15 Soldier Sailor, FJSS (Dec 1958)

A storyette of 21 pictures which stars John Skilling as the Sailor and Fred Collins as the Soldier who swap uniforms, quarrel over a drum and are finally tied up together to cool down. 

It first featured in an advert in Tomorrow's Man in December 1958. Man Alive observed in Jun 1959 that 'there really isn't much of a story', but the Soldier Sailor set is actually a fairly good example of a Royale Studio 'Uniform' storyette. It has many of the ingredients that defined Royale's, highly original approach to beefcake photography.  The military-themed pictures seem quaint and artificial at first sight, but closer investigation reveals it to be laced with subtle and not-so-subtle erotic constructs. There's a fairly obvious example in the image above, revolving around the iron. It's no coincidence that there are many, very well known images in this series.

Articles at the time praised Clavering's skill with the camera, and it's quite likely that it was this daring, subversive element that was so much admired. It didn't prevent him from marketing the photos, however. Man Alive 5 in Jun 1959 carried a spread showing 6 pictures from the set including the one above (1, 3,10, 14, 16 and 21). There don't appear to have been any repercussions, but I haven't found any others in the beefcake press of the day, and only the title is ever mentioned in Royale's subsequent advertisements.

The Royale Catalogue advertised 21 pictures in the set and the Archive has copies of them all. That's largely thanks to the popularity of the series, which has ensured that many of the pictures can still be found on the internet*. Also to the existence of a high resolution copy of the official thumbnail sheet which defines the sequence and fills in the gaps.

 (*Most of these originate from the British Photographer's collection, Source 1 and the p-collection, Source 7).

 

Royale Catalogue Thumbnail Sheet for FJSS

The code for this set - EX2 FJSS - puzzled me at one time, I now know it stands for Fred-John-Soldier-Sailor with the prefix indicating that it was listed in the second 'extra' supplement to the Royale Catalogue published some time during 1958. By the time the 1960 Catalogue was published, it had been merged with all the other early sets into List 'A'.

The name itself, 'Soldier-Sailor', had a catchy, popular resonance for British people, being part of the traditional children's rhyme 'Tinker, Tailor .....'

Read Soldier - Sailor

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All the images in this storyette were reproduced (unenhanced) in my original mitchmen article on 'FJSS'. It starts with an examination of the puzzles that (for me) used to surround the set. I have recently improved the linkage of the articles to make them easier to read.