It is quite clear that there are tens and scores
of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly
thrilling and romantic.
of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly
thrilling and romantic.
Orwell
Along the edges of the fields channels are hacked out to a depth of thirty
or forty feet to get at the tiny trickles which run through the subsoil.
Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my house, each
carrying a load of firewood. All of them are mummified with age and the sun, and all of
them are tiny. It seems to be generally the case in primitive communities that the women,
when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size of children. One day a poor old
creature who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a vast load
of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou piece (a little more than a farthing) into her
hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was partly gratitude but
mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I
seemed almost to be violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman,
that is to say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is quite usual to see a
father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys, and an old woman following on foot,
carrying the baggage.
But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For several weeks, always at
about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the house with their
firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say
that I had seen them. Firewood was passing — that was how I saw it. It was only that one
day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a
load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time
I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin,
bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on
Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it.
There is no question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The Moroccan donkey is
hardly bigger than a St Bernard dog, it carries a load which in the British army would be
considered too much for a fifteen-hands mule, and very often its pack-saddle is not taken
off its back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is the most willing
creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and does not need either bridle or halter.
After a dozen years of devoted work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it
into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold.
This kind of thing makes one’s blood boil, whereas — on the whole — the plight of the
human beings does not. 1 am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with
brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled
back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old
woman under her load of sticks.
As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching southward — a long, dusty
column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more infantry, four or five thousand men
in all, winding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels.
They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black that sometimes it is
difficult to see whereabouts on their necks the hair begins. Their splendid bodies were
hidden in reach-me-down khaki unifonns, their feet squashed into boots that looked like
blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes too small, ft was very
hot and the men had marched a long way. They slumped under the weight of their packs
and the curiously sensitive black faces were glistening with sweat.
As they went past a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my eye. But the look he
gave me was not in the least the kind of look you might expect. Not hostile, not
contemptuous, not sullen, not even inquisitive, ft was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look,
which actually is a look of profound respect. 1 saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is
a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch
syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has
been taught that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it.
But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn’t matter
twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past.
“How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their
guns in the other direction? ”
It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other
in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating
chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all
knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn’t know it. And really it was
almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of
anned men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them
in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper.
BOYS’ WEEKLIES AND FRANK RICHARDS’S REPLY (1940)
You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a
small newsagent’s shop. The general appearance of these shops is always very much the
same: a few posters for the DAILY MAIL and the NEWS OE THE WORLD outside, a
poky little window with sweet-bottles and packets of Players, and a dark interior smelling
of liquorice allsorts and festooned from floor to ceiling with vilely printed twopenny
papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours.
Except for the daily and evening papers, the stock of these shops hardly overlaps at all
with that of the big news-agents. Their main selling line is the twopenny weekly, and the
number and variety of these are almost unbelievable. Every hobby and pastime — cage-
birds, fretwork, carpentering, bees, carrier-pigeons, home conjuring, philately, chess —
has at least one paper devoted to it, and generally several. Gardening and livestock-
keeping must have at least a score between them. Then there are the sporting papers, the
radio papers, the children’s comics, the various snippet papers such as TIT-BITS, the
large range of papers devoted to the movies and all more or less exploiting women’s legs,
the various trade papers, the women’s story-papers (the ORACLE, SECRETS, PEG’S
PAPER, etc. etc. ), the needlework papers — these so numerous that a display of them
alone will often fill an entire window — and in addition the long series of ‘Yank Mags’
(FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, WESTERN SHORT STORIES, etc. ), which are
imported shop-soiled from America and sold at twopence halfpenny or threepence. And
the periodical proper shades off into the fourpenny novelette, the ALDINE BOXING
NOVELS, the BOYS’ FRIEND LIBRARY, the SCHOOLGIRLS’ OWN LIBRARY and
many others.
Probably the contents of these shops is the best available indication of what the mass of
the English people really feels and thinks. Certainly nothing half so revealing exists in
documentary form. Best-seller novels, for instance, tell one a great deal, but the novel is
aimed almost exclusively at people above the £4-a-week level. The movies are probably a
very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the film industry is virtually a monopoly,
which means that it is not obliged to study its public at all closely. The same applies to
some extent to the daily papers, and most of all to the radio. But it does not apply to the
weekly paper with a smallish circulation and specialized subject-matter. Papers like the
EXCHANGE AND MART, for instance, or CAGE-BIRDS, or the ORACLE, or the
PREDICTION, or the MATRIMONIAL TIMES, only exist because there is a definite
demand for them, and they reflect the minds of their readers as a great national daily with
a circulation of millions cannot possibly do.
Here I am only dealing with a single series of papers, the boys’ twopenny weeklies, often
inaccurately described as ‘penny dreadfuls’. Falling strictly within this class there are at
present ten papers, the GEM, MAGNET, MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH and CHAMPION,
all owned by the Amalgamated Press, and the WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR
and ADVENTURE, all owned by D. C. Thomson & Co. What the circulations of these
papers are, I do not know. The editors and proprietors refuse to name any figures, and in
any case the circulation of a paper carrying serial stories is bound to fluctuate widely. But
there is no question that the combined public of the ten papers is a very large one. They
are on sale in every town in England, and nearly every boy who reads at all goes through
a phase of reading one or more of them. The GEM and MAGNET, which are much the
oldest of these papers, are of rather different type from the rest, and they have evidently
lost some of their popularity during the past few years. A good many boys now regard
them as old fashioned and ‘slow’. Nevertheless I want to discuss them first, because they
are more interesting psychologically than the others, and also because the mere survival
of such papers into the nineteen-thirties is a rather startling phenomenon! .
The GEM and MAGNET are sister-papers (characters out of one paper frequently appear
in the other), and were both started more than thirty years ago. At that time, together with
Chums and the old B[oy’s] 0[wn] P[aper], they were the leading papers for boys, and
they remained dominant till quite recently. Each of them carries every week a fifteen — or
twenty-thousand-word school story, complete in itself, but usually more or less connected
with the story of the week before. The Gem in addition to its school story carries one or
more adventure serial. Otherwise the two papers are so much alike that they can be
treated as one, though the MAGNET has always been the better known of the two,
probably because it possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy. Billy Bunter.
The stories are stories of what purports to be public-school life, and the schools
(Greyfriars in the MAGNET and St Jim’s in the GEM) are represented as ancient and
fashionable foundations of the type of Eton or Winchester. All the leading characters are
fourth-form boys aged fourteen or fifteen, older or younger boys only appearing in very
minor parts. Like Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee, these boys continue week after week and
year after year, never growing any older. Very occasionally a new boy arrives or a minor
character drops out, but in at any rate the last twenty-five years the personnel has barely
altered. All the principal characters in both papers — Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry
Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy Bunter and the rest of them — were at Greyfriars or St Jim’s
long before the Great War, exactly the same age as at present, having much the same kind
of adventures and talking almost exactly the same dialect. And not only the characters but
the whole atmosphere of both Gem and Magnet has been preserved unchanged, partly by
means of very elaborate stylization. The stories in the Magnet are signed ‘Frank
Richards’ and those in the GEM, ‘Martin Clifford’, but a series lasting thirty years could
hardly be the work of the same person every week. Consequently they have to be written
in a style that is easily imitated — an extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style, quite
different from anything else now existing in English literature. A couple of extracts will
do as illustrations. Here is one from the MAGNET:
Groan!
‘Shutup, Bunter! ’
Groan!
Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter’s line. He seldom shut up, though often
requested to do so. On the present awful occasion the fat Owl of Greyfriars was less
inclined than ever to shut up. And he did not shut up! He groaned, and groaned, and went
on groaning.
Even groaning did not fully express Bunter’s feelings. His feelings, in fact, were
inexpressible.
There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered sounds of woe and
lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter, uttered enough for the whole party
and a little over.
Harry Wharton & Co. stood in a wrathy and worried group. They were landed and
stranded, diddled, dished and done! etc. , etc. , etc.
Here is one from the Gem:
‘Oh cwumbsT
‘Oh gum! ’
‘Oooogh! ’
‘Urrggh! ’
Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily. He grabbed his handkerchief and pressed it to his
damaged nose. Tom Merry sat up, gasping for breath. They looked at one another.
