I say, you chaps
Benny Green
This week marks the centenary of the birth of the most prolific writer of English fiction of all time, a man who published sixty million words, created at least six characters who long ago passed into the pantheon of literary archetypes along with Holmes and Watson, Jeeves and Wooster, Hamlet, Falstaff, Sam Weller, Mr Pickwick and the rest of them, and yet who is hardly ever mentioned at all by cultural gossips and reporters. His name was Charles Hamilton, known to the literary police under several aliases, including Martin Clifford, Owen Conquest, Clifford Owen, Ralph Redway, Hilda Richards, and at least eighteen others. He will be remembered, however, as Frank Richards, and the persistence of his popularity is clearly something with which the historians will eventually have to come to terms. Most literary critics appear either never to have heard of him, or to have decided not to bother with him. When the other day I suggested to the BBC that the centenary should be marked by a programme, it was decided that Richards appealed only to boys of a eel tam n class and age-group, and the idea was rejected. Anthologists brush him aside, add academics rummaging through the Victorian lumber-room in search of theses overlook him with a consistency which would be comic were it not also a little sad.
But it is no use trying to ignore sixty million words, nor is it practical to go on turning a blind eye to a body of readership which has stood firm for at least seventy years. Hamilton's reputation will endure in his assumed identity of Frank Richards, the creator of Greyfriars School and all its inmates, and before people complain that Hamilton's books 'are of no great literary merit', as John Rowe Townsend does, or that 'there is no time to take the stylised characters ser
iously'. as Margery Fisher does, it needs to be said that literary merit and stylisation don't come into it. Whatever his merits or shortcomings Hamilton, wearing his Richards disguise, has infiltrated the imagination of two successive generations, and should certainly be given credit for the feat.
It is possible that Hamilton's obscurity, instead of being considerable, might even have been total had it not been for George Orwell's famous assault on him nearly forty years ago. Orwell was worried that Greyfriars School, with its seductive ivy-bearded archetypes, might seduce virtuous workingclass lads up the primrose path which leads to theH igh Tory tea. table. That so intelligent, perceptive and honourable a critic should have made so idiotic an error of judgment still passes all understanding, and I can only assume that Orwell came upon Greyfriars'not in childhood, when it works, but as an adult, reasoning philosopher, when it doesn't.
In any case, men who have received their education at Eton have never been very trustworthy guides when it comes to working-class sensibilities, and Greyfriars had about as much chance of polluting the political innocence of my own back-street generation as Tarzan of the Apes had of negating The Origin of Species.
Greyfriars and its inmates, when I first met them in my ninth year, existed in the pellucid atmosphere of a dream, slightly incorporeal and yet in some peculiar way more real than reality. The stories appealed to us not so much because of the plots, which were predictable, nor for the school boyish jokey language, which was very often antiquated, but for quite another reason which neither Orwell nor any of the other critics have ever bothered to acknowledge. Richards succeeded with the Greyfriars-St Jim's stories
because of their multifarious characters. Those, like Orwell, who worried that there was nobody in the Greyfriars Remove with whom a working-class reader could identify were utterly misguided. Young readers are not interested in incomes and accents and antecedents, nor in literary merit or cultural overtones, but only in recognisable characters.
Richards had a knack of putting down .on paper the very types which we ourselves comprised, and was therefore able to present to us a heightened portrait of our own classmates. Vernon-Smith may have been the son of a man richer than any we knew, and he may have been called 'The pounder' at 3 point in social history when bounders had long since been superseded by Stinkers and Dirty Rats, but all that was nothing cornpared to his regrettable skill at snooker and his precocious talent for dangling cigarettes from his lower lip. We knew Vernon-Smith; we knew him because he sat three places fronl us in the classroom, and we exulted accordingly when Richards rendered him heroic and melodramatic.
About Hamilton himself there remain a few mysteries. A morbidly private man wh° had the engaging effrontery to begin his autobiography with 'Frank Richards, at seventeen, was at a loose end', he appears 10 have spent the last seventy of his years cover" ing up the origins of the first fifteen, and it has always seemed likely to me that the fact that his seventeenth year was clearly sotue kind of watershed in his life, allied to the fact that Harry Wharton and company never ever progress beyond the Remove, suggest that Hamilton's own school career was probably cut off in its prime at just the point when he was living Wharton's life, educationally speaking. Hamilton's pet characters are locked forever in a dream of mid' school morality, liberated from the drudgery of fagging and yet still not bowed down by the weights of prefecture. A recent garbled attempt at a biography by Messrs Lofts and Adley answered several of the questions, and uncovered the fact that Hamilton had been rescued from premature school-leaving by a benign uncle, without drawing the obvious parallels with Harry and Colonel Wharton.
In the end, though, Richards will be defined by the literary historians as the writer who created the most famous Fat Man since Falstaff and Pickwick. Or rather, Fat BOY. When I was an elementary schoolboY' Oliver Hardy had only one rival for our affection in the Fatso Stakes, and that rival was Billy Bunter, of whom Margery Fisher' with a most uncharacteristic lack of charitYt says, `it is not possible to avoid looking on him as a member of the human race and wha,,t one sees is shockingly displeasing'. I finu, this judgment really extraordinary, 00` because it is untrue, but because it is irrelevant, and have no doubt that posteritY, the, invisible agent which can usually be relic°, upon to straighten out these affairs, will think a great deal more of the Fat Owl of the Remove than his contemporary critics.
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