The Press: Daughter of Jane

What Rita Hayworth was to the American G.I., a lissome lass named Jane was to the British Tommy—and more. Jane was the comely blonde heroine of a comic strip in Britain’s giant Daily Mirror (circ. 4,593,263). She somehow managed to lose her clothing at least once a week, and she was so popular that the morale of the R.A.F. was said to rise and fall with her skirts. Minor victories from the Mediterranean to Malaya were attributed to the fact that Jane was unblushingly bare on a particular morning. After the war Jane continued to cavort across the pages of the Mirror, delighting demobbed servicemen who found that she looked as luscious at a suburban breakfast table as she had in an army mess hall.

But in October 1959, when the Mirror underwent a thorough revamping and made a brassy new pitch to British youth, Chairman Cecil Harmsworth King decided to pension Jane off. “You can’t go on being a bright young thing forever,” said King, although Jane had made a good start at doing just that. First unveiled—or rather, undraped—on the Mirror’s pages in December 1932, at the age of 21, she vanished 27 years later at the same age. “Let’s quietly disappear and start again together,” said Jane’s perennial fiance, Georgie, in the farewell strip as the couple headed for marriage. At last, Jane was decently clad: not only did she wear a swim suit for her finale, but a sweater as well.

Jane’s successor was Patti, an 18-yearold supposed to be a sample of Britain’s youth. But Patti, less prone than Jane to losing all but her lingerie, never caught Britain’s fancy, and the Mirror sent her packing five months ago. In her place last week appeared “Daughter of Jane,” an ectoplasmic 16-year-old who has clearly inherited her mother’s inability to keep buttoned up. “Her fundamental attributes,” said one Mirror man demurely, “are always covered by a towel.” Occasionally the towel is about the size of an un-Sanforized dishcloth. Britons brightened at Jane’s return, but the august Guardian, fully aware that Jane had wed Georgie a scant 22 months ago, was aghast at the sudden appearance of a teen-aged daughter. “Can it be parthenogenesis?” asked the Guardian in its “London Letter” column. “There is a slight accent of scandal about the whole thing.”