'Working-class Hero': Dredger
Gerry had a knack of turning so many stereotypes on their head, even though, politically, we were probably poles apart.
‘… There’s room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill’
John Lennon
Dredger as a working-class secret agent was ‘something to be’, to quote Lennon’s immortal lyrics. Such characters had never appeared in comics before and were a rarity in film and novels. And they still are today.
The brief I gave Gerry Finley-Day was for a dirty, working-class secret agent with elements of Callan, Dirty Harry, and maybe a dash of Harry Palmer and The Sweeney – hence the Dredger logo. I was sick to death of the upper classes immortalising and preening their own class with James Bond, Richard Hannay, or Ashenden (by Somerset Maughan).
It’s why, as an aside, I’m currently trying to immortalise Major Hugh Pollard in my various stories, such as Hellbreaker, Ragtime Soldier and even Otto Vampire Knight (where he appears under his pen name as occult investigator Oliver Brand). Because he was a real-life, upper-class James Bond. Pollard was also an utter shit – worse than the fictional Flashman – which is why the establishment will never make a movie about him because the truth about him is so embarrassing. So I do my best (or worst) in comics to expose him.
Gerry came up with the excellent Dredger, with an upper-class sidekick called Breed. I think that must have been Gerry’s idea, contrasting the two men, because I don’t recall it in my brief. It was a great idea. Gerry had a knack of turning so many stereotypes on their head, even though, politically, we were probably poles apart. Bear in mind, this was still the era where upper-class heroes had servants or working-class sidekicks. For example The Wolf of Kabul: secret agent William Sampson with his oriental sidekick Chung and his cricket bat weapon ‘clicky-ba’. They had appeared only a couple of years earlier in Warlord. Talk about Lone Ranger and Tonto! So it was long fucking overdue for things to change.
