16 PT Class (Jul 1961)

This set simply depicts a group of gym students performing Physical Training exercises under the direction of their Instructor. In the 1950s, physical training for health in gym classes was much in vogue, 'fitness' today has a more varied and individualistic form. In the 50s, the words 'PT Class' struck fear into many a schoolboy's heart. 

 Unlike the Airman Gym set, there's no punishment or intimidation involved in this storyette (at least not in the available images), instead numerous provocative poses are contrived in tight-fitting shorts. Unfortunately, our ability to enjoy them is limited by the hazy quality and low resolution of nearly all the available, original images (see original of the above image). These all come from the magazine spread referenced below, published with 6 pictures to a roughly A5-sized page.

Images from this set first appeared as 'The P.T. Class' in Man Alive 15 (Jul 1961). It was published under the new 'Hussar' brand. A Hussar ad in the same issue mentions a 'playlet' called 'Jim Nasium', so it seems possible that this was their official title, although there isn't anyone called Jim in the cast.

 Though branded as Hussar, the cast are all stalwarts from the Royale era:- Tibor Urgay, Brian Lamprill and Fred Collins as the gymnasts plus David Tompkins as the PT Instructor. This suggests that the set may have been photographed much earlier. The 1959 TIFC2 set of Tibor Urgay posing with Fred, also in a gymnast scenario, is strikingly similar. A different set called 'In The Gym' was advertised in Tomorrow's Man in May 1958, but there is no information about its contents and there are other 'orphan' gym images known, which it may have contained. Neither PT Class nor 'In the Gym' are mentioned in the 1960 Catalogue, but many of the early sets had been deleted by Royale by then.

PT Class has a cast of 4, which is unusually large for Royale, it's exceeded only by 'Football Ballet' (5).

 The archive has 13 images from the set, but the original total number is not known.

 Read PT Class

The Original mitchmen article is superseded by this article. It contains most of the imagery in unenhanced form, and a different sequence to that used here. That sequence was taken from the printed order of Man Alive's article, the six on the first page followed by the six on the second page. The sequence adopted for the newer Archive article takes the images row by row, reading right across the two facing pages before dropping to the next row below. This method of ordering pictures was used in other Man Alive spreads.