An Eagle mystery

Chris from Bristle's Blog has sent over an interesting question that I'm hoping someone can answer.

"Bit of an odd one I'm looking for a bit of help with," he says. "Whilst watching the 1957 episode of The Rock N Roll Years, there was a bit about Hungarian refugees from the uprising being welcomed into Britain, and in the accompanying film footage, you can clearly see them being handed copies of Eagle.

"I was just trying to find out more about this - whether Hulton was involved, or whether this was an ad hoc thing undertaken by volunteers, or who knows what else."

Chris has included a screengrab from the programme (above) and you can clearly see it's a copy of Eagle. It's not so clear which issue is being handed out, which might help date the film clip a little better. The Hungarian Revolution took place in late October and early November 1956 but refugees were still pouring out of Hungary until the spring of 1957, a total of 180,000 to Austria and a further 20,000 to Yugoslavia. Attempts to resettle these refugees began almost immediately and 7,500 refugees had been transported to the UK by December 14. Eventually, 20,990 Hungarians were resettled in the UK.

One imagines that those greeting the refugees from Hungary would have been from amongst the major volunteer groups such as the British Red Cross. One also imagines that Picture Post, the famous Hulton paper, would have been on hand covering events in its latter days (sales of PP was slipping at the time and it was to fold in May 1957). Perhaps it was felt that distributing copies of Eagle would make a good photo opportunity as well as a humanitarian gesture.