Book of the Month: Frank Richards

 

Regular readers of this blog and many others beyond in the wider world will probably know Frank Richards to be the author of the wildly popular (in their day) Billy Bunter stories.

He is recognised as the most prolific published writer in the English language.

Mary Cadogan in her book Frank Richards, The Chap Behind the Chums, published in 1988, tells us that ‘Frank Richards’ was only one of more than 20 pen-names used by Charles Harold St John Hamilton. He created almost a hundred fictional schools and published well over 72 million words of fiction, or the equivalent of a thousand novels.

He is best known as Frank Richards, the pseudonym he used when writing the Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School stories, but he also created St Jim’s as Martin Clifford and Rookwood School as Owen Conquest.

Cadogan doesn’t dwell on the undoubted fact that Frank Richards stories included a great deal of corporal punishment, mostly in the form of canings, but also with the birch. The yell “Yarooh!” that Bunter makes as the cane strikes against the seat of his stretched trousers entered the English language and is still recognised by many today.

Frank Richards more than any other of his contemporary writers seemed to relish describing canings in some detail.

Cadogan says that canings were a universal leveller. ‘Aristocrats and scholarship boys, snobs and knuts, sneaks, toadies and slackers, bullies, bounders and manly boys alike all, on occasion, had punishment of this nature inflicted upon them. Whatever the rights and wrongs of corporal punishment as a means of cutting boys down to size, it played a part in the plot structure of many of the stories. Bunter, while wildly fleeing from the swishing ash-plant of a wrathful prefect, is likely to shut himself up in some strange bolt-hole, where he will stumble upon the clue to whatever weird mystery is at that moment baffling the Remove, or, indeed, the whole of Greyfriars.’

I wonder if Cadogan doesn’t let him off the hook a little (what would today’s therapists make of his writings today?) when she says that the plethora of corporal punishment inflicted over the decades at the schools he wrote about were, “in the same bracket as the biffs, bangs and wallops meted out to Donald Duck, Tom and Jerry and other stalwarts of the animated cartoon. In both cases pain is symbolic rather than actual and the victims spring back to normality with indiarubber-like resilience.”

Oddly, she seems to contradict herself when she offers the following extract from ‘Bunter’s Brainstorm’, published in the Magnet no 996 (1927). Mr Quelch, the Remove form master, does appear to be overdoing it a bit …

“I shall give you twenty strokes for your iniquitous conduct this afternoon. I shall give you ten strokes in addition for having played a further prank and attempted to deceive me.”

“Oh, lor!!”

“Bend over that chair, Bunter …”

Whack, whack!

“Yarooh! Help! …”

The cane was still whacking rhythmically. Billy Bunter’s yells rang far and wide. Towards the end of the infliction the strokes fell a little more lightly. Perhaps Mr Quelch thought that Bunter had had enough. If so, for once Bunter was in full agreement with his form-master. He had had enough and to spare.

“There, Bunter!” gasped Mr Quelch at last. Vigorous gentleman as he was, he was a little tired, though not so tired as Bunter.

“Yow-ow-ow-ow!”

“You may go.”

 

Frank Richards, The Chap Behind the Chums, by Mary Cadogan (Viking: 1988)

 

For more Billy Bunter, click here

 

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