Liz suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

British Children’s Fiction in the Second World War

Firing the youthful imagination

Owen Dudley Edwards
Edinburgh University Press, 744pp, £150,

Nicolas Barker

Wednesday, 16th April 2008

Nicolas Barker on Owen Dudley Edwards' overview of WW2 children's fiction

I must first declare an interest, now almost subliminal, in the subject of this vast, comprehensive, polymorphous and wholly captivating book. I was six when the war broke out and 12 when it ended. I read a lot of the books described new, as well as many more that were older. I remember the Magnet, best of comics, closed when the Amalgamated Press ran short of paper; we had to make do with the Dandy and Beano, published by D. C. Thomson of Dundee. George Orwell was less sorry. In ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, published in Horizon in March 1940, he asserted that comics preserved the ruling class attitudes of 1910. ‘The stories in the Magnet are signed “Frank Richards”, but a series lasting 30 years could hardly be the work of the same person every week.’ To his great surprise, the real ‘Frank Richards’ wrote to protest and assert his individuality as the author of 1,380 Greyfriars School stories, Billy Bunter and all. They made it up later. When the Saturday Book featured Frank Richards as ‘Boys’ Writer’, Orwell, reviewing the book, was ‘delighted to see that Frank Richards is back on the job’. Well he might be. ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ had dealt with the current Magnet in detail. Was it the 15 April 1939 cover, showing Billy Bunter confronted by a pig’s head, that suggested the dénouement of Animal Farm?

This is just one of the many brilliant flashes that illuminate the lives and works of Richards’s contemporaries. Born in 1876, he was older than the other heroes, Richmal Crompton (1890), Captain W. E. Johns (1892), Elinor Brent-Dyer (1894) and Enid Blyton (1897). If Billy Bunter became proverbial for fatness, Just William, triumphant over authority even when his plans go wrong, Biggles, triumphant in and out of the air all over the world, the ‘Chalet School’ girls, equally versatile, and the ubiquitous ‘Famous Five’, all set the mark on a generation of children. Their fiction, superficially escapist, reflected the reality of the second world war, consciously and (even more revealingly) unconsciously. All five were vastly prolific, but there were many others (a useful table shows how much fiction dominated the produce of the war-torn publishing trade). Tolkien, diverting insomnia by continuing The Hobbit (1937), early saw the threat to the Jews as he worked his fable of Christian redemption. C. S. Lewis began The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) for the evacuees arrived on ‘the old professor’. John Masefield, attacking Munich in Live and Kicking Ned (1939), accurately anticipated collaborationist France.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (1) | Apollo Art Books

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Margaret Stoll

April 21st, 2008 11:35am

I'm glad you mentioned Violet Needham. She doesn't seem to be remembered much nowadays although Blyton, Johns, Crompton et al are well recalled and their works presented to a modern audience (Martin Jarvis reading the William stories on Radio 4 - what a joy!)

No, Violet Needham brought a new word and a new concept to my vocabulary - 'fortitude'. The young hero of 'The Black Riders' and 'The Stormy Petrel' was a precursor of Alex Rider, the boy agent. 'To look a tyrant in the eye and say him nay' as Needham's hero Richard Fauconbois did, became an ideal of mine. And perhaps, an icon for those times.