Mr Therm at the Festival of Britain

Following on from last week’s adventures we find Mr Therm drawing back the curtain on the Festival of Britain. He was master of all he surveyed in 1951 when public ownership of the economy was at its high point. Promises of a brighter gas-powered future went largely undelivered as the industry acquired a reputation for inefficiency and poor customer service. Its generally dismal performance made it a sitting duck when Mrs Thatcher began selling off state-owned industries. In the unlikely event that Corbynomics sweeps all before it, there just might be a future for an updated Mr Therm, complete with hipster beard, piercing and an ostentatiously tattooed flipper. A few more examples below of the kind of company Mr Therm enjoyed in 1951, including Siemens, making the very most of its British connections. 

Mr Therm’s Adventures on the Home Front

By the end of the 1950s a new era of affluence was dawning in Austerity Britain. New technologies and home improvements were actively embraced by a grateful populace. Despite being a little long in the tooth, Mr Therm (born 1931) was still doing his bit for the gas industry in the pages of the quintessentially middle class boys’ comic, The Eagle. It may seem like a doomed project to interest adolescent youth in the finer points of home insulation or transforming a hostess trolley but they were very different times. Ian Allan ABCs and I-SPY books offered genuine high-level distraction to youngsters for whom a fruit gum or a minute ice cream wafer that melted and collapsed in an instant was the ultimate in treats. Mr Therm’s adventures appear somewhat overloaded in didactic content and the entertainment value was nugatory despite the occasional lumbering attempts to inject some humour into the proceedings. For many years Mr Therm’s cheery contours had brightened up the exceedingly dull and stuffy world of British consumer advertising but he might have been expected to retire by this point – given the steady rise in Cold War nuclear paranoia in this period, he could well have been relaunched as Mr Thermo-Nuclear. As for his inventor the sober and industrious illustrator, Eric Fraser would dedicate his talents to the world of literature and performance and never again produce anything with the recognition value of Mr Therm.