BILLY BUNTER'S METAMORPHOSIS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 381, 11 October 1946, Page 9

BILLY BUNTER'S METAMORPHOSIS

N August, 1940, to the accompaniment of sentimental lamentation from the nearly middleaged (muted somewhat by more immediate preoccupation with the Battle of Britain), the death was announced of Billy Bunter, of Greyfriars School, along with Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Tom Merry and Co., Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, er of the Fifth, and all the other inhabitants of those wells of undefiled public School English ("Crickey, chaps!"), The Gem and The Magnet. It now appears that The Listener report of this catastrophe (gleaned from overseas exchanges) was somewhat exaggerated. The Gem and The Magnet, it is true, are now only a_ sentimental memory, revived (not very successfully) some years ago by a radio serial broadcast in New Zealand. But a new boys’ magazine Pie, has appeared with a new series of stories by Frank Richards, Bunter’s creator, and they are there, all there, The Old Familiar Faces. The names have changed and the slang has progressed slightly from its original fin de siecle archaisms ("chump,". "go and eat coke," "scrag him,’ et al.) but the mixture is as before

Greyfriars emerges as Carcroft School, but the pupils are the same old merry crowd, all ducked as "new bugs" in the fountain of eternal youth, all living in their old familiar, ink-stained ivory towers (or, if the critic too is to be up-to-date, behind their ivory curtain). Bunter emerges in the atomic age as the ever-so-slightly more streamlined Turkey Turk. If he wears glasses they must be of the contact-lens type, for they aren’t apparent, and to judge from an advance portrait of him there is more drinking of coke in the new milieu than there was eating of it in the old. Bob Drake of Carcroft is Bob Cherry, Harry Compton is Harry Wharton, Dick Lee is Frank Nugent. But Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, whose chee-chee English was such a terrific feature of the original stories, has disappeared. Even Greyfriars appears to have felt the influence of Mr. Gandhi and the Congress Party. Only to a slight extent, however, has there been any change in the atmosphere which George Orwell, in his essay on’ boys’ weeklies (written while The Gem and The Magnet still appeared) described as follows: The year is 1910-or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosycheeked boy of 14 in -posh tailor-made clothes, sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage after an exciting game of football which was won by an odd goal in the last half-minute. There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel, and at the outposts of Empire the monocied Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay. Lord Mauleverer has just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. After tea we shall sit round the study fire having a good laugh at Billy Bunter and discussing the team for next week’s match

against Rookwood, Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything. wifl be the same for ever and ever. That approximately is the atmosphere.* The Man Responsible According to Picture Post, source of our present news of Bunter & Co., Frank Richards (who had been writing school stories for over 30 years when The Gem and The Magnet closed down in 1940) was born Charles Hamilton about 70 years ago, He has had about 15 different literary aliases, including Martin Clifford, of The Gem, Hilda Richards (under which disguise he wrote a parallel series of girls’ stories, starring such mMames as Bessie Bunter), Owen Conquest, and Winston Cardew. Age has made him shortsighted, and these days he finds it difficult to move about. He seldom leaves his house in Kingsgate, a bungalow village near Broadstairs in Kent, and most of his day is spent, in dressing-gown. and black skull-cap, working at his typewriter. But though he is almost a recluse, and well on in’ years Frank Richards is still writing the same boisterous type of extroverted schoolstory as he has done for two generations. As well as the Carcroft stories, he is writing about a parallel establishment, Sparshott School, for a London publisher, and about two others, Ferndale and Oakhurst schools, for a Manchester house. One of the Ferndale characters, by the way, is Cedric St. Leger, whose archetype was, of course, D’Arcy, the dude of St. Jim’s. There are not, of course, and never have been any young Woodleys at Frank Richards’s schools. ‘The chaps of the Remove and the Shell were (and are) all simple, uncomplicated little animals enjoying what should be, rather than what *From Critical Essays (Secker and Warburg).

actually is, public school life. The ashe plants might. be flying in the air cone tinually, but no one appeared one ‘penny the worse for them, and psychoses exe isted in inverse ratio to the "whoppings" administered. It is all good clean escapism, and in reply to those who criticise this kind of writing, Richards says quite rightly that he did what he set out to do; give a lot of pleasure to a great many children. And, one might add, a great deal of retrospective pleasure to many grown-ups. His stories seem easy to imitate; many have tried to da so. But no one ever quite reproduced ‘his essential charm. Now, at 70; he is at it again. There are a few concessions to modernity, says Picture Post, but even these new stories have a curiously dated flavour. They are full of the old vitality and high spirits, and old fans will read them with delight. Richards himself thinks that they can still compete, in England at least, with pulp magazines devoted to popular mechanics, Dick Tracy and the. neoatomic adventurers. Whatever our own doubts may be we can’t help hoping he’s right. As Orwell himself admits, Richards has never introduced the fuehrer-prin-ciple to his writings.