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Sapphire & Steel
"The Great Fire of London"
Look-In (1980) #15-19
Written by: Angus Allan
Art by: Arthur Ransom |
When Sapphire and Steel travel back in time to help a boy, they
find themselves in the middle of the Great Fire of London.
Read the story summary at
the Internet Archive copy of Animus Web
Notes from the Sapphire & Steel chronology
The "modern day" elements of this story take place in 1980.
Didja Know?
Comic strips in
Look-In magazine were generally not credited to
author and artist. According to the
Animus Web site, the
Sapphire & Steel strips were written by Angus
Allan and drawn by
Arthur Ransom.
All of the strips feature Sapphire and Steel dressed in the
clothes they wore in the first television storyline,
"Escape Through a Crack in Time".
The artist must have had only photo references from those early
episodes.
This story appeared in five issues of Look-In, a UK
magazine geared towards kids. The story is told in comic strip
form and appeared in two-page chapters of each issue.
The story itself is untitled. I borrowed the title
"The Great Fire of London" and short description from the
Sapphire & Steel Chronology on the
Look-In wiki.
Sapphire and Steel travel back in time to 1666 in this story.
Though they fought the forces of time, the pair did not have the
ability to travel back in time beyond Sapphire's ability to
rewind time up to about half a day.
Characters appearing or mentioned in this episode
Billy Moon
street urchins
Sapphire
Steel
Morris (mentioned only)
Van Hulst
time
Didja Notice?
On page 1, panel 2 of the story, the 17th Century boys refer
to the boy-out-of-time as "cully". This is an old English
term for a dupe.
On page 2 of the story, Sapphire and Billy arrive by sedan
chair at the Golden Cross Inn. This was an actual inn in the
Charing Cross junction of London of the 17th Century. The
exterior of the inn presented here looks vaguely like the
actual inn as depicted in the 1752 painting by Canaletto of
Charing Cross called London: Northumberland House.
The boy-out-of-time, Billy Moon, was possibly named by the
writer for the son of Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne,
Christopher Robin Milne, who went by the nickname Billy Moon
when he was young.
Billy tells
Sapphire and Steel that he was in front of a junk shop in
Whitechapel High Street just before he found himself in the
London of 1666. Whitechapel is a district of East London.
"High Street" is the term used for the primary business
street of a town or city in England, just as "Main Street"
is used in the U.S.
Sapphire and Steel and their young charge are said to have
walked from the inn to the spot where the junk shop will be located in
about a half-hour's time. But Whitechapel is about 3.5 miles
from Charing Cross where the inn is located...I think that's
more than a half-hour walk for most people!
Billy focuses on his memory of the painting he saw in the junk
store window and recalls the tag on it read: "Gutter Lane, 1666.
Etching by Morris after Van Hulst." Gutter Lane is an actual
road in London. As far as I can tell, the etching is fictitious,
as are the artists involved.
After Billy runs away from them, Sapphire and Steel seem to
walk from Whitechapel to Gutter Lane in mere moments, but it
should take about 30 minutes!
On page 6 of the story, Sapphire reveals that Billy is from
1980.
This story gives the entity called "time" a form...that of an
enormous, horned, scaled beast! Is this "time's" true form? Was
it a form it put on based on something from Billy's memory?
On page 8 of the story,
Sapphire and Steel witness the start of the Great Fire of
London. It started in a bakery (or the baker's house) on Pudding
Street in 1666, just as seen here.
Page 8 of the story reveals that the whole occurrence of Billy's
abduction from 1980 to 1666 was a trap set by time against
Sapphire and Steel.
Unanswered Questions
How are
Sapphire and Steel able to travel back in time to 1666?
Though they fought the forces of time, the pair did not have
the ability to travel back in time beyond Sapphire's ability
to rewind time up to about half a day.
Is the beast representing time in this story the true form
of the entity of time?
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