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| Royale Studio - Peter George posing in mesh covered pouch |
This is a splendid image of Peter George, with a nice shot of his torso and featuring the same yearning, far-away look that characterises a number of his best pictures (see Peter George Part1). It's also a rather nice distillation of his boyish characteristics into growing manliness.
The garment he's wearing here is not at all like the very average posing pouch seen in Peter George Part 2, it seems to be overlaid with a mesh made of something like thin leather strips (as used in fringing and some boot laces). The criss-cross lines curving across his bulge create a distinctive restraining effect that hints of chastity cages and S&M leather fetish. It's an intriguing complement to the sexy dabble into bondage we saw in Peter George Part 2
On a purely visual level, the dark mesh also creates a more definite boundary to the pouch, so that it doesn't merge into his body as simple, white pouches tend to do, but stands away from his abdomen creating a particularly sexy, open effect where it dips behind the top line of his thigh.
This is the only other image I have found of Peter featuring this adapted pouch.
With its dark background, it's possible that these are part of Royale's 2-PUN set (1959), there's a marked similarity with image 2 of that group but there's no hint of it in Royale's description and both these pictures seem to have first appeared rather later - in 1961, appearing in several magazines in that year.
'Tomorrow's Man' magazine thought the exotic pouch too risky and painted it out when they carried the less showy of the two images in their June 1961 issue.
If the images above and the explicit bondage image that headlined the 2-PUN set hint at fetish interests, this picture (attributed to Royale's subsidiary, Hussar) 'wades' into that world more openly and seems to give this man a distinctly interesting, bdsm profile.
The rubber waders in this picture provide a striking erotic contrast to the white, compact pouch Peter is wearing which which, in its tight containment, seems more exposing (to me anyway) than dangling nudity would be. It's not a very good scan unfortunately but projects a softer impression of Peter's muscularity that seems sexily incongruous with the intimidating waders
from Grecian Guild Pictorial No 30 (Jun1961)
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| Tom of Finland - Logger in Waders |
Peter's waders and fishing net masquerade as the equipment of professional fishermen, a real working man. This association is rather like the carpenter's rough saw bench seen in 2-PUN, but groin-enhancing waders were also well-established as homoerotic, fetish gear in the 1960's (think about those Tom of Finland logger images and Etienne's fisherman).
At first sight this is also the casual pose of a workman at rest but the net here is not just deployed as a working man's tool, Peter is pulling it over his head (a not particularly pleasant experience I imagine if it has ever been used to catch fish in the sea). It's as if he's being caught by it.
The wader tops seem to be catching his pouch too, cupping it in this particular camera angle.
Here Peter seems to be posing as the catch, brought ashore and dumped unconscious on the quayside. His open legs leave his pouch to stand out unprotected (despite the white-out)
His torso is also open and inviting to the touch.
These last two images appeared in Grecian Guild Pictorial No 32 (Oct1961)
This picture from the 'net' series is a more convincing attempt to invoke the working fisherman as the inspiration for it all. It shows Peter checking his net for holes.
In the preceding articles we have become familiar with Peter's impressive backside and this image adds new dimensions to that collection. If anything, the waders make it seem even more bulky. The curve of the wader's top line creates an impression of emergence and cupping.
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In this photo Peter uses the net as a cloak and it's not a terribly successful image, for some reason the body proportions don't seem to have come out quite right and he looks more boyish than ever.
However, there is more adult, erotic interest in the detail where Peter's pouch seems to be slung in an astonishingly low and revealing position, showing most of his lower abdomen and entailing considerable bunching down below which is remarkably bold for the era.
These last two images were published in Manual 24 (May 1961) preceding those at the start of this post (though only by a couple of months). They were attributed to Dolphin Studio, a Royale brand that was eventually replaced by Hussar, but these names don't seem to have distinctive identities and were interchanged freely. This set is a good example
I'm not sure if the slanting presentation of these last two images was a device of the magazine or a format used by the studio in their proofs. By co-incidence(?) it was also employed for the 'bamboo pole' group of images that I appended at the foot of the Pouch Post (Peter George Part 2 of this mitchmen series). This set had similar dramatic lighting (see this Crossed Poles example) and appeared in the same year - 1961. It was in a different magazine, Trim, but one that belonged to the same publishing group.
Peter's bdsm-oriented imagery continued later with his appearance in the Royale Rigging series, set R01C, a series of images showing him dressed as a sailor, tied hand and foot and spread-eagled on the ropes in a punishment position. I have tentatively dated these images to 1963 by association with other pictures using the same prop. This may have also been his last appearance for Basil Clavering's Royale and Hussar Studios, which ceased publishing in the same year.
There are also bdsm ingredients in the numerous 'storyettes' featuring this model
(to be covered in a separate post, link pending).
We tend to associate Royale Studio with Military Uniforms and Sporting subjects, but there is always an undercurrent of fetish in them, often it's spanking, sometimes bondage and frequently forced undressing and changes of clothes. There is also a strong leather, biker thread in other storyettes which veered towards weird extremes at times and surfaced more explicitly in the images of the successor studio 'Guys In Uniform', notably the strange, uncomfortably militaristic series 'Willing To Learn'.
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While researching this article I stumbled across an astonishing, entirely new colour picture of Peter George clad in a red zip-up jacket, studded belt and jock-strap with a furry pouch. This takes Peter's fetish persona into whole new realms that I've not seen anywhere else in Royale's photography. It seems to be related to the Colville Collection of coloured Royale images.
(I'm not reproducing the picture here for copyright reasons,
if the first link stops working try here and please let me know via comments).
In the concluding Part 5 of this series of posts about Peter George, mitchmen will look at his farm-boy series and suggest an explanation for the missing 1-PUN solo set.