(from Wikipedia)   The magazine was founded in 1948 as Collins Magazine for Boys & Girls.   It was first published Canada due to limitations of paper use in the United Kingdom.     The publishing became available for the magazine in its native country in 1950.     In 1953, two weeks before the coronation of Elizabeth II  the magazine changed its name to The Young Elizabethan to honour the new queen.     In 1958 it changed again to The Elizabethan.

The Young Elizabethan generally serialised novels and also contained short stories, book reviews, poems, puzzles, and drawings. It was targeted at grammar school students. It ceased publication in 1973.

One of the magazine's editors was Kaye Webb (first wife of artist Ronald Searle who also became a contributer to not only covers but also articles  esp Molesworth inside).     there will be a large number of volumes showing off the talent of John Verney,  Richard Kennedy,  Ronald Searle, Quentin Blake, John Ward, Christopher Brooker, Mervyn Peake, Susan Einzig, Paul Hogarth, Raymond Sheppard,  and many others in my listings 'fore edge books' (combined postage offered) in the days to come in May 2017

(from Ronald Searle tribute 'Perpetua'         When Searle's first wife, Kaye Webb, took over as editor of (Collins) Young Elizabethan magazine she enlisted her husband to provide artwork.  Searle designed covers and Nigel Molesworth debuted in the magazine.

This must be the finest designed magazine for children ever published.  Does anybody remember it or have any copies? It's incredibly hard to find these.

(from Sunday Times Mag)         Long before anyone called us Baby Boomers, we were the Young Elizabethans.

The term never caught on. But schoolchildren of the 1950s were the first who could watch their new Queen being crowned in the Abbey, as we huddled around a neighbour’s television set, the first we had seen. We were given Coronation mugs or silver lockets as souvenirs.

We didn’t realise it yet, but from birth we were a uniquely blessed generation. Nurtured on free orange juice and cod liver oil, we inhabited a peaceful world. A whiskery old prime minister — no Bambi-ish guitar-twanging PMs for us — assured our parents that they had never had it so good. Every advantage in education, welfare, employment, sexual freedom, contraception, equal pay, affordable housing, new maternity rights and child benefit, right up to pensions and freedom passes at 60 when still in our prime, would accrue to us over the decades.

In the 1950s, our bright future seemed assured, and underscoring our aspirations was a monthly magazine for children aged 10 to 16: the hitherto dull-sounding Collins Magazine was re-named the Young Elizabethan, giving us a new historical identity. It is largely forgotten now. When Sir Max Hastings appeared on Start the Week recently, arguing with other historians about who might become the luminaries of the current Elizabethan age, he asked “Does nobody remember a magazine called the Young Elizabethan?” and nobody did — not even Andrew Marr or Mary Beard. Both born too late.

Readers of the magazine included not only young Max, but lots of other bright sparks. Flicking through the magazine for the years 1954-8, you might find among the prizewinners the names of Tessa (now Baroness) Blackstone, the late historian Ben Pimlott, the art critic William Feaver, Quote ... Unquote’s Nigel Rees, the biographers Ion Trewin and Jonathan Fenby — and even the playwright Alan Ayckbourn.

I paid £14.50 in a bidding war on eBay for the December 1954 issue of Young Elizabethan, containing the byline Alan Ayckbourne (sic), aged 15. He was then at school at Haileybury and his poem was called Dawn.

A gentle grey lights up the eastern sky Which quietly heralds dawn in her approach And stirs the rustic world. “I was urged on by my mother”, says Sir Alan, now 73, “who, as a professional short-story writer, wanted to see her offspring follow her into print. I rather fancied myself as a bit of a poet, but at that age who doesn’t? Reading it now, I’m delighted that I outgrew that career option.”

Any child ambitious to get into print would send in stories, poems and drawings . Ben (then Benjamin, aged 10) Pimlott’s first appearance in print was an ingenious story about a man obsessed with books, which won him a trip to Peter Scott’s bird sanctuary. His widow, Prof Jean Seaton, official historian of the BBC, who has just updated Pimlott’s biography of The Queen, was also a Young Elizabethan reader. Her background was different from Pimlott’s. He was the Marlborough-educated son of a top civil servant; she was the daughter of a butcher in Battersea. “Yet we both read the Young Elizabethan. Of course I did — didn’t you?” Seaton says.

No, I did not. At 10, I decided it was not for me. Such worthy articles about bravery, heroism, how to make marionettes; and such daunting competitions — “Design a science lab” or “Write a poem in the manner of William Blake’s Tyger”. I associated the magazine with the goody-goodies on Huw Wheldon’s Sunday evening programme All Your Own, which often featured a bespectacled boy who had constructed a cathedral out of matchsticks.

Children were so biddable, so well behaved in the 1950s and there were no screens to distract them. Only an hour of TV a day, including Children’s Newsreel and a bookish serial on Sundays. There was time to read, make things, listen to the radio and plenty of time just to think.

