Identifying Royale Studio and Hussar Model's Names

How the lost names of Royale and Hussar models are discovered

Who played the MP in 'Redcap & Deserter?

   One of the main aims of the Royale Open Archive project is to identify by name and recognise the largely unsung heroes who actually posed for the photos that Royale fans love so much. The January 1960, Royale Catalogue is a priceless source of information, it names the stars of many of the early sets - David Reid, Fred Collins and Peter George etc., who often have such distinctive faces that it's easy to spot them in other, undocumented roles. Lesser mortals are much more difficult.  

  Royale Storyettes and Hussar playlets that were issued after January 1960 are almost completely undocumented. So, for example, it would not be possible to name the seedy barman in Shanghai'ed Sailor (Jack Shrimpton) without the help of a feature that appeared in Man Alive 10. Unfortunately few of the beefcake magazines of the time followed Man Alive's example in publishing storyette photos, so the supporting actors in most later storyettes (and some early ones that had been deleted from the Catalogue by January 1960) are completely unknown.

The only recourse is to try and match storyette faces to those of models featured in solo poses in the physique press. That task is not made any easier by the fact that faces change dramatically when they are angled and in the vast majority of solo poses, the model is looking directly at the camera, whereas in storyette roles, they are often seen only in profile and sometimes only from behind or below. Tentative identifications can best be corroborated by matching the dates when storyettes and solo poses were published, since most models only had short careers in the spotlight and in lesser cases probably had effectively only one posing engagement, perhaps spread over more than one day to accommodate separate solo and storyette sessions.

I have succeeded (I believe) in uncovering the identities of some of these mystery men, or at least suggesting possible names for them. These are presently explained in the profile articles of the sets concerned as and when I discover them, but this is often a retrospective change, so I plan to follow up this explanatory article by announcing the 'discovery' in blog articles here, using the common post label 'Identifying Model's Names'.

The first example will be the name of the model who plays the Military Policeman or 'Redcap' in the Redcap and the Deserter, story number 41, illustrated at the top of this post.