‘Bai Jove! This is a go, deah boy! ’ gurgled Arthur Augustus. ‘I have been thwown into
quite a fluttah! Oogh! The wottahsl The wuffians! The feahful outsidahs! Wow! ’ etc. ,
etc. , etc.
Both of these extracts are entirely typical: you would find something like them in almost
every chapter of every number, to-day or twenty-five years ago. The first thing that
anyone would notice is the extraordinary amount of tautology (the first of these two
passages contains a hundred and twenty-five words and could be compressed into about
thirty), seemingly designed to spin out the story, but actually playing its part in creating
the atmosphere. For the same reason various facetious expressions are repeated over and
over again; ‘wrathy’, for instance, is a great favourite, and so is ‘diddled, dished and
done’. ‘Oooogh! ’, ‘Grooo! ’ and ‘Yaroo! ’ (stylized cries of pain) recur constantly, and so
does ‘Ha! ha! ha! ’, always given a line to itself, so that sometimes a quarter of a column
or there-abouts consists of ‘Ha! ha! ha! ’ The slang (‘Go and cat coke! ’, ‘What the
thump! ’, ‘You frabjous ass! ’, etc. etc. ) has never been altered, so that the boys are now
using slang which is at least thirty years out of date. In addition, the various nicknames
are rubbed in on every possible occasion. Every few lines we are reminded that Harry
Wharton & Co. are ‘the Famous Five’, Bunter is always ‘the fat Owl’ or ‘the Owl of the
Remove’, Vemon-Smith is always ‘the Bounder of Greyfriars’, Gussy (the Honourable
Arthur Augustus D’Arcy) is always ‘the swell of St Jim’s’, and so on and so forth. There
is a constant, untiring effort to keep the atmosphere intact and to make sure that every
new reader learns immediately who is who. The result has been to make Greyfriars and St
Jim’s into an extraordinary little world of their own, a world which cannot be taken
seriously by anyone over fifteen, but which at any rate is not easily forgotten. By a
debasement of the Dickens technique a series of stereotyped ‘characters’ has been built
up, in several cases very successfully. Billy Bunter, for instance, must be one of the best-
known figures in English fiction; for the mere number of people who know him he ranks
with Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and a handful of characters in Dickens.
Needless to say, these stories are fantastically unlike life at a real public school. They run
in cycles of rather differing types, but in general they are the clean-fun, knock-about type
of story, with interest centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging roasters, fights,
canings, football, cricket and food. A constantly recurring story is one in which a boy is
accused of some misdeed committed by another and is too much of a sportsman to reveal
the truth. The ‘good’ boys are ‘good’ in the clean-living Englishman tradition — they keep
in hard training, wash behind their ears, never hit below the belt etc. , etc. , — and by way
of contrast there is a series ofbad’ boys, Racke, Crooke, Loder and others, whose
badness consists in betting, smoking cigarettes and frequenting public-houses. All these
boys are constantly on the verge of expulsion, but as it would mean a change of personnel
if any boy were actually expelled, no one is ever caught out in any really serious offence.
Stealing, for instance, barely enters as a motif. Sex is completely taboo, especially in the
form in which it actually arises at public schools. Occasionally girls enter into the stories,
and very rarely there is something approaching a mild flirtation, but it is entirely in the
spirit of clean fun. A boy and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides together — that is all it
ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance, would be regarded as ‘soppy’. Even the bad boys
are presumed to be completely sexless. When the GEM and MAGNET were started, it is
probable that there was a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden
atmosphere that pervaded so much of the earlier literature for boys. In the nineties the
BOYS’ OWN PAPEr, for instance, used to have its correspondence columns full of
terrifying warnings against masturbation, and books like ST WINIFRED’S and TOM
BROWN’S SCHOOL-DAYS were heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the
authors were not fully aware of it. In the GEM and MAGNET sex simply does not exist
as a problem. Religion is also taboo; in the whole thirty years’ issue of the two papers the
word ‘God’ probably does not occur, except in ‘God save the King’. On the other hand,
there has always been a very strong ‘temperance’ strain. Drinking and, by association,
smoking are regarded as rather disgraceful even in an adult (‘shady’ is the usual word),
but at the same time as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of substitute for sex. In
their moral atmosphere the GEM and MAGNET have a great deal in common with the
Boy Scout movement, which started at about the same time.
All literature of this kind is partly plagiarism. Sexton Blake, for instance, started off quite
frankly as an imitation of Sherlock Holmes, and still resembles him fairly strongly; he
has hawk-like features, lives in Baker Street, smokes enormously and puts on a dressing-
gown when he wants to think. The GEM and MAGNET probably owe something to the
old school-story writers who were flourishing when they began, Gunby Hadath,
Desmond Coke and the rest, but they owe more to nineteenth-century models. In so far as
Greyfriars and St Jim’s are like real schools at all, they are much more like Tom Brown’s
Rugby than a modem public school. Neither school has an O. T. G. , for instance, games
are not compulsory, and the boys are even allowed to wear what clothes they like. But
without doubt the main origin of these papers is STALKY & CO. This book has had an
immense influence on boys’ literature, and it is one of those books which have a sort of
traditional reputation among people who have never even seen a copy of it. More than
once in boys’ weekly papers I have come across a reference to STALKY & CO. in which
the word was spelt ‘Storky’. Even the name of the chief comic among the Greyfriars
masters, Mr Prout, is taken from STALKY & CO. , and so is much of the slang; ‘jape’,
‘merry’, ‘giddy’, ‘bizney’ (business), ‘frabjous’, ‘don’t’ for ‘doesn’t’ — all of them out of
date even when GEM and MAGNET started. There are also traces of earlier origins. The
name ‘Greyfriars’ is probably taken from Thackeray, and Gosling, the school porter in
the MAGNET, talks in an imitation of Dickens’s dialect.
With all this, the supposed ‘glamour’ of public-school life is played for all it is worth.
There is all the usual para-phernalia — lock-up, roll-call, house matches, fagging, prefects,
cosy teas round the study fire, etc. etc. — and constant reference to the ‘old school’, the
‘old grey stones’ (both schools were founded in the early sixteenth century), the ‘team
spirit’ of the ‘Greyfriars men’. As for the snob-appeal, it is completely shameless. Each
school has a titled boy or two whose titles are constantly thrust in the reader’s face; other
boys have the names of well-known aristocratic families, Talbot, Manners, Lowther. We
are for ever being reminded that Gussy is the Honourable Arthur A. D’Arcy, son of Lord
Eastwood, that Jack Blake is heir to ‘broad acres’, that Hurree Jamset Ram Singh
(nicknamed Inky) is the Nabob of Bhanipur, that Vemon-Smith’s father is a millionaire.
Till recently the illustrations in both papers always depicted the boys in clothes imitated
from those of Eton; in the last few years Greyfriars has changed over to blazers and
flannel trousers, but St Jim’s still sticks to the Eton jacket, and Gussy sticks to his top-
hat. In the school magazine which appears every week as part of the MAGNET, Harry
Wharton writes an article discussing the pocket-money received by the ‘fellows in the
Remove’, and reveals that some of them get as much as five pounds a week! This kind of
thing is a perfectly deliberate incitement to wealth-fantasy. And here it is worth noticing
a rather curious fact, and that is that the school story is a thing peculiar to England. So far
as I know, there are extremely few school stories in foreign languages. The reason,
obviously, is that in England education is mainly a matter of status. The most definite
dividing line between the petite -bourgeoisie and the working class is that the fonner pay
for their education, and within the bourgeoisie there is another unbridgeable gulf between
the ‘public’ school and the ‘private’ school.
It is quite clear that there are tens and scores
of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly
thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that mystic world of quad-rangles and
house-colours, but they can yearn after it, day-dream about it, live mentally in it for hours
at a stretch. The question is, Who arc these people? Who reads the GEM and MAGNET?
