liner. He returned 44 days later to be greeted by a crowd of 20,000 cheering admirers and his mightily relieved mother, who, according to the Copenhagen Post, "had been prescribed sleeping tablets for the duration".

The following year, an intrepid, globetrotting boy reporter – fresh-faced, freckled, with a snub nose, a shock of bright red hair and a penchant for plus-fours – made his first appearance in a Brussels newspaper called Le Petit Vingtième.

Over the following 50-odd years, Tintin, the creation of a Belgian comic artist called Georges Rémi, better known as Hergé, went on to star in some two-dozen comic books with more than 200 million volumes being sold worldwide.

Meanwhile, Huld, who died last week, went on to a glittering career as a stage and screen actor inDenmark, performing for years with the Danish Royal Theatre and appearing in 40 movies.

But was he the inspiration for Tintin? Huld certainly suggested so. However, some Tintinologists believe their hero was more likely to have been inspired by a French war and travel photojournalist called Robert Sexe – who not only, like Tintin, rode a motorbike, but also had a best friend called René Milhoux (Tintin's dog, Snowy, is called Milou in French) and toured the Soviet Union, the Congo and the US in the same order as Tintin's first three books.

It is not, sadly, a dispute that is ever likely to be solved: Hergé died in 1986, and in any case always claimed that "Tintin, c'est moi".