Witness readers’ letters. “Though I agree with Tina Withers-Payne (September edition)”, wrote Roger Ferrar of Chislehurst in 1957, “in that truth is essential to happiness, I fear I disagree with her over the point of freedom ... Nothing a nation or government can do can harm one’s spiritual freedom, and on that alone does happiness depend.”

I see now why I felt excluded. The magazines I subscribed to — Girl, Pony and Enid Blyton’s Magazine — made no demands on the intellect whatsoever. The one bit of Young Elizabethan that I loved was Willans and Searle’s Nigel Molesworth stories — and I got those in book form.

Comics such as Eagle and Girl were OK because the editor was a vicar; Beano and Dandy gave you playground cred; but Young Elizabethan was approved because it was so obviously edifying. Its patrons included contemporary achievers and heroes: Pat Smythe, Sir John Hunt, Squadron Leader Neville Duke, the Chief Scout Lord Rowallan, Sir Julian Huxley and Joyce Grenfell. No vacuous celebs.

Readers were almost exclusively white and middle-class, imbued with good citizenship and often privileged. “I wonder if I am the youngest child ever to go on a leopard-hunting expedition,” wondered Shirley Everett. (She was two weeks old when her parents took her on safari.) And they were so curious. “I am interested in the music of Mozart.” “I think you should make the puzzles harder. I can do them much too easily.” “I am interested in astronomy and space. Do you know any clubs I could join?” Joining clubs and making penfriends was a key refrain.

The magazine was owned by John Grigg, Tory Old Etonian (whose father was in Churchill’s cabinet). He appointed as editor Laura Fergusson, wife of Lord Ballantrae; then Kaye Webb, wife of Ronald Searle; then his own wife Patsy, who had joined the magazine at 23. She became joint-editor with Tom Pocock, The Times’s naval correspondent.

Young Elizabethan interacted with its readers, inviting them to a ramble on Hampstead Heath, a tour of Kew Gardens, a fireworks party. It was educational: Admiral Sir Gerald Charles Dickens wrote about his grandfather: “When Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities, there were people still alive who could remember the days of the French Revolution and its horrible Reign of Terror.” Nigel Calder of the New Scientist predicted that by 1970 men would land on the moon, stay for a month, then report on how dull and lonely it was up there.

One month it published photographs of birds taken by Prince Philip on his travels — including an albatross, which had come aboard HMS Britannia on Trafalgar Day. “We put a ring on it and called it Horatio, and then it flew away,” said HRH. (The YE wittily captioned the photo: “And with his camera he shot the bird.” Every reader would be expected to get this reference to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.) The writer Jessica Mann, who is about to publish her memoir of the 1950s, was one of four readers selected to be photographed enjoying the Festival of Britain in 1951. William Feaver, biographer of Lucian Freud, supplied YE with book reviews at 12, and Noel Streatfeild took him to appear on a children’s books programme on ITV. The magazine had, he recalls, a pious streak — “read by children of the vicarage like me” .

Caroline Medawar, the daughter of Sir Peter Medawar, was already a remarkable poet at 16, as is clear from Autumn Came on a Sunday, published December 1954. “I got first prize, 15 shillings,” she recalls, “and walked along as if on air. The only comparable feeling was when I won the National Poetry Prize about ten years ago.” (She is a psychoanalyst by profession, but still writes poetry as Beatrice Garland).

It makes me wonder about all the other prize-winners. What became of Clare Laurel Harris, whose poem on loneliness was so good that the great Christopher Fry judged it to be “faultless”? Patsy Grigg recalls that it made everyone in the office cry. Where is Venice Findlay (15) who wrote about ephemerality? Or Caroline Thistlethwaite (14), or Robert Serpell (11) who sent in a poem in French?

It was flagged as “the magazine to grow up with”, but only latterly was there a Girls Only page featuring fashions: pony-tails, circular sailcloth skirts, crop trousers. There were as yet no teen mags. The word teenager barely existed. In 1957 the Your Questions Answered page included “What age should a girl begin to wear lipstick?” and the answer was 17. But by 1961, rock’n’roll had registered: YE cover lines were “Elvis — Cliff — Adam”. Half a century later, says Jean Seaton, a magazine like Young Elizabethan just wouldn’t have a hope. “Teen magazines today — often read by 9 and 10-year-olds — are terrifying: ‘How to give a blow-job’, etc.” One can only imagine what Joyce Grenfell (“George! Don’t do that”) would make of this. “Today’s young people are a different species and the 1950s child will not return,” Seaton says. “That child is obsolete. We were part of that moment associated with the new young Queen; our parents all felt they had done something important, taken part in the war; things had got so much better, when rationing ended; and we shared the confidence, the absolute certainty, that they would always get better in future.”

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