Obviously one can never be quite certain about this kind of thing. All I can say from my
own observation is this. Boys who are likely to go to public schools themselves generally
read the GEM and MAGNET, but they nearly always stop reading them when they are
about twelve; they may continue for another year from force of habit, but by that time
they have ceased to take them seriously. On the other hand, the boys at very cheap private
schools, the schools that are designed for people who can’t afford a public school but
consider the Council schools ‘common’, continue reading the GEM and MAGNET for
several years longer. A few years ago I was a teacher at two of these schools myself. I
found that not only did virtually all the boys read the GEM and MAGNET, but that they
were still taking them fairly seriously when they were fifteen or even sixteen. These boys
were the sons of shopkeepers, office employees and small business and professional men,
and obviously it is this class that the GEM and MAGNET are aimed at. But they are
certainly read by working-class boys as well. They are generally on sale in the poorest
quarters of big towns, and I have known them to be read by boys whom one might expect
to be completely immune from public-school ‘glamour’. I have seen a young coal miner,
for instance, a lad who had already worked a year or two underground, eagerly reading
the GEM. Recently I offered a batch of English papers to some British legionaries of the
French Foreign Legion in North Africa; they picked out the GEM and MAGNET first.
Both papers are much read by girls, and the Pen Pals department of the GEM shows that
it is read in every corner of the British Empire, by Australians, Canadians, Palestine Jews,
Malays, Arabs, Straits Chinese, etc. , etc. The editors evidently expect their readers to be
aged round about fourteen, and the advertisements (milk chocolate, postage stamps, water
pistols, blushing cured, home conjuring tricks, itching powder, the Phine Phun Ring
which runs a needle into your friend’s hand, etc. , etc. ) indicate roughly the same age;
there are also the Admiralty advertisements, however, which call for youths between
seventeen and twenty-two. And there is no question that these papers are also read by
adults. It is quite common for people to write to the editor and say that they have read
every number of the GEM or MAGNET for the past thirty years. Here, for instance, is a
letter from a lady in Salisbury:
I can say of your splendid yams of Harry Wharton & Co. of Greyfriars, that they never
fail to reach a high standard. Without doubt they are the finest stories of their type on the
market to-day, which is saying a good deal. They seem to bring you face to face with
Nature. I have taken the Magnet from the start, and have followed the adventures of
Harry Wharton & Co. with rapt interest. I have no sons, but two daughters, and there’s
always a rush to be the first to read the grand old paper. My husband, too, was a staunch
reader of the Magnet until he was suddenly taken away from us.
It is well worth getting hold of some copies of the GEM and MAGNET, especially the
GEM, simply to have a look at the correspondence columns. What is truly startling is the
intense interest with which the pettiest details of life at Greyfriars and St Jim’s are
followed up. Here, for instance, are a few of the questions sent in by readers:
What age is Dick Roylance? ’ ‘How old is St Jim’s? ’ ‘Can you give me a list of the Shell
and their studies? ’ ‘How much did D’Arcy’s monocle cost? ’ ‘How is it that fellows like
Crooke are in the Shell and decent fellows like yourself are only in the Fourth? ’ ‘What
arc the Fonn captain’s three chief duties? ’ ‘Who is the chemistry master at St Jim’s? ’
(From a girl) ‘Where is St Jim’s situated? COULD you tell me how to get there, as I
would love to sec the building? Are you boys just “phoneys”, as I think you are? ’
It is clear that many of the boys and girls who write these letters are living a complete
fantasy-life. Sometimes a boy will write, for instance, giving his age, height, weight,
chest and bicep measurements and asking which member of the Shell or Fourth Form he
most exactly resembles. The demand for a list of the studies on the Shell passage, with an
exact account of who lives in each, is a very common one. The editors, of course, do
everything in their power to keep up the illusion. In the GEM Jack Blake is supposed to
write answers to correspondents, and in the MAGNET a couple of pages is always given
up to the school magazine (the GREYFRIARS HERALD, edited by Harry Wharton), and
there is another page in which one or other character is written up each week. The stories
run in cycles, two or three characters being kept in the foreground for several weeks at a
time. First there will be a series of rollicking adventure stories, featuring the Famous Five
and Billy Bunter; then a run of stories turning on mistaken identity, with Wibley (the
make-up wizard) in the star part; then a run of more serious stories in which Vernon-
Smith is trembling on the verge of expulsion. And here one comes upon the real secret of
the GEM and MAGNET and the probable reason why they continue to be read in spite of
their obvious out-of-dateness.
It is that the characters are so carefully graded as to give almost every type of reader a
character he can identify himself with. Most boys’ papers aim at doing this, hence the
boy-assistant (Sexton Blake’s Tinker, Nelson Lee’s Nipper, etc. ) who usually
accompanies the explorer, detective or what-not on his adventures. But in these cases
there is only one boy, and usually it is much the same type of boy. In the GEM and
MAGNET there is a model for very nearly everybody. There is the nonnal athletic, high-
spirited boy (Tom Merry, Jack Blake, Frank Nugent), a slightly rowdier version of this
type (Bob Cherry), a more aristocratic version (Talbot, Manners), a quieter, more serious
version (Harry Wharton), and a stolid, ‘bulldog’ version (Johnny Bull). Then there is the
reckless, dare-devil type of boy (Vernon-Smith), the definitely ‘clever’, studious boy
(Mark Linley, Dick Penfold), and the eccentric boy who is not good at games but
possesses some special talent (Skinner Wibley). And there is the scholarship-boy (Tom
Redwing), an important figure in this class of story because he makes it possible for boys
from very poor homes to project themselves into the public-school atmosphere. In
addition there are Australian, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Yorkshire and Lancashire boys to play
upon local patriotism. But the subtlety of characterization goes deeper than this. If one
studies the correspondence columns one sees that there is probably NO character in the
GEM and MAGNET whom some or other reader does not identify with, except the out-
and-out comics, Coker, Billy Bunter, Fisher T. Fish (the money-grabbing American boy)
and, of course, the masters. Bunter, though in his origin he probably owed something to
the fat boy in PICKWICK, is a real creation. His tight trousers against which boots and
canes are constantly thudding, his astuteness in search of food, his postal order which
never turns up, have made him famous wherever the Union Jack waves. But he is not a
subject for day-dreams. On the other hand, another seeming figure of fun, Gussy (the
Honourable Arthur A. D’Arcy, ‘the swell of St Jim’s’), is evidently much admired. Like
everything else in the GEM and MAGNET, Gussy is at least thirty years out of date. He
is the ‘knut’ of the early twentieth century or even the ‘masher’ of the nineties (‘Bai Jove,
deah boy! ’ and ‘Weally, I shall be obliged to give you a feahful thwashin’! ’), the
monocled idiot who made good on the fields of Mons and Le Gateau. And his evident
popularity goes to show how deep the snob-appeal of this type is. English people are
extremely fond of the titled ass (cf. Lord Peter Wimscy) who always turns up trumps in
the moment of emergency. Here is a letter from one of Gussy’s girl admirers;
I think you’re too hard on Gussy. I wonder he’s still In existence, the way you treat him.
He’s my hero. Did you know I write lyrics? How’s this — to the tune of Goody Goody’?
Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.
’Cos I’m wise to all those bombs you drop on me.
Gonna dig myself a trench Inside the garden fence;
Gonna seal my windows up with tin
So the tear gas can’t get in;
Gonna park my cannon right outside the kerb
With a note to Adolf Hitler: ‘Don’t disturb! ’
And if I never fall in Nazi hands
That’s soon enough for me
Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.
P. S. — Do you get on well with girls?
I quote this in full because (dated April 1939) it is interesting as being probably the
earliest mention of Hitler in the GEM. In the GEM there is also a heroic fat boy. Fatty
Wynn, as a set-off against Bunter. Vemon-Smith, ‘the Bounder of the Remove’, a
Byronic character, always on the verge of the sack, is another great favourite. And even
some of the cads probably have their following. Loder, for instance, ‘the rotter of the
Sixth’, is a cad, but he is also a highbrow and given to saying sarcastic things about
football and the team spirit. The boys of the Remove only think him all the more of a cad
for this, but a certain type of boy would probably identify with him. Even Racke, Grooke
& Co. are probably admired by small boys who think it diabolically wicked to smoke
cigarettes. (A frequent question in the correspondence column; ‘What brand of cigarettes
does Racke smoke? ’)
Naturally the politics of the GEM and MAGNET are Conservative, but in a completely
pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge. In reality their basic political assumptions are two:
nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny. In the GEM of 1939 Frenchmen are still
Froggies and Italians are still Dagoes. Mossoo, the French master at Greyfriars, is the
usual comic-paper Frog, with pointed beard, pegtop trousers, etc. Inky, the Indian boy,
though a rajah, and therefore possessing snob-appeal, is also the comic babu of the
PUNCH tradition. (“The rowfulness is not the proper caper, my esteemed Bob,” said
Inky. “Let dogs delight in the barkfulness and bitefulness, but the soft answer is the
cracked pitcher that goes longest to a bird in the bush, as the English proverb remarks. ”)
Fisher T. Fish is the old-style stage Yankee (“Waal, I guess”, etc. ) dating from a peroid of
Anglo-American jealousy. Wun Lung, the Chinese boy (he has rather faded out of late,
no doubt because some of the MAGNET’S readers are Straits Chinese), is the nineteenth-
century pantomime Chinaman, with saucer-shaped hat, pigtail and pidgin-English. The
assumption all along is not only that foreigners are comics who are put there for us to
laugh at, but that they can be classified in much the same way as insects. That is why in
all boys’ papers, not only the GEM and MAGNET, a Chinese is invariably portrayed
with a pigtail. It is the thing you recognize him by, like the Frenchman’s beard or the
Italian’s barrel-organ. In papers of this kind it occasionally happens that when the setting
of a story is in a foreign country some attempt is made to describe the natives as
individual human beings, but as a rule it is assumed that foreigners of any one race are all
alike and will conform more or less exactly to the following patterns:
FRENCHMAN: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly. SPANIARD, Mexican, etc. :
Sinister, treacherous. ARAB, Afghan, etc. : Sinister, treacherous. CHINESE: Sinister,
treacherous. Wears pigtail. ITALIAN: Excitable. Grinds barrel-organ or carries stiletto.
SWEDE, Dane, etc. : Kind-hearted, stupid. NEGRO: Comic, very faithful.
The working classes only enter into the GEM and MAGNET as comics or semi-villains
(race-course touts, etc. ). As for class-friction, trade unionism, strikes, slumps,
unemployment, Fascism and civil war — not a mention. Somewhere or other in the thirty
years’ issue of the two papers you might perhaps find the word ‘Socialism’, but you
would have to look a long time for it. If the Russian Revolution is anywhere referred to, it
will be indirectly, in the word ‘Bolshy’ (meaning a person of violent disagreeable habits).
Hitler and the Nazis are just beginning to make their appearance, in the sort of reference I
quoted above. The war-crisis of September 1938 made just enough impression to produce
a story in which Mr Vemon-Smith, the Bounder’s millionaire father, cashed in on the
general panic by buying up country houses in order to sell them to ‘crisis scuttlers’. But
that is probably as near to noticing the European situation as the GEM and MAGNET
will come, until the war actually starts. That does not mean that these papers are
unpatriotic — quite the contrary! Throughout the Great War the GEM and MAGNET were
perhaps the most consistently and cheerfully patriotic papers in England. Almost every
week the boys caught a spy or pushed a conchy into the army, and during the rationing
period ‘EAT LESS BREAD’ was printed in large type on every page. But their patriotism
has nothing whatever to do with power-politics or ‘ideological’ warfare. It is more akin to
family loyalty, and actually it gives one a valuable clue to the attitude of ordinary people,
especially the huge untouched block of the middle class and the better-off working class.
These people are patriotic to the middle of their bones, but they do not feel that what
happens in foreign countries is any of their business. When England is in danger they
rally to its defence as a matter of course, but in between-times they are not interested.
After all, England is always in the right and England always wins, so why worry? It is an
attitude that has been shaken during the past twenty years, but not so deeply as is
sometimes supposed. Failure to understand it is one of the reasons why Left Wing
political parties are seldom able to produce an acceptable foreign policy.
The mental world of the GEM and MAGNET, therefore, is something like this:
The year is 1910 — or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked
boy of fourteen 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 monocled 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 Rook-wood. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable.
Everything will be the same for ever and ever. That approximately is the atmosphere.
But now turn from the GEM and MAGNET to the more up-to-date papers which have
appeared since the Great War. The truly significant thing is that they have more points of
resemblance to the GEM and MAGNET than points of difference. But it is better to
consider the differences first.
There are eight of these newer papers, the MODEM BOY, TRIUMPH, CHAMPION,
WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR and ADVENTURE. All of these have
appeared since the Great War, but except for the MODERN BOY none of them is less
than five years old. Two papers which ought also to be mentioned briefly here; though
they are not strictly in the same class as the rest, are the DETECTIVE WEEKLY and the
THRILLER, both owned by the Amalgamated Press. The DETECTIVE WEEKLY has
taken over Sexton Blake. Both of these papers admit a certain amount of sex-interest into
their stories, and though certainly read by boys; they are not aimed at them exclusively.
All the others are boys’ papers pure and simple, and they are sufficiently alike to be
considered together. There does not seem to be any notable difference between
Thomson’s publications and those of the Amalgamated Press.
As soon as one looks at these papers one sees their technical superiority to the GEM and
MAGNET. To begin with, they have the great advantage of not being written entirely by
one person. Instead of one long complete story, a number of the WIZARD or HOTSPUR
consists of half a dozen or more serials, none of which goes on for ever. Consequently
there is far more variety and far less padding, and none of the tiresome stylization and
facetiousness of the GEM and MAGNET. Look at these two extracts, for example:
Billy Bunter groaned.
A quarter of an hour had elapsed out of the two hours that Bunter was booked for extra
French.
In a quarter of an hour there were only fifteen minutes! But every one of those minutes
seemed inordinately long to Bunter. They seemed to crawl by like tired snails.
Looking at the clock in Classroom No. 10 the fat Owl could hardly believe that only
fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed more like fifteen hours, if not fifteen days!
Other fellows were in extra French as well as Bunter. They did not matter. Bunter did!
(The Magnet)
After a terrible climb, hacking out handholds in the smooth ice every step of the way up.
Sergeant Lionheart Logan of the Mounties was now clinging like a human fly to the face
of an icy cliff, as smooth and treacherous as a giant pane of glass.
An Arctic blizzard, in all its fury, was buffeting his body, driving the blinding snow into
his face, seeking to tear his fingers loose from their handholds and dash him to death on
the jagged boulders which lay at the foot of the cliff a hundred feet below.
Crouching among those boulders were eleven villainous trappers who had done their best
to shoot down Lionheart and his companion, Constable Jim Rogers — until the blizzard
had blotted the two Mounties out of sight from below. (The Wizard)
The second extract gets you some distance with the story, the first takes a hundred words
to tell you that Bunter is in the detention class. Moreover, by not concentrating on school
stories (in point of numbers the school story slightly predominates in all these papers,
except the THRILLER and DETECTIVE WEEKLY), the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc. ,
have far greater opportunities for sensationalism. Merely looking at the cover illustrations
of the papers which I have on the table in front of me, here are some of the things I see.
On one a cowboy is clinging by his toes to the wing of an aeroplane in mid-air and
shooting down another aeroplane with his revolver. On another a Chinese is swimming
for his life down a sewer with a swarm of ravenous-looking rats swimming after him. On
another an engineer is lighting a stick of dynamite while a steel robot feels for him with
its claws. On another a man in airman’s costume is fighting barehanded against a rat
somewhat larger than a donkey. On another a nearly naked man of terrific muscular
development has just seized a lion by the tail and flung it thirty yards over the wall of an
arena, with the words, ‘Take back your blooming lion! ’ Clearly no school story can
compete with this kind of thing. From time to time the school buildings may catch fire or
the French master may turn out to be the head of an international anarchist gang, but in a
general way the interest must centre round cricket, school rivalries, practical jokes, etc.
There is not much room for bombs, death-rays, sub-machine guns, aeroplanes, mustangs,
octopuses, grizzly bears or gangsters.
Examination of a large number of these papers shows that, putting aside school stories,
the favourite subjects are Wild West, Frozen North, Foreign Fegion, crime (always from
the detective’s angle), the Great War (Air Force or Secret Service, not the infantry), the
Tarzan motif in varying forms, professional football, tropical exploration, historical
romance (Robin Hood, Cavaliers and Round-heads, etc. ) and scientific invention. The
Wild West still leads, at any rate as a setting, though the Red Indian seems to be fading
out. The one theme that is really new is the scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, invisible
men, robots, helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely: here and there there are
even far-off rumours of psychotherapy and ductless glands. Whereas the GEM and
MAGNET derive from Dickens and Kipling, the WIZARD, CHAMPION, MODEM
BOY, etc. , owe a great deal to H. G.
or forty feet to get at the tiny trickles which run through the subsoil.
Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my house, each
carrying a load of firewood. All of them are mummified with age and the sun, and all of
them are tiny. It seems to be generally the case in primitive communities that the women,
when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size of children. One day a poor old
creature who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a vast load
of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou piece (a little more than a farthing) into her
hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was partly gratitude but
mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I
seemed almost to be violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman,
that is to say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is quite usual to see a
father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys, and an old woman following on foot,
carrying the baggage.
But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For several weeks, always at
about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the house with their
firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say
that I had seen them. Firewood was passing — that was how I saw it. It was only that one
day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a
load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time
I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin,
bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on
Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it.
There is no question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The Moroccan donkey is
hardly bigger than a St Bernard dog, it carries a load which in the British army would be
considered too much for a fifteen-hands mule, and very often its pack-saddle is not taken
off its back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is the most willing
creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and does not need either bridle or halter.
After a dozen years of devoted work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it
into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold.
This kind of thing makes one’s blood boil, whereas — on the whole — the plight of the
human beings does not. 1 am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with
brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled
back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old
woman under her load of sticks.
As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching southward — a long, dusty
column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more infantry, four or five thousand men
in all, winding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels.
They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black that sometimes it is
difficult to see whereabouts on their necks the hair begins. Their splendid bodies were
hidden in reach-me-down khaki unifonns, their feet squashed into boots that looked like
blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes too small, ft was very
hot and the men had marched a long way. They slumped under the weight of their packs
and the curiously sensitive black faces were glistening with sweat.
As they went past a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my eye. But the look he
gave me was not in the least the kind of look you might expect. Not hostile, not
contemptuous, not sullen, not even inquisitive, ft was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look,
which actually is a look of profound respect. 1 saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is
a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch
syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has
been taught that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it.
But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn’t matter
twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past.
“How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their
guns in the other direction? ”
It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other
in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating
chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all
knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn’t know it. And really it was
almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of
anned men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them
in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper.
BOYS’ WEEKLIES AND FRANK RICHARDS’S REPLY (1940)
You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a
small newsagent’s shop. The general appearance of these shops is always very much the
same: a few posters for the DAILY MAIL and the NEWS OE THE WORLD outside, a
poky little window with sweet-bottles and packets of Players, and a dark interior smelling
of liquorice allsorts and festooned from floor to ceiling with vilely printed twopenny
papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours.
Except for the daily and evening papers, the stock of these shops hardly overlaps at all
with that of the big news-agents. Their main selling line is the twopenny weekly, and the
number and variety of these are almost unbelievable. Every hobby and pastime — cage-
birds, fretwork, carpentering, bees, carrier-pigeons, home conjuring, philately, chess —
has at least one paper devoted to it, and generally several. Gardening and livestock-
keeping must have at least a score between them. Then there are the sporting papers, the
radio papers, the children’s comics, the various snippet papers such as TIT-BITS, the
large range of papers devoted to the movies and all more or less exploiting women’s legs,
the various trade papers, the women’s story-papers (the ORACLE, SECRETS, PEG’S
PAPER, etc. etc. ), the needlework papers — these so numerous that a display of them
alone will often fill an entire window — and in addition the long series of ‘Yank Mags’
(FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, WESTERN SHORT STORIES, etc. ), which are
imported shop-soiled from America and sold at twopence halfpenny or threepence. And
the periodical proper shades off into the fourpenny novelette, the ALDINE BOXING
NOVELS, the BOYS’ FRIEND LIBRARY, the SCHOOLGIRLS’ OWN LIBRARY and
many others.
Probably the contents of these shops is the best available indication of what the mass of
the English people really feels and thinks. Certainly nothing half so revealing exists in
documentary form. Best-seller novels, for instance, tell one a great deal, but the novel is
aimed almost exclusively at people above the £4-a-week level. The movies are probably a
very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the film industry is virtually a monopoly,
which means that it is not obliged to study its public at all closely. The same applies to
some extent to the daily papers, and most of all to the radio. But it does not apply to the
weekly paper with a smallish circulation and specialized subject-matter. Papers like the
EXCHANGE AND MART, for instance, or CAGE-BIRDS, or the ORACLE, or the
PREDICTION, or the MATRIMONIAL TIMES, only exist because there is a definite
demand for them, and they reflect the minds of their readers as a great national daily with
a circulation of millions cannot possibly do.
Here I am only dealing with a single series of papers, the boys’ twopenny weeklies, often
inaccurately described as ‘penny dreadfuls’. Falling strictly within this class there are at
present ten papers, the GEM, MAGNET, MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH and CHAMPION,
all owned by the Amalgamated Press, and the WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR
and ADVENTURE, all owned by D. C. Thomson & Co. What the circulations of these
papers are, I do not know. The editors and proprietors refuse to name any figures, and in
any case the circulation of a paper carrying serial stories is bound to fluctuate widely. But
there is no question that the combined public of the ten papers is a very large one. They
are on sale in every town in England, and nearly every boy who reads at all goes through
a phase of reading one or more of them. The GEM and MAGNET, which are much the
oldest of these papers, are of rather different type from the rest, and they have evidently
lost some of their popularity during the past few years. A good many boys now regard
them as old fashioned and ‘slow’. Nevertheless I want to discuss them first, because they
are more interesting psychologically than the others, and also because the mere survival
of such papers into the nineteen-thirties is a rather startling phenomenon! .
The GEM and MAGNET are sister-papers (characters out of one paper frequently appear
in the other), and were both started more than thirty years ago. At that time, together with
Chums and the old B[oy’s] 0[wn] P[aper], they were the leading papers for boys, and
they remained dominant till quite recently. Each of them carries every week a fifteen — or
twenty-thousand-word school story, complete in itself, but usually more or less connected
with the story of the week before. The Gem in addition to its school story carries one or
more adventure serial. Otherwise the two papers are so much alike that they can be
treated as one, though the MAGNET has always been the better known of the two,
probably because it possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy. Billy Bunter.
The stories are stories of what purports to be public-school life, and the schools
(Greyfriars in the MAGNET and St Jim’s in the GEM) are represented as ancient and
fashionable foundations of the type of Eton or Winchester. All the leading characters are
fourth-form boys aged fourteen or fifteen, older or younger boys only appearing in very
minor parts. Like Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee, these boys continue week after week and
year after year, never growing any older. Very occasionally a new boy arrives or a minor
character drops out, but in at any rate the last twenty-five years the personnel has barely
altered. All the principal characters in both papers — Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry
Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy Bunter and the rest of them — were at Greyfriars or St Jim’s
long before the Great War, exactly the same age as at present, having much the same kind
of adventures and talking almost exactly the same dialect. And not only the characters but
the whole atmosphere of both Gem and Magnet has been preserved unchanged, partly by
means of very elaborate stylization. The stories in the Magnet are signed ‘Frank
Richards’ and those in the GEM, ‘Martin Clifford’, but a series lasting thirty years could
hardly be the work of the same person every week. Consequently they have to be written
in a style that is easily imitated — an extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style, quite
different from anything else now existing in English literature. A couple of extracts will
do as illustrations. Here is one from the MAGNET:
Groan!
‘Shutup, Bunter! ’
Groan!
Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter’s line. He seldom shut up, though often
requested to do so. On the present awful occasion the fat Owl of Greyfriars was less
inclined than ever to shut up. And he did not shut up! He groaned, and groaned, and went
on groaning.
Even groaning did not fully express Bunter’s feelings. His feelings, in fact, were
inexpressible.
There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered sounds of woe and
lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter, uttered enough for the whole party
and a little over.
Harry Wharton & Co. stood in a wrathy and worried group. They were landed and
stranded, diddled, dished and done! etc. , etc. , etc.
Here is one from the Gem:
‘Oh cwumbsT
‘Oh gum! ’
‘Oooogh! ’
‘Urrggh! ’
Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily. He grabbed his handkerchief and pressed it to his
damaged nose. Tom Merry sat up, gasping for breath. They looked at one another.
‘Bai Jove! This is a go, deah boy! ’ gurgled Arthur Augustus. ‘I have been thwown into
quite a fluttah! Oogh! The wottahsl The wuffians! The feahful outsidahs! Wow! ’ etc. ,
etc. , etc.
