Scoops was a British weekly that published Science Fiction in tabloid format in 1934. The editor was Haydn Dimmock and the publisher was Pearson’s. Originally aimed at kids, it switched to more adult SF as the editor realized the readers weren’t all ten years old. To do this he bought stories from John Russell Fearn and Maurice Hugi. He also reprinted A. Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt and ran it for six issues.
Despite his attempts to improve Scoops, the publisher discontinued it after twenty issues. This lead to the idea that Britain could not sustain an SF magazine because of lack of readership. Readers would have to wait four years until Walter Gillings brought out Tales of Wonder to prove them wrong.
At first Scoops did not even credit their writers let alone artists. The artist that illustrated The Poison Belt is not known. His work seems to me to be influenced by The Strand illustrators like Sidney Paget, so associated with Doyle through his Sherlock Holmes stories. The Poison Belt originally appeared in The Strand from March-July 1913 with illustrations by Harry Rountree. The story follows The Lost World (1912) with Professor Challenger and his team facing a new threat, a cloud of gas that will envelop the Earth. The men wait out the global disaster then journey into a London decimated by the gas. The effect turn out to be temporary, not lethal but inducing sleep, and everybody wakes up.
Not the masterpiece that The Lost World was, it had different challenges for the artist. (How do you illustrate a story about four men and a woman locked up in a room?) Here’s what he came up with:
