Wears beard,
gesticulates
wildly.
Orwell
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using slang which is at least thirty years out of date.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. Wells, who, rather than Jules Veme, is the father of
‘Scientifiction’. Naturally it is the magical Martian aspect of science that is most
exploited, but one or two papers include serious articles on scientific subjects, besides
quantities of informative snippets. (Examples: ‘A Kauri tree in Queensland, Australia, is
over 12,000 years old’; ‘Nearly 50,000 thunderstonns occur every day’; ‘Helium gas
costs £1 per 1000 cubic feet’; ‘There are over 500 varieties of spiders in Great Britain’;
‘London firemen use 14,000,000 gallons of water annually’, etc. , etc. ) There is a marked
advance in intellectual curiosity and, on the whole, in the demand made on the reader’s
attention. In practice the GEM and MAGNET and the post-war papers are read by much
the same public, but the mental age aimed at seems to have risen by a year or two years —
an improvement probably corresponding to the improvement in elementary education
since 1909.
The other thing that has emerged in the post-war boys’ papers, though not to anything
like the extent one would expect, is bully-worship and the cult of violence.
If one compares the GEM and MAGNET with a genuinely modern paper, the thing that
immediately strikes one is the absence of the leader-principle. There is no central
dominating character; instead there are fifteen or twenty characters, all more or less on an
equality, with whom readers of different types can identify. In the more modem papers
this is not usually the case. Instead of identifying with a schoolboy of more or less his
own age, the reader of the SKIPPER, HOTSPUR, etc. , is led to identify with a G-man,
with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant of Tarzan, with an air ace, a master spy, an
explorer, a pugilist — at any rate with some single all-powerful character who dominates
everyone about him and whose usual method of solving any problem is a sock on the jaw.
This character is intended as a superman, and as physical strength is the form of power
that boys can best understand, he is usually a sort of human gorilla; in the Tarzan type of
story he is sometimes actually a giant, eight or ten feet high. At the same time the scenes
of violence in nearly all these stories are remarkably harmless and unconvincing. There is
a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty English paper and the
threepenny Yank Mags, FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, etc. (not strictly boys’
papers, but largely read by boys). In the Yank Mags you get real blood-lust, really gory
descriptions of the all-in, jump-on-his-testicles style fighting, written in a jargon that has
been perfected by people who brood end-lessly on violence. A paper like FIGHT
STORIES, for instance, would have very little appeal except to sadists and masochists.
You can see the comparative gentleness of the English civilization by the amateurish way
in which prize-fighting is always described in the boys’ weeklies. There is no specialized
vocabulary. Look at these four extracts, two English, two American;
When the gong sounded, both men were breathing heavily and each had great red marks
on his chest. Bill’s chin was bleeding, and Ben had a cut over his right eye.
Into their comers they sank, but when the gong clanged again they were up swiftly, and
they went like tigers at each other. (ROVER)
H= * *
He walked in stolidly and smashed a clublike right to my face. Blood spattered and I
went back on my heels, but surged in and ripped my right under the heart. Another right
smashed full on Ben’s already battered mouth, and, spitting out the fragments of a tooth,
he crashed a flailing left to my body. (FIGHT STORIES)
* * *
It was amazing to watch the Black Panther at work. His muscles rippled and slid under
his dark skin. There was all the power and grace of a giant cat in his swift and terrible
onslaught.
He volleyed blows with a bewildering speed for so huge a fellow. In a moment Ben was
simply blocking with his gloves as well as he could. Ben was really a past-master of
defence. He had many fine victories behind him. But the Negro’s rights and lefts crashed
through openings that hardly any other fighter could have found. (WIZARD)
* * *
Haymakers which packed the bludgeoning weight of forest monarchs crashing down
under the ax hurled into the bodies of the two heavies as they swapped punches. (FIGHT
STORIES)
Notice how much more knowledgeable the American extracts sound. They are written for
devotees of the prize-ring, the others are not. Also, it ought to be emphasized that on its
level the moral code of the English boys’ papers is a decent one. Crime and dishonesty
are never held up to admiration, there is none of the cynicism and corruption of the
American gangster story. The huge sale of the Ya nk Mags in England shows that there is
a demand for that kind of thing, but very few English writers seem able to produce it.