Both of these extracts are entirely typical: you would find something like them in almost
every chapter of every number, to-day or twenty-five years ago. The first thing that
anyone would notice is the extraordinary amount of tautology (the first of these two
passages contains a hundred and twenty-five words and could be compressed into about
thirty), seemingly designed to spin out the story, but actually playing its part in creating
the atmosphere. For the same reason various facetious expressions are repeated over and
over again; ‘wrathy’, for instance, is a great favourite, and so is ‘diddled, dished and
done’. ‘Oooogh! ’, ‘Grooo! ’ and ‘Yaroo! ’ (stylized cries of pain) recur constantly, and so
does ‘Ha! ha! ha! ’, always given a line to itself, so that sometimes a quarter of a column
or there-abouts consists of ‘Ha! ha! ha! ’ The slang (‘Go and cat coke! ’, ‘What the
thump! ’, ‘You frabjous ass! ’, etc. etc. ) has never been altered, so that the boys are now
using slang which is at least thirty years out of date. In addition, the various nicknames
are rubbed in on every possible occasion. Every few lines we are reminded that Harry
Wharton & Co. are ‘the Famous Five’, Bunter is always ‘the fat Owl’ or ‘the Owl of the
Remove’, Vemon-Smith is always ‘the Bounder of Greyfriars’, Gussy (the Honourable
Arthur Augustus D’Arcy) is always ‘the swell of St Jim’s’, and so on and so forth. There
is a constant, untiring effort to keep the atmosphere intact and to make sure that every
new reader learns immediately who is who. The result has been to make Greyfriars and St
Jim’s into an extraordinary little world of their own, a world which cannot be taken
seriously by anyone over fifteen, but which at any rate is not easily forgotten. By a
debasement of the Dickens technique a series of stereotyped ‘characters’ has been built
up, in several cases very successfully. Billy Bunter, for instance, must be one of the best-
known figures in English fiction; for the mere number of people who know him he ranks
with Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and a handful of characters in Dickens.
Needless to say, these stories are fantastically unlike life at a real public school. They run
in cycles of rather differing types, but in general they are the clean-fun, knock-about type
of story, with interest centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging roasters, fights,
canings, football, cricket and food. A constantly recurring story is one in which a boy is
accused of some misdeed committed by another and is too much of a sportsman to reveal
the truth. The ‘good’ boys are ‘good’ in the clean-living Englishman tradition — they keep
in hard training, wash behind their ears, never hit below the belt etc. , etc. , — and by way
of contrast there is a series ofbad’ boys, Racke, Crooke, Loder and others, whose
badness consists in betting, smoking cigarettes and frequenting public-houses. All these
boys are constantly on the verge of expulsion, but as it would mean a change of personnel
if any boy were actually expelled, no one is ever caught out in any really serious offence.
Stealing, for instance, barely enters as a motif. Sex is completely taboo, especially in the
form in which it actually arises at public schools. Occasionally girls enter into the stories,
and very rarely there is something approaching a mild flirtation, but it is entirely in the
spirit of clean fun. A boy and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides together — that is all it
ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance, would be regarded as ‘soppy’. Even the bad boys
are presumed to be completely sexless. When the GEM and MAGNET were started, it is
probable that there was a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden
atmosphere that pervaded so much of the earlier literature for boys. In the nineties the
BOYS’ OWN PAPEr, for instance, used to have its correspondence columns full of
terrifying warnings against masturbation, and books like ST WINIFRED’S and TOM
BROWN’S SCHOOL-DAYS were heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the
authors were not fully aware of it. In the GEM and MAGNET sex simply does not exist
as a problem. Religion is also taboo; in the whole thirty years’ issue of the two papers the
word ‘God’ probably does not occur, except in ‘God save the King’. On the other hand,
there has always been a very strong ‘temperance’ strain. Drinking and, by association,
smoking are regarded as rather disgraceful even in an adult (‘shady’ is the usual word),
but at the same time as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of substitute for sex. In
their moral atmosphere the GEM and MAGNET have a great deal in common with the
Boy Scout movement, which started at about the same time.
All literature of this kind is partly plagiarism. Sexton Blake, for instance, started off quite
frankly as an imitation of Sherlock Holmes, and still resembles him fairly strongly; he
has hawk-like features, lives in Baker Street, smokes enormously and puts on a dressing-
gown when he wants to think. The GEM and MAGNET probably owe something to the
old school-story writers who were flourishing when they began, Gunby Hadath,
Desmond Coke and the rest, but they owe more to nineteenth-century models. In so far as
Greyfriars and St Jim’s are like real schools at all, they are much more like Tom Brown’s
Rugby than a modem public school. Neither school has an O. T. G. , for instance, games
are not compulsory, and the boys are even allowed to wear what clothes they like. But
without doubt the main origin of these papers is STALKY & CO. This book has had an
immense influence on boys’ literature, and it is one of those books which have a sort of
traditional reputation among people who have never even seen a copy of it. More than
once in boys’ weekly papers I have come across a reference to STALKY & CO. in which
the word was spelt ‘Storky’. Even the name of the chief comic among the Greyfriars
masters, Mr Prout, is taken from STALKY & CO. , and so is much of the slang; ‘jape’,
‘merry’, ‘giddy’, ‘bizney’ (business), ‘frabjous’, ‘don’t’ for ‘doesn’t’ — all of them out of
date even when GEM and MAGNET started. There are also traces of earlier origins. The
name ‘Greyfriars’ is probably taken from Thackeray, and Gosling, the school porter in
the MAGNET, talks in an imitation of Dickens’s dialect.
With all this, the supposed ‘glamour’ of public-school life is played for all it is worth.
There is all the usual para-phernalia — lock-up, roll-call, house matches, fagging, prefects,
cosy teas round the study fire, etc. etc. — and constant reference to the ‘old school’, the
‘old grey stones’ (both schools were founded in the early sixteenth century), the ‘team
spirit’ of the ‘Greyfriars men’. As for the snob-appeal, it is completely shameless. Each
school has a titled boy or two whose titles are constantly thrust in the reader’s face; other
boys have the names of well-known aristocratic families, Talbot, Manners, Lowther. We
are for ever being reminded that Gussy is the Honourable Arthur A. D’Arcy, son of Lord
Eastwood, that Jack Blake is heir to ‘broad acres’, that Hurree Jamset Ram Singh
(nicknamed Inky) is the Nabob of Bhanipur, that Vemon-Smith’s father is a millionaire.
Till recently the illustrations in both papers always depicted the boys in clothes imitated
from those of Eton; in the last few years Greyfriars has changed over to blazers and
flannel trousers, but St Jim’s still sticks to the Eton jacket, and Gussy sticks to his top-
hat. In the school magazine which appears every week as part of the MAGNET, Harry
Wharton writes an article discussing the pocket-money received by the ‘fellows in the
Remove’, and reveals that some of them get as much as five pounds a week! This kind of
thing is a perfectly deliberate incitement to wealth-fantasy. And here it is worth noticing
a rather curious fact, and that is that the school story is a thing peculiar to England. So far
as I know, there are extremely few school stories in foreign languages. The reason,
obviously, is that in England education is mainly a matter of status. The most definite
dividing line between the petite -bourgeoisie and the working class is that the fonner pay
for their education, and within the bourgeoisie there is another unbridgeable gulf between
the ‘public’ school and the ‘private’ school.
It is quite clear that there are tens and scores
of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly
thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that mystic world of quad-rangles and
house-colours, but they can yearn after it, day-dream about it, live mentally in it for hours
at a stretch. The question is, Who arc these people? Who reads the GEM and MAGNET?
