Cover artist: John Richardson

Bella (artist John Armstrong, Primrose Cumming)

Maggie’s Menagerie (artist Tony Coleman)

Dancer Entranced (Angeles Felices)

Crawl, Carrie, Crawl (artist Escandell Torres) – final episode

Bessie Bunter (artist Cecil Orr)

Molly Mills and the Tender Trap (artist Douglas Perry, writer Maureen Spurgeon)

Wreck on Stormy Point (artist Veronica Weir) – Strange Story

Edie the Ed’s Niece (artist Joe Collins)

Wee Sue (artist Jim Eldridge)

Team in Action (artist Carmona)

Thanks to two spiteful rivals, Bella loses a competition she so badly needed to win in order to keep the coaching job that brought her to Australia. That means it’s the end of that job, “so what next?” As it turns out, as one door closes, another opens, for she gets a new job offer from that competition.

“Crawl, Carrie, Crawl” reaches its final episode, where Carrie risks her life swimming in stormy seas to save lives, which resolves all the plot threads for us to get our happy ending. Replacing it next week is a more lightweight story, “One Girl and Her Dog…”. It stars a dog who’s “the size of a donkey” and, from the looks of things, has the brains of Dopey.

“Maggie’s Menagerie” is clearly on its penultimate episode, for the inevitable has finally happened: Gran discovers the secret animal hoard Maggie hid on her houseboat. She’s not pleased, and she’s not the sort to allow them to stay, so what will happen to the animals?

“Dancer Entranced” and “Team in Action”, which started in the previous issue, begin to take the shape they will follow for the rest of their runs. In the former, Trina Carr, who seems hopeless at ballet, suddenly becomes brilliant at the ticking of a mesmerist’s metronome when he selects her as the subject of his hypnotist act. So, is hypnotism the answer to Trina’s problem? Although the mesmerist is then arrested as a charlatan, Trina certainly thinks so, but she needs to find out fast, as she’s being selected for a ballet school, and the only way to do that is to get hold of the metronome. In the latter, four disparate girls put in charge of a school newspaper begin to find their feet as journalists, and they’ve stumbled across a mystery that could be their first scoop. 

The district nurse falls for bully butler Pickering, believe it or not. Pickering kicks Molly out in drenching rain to set the nurse straight, but the silly nurse ends up thinking Molly is acting out of jealousy because she’s in love with Pickering herself. Holy love entanglement!

This week’s Strange Story is set at the seaside, where an old salt lends birdwatcher Lynn Hughes his telescope to get good views from Stormy Point. But what Lynn sees through the telescope is not quite what she expects.

Bessie is banned from sweets as a punishment, but – surprise, surprise – her tale ends with her being totally off sweets. 

This week’s Wee Sue story is about the demanding amounts of homework Miss Bigger is always dishing out. Sue strikes problems in getting it done, including falling foul of two homework dodgers. She also has a new artist, one who may be Barrie Mitchell, Jim Eldridge or someone using a similar style. A sample is included below for anyone who may be able to help identify the artist. Update: we now believe the artist is Jim Eldridge.