The Life and Times of Milly O'Naire

This is the very first edition of The Toffs and the Toughs, which appeared in IPC/Fleetway's Knockout across its 106 weekly issues from 1971 to 1973. It is one of many, many, many Fleetway strips based around class war, a few more of which we are soon to encounter.

I am not absolutely certain, but I think this very first instalment of TTatT is the only one in which the names of the individual toffs and toughs are ever given -- certainly I've read quite a lot of other strips and none of the characters are named in them. The artist was Reg Parlett, although some sources claim it was Joe McCaffrey; possibly McCaffrey ghosted some strips further down the line.

When Knockout finished in 1973 it merged with Whizzer and Chips. It appears The Toffs and the Toughs was carried forward to Whizzer and Chips incorporating Knockout (as it was known for a little over a year post-merger), but -- like several of the other strips that made the leap forward -- didn't last in its new home for more than a year or so. (Perhaps the most famous survivor of Knockout was Fuss Pot, who survived another merger later on and continued to appear in Fleetway's last comic standing, Buster, until it ended.)

However, the Knockout Christmas annual continued to be issued until 1984, and the toffs and the toughs continued to wage their wars against each other in that; additionally, later in the 70s the characters had a relaunch of sorts in a W&C strip called Smarty's Toffs and Tatty's Toughs (a sample of which can be seen here), which made the two groups supporting characters to the pre-established leads of Smarty Pants and Tatty Ed, although they seem to have disappeared from the pages of Whizzer and Chips for good by the late seventies.

Meanwhile, in 1979 Fleetway launched another new comic, Jackpot, which featured another class war-based strip in all 141 issues over a run of just under three years: Milly O'Naire and Penny Less (drawn by Sid Burgon), recycling the name of the female toff in The Toffs and the Toughs -- most likely unconsciously, although the two Millys do have some interesting similarities in their character designs.

And that is how Fleetway had two concurrent characters with the exact same name, without anybody noticing.

What happened to Milly the Second and her friend is quite interesting, though: in early 1982, it was time for Jackpot to end and, like so many other Fleetway comics, it merged with Buster. Milly and Penny had regularly finished top of reader polls to find the most popular story throughout Jackpot's lifetime, and were obvious candidates to be carried forward to Buster and Jackpot (as it would be known for the first 13 months following the merger).

However, Buster was already running arguably the most famous rich-versus-poor strip in the Fleetway canon, Ivor Lott and Tony Broke, which had originated in Cor!! in 1970 and moved over to Buster and Cor!! (as it would be known for the first 16 months following the merger) when Cor!! ended in 1974. Milly and Penny were basically the distaff counterparts of Ivor and Tony (indeed, Sid Burgon was the artist for both, having inherited Ivor and Tony from their originator, who was none other than Reg Parlett), and it made no sense to keep both strips. But Ivor and Tony were also hugely popular with readers, and had been around for longer.

The solution was to merge the two strips themselves into the rather unwieldily-titled Ivor Lott and Tony Broke with Milly O'Naire and Penny Less, providing a distinct fourth chapter for a Fleetway character called Milly O'Naire. ILaTBwMO'NaPL ran for another four years, and then in 1986 the girls were slowly phased out, with a proper exit storyline: Milly went to attend a private boarding school but discovered that Penny had won a scholarship and they would be studying together. Although the girls would then be dropped from the strip's title, Ivor and Tony paid occasional visits to their girlfriends until some time in 1987. New strips featuring Ivor and Tony ran until 1990, when Sid Burgon moved over to D. C. Thomson; after that point they only ever appeared in Buster as repeats for the last decade or so of the comic's life.

Another Jackpot strip which survived the merger with Buster was about a private school which had to merge with a nearby comprehensive, which was -- at first -- literally called Class Wars. Perhaps this title was judged to be a little too on-the-nose, as it was later rebranded Top of the Class, which is how it is better known; it ran until 1987 under this name. The title panel for this strip labelled the two groups of students with the curiously familiar labels of "the scruffs and the toffs".

(As you can probably guess from the strips featured throughout this piece, the snobs almost invariably came off the worst each week. Just occasionally the strip would end in a score-draw, most often at Christmas, or in some Ivor/Tony strips the punchline would be based around how much money Ivor was willing to spend. Certainly the snobs never came out on top, although Top of the Class featured more cooperation between the two sides than other strips.)

If nothing else, I hope I've gotten across how complicated the various Fleetway mergers can be to disentangle. (I tried to put together a timeline of all of them and I think part of my brain actually melted. You may like to know that there were only 16 issues of Nipper, but 19 issues of Buster which were branded as Buster and Nipper.)