Obviously one can never be quite certain about this kind of thing. All I can say from my
own observation is this. Boys who are likely to go to public schools themselves generally
read the GEM and MAGNET, but they nearly always stop reading them when they are
about twelve; they may continue for another year from force of habit, but by that time
they have ceased to take them seriously. On the other hand, the boys at very cheap private
schools, the schools that are designed for people who can’t afford a public school but
consider the Council schools ‘common’, continue reading the GEM and MAGNET for
several years longer. A few years ago I was a teacher at two of these schools myself. I
found that not only did virtually all the boys read the GEM and MAGNET, but that they
were still taking them fairly seriously when they were fifteen or even sixteen. These boys
were the sons of shopkeepers, office employees and small business and professional men,
and obviously it is this class that the GEM and MAGNET are aimed at. But they are
certainly read by working-class boys as well. They are generally on sale in the poorest
quarters of big towns, and I have known them to be read by boys whom one might expect
to be completely immune from public-school ‘glamour’. I have seen a young coal miner,
for instance, a lad who had already worked a year or two underground, eagerly reading
the GEM. Recently I offered a batch of English papers to some British legionaries of the
French Foreign Legion in North Africa; they picked out the GEM and MAGNET first.
Both papers are much read by girls, and the Pen Pals department of the GEM shows that
it is read in every corner of the British Empire, by Australians, Canadians, Palestine Jews,
Malays, Arabs, Straits Chinese, etc. , etc. The editors evidently expect their readers to be
aged round about fourteen, and the advertisements (milk chocolate, postage stamps, water
pistols, blushing cured, home conjuring tricks, itching powder, the Phine Phun Ring
which runs a needle into your friend’s hand, etc. , etc. ) indicate roughly the same age;
there are also the Admiralty advertisements, however, which call for youths between
seventeen and twenty-two. And there is no question that these papers are also read by
adults. It is quite common for people to write to the editor and say that they have read
every number of the GEM or MAGNET for the past thirty years. Here, for instance, is a
letter from a lady in Salisbury:
I can say of your splendid yams of Harry Wharton & Co. of Greyfriars, that they never
fail to reach a high standard. Without doubt they are the finest stories of their type on the
market to-day, which is saying a good deal. They seem to bring you face to face with
Nature. I have taken the Magnet from the start, and have followed the adventures of
Harry Wharton & Co. with rapt interest. I have no sons, but two daughters, and there’s
always a rush to be the first to read the grand old paper. My husband, too, was a staunch
reader of the Magnet until he was suddenly taken away from us.
It is well worth getting hold of some copies of the GEM and MAGNET, especially the
GEM, simply to have a look at the correspondence columns. What is truly startling is the
intense interest with which the pettiest details of life at Greyfriars and St Jim’s are
followed up. Here, for instance, are a few of the questions sent in by readers:
What age is Dick Roylance? ’ ‘How old is St Jim’s? ’ ‘Can you give me a list of the Shell
and their studies? ’ ‘How much did D’Arcy’s monocle cost? ’ ‘How is it that fellows like
Crooke are in the Shell and decent fellows like yourself are only in the Fourth? ’ ‘What
arc the Fonn captain’s three chief duties? ’ ‘Who is the chemistry master at St Jim’s? ’
(From a girl) ‘Where is St Jim’s situated? COULD you tell me how to get there, as I
would love to sec the building? Are you boys just “phoneys”, as I think you are? ’
It is clear that many of the boys and girls who write these letters are living a complete
fantasy-life. Sometimes a boy will write, for instance, giving his age, height, weight,
chest and bicep measurements and asking which member of the Shell or Fourth Form he
most exactly resembles. The demand for a list of the studies on the Shell passage, with an
exact account of who lives in each, is a very common one. The editors, of course, do
everything in their power to keep up the illusion. In the GEM Jack Blake is supposed to
write answers to correspondents, and in the MAGNET a couple of pages is always given
up to the school magazine (the GREYFRIARS HERALD, edited by Harry Wharton), and
there is another page in which one or other character is written up each week. The stories
run in cycles, two or three characters being kept in the foreground for several weeks at a
time. First there will be a series of rollicking adventure stories, featuring the Famous Five
and Billy Bunter; then a run of stories turning on mistaken identity, with Wibley (the
make-up wizard) in the star part; then a run of more serious stories in which Vernon-
Smith is trembling on the verge of expulsion. And here one comes upon the real secret of
the GEM and MAGNET and the probable reason why they continue to be read in spite of
their obvious out-of-dateness.
It is that the characters are so carefully graded as to give almost every type of reader a
character he can identify himself with. Most boys’ papers aim at doing this, hence the
boy-assistant (Sexton Blake’s Tinker, Nelson Lee’s Nipper, etc. ) who usually
accompanies the explorer, detective or what-not on his adventures. But in these cases
there is only one boy, and usually it is much the same type of boy. In the GEM and
MAGNET there is a model for very nearly everybody. There is the nonnal athletic, high-
spirited boy (Tom Merry, Jack Blake, Frank Nugent), a slightly rowdier version of this
type (Bob Cherry), a more aristocratic version (Talbot, Manners), a quieter, more serious
version (Harry Wharton), and a stolid, ‘bulldog’ version (Johnny Bull). Then there is the
reckless, dare-devil type of boy (Vernon-Smith), the definitely ‘clever’, studious boy
(Mark Linley, Dick Penfold), and the eccentric boy who is not good at games but
possesses some special talent (Skinner Wibley). And there is the scholarship-boy (Tom
Redwing), an important figure in this class of story because he makes it possible for boys
from very poor homes to project themselves into the public-school atmosphere. In
addition there are Australian, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Yorkshire and Lancashire boys to play
upon local patriotism. But the subtlety of characterization goes deeper than this. If one
studies the correspondence columns one sees that there is probably NO character in the
GEM and MAGNET whom some or other reader does not identify with, except the out-
and-out comics, Coker, Billy Bunter, Fisher T. Fish (the money-grabbing American boy)
and, of course, the masters. Bunter, though in his origin he probably owed something to
the fat boy in PICKWICK, is a real creation. His tight trousers against which boots and
canes are constantly thudding, his astuteness in search of food, his postal order which
never turns up, have made him famous wherever the Union Jack waves. But he is not a
subject for day-dreams. On the other hand, another seeming figure of fun, Gussy (the
Honourable Arthur A. D’Arcy, ‘the swell of St Jim’s’), is evidently much admired. Like
everything else in the GEM and MAGNET, Gussy is at least thirty years out of date. He
is the ‘knut’ of the early twentieth century or even the ‘masher’ of the nineties (‘Bai Jove,
deah boy! ’ and ‘Weally, I shall be obliged to give you a feahful thwashin’! ’), the
monocled idiot who made good on the fields of Mons and Le Gateau. And his evident
popularity goes to show how deep the snob-appeal of this type is. English people are
extremely fond of the titled ass (cf. Lord Peter Wimscy) who always turns up trumps in
the moment of emergency. Here is a letter from one of Gussy’s girl admirers;
I think you’re too hard on Gussy. I wonder he’s still In existence, the way you treat him.
He’s my hero. Did you know I write lyrics? How’s this — to the tune of Goody Goody’?
Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.
’Cos I’m wise to all those bombs you drop on me.
Gonna dig myself a trench Inside the garden fence;
Gonna seal my windows up with tin
So the tear gas can’t get in;
Gonna park my cannon right outside the kerb
With a note to Adolf Hitler: ‘Don’t disturb! ’
And if I never fall in Nazi hands
That’s soon enough for me
Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.
