea, that is. Due to some wrinkle in the space-time continuum, cartoonist Hank Ketcham’s syndicated namesake debuted in 16 American newspapers on exactly the same day as the British Dennis.
The US version was apparently inspired by a real-life four-year-old called Dennis — Ketcham’s son. Given an opportunity to nap one day, the boy had instead chosen chaos. Ketcham’s wife Alice walked from the wrecked bedroom to her husband’s studio to inform him
Your son is a menace!
…and an idea was born. The British version apparently took its name from a 1935 music hall song, Dennis the Menace from Venice.
They were, and remain, very different characters. Partly due to the difference in their ages, American Dennis’ adventures are, like his locks, of a lighter shade. In America, he’s a lovable scamp, mischievous but ultimately wholesome. In post-war Britain, he’s an anarchic vandal, pursued by police officers, and a bully of ‘softies’ like Walter. He’s the sort of child who might have spent his formative years playing on bombsites.
Inevitably, of course, the land that gave (some of) its people The American Dream is the one that’s not holding a mirror up to nature. Little is known of the personal life of David Law, but Alice Ketcham died when her son was 12. Hank, already estranged from her, remarried three weeks later. Dennis went off to boarding school, and later Vietnam, rarely seeing his father for the rest of his life. His fictional counterpart, born in the optimistic 1950s, remained sunny.
British Dennis, in the words of Smithsonian magazine,
emerged during a time of class struggle and waning empire, when the U.K. establishment feared the oik, the yob, the ungovernable prole
…and would not be contained.
12 March 2007
Rather splendidly, we have a bonus story today, from 51 years later, which also concerns misbehaviour, albeit of a rather different variety, and occurring in South America. For this was the day when Israeli media reported that the country’s ambassador to El Salvador had been recalled after local police found him drunk.
The intoxication itself was not the problem. Tsuriel Raphael had not restricted himself to merely taking drink. He was in his embassy’s grounds, naked, bound, gagged with a rubber ball, and “surrounded by sex toys”. This really had been quite the session.
A foreign ministry spokesperson said
The ministry sees his behaviour as unbecoming of a diplomat
…which was, appropriately, a diplomatic way of putting it.
