Rag Rag : The Rag Rag Annual Magazine, 1940

University of Manchester Student Union

Rag Rag

<p style='text-align: justify;'>Volume 17 of the University of Manchester Rag Rag. Cover features a cartoon red snake hanging from a yellow airship, the snake wearing an air raid warden’s helmet and carrying a medical canister in its mouth. Proceeds from the magazine were donated to various medical charities, and donations were requested for hospitals such as Saint Mary’s Hospitals for Women and Children and Manchester Royal Infirmary.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>This was the first edition to be published during the Second World War, which naturally appears in much of the content. A double page feature, ‘Our Brave New World!!!’, shows the world reorganised into symbols such as the hammer and sickle and the swastika. There are references to hen-keeping and rationing. Cartoons show sexualised female imagery and demeaning racial stereotypes.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>This volume’s comedic advertisements include Redfern’s scrap, C. W. and H. Dean furnishers, Palmolive shaving cream, Birkett and Bostock loaves, Jones and Jackson painters and decorators, Nulux mattresses, S. Dodd and Sons textile machinery, Ancoats hospital, Copley’s wools, Alfred Hodkinson builders, Kendals, Salford Royal Hospital, W. F. Malone paper, Mentor shirts and others.</p>