When hatred of Hitler became a major emotion in America, it was interesting to see how
promptly ‘anti-Fascism’ was adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank
Mags. One magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long, complete story,
‘When Hell Game to America’, in which the agents of a ‘blood-maddened European
dictator’ are trying to conquer the U. S. A. with death-rays and invisible aeroplanes. There
is the fra nk est appeal to sadism, scenes in which the Nazis tie bombs to women’s backs
and fling them off heights to watch them blown to pieces in mid-air, others in which they
tie naked girls together by their hair and prod them with knives to make them dance, etc. ,
etc. The editor comments solemnly on all this, and uses it as a plea for tightening up
restrictions against immigrants. On another page of the same paper: ‘LIVES OF THE
HOTCHA CHORUS GIRLS. Reveals all the intimate secrets and fascinating pastimes of
the famous Broadway Hotcha girls. NOTHING IS OMITTED. Price 10c. ’ ‘HOW TO
LOVE. 10c. ’ ‘FRENCH PHOTO RING. 25c. ’ ‘NAUGHTY NUDIES TRANSFERS.
From the outside of the glass you see a beautiful girl, innocently dressed. Turn it around
and look through the glass and oh! what a difference! Set of 3 transfers 25c. ,’ etc. , etc. ,
etc. There is nothing at all like this in any English paper likely to be read by boys. But the
process of Americanization is going on all the same. The American ideal, the ‘he-man’,
the ‘tough guy’, the gorilla who puts everything right by socking everybody on the jaw,
now figures in probably a majority of boys’ papers. In one serial now running in the
SKIPPER he is always portrayed ominously enough, swinging a rubber truncheon.
The development of the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc. , as against the earlier boys’ papers,
boils down to this: better technique, more scientific interest, more bloodshed, more
leader-worship. But, after all, it is the LACK of development that is the really striking
thing.
To begin with, there is no political development whatever. The world of the SKIPPER
and the CHAMPION is still the pre-1914 world of the MAGNET and the GEM. The
Wild West story, for instance, with its cattle-rustlers, lynch-law and other paraphernalia
belonging to the eighties, is a curiously archaic thing. It is worth noticing that in papers of
this type it is always taken for granted that adventures only happen at the ends of the
earth, in tropical forests, in Arctic wastes, in African deserts, on Western prairies, in
Chinese opium dens — everywhere in fact, except the places where things really DO
happen. That is a belief dating from thirty or forty years ago, when the new continents
were in process of being opened up. Nowadays, of course, if you really want adventure,
the place to look for it is in Europe. But apart from the picturesque side of the Great War,
contemporary history is carefully excluded. And except that Americans are now admired
instead of being laughed at, foreigners are exactly the same figures of fun that they
always were. If a Chinese character appears, he is still the sinister pigtailed opium-
smuggler of Sax Rohmer; no indication that things have been happening in China since
1912 — no indication that a war is going on there, for instance. If a Spaniard appears, he is
still a ‘dago’ or ‘greaser’ who rolls cigarettes and stabs people in the back; no indication
that things have been happening in Spain. Hitler and the Nazis have not yet appeared, or
are barely making their appearance. There will be plenty about them in a little while, but
it will be from a strictly patriotic angle (Britain versus Gennany), with the real meaning
of the struggle kept out of sight as much as possible. As for the Russian Revolution, it is
extremely difficult to find any reference to it in any of these papers. When Russia is
mentioned at all it is usually in an infonnation snippet (example: ‘There are 29,000
centenarians in the USSR. ’), and any reference to the Revolution is indirect and twenty
years out of date. In one story in the ROVER, for instance, somebody has a tame bear,
and as it is a Russian bear, it is nicknamed Trotsky — obviously an echo of the 1917-23
period and not of recent controversies. The clock has stopped at 1910. Britannia rules the
waves, and no one has heard of slumps, booms, unemployment, dictatorships, purges or
concentration camps.
