A battle long ago
Alan Gibson
In his third Reith Lecture, Professor Halsey cited The Magnet to illustrate a point in his discussion of status in British society. I was reminded of a celebrated literary controversy of my youth. In March 1940, Horizon published an essay by George Orwell on `Boys' Weeklies'. A considerable part of it dealt with The Magnet and The Gem, magazines which each week carried long school stories, in The Magnet about Greyfriars (under the name of Frank Richards), and in The Gem about St Jim's (under the name of Martin Clifford). I had been an avid reader of both, a few years earlier. I have always counted myself a St Jim's man, but Greyfriars increasingly became the senior establishment, chiefly because it possessed Billy Bunter. It is an interesting thought that probably more Spectator readers will be familiar with the name of Bunter today than would have been the case in 1940.
Orwell's article (still in print, in the collected essays) does grant that Bunter is `a really first-rate character', but is rarely otherwise sympathetic. The style of the stories, he points out, is tautologous, and easily imitable as it had to be, since they could not possibly all be the work of one man. But he is most interesting on the moral assumptions behind them. They are 'fantastically unlike life at a real public school'. The good boys are good, the bad boys are bad. Badness consists of slacking, betting, smoking and drinking (stealing is comparatively rare). Sex is out of the picture, even for the bad boys. So is religion, even for the good. 'As for the snob-appeal, it is completely shameless' — observe the prevalence of titles, and aristocratic names (Lord Maulever; the Honourable Arthur Augustus D'Arcy; The Nabob of Bhanipur; Manners, Talbot, Lowther). Pocket-money for a favoured few, even juniors, could be up to five pounds a week: `a perfectly deliberate incitement to wealth-fantasy'. The school-story, he says, is largely a thing peculiar to England — `the reason, obviously, is that in England education is mainly a matter of status.'
Orwell then goes on to discuss the background of the readers, possibly not very accurately, and the politics of the magazines — `Conservative, but in a pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge. In reality their basic political assumptions are two: nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny'. The working classes 'only enter into the Gem and Magnet as comics or semi-villains.' This prompts him, at the end of the article, to contemplate whether a left-wing boys' paper is practicable, but he comes to the sensible conclusion that on the whole it is not. He sums up in a paragraph which has often been quoted, but is worth quoting again: 'The year is 1910— or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosycheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailormade 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 battleships of the British fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay. Lord MauleVer 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 will be the same for ever and ever. That approximately is the atmosphere.'
Some weeks later the editor of Horizon, Cyril Connolly, was astonished to receive a request from Frank Richards for space to reply. So there was such a person! Orwell was apprehensive. He told Geoffrey Gorer that `the editor of The Magnet' had written: `I look forward to this with some uneas iness, as I've no doubt made many mistakes, but what he'll probably pick on is my suggestion that these papers try to inculcate snobbishness.' Richards's reply was published in May, and caused a stir among the literati.
He had one unquestioned score. The overwhelming majority of the stories, in both papers, had been written by the same hand, not by a syndicate. Frank Richards and Martin Clifford were the same person (also Owen Conquest, Ralph Redway, sometimes Hilda Richards, and many more: his real name was Charles Hamilton). Orwell handsomely acknowledged the error.
So the stories 'smack of the year 1910'. `I can tell him,' said Richards, `the world went very well then. It has not been improved by the Great War, the General Strike, the out break of sex-chatter, by the present dis contents, or by Mr Orwell's thoughts upon the present discontents!' The next charges are of plagiarism, snobbishness, being out of date, and cleanliness of mind. Richards pleads guilty to the last, innocent to the other three. I find his defence against plagiarism reasonable. He was undoubtedly influenced by other writers — notably, I am sure, by Talbot Baines Reed, whom Orwell had not mentioned — but in such a vast out put, coincidences will happen. Richards was in fact more plagiarised than plagiarising.
As to snobbishness: Richards claims that he makes an aristocrat act as an aristocrat should. `It is an actual fact that, in this country at least, noblemen generally are better fellows than commoners. My own acquaintance with titled Nobs is strictly limited; but it is my experience, and I believe everybody's, that — excepting the peasanton-the-land class, which is the salt of the earth — the higher you go up the social scale the better you find the manners, and the more fixed the principles.' Hum.
As to being `out-of-date': 'If, as Mr Orwell himself says, a boy in 1940 can identify himself with a boy in The Magnet, obviously that boy is a boy of 1940.' A strong point — and what would Orwell have thought had he known that the stories would still be selling, in hard-back, thirty years later, to say nothing of facsimiles of the old magazines?
`The political assumptions.' Patriotism? `I have never seen any nation the equal of my own.' Nothing ever changes? `The writer for young people should still endeavour to give his readers a sense of stability and security.' Foreigners funny? Foreigners are (a point which must have secretly appealed to the inveterate Englishman in Orwell). Strikes and slumps?
'Are these really subjects for young people to meditate upon? It is true that we live in an insecure world: but why should not youth feel as secure as possible? . . Every day of happiness, illusory or otherwise — and most happiness is illusory — is so much to the good. It will help to give the boy confidence and hope. Frank Richards tells him that there are some splendid fellows in a world that is, after all, a decent sort of place. . . Mr Orwell would have told him that he is a shabby little blighter, his father an ill-used
serf, his world a dirty, muddled, rotten sort of show. I don't think it would be fair to take his twopence for telling him that.'
This is the gist of the famous argument, With honours to both sides. I would just add a footnote. Richards had deduced that Horizon must be 'a very highbrowed paper indeed', since it contained 'a picture that does not resemble a picture, a poem that does not resemble poetry, and a story that does not resemble a story.' The picture must have been Graham Sutherland's 'Association of Oaks'. There are several possibilities for the poem: I incline to Auden's 'In Memory of Sigmund Freud'. The story must have been The First Day of Term', by Philip Toynbee. It is about a prep school master who is well-meaning but not very competent. He makes a worthy attempt to save a boy who has fallen off a train, gets into a muddle about it, and is ticked off by the Head. He surveys the dining-room at tea-time.
'He hates the boys and masters and the matron, but the boys more than anybody else. His hatred of the boys is so clamorous that he goes to the dining-room door and opens it. The noise is like the discordant shriek of starlings ... It seems to Mr Caslon that there is no more innocence in children than in rats or tigers ... Mr Caslon drinks his tea, and, looking at the boys, he knows they will be with him all his life.'
No, not at all Greyfriars style.
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