Remembering: The Gem

 The Gem, Issue No 758, 19 August 1922

The Gem was in its day one of the most popular of the story papers that chronicled the goings-on among boys at school. It brought us Tom Merry, who is probably one of the few characters from that era that stayed in the public consciousness long after the paper closed.

The Gem was launched in 1907 by the Amalgamated Press and although it is fair to say that for many years it lived in the shadow of its more accomplished cousin The Magnet which brought us the great Fat Owl of The Remove, Billy Bunter.

The heydays of the English School stories ran from about 1900 to the late 1930s. Papers such as The Hotspur and The Rover also carried these stories. Looking back today we can see there was very little difference between the papers. The boys were at public school – that is elite private fee paying boarding schools. They moved in groups of four or five chums and each pal had a slightly different personality from his fellows. The idea was for the reader to be able to relate personally to one or other of them.

The Gem featured stories of St James College in Sussex – commonly known as St Jim’s to the boys, concentrating on the adventures of the Fourth and Shell forms. There were two houses, the School House and the New House. The main characters were the ‘Terrible Three’ – Merry, Manners and Lowther from the Shell; Blake, D’Arcy, Herries and Digby from the School House Fourth; Figgins, Kerr and ‘Fatty’ Wynn from the New House Fourth.

In The Gem the fictional heroes of St Jim’s inhabited a world of cane- or birch-wielding schoolmasters, (although none was quite so manic as Mr Quelch from The Magnet (click here for more) and bullying prefects.

The Gem, Issue No. 539, 8 June 1918

The Gem, Issue No. 1226, 15 August 1931

 

The Magnet and The Gem were published by the same company and Frank Richards who penned the Billy Bunter stories for The Magnet was the same Martin Clifford who wrote about Tom Merry.

The Gem was killed off in 1939 after the start of the Second World, but Tom Merry lived on for many years. Tom Merry’s Own, an annual, appeared from 1949 to 1954. In the 1970s Howard Baker published a series of books reproducing original copies of The Gem.

Copies of The Gem can be read online or downloaded at the Friardale website, here.

Here’s an example of Martin Clifford in action. Click on the date to download the full story paper.