And in social outlook there is hardly any advance. The snobbishness is somewhat less
open than in the GEM and MAGNET — that is the most one can possibly say. To begin
with, the school story, always partly dependent on snob-appeal, is by no means
eliminated. Every number of a boys’ paper includes at least one school story, these stories
slightly outnumbering the Wild Westerns. The very elaborate fantasy-life of the GEM
and MAGNET is not imitated and there is more emphasis on extraneous adventure, but
the social atmosphere (old grey stones) is much the same. When a new school is
introduced at the beginning of a story we are often told in just those words that ‘it was a
very posh school’. From time to time a story appears which is ostensibly directed
AGAINST snobbery. The scholarship-boy (cf. Tom Redwing in the MAGNET) makes
fairly frequent appearances, and what is essentially the same theme is sometimes
presented in this form: there is great rivalry between two schools, one of which considers
itself more ‘posh’ than the other, and there are fights, practical jokes, football matches,
etc. , always ending in the discomfiture of the snobs. If one glances very superficially at
some of these stories it is possible to imagine that a democratic spirit has crept into the
boys’ weeklies, but when one looks more closely one sees that they merely reflect the
bitter jealousies that exist within the white-collar class. Their real function is to allow the
boy who goes to a cheap private school (NOT a Council school) to feel that his school is
just as ‘posh’ in the sight of God as Winchester or Eton. The sentiment of school loyalty
(‘We’re better than the fellows down the road’), a thing almost unknown to the real
working class, is still kept up. As these stories are written by many different hands, they
do, of course, vary a good deal in tone. Some are reasonably free from snobbishness, in
others money and pedigree are exploited even more shamelessly than in the GEM and
MAGNET. In one that I came across an actual MAJORITY of the boys mentioned were
titled.
Where working-class characters appear, it is usually either as comics (jokes about tramps,
convicts, etc. ), or as prize-fighters, acrobats, cowboys, professional footballers and
Foreign Legionaries — in other words, as adventurers. There is no facing of the facts
about working-class life, or, indeed, about WORKING life of any description. Very
occasionally one may come across a realistic description of, say, work in a coal-mine, but
in all probability it will only be there as the background of some lurid adventure. In any
case the central character is not likely to be a coal-miner. Nearly all the time the boy who
reads these papers — in nine cases out often a boy who is going to spend his life working
in a shop, in a factory or in some subordinate job in an office — is led to identify with
people in positions of command, above all with people who are never troubled by
shortage of money.
‘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. Wells, who, rather than Jules Veme, is the father of
‘Scientifiction’. Naturally it is the magical Martian aspect of science that is most
exploited, but one or two papers include serious articles on scientific subjects, besides
quantities of informative snippets. (Examples: ‘A Kauri tree in Queensland, Australia, is
over 12,000 years old’; ‘Nearly 50,000 thunderstonns occur every day’; ‘Helium gas
costs £1 per 1000 cubic feet’; ‘There are over 500 varieties of spiders in Great Britain’;
‘London firemen use 14,000,000 gallons of water annually’, etc. , etc. ) There is a marked
advance in intellectual curiosity and, on the whole, in the demand made on the reader’s
attention. In practice the GEM and MAGNET and the post-war papers are read by much
the same public, but the mental age aimed at seems to have risen by a year or two years —
an improvement probably corresponding to the improvement in elementary education
since 1909.
The other thing that has emerged in the post-war boys’ papers, though not to anything
like the extent one would expect, is bully-worship and the cult of violence.
If one compares the GEM and MAGNET with a genuinely modern paper, the thing that
immediately strikes one is the absence of the leader-principle. There is no central
dominating character; instead there are fifteen or twenty characters, all more or less on an
equality, with whom readers of different types can identify. In the more modem papers
this is not usually the case. Instead of identifying with a schoolboy of more or less his
own age, the reader of the SKIPPER, HOTSPUR, etc. , is led to identify with a G-man,
with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant of Tarzan, with an air ace, a master spy, an
explorer, a pugilist — at any rate with some single all-powerful character who dominates
everyone about him and whose usual method of solving any problem is a sock on the jaw.
This character is intended as a superman, and as physical strength is the form of power
that boys can best understand, he is usually a sort of human gorilla; in the Tarzan type of
story he is sometimes actually a giant, eight or ten feet high. At the same time the scenes
of violence in nearly all these stories are remarkably harmless and unconvincing. There is
a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty English paper and the
threepenny Yank Mags, FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, etc. (not strictly boys’
papers, but largely read by boys). In the Yank Mags you get real blood-lust, really gory
descriptions of the all-in, jump-on-his-testicles style fighting, written in a jargon that has
been perfected by people who brood end-lessly on violence. A paper like FIGHT
STORIES, for instance, would have very little appeal except to sadists and masochists.
You can see the comparative gentleness of the English civilization by the amateurish way
in which prize-fighting is always described in the boys’ weeklies. There is no specialized
vocabulary. Look at these four extracts, two English, two American;
When the gong sounded, both men were breathing heavily and each had great red marks
on his chest. Bill’s chin was bleeding, and Ben had a cut over his right eye.
Into their comers they sank, but when the gong clanged again they were up swiftly, and
they went like tigers at each other. (ROVER)
H= * *
He walked in stolidly and smashed a clublike right to my face. Blood spattered and I
went back on my heels, but surged in and ripped my right under the heart. Another right
smashed full on Ben’s already battered mouth, and, spitting out the fragments of a tooth,
he crashed a flailing left to my body. (FIGHT STORIES)
* * *
It was amazing to watch the Black Panther at work. His muscles rippled and slid under
his dark skin. There was all the power and grace of a giant cat in his swift and terrible
onslaught.
He volleyed blows with a bewildering speed for so huge a fellow. In a moment Ben was
simply blocking with his gloves as well as he could. Ben was really a past-master of
defence. He had many fine victories behind him. But the Negro’s rights and lefts crashed
through openings that hardly any other fighter could have found. (WIZARD)
* * *
Haymakers which packed the bludgeoning weight of forest monarchs crashing down
under the ax hurled into the bodies of the two heavies as they swapped punches. (FIGHT
STORIES)
Notice how much more knowledgeable the American extracts sound. They are written for
devotees of the prize-ring, the others are not. Also, it ought to be emphasized that on its
level the moral code of the English boys’ papers is a decent one. Crime and dishonesty
are never held up to admiration, there is none of the cynicism and corruption of the
American gangster story. The huge sale of the Ya nk Mags in England shows that there is
a demand for that kind of thing, but very few English writers seem able to produce it.
When hatred of Hitler became a major emotion in America, it was interesting to see how
promptly ‘anti-Fascism’ was adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank
Mags. One magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long, complete story,
‘When Hell Game to America’, in which the agents of a ‘blood-maddened European
dictator’ are trying to conquer the U. S. A. with death-rays and invisible aeroplanes. There
is the fra nk est appeal to sadism, scenes in which the Nazis tie bombs to women’s backs
and fling them off heights to watch them blown to pieces in mid-air, others in which they
tie naked girls together by their hair and prod them with knives to make them dance, etc. ,
etc. The editor comments solemnly on all this, and uses it as a plea for tightening up
restrictions against immigrants. On another page of the same paper: ‘LIVES OF THE
HOTCHA CHORUS GIRLS. Reveals all the intimate secrets and fascinating pastimes of
the famous Broadway Hotcha girls. NOTHING IS OMITTED. Price 10c. ’ ‘HOW TO
LOVE. 10c. ’ ‘FRENCH PHOTO RING. 25c. ’ ‘NAUGHTY NUDIES TRANSFERS.
From the outside of the glass you see a beautiful girl, innocently dressed. Turn it around
and look through the glass and oh! what a difference! Set of 3 transfers 25c. ,’ etc. , etc. ,
etc. There is nothing at all like this in any English paper likely to be read by boys. But the
process of Americanization is going on all the same. The American ideal, the ‘he-man’,
the ‘tough guy’, the gorilla who puts everything right by socking everybody on the jaw,
now figures in probably a majority of boys’ papers. In one serial now running in the
SKIPPER he is always portrayed ominously enough, swinging a rubber truncheon.
The development of the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc. , as against the earlier boys’ papers,
boils down to this: better technique, more scientific interest, more bloodshed, more
leader-worship. But, after all, it is the LACK of development that is the really striking
thing.
To begin with, there is no political development whatever. The world of the SKIPPER
and the CHAMPION is still the pre-1914 world of the MAGNET and the GEM. The
Wild West story, for instance, with its cattle-rustlers, lynch-law and other paraphernalia
belonging to the eighties, is a curiously archaic thing. It is worth noticing that in papers of
this type it is always taken for granted that adventures only happen at the ends of the
earth, in tropical forests, in Arctic wastes, in African deserts, on Western prairies, in
Chinese opium dens — everywhere in fact, except the places where things really DO
happen. That is a belief dating from thirty or forty years ago, when the new continents
were in process of being opened up. Nowadays, of course, if you really want adventure,
the place to look for it is in Europe. But apart from the picturesque side of the Great War,
contemporary history is carefully excluded. And except that Americans are now admired
instead of being laughed at, foreigners are exactly the same figures of fun that they
always were. If a Chinese character appears, he is still the sinister pigtailed opium-
smuggler of Sax Rohmer; no indication that things have been happening in China since
1912 — no indication that a war is going on there, for instance. If a Spaniard appears, he is
still a ‘dago’ or ‘greaser’ who rolls cigarettes and stabs people in the back; no indication
that things have been happening in Spain. Hitler and the Nazis have not yet appeared, or
are barely making their appearance. There will be plenty about them in a little while, but
it will be from a strictly patriotic angle (Britain versus Gennany), with the real meaning
of the struggle kept out of sight as much as possible. As for the Russian Revolution, it is
extremely difficult to find any reference to it in any of these papers. When Russia is
mentioned at all it is usually in an infonnation snippet (example: ‘There are 29,000
centenarians in the USSR. ’), and any reference to the Revolution is indirect and twenty
years out of date. In one story in the ROVER, for instance, somebody has a tame bear,
and as it is a Russian bear, it is nicknamed Trotsky — obviously an echo of the 1917-23
period and not of recent controversies. The clock has stopped at 1910. Britannia rules the
waves, and no one has heard of slumps, booms, unemployment, dictatorships, purges or
concentration camps.
And in social outlook there is hardly any advance. The snobbishness is somewhat less
open than in the GEM and MAGNET — that is the most one can possibly say. To begin
with, the school story, always partly dependent on snob-appeal, is by no means
eliminated. Every number of a boys’ paper includes at least one school story, these stories
slightly outnumbering the Wild Westerns. The very elaborate fantasy-life of the GEM
and MAGNET is not imitated and there is more emphasis on extraneous adventure, but
the social atmosphere (old grey stones) is much the same. When a new school is
introduced at the beginning of a story we are often told in just those words that ‘it was a
very posh school’. From time to time a story appears which is ostensibly directed
AGAINST snobbery. The scholarship-boy (cf. Tom Redwing in the MAGNET) makes
fairly frequent appearances, and what is essentially the same theme is sometimes
presented in this form: there is great rivalry between two schools, one of which considers
itself more ‘posh’ than the other, and there are fights, practical jokes, football matches,
etc. , always ending in the discomfiture of the snobs. If one glances very superficially at
some of these stories it is possible to imagine that a democratic spirit has crept into the
boys’ weeklies, but when one looks more closely one sees that they merely reflect the
bitter jealousies that exist within the white-collar class. Their real function is to allow the
boy who goes to a cheap private school (NOT a Council school) to feel that his school is
just as ‘posh’ in the sight of God as Winchester or Eton. The sentiment of school loyalty
(‘We’re better than the fellows down the road’), a thing almost unknown to the real
working class, is still kept up. As these stories are written by many different hands, they
do, of course, vary a good deal in tone. Some are reasonably free from snobbishness, in
others money and pedigree are exploited even more shamelessly than in the GEM and
MAGNET. In one that I came across an actual MAJORITY of the boys mentioned were
titled.
Where working-class characters appear, it is usually either as comics (jokes about tramps,
convicts, etc. ), or as prize-fighters, acrobats, cowboys, professional footballers and
Foreign Legionaries — in other words, as adventurers. There is no facing of the facts
about working-class life, or, indeed, about WORKING life of any description. Very
occasionally one may come across a realistic description of, say, work in a coal-mine, but
in all probability it will only be there as the background of some lurid adventure. In any
case the central character is not likely to be a coal-miner. Nearly all the time the boy who
reads these papers — in nine cases out often a boy who is going to spend his life working
in a shop, in a factory or in some subordinate job in an office — is led to identify with
people in positions of command, above all with people who are never troubled by
shortage of money.
