Cathy and Claire - Jackie magazine

[Redvelvet73]

Inspired by another thread.

Does anyone remember this advice column? Did anyone ever write to them and actually get their letter published? Always wondered if the letters were genuine.

My mum used to get Woman’s Own. She knew me and my sis liked to read it after her, so she used to rip out the problem page before she let us have it!! 😂

MissyB1
I got told off for reading The News of the World as it "wasn't suitable for young girls" by my auntie who read it cover to cover.

Have you read Dear Mrs Bird, OP?

It's about a young woman who inadvertently becomes an agony aunt for a woman's magazine during WW2.

It's a really great read.

My father’s cousin’s daughter got pregnant & my mother asked me if I knew how it had happened. I said ‘Yes, she went all the way.’ I had no idea what all the way meant at the time.

Oh gosh I had forgotten that saying!!

Loved Jackie and Cathy and Claire, I never wrote to them though.

Yes! David Essex 😍😍😍

Absolutely nothing!
I used to love the freebies stuck to the front of the magazine with sellotape.

I can still remember the excitement when Jackie was delivered, can’t remember what day it used to arrive but I so looked forward to it!

Moved on to Petticoat magazine …

Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders talk about this on their podcast , the advice on boys trouble was hilarious

I can't remember whether it was Jackie or another teen girls mag, maybe Pink? But they had a section where you could get a penpal. There were names and addresses and a brief bio, of young girls who wanted penpals. I struck up a couple of short term penpal correspondences.
Thinking back now, if any of the girls suggested meeting up, a teenage girl could turn up and be meeting a a fat bald 50 year old bloke!! (70s version of online grooming)
Nobody seemed to think there was a safeguarding issue back then with teenage girls publishing their address in a national magazine!!

It was Mizz with the penpals! I had a lovely one for years. Definitely remember C&C and how tame it was… they were the first pages I would read 🤣 I would get J17 in my local library as it looked wayyyy wilder. Their problems page, OMG 😂 Much later there was More, which was raunchier still. Actually, that word, “raunchy”… it’s so 1989, isn’t it?!

I now have this song buzzing round my head...

lyricstranslate.com/en/fuzzbox-jackie-lyrics.html

I think I saw a program about Jackie magazine and Cathy and Clare basically admitted to making a lot of the problem up. Might have been for a different magazine though as was a long time ago that I saw it, but I should imagine that making up the problems was fairly standard.

My (then) boyfriends sister answered the letters on Cathy and Claire but her name was Linda and she was from Dundee.

I've still got the 1985 Jackie annual!

My godmother was front page news on the News of The World for a few weeks. She also had a two page spread written about her on the middle pages.

Cathy and Claire were always going on about love bites, it must have been a national obsession at the time.

I had forgotten about that!

Ex Jackie here.

Cathy and Claire letters were definitely mostly real. They arrived by the sackload. The agony aunt during my time was neither called Cathy nor Claire.

Behind the scenes the magazines were all overseen by Editorial Directors were all men and mostly members of the family who owned the publishing group. The family were old fashioned, Scots Presbyterian types who would not permit explicit content or actual sex being referred to on the C & C letters or on any part of the teenage magazines, so those letters which were published were always the tamer content. (I believe it's possible that some letters might have been made up from time to tkne so that there was enough variety of topics in any particular edition, but the fabricated letters would still have been taken from general themes that emerged from the real letters)

I'm not aware of a 'team' of people who answered the letters but I do know that the person who had the agony aunt role while I was there, worked very hard to try to weed out the crisis letters and respond to them. Bearing in mind that at the time the content was on a 4-6 week lead time from writing to publishing a mag, it doesn't bear thinking about how many crises really couldn't be supported quickly enough.

By the way at that time the same editorial directors wouldn't allow black models on the cover.

Thank you for this.

I wasn't aware of the lack of black models when I was a teenager but now that I think about it they were all white. Shocking.

Thank you Definitelynot…. for clearing up something that was niggling in my mind. I was sure I’d heard that the original Cathy and Claire were male! But your explanation of the owners and management of the magazine have made this make sense.

I loved Jackie, had it every week. A few years ago there were some reprinted compilations from the original magazines. The Osmonds, David Cassidy, David Essex, Marc Bolan, ahhh, a sigh for my lost youth! 😊

And way back in the day a person was asked at interview which school they went to in order to weed out the RC’s who knew before they went in for the interview they stood absolutely no chance at all of getting the job but they’d still try for it anyway.

Definitely not male back in the early 70’s.

@MrsTumblebee yes to the interview thing and also, of course, women were paid considerably lower than men for doing the same job.