Firing the youthful imagination

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.