P. S. — Do you get on well with girls?
I quote this in full because (dated April 1939) it is interesting as being probably the
earliest mention of Hitler in the GEM. In the GEM there is also a heroic fat boy. Fatty
Wynn, as a set-off against Bunter. Vemon-Smith, ‘the Bounder of the Remove’, a
Byronic character, always on the verge of the sack, is another great favourite. And even
some of the cads probably have their following. Loder, for instance, ‘the rotter of the
Sixth’, is a cad, but he is also a highbrow and given to saying sarcastic things about
football and the team spirit. The boys of the Remove only think him all the more of a cad
for this, but a certain type of boy would probably identify with him. Even Racke, Grooke
& Co. are probably admired by small boys who think it diabolically wicked to smoke
cigarettes. (A frequent question in the correspondence column; ‘What brand of cigarettes
does Racke smoke? ’)
Naturally the politics of the GEM and MAGNET are Conservative, but in a completely
pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge. In reality their basic political assumptions are two:
nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny. In the GEM of 1939 Frenchmen are still
Froggies and Italians are still Dagoes. Mossoo, the French master at Greyfriars, is the
usual comic-paper Frog, with pointed beard, pegtop trousers, etc. Inky, the Indian boy,
though a rajah, and therefore possessing snob-appeal, is also the comic babu of the
PUNCH tradition. (“The rowfulness is not the proper caper, my esteemed Bob,” said
Inky. “Let dogs delight in the barkfulness and bitefulness, but the soft answer is the
cracked pitcher that goes longest to a bird in the bush, as the English proverb remarks. ”)
Fisher T. Fish is the old-style stage Yankee (“Waal, I guess”, etc. ) dating from a peroid of
Anglo-American jealousy. Wun Lung, the Chinese boy (he has rather faded out of late,
no doubt because some of the MAGNET’S readers are Straits Chinese), is the nineteenth-
century pantomime Chinaman, with saucer-shaped hat, pigtail and pidgin-English. The
assumption all along is not only that foreigners are comics who are put there for us to
laugh at, but that they can be classified in much the same way as insects. That is why in
all boys’ papers, not only the GEM and MAGNET, a Chinese is invariably portrayed
with a pigtail. It is the thing you recognize him by, like the Frenchman’s beard or the
Italian’s barrel-organ. In papers of this kind it occasionally happens that when the setting
of a story is in a foreign country some attempt is made to describe the natives as
individual human beings, but as a rule it is assumed that foreigners of any one race are all
alike and will conform more or less exactly to the following patterns:
FRENCHMAN: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly. SPANIARD, Mexican, etc. :
Sinister, treacherous. ARAB, Afghan, etc. : Sinister, treacherous. CHINESE: Sinister,
treacherous. Wears pigtail. ITALIAN: Excitable. Grinds barrel-organ or carries stiletto.
SWEDE, Dane, etc. : Kind-hearted, stupid. NEGRO: Comic, very faithful.
The working classes only enter into the GEM and MAGNET as comics or semi-villains
(race-course touts, etc. ). As for class-friction, trade unionism, strikes, slumps,
unemployment, Fascism and civil war — not a mention. Somewhere or other in the thirty
years’ issue of the two papers you might perhaps find the word ‘Socialism’, but you
would have to look a long time for it. If the Russian Revolution is anywhere referred to, it
will be indirectly, in the word ‘Bolshy’ (meaning a person of violent disagreeable habits).
Hitler and the Nazis are just beginning to make their appearance, in the sort of reference I
quoted above. The war-crisis of September 1938 made just enough impression to produce
a story in which Mr Vemon-Smith, the Bounder’s millionaire father, cashed in on the
general panic by buying up country houses in order to sell them to ‘crisis scuttlers’. But
that is probably as near to noticing the European situation as the GEM and MAGNET
will come, until the war actually starts. That does not mean that these papers are
unpatriotic — quite the contrary! Throughout the Great War the GEM and MAGNET were
perhaps the most consistently and cheerfully patriotic papers in England. Almost every
week the boys caught a spy or pushed a conchy into the army, and during the rationing
period ‘EAT LESS BREAD’ was printed in large type on every page. But their patriotism
has nothing whatever to do with power-politics or ‘ideological’ warfare. It is more akin to
family loyalty, and actually it gives one a valuable clue to the attitude of ordinary people,
especially the huge untouched block of the middle class and the better-off working class.
These people are patriotic to the middle of their bones, but they do not feel that what
happens in foreign countries is any of their business. When England is in danger they
rally to its defence as a matter of course, but in between-times they are not interested.
After all, England is always in the right and England always wins, so why worry? It is an
attitude that has been shaken during the past twenty years, but not so deeply as is
sometimes supposed. Failure to understand it is one of the reasons why Left Wing
political parties are seldom able to produce an acceptable foreign policy.
The mental world of the GEM and MAGNET, therefore, is something like this:
The year is 1910 — or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked
boy of fourteen 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 monocled 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 Rook-wood. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable.
Everything will be the same for ever and ever. That approximately is the atmosphere.
But now turn from the GEM and MAGNET to the more up-to-date papers which have
appeared since the Great War. The truly significant thing is that they have more points of
resemblance to the GEM and MAGNET than points of difference. But it is better to
consider the differences first.
There are eight of these newer papers, the MODEM BOY, TRIUMPH, CHAMPION,
WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR and ADVENTURE. All of these have
appeared since the Great War, but except for the MODERN BOY none of them is less
than five years old. Two papers which ought also to be mentioned briefly here; though
they are not strictly in the same class as the rest, are the DETECTIVE WEEKLY and the
THRILLER, both owned by the Amalgamated Press. The DETECTIVE WEEKLY has
taken over Sexton Blake. Both of these papers admit a certain amount of sex-interest into
their stories, and though certainly read by boys; they are not aimed at them exclusively.
All the others are boys’ papers pure and simple, and they are sufficiently alike to be
considered together. There does not seem to be any notable difference between
Thomson’s publications and those of the Amalgamated Press.
As soon as one looks at these papers one sees their technical superiority to the GEM and
MAGNET. To begin with, they have the great advantage of not being written entirely by
one person. Instead of one long complete story, a number of the WIZARD or HOTSPUR
consists of half a dozen or more serials, none of which goes on for ever. Consequently
there is far more variety and far less padding, and none of the tiresome stylization and
facetiousness of the GEM and MAGNET. Look at these two extracts, for example:
Billy Bunter groaned.
A quarter of an hour had elapsed out of the two hours that Bunter was booked for extra
French.
In a quarter of an hour there were only fifteen minutes! But every one of those minutes
seemed inordinately long to Bunter. They seemed to crawl by like tired snails.
Looking at the clock in Classroom No. 10 the fat Owl could hardly believe that only
fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed more like fifteen hours, if not fifteen days!
Other fellows were in extra French as well as Bunter. They did not matter. Bunter did!
(The Magnet)
After a terrible climb, hacking out handholds in the smooth ice every step of the way up.
Sergeant Lionheart Logan of the Mounties was now clinging like a human fly to the face
of an icy cliff, as smooth and treacherous as a giant pane of glass.
An Arctic blizzard, in all its fury, was buffeting his body, driving the blinding snow into
his face, seeking to tear his fingers loose from their handholds and dash him to death on
the jagged boulders which lay at the foot of the cliff a hundred feet below.
Crouching among those boulders were eleven villainous trappers who had done their best
to shoot down Lionheart and his companion, Constable Jim Rogers — until the blizzard
had blotted the two Mounties out of sight from below. (The Wizard)
The second extract gets you some distance with the story, the first takes a hundred words
to tell you that Bunter is in the detention class. Moreover, by not concentrating on school
stories (in point of numbers the school story slightly predominates in all these papers,
except the THRILLER and DETECTIVE WEEKLY), the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc. ,
have far greater opportunities for sensationalism. Merely looking at the cover illustrations
of the papers which I have on the table in front of me, here are some of the things I see.
On one a cowboy is clinging by his toes to the wing of an aeroplane in mid-air and
shooting down another aeroplane with his revolver. On another a Chinese is swimming
for his life down a sewer with a swarm of ravenous-looking rats swimming after him. On
another an engineer is lighting a stick of dynamite while a steel robot feels for him with
its claws. On another a man in airman’s costume is fighting barehanded against a rat
somewhat larger than a donkey. On another a nearly naked man of terrific muscular
development has just seized a lion by the tail and flung it thirty yards over the wall of an
arena, with the words, ‘Take back your blooming lion! ’ Clearly no school story can
compete with this kind of thing. From time to time the school buildings may catch fire or
the French master may turn out to be the head of an international anarchist gang, but in a
general way the interest must centre round cricket, school rivalries, practical jokes, etc.
There is not much room for bombs, death-rays, sub-machine guns, aeroplanes, mustangs,
octopuses, grizzly bears or gangsters.
Examination of a large number of these papers shows that, putting aside school stories,
the favourite subjects are Wild West, Frozen North, Foreign Fegion, crime (always from
the detective’s angle), the Great War (Air Force or Secret Service, not the infantry), the
Tarzan motif in varying forms, professional football, tropical exploration, historical
romance (Robin Hood, Cavaliers and Round-heads, etc. ) and scientific invention. The
Wild West still leads, at any rate as a setting, though the Red Indian seems to be fading
out. The one theme that is really new is the scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, invisible
men, robots, helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely: here and there there are
even far-off rumours of psychotherapy and ductless glands. Whereas the GEM and
MAGNET derive from Dickens and Kipling, the WIZARD, CHAMPION, MODEM
BOY, etc. , owe a great deal to H. G.
