Swankpot Academy

 

Here’s an unusual ‘rags to riches’ story set at Swankpot Academy, a school for toffs featured in the Rover story paper in the 1920s.

Here’s the opening sentences from one story. ‘Billy Bragg chuckled as he stole down the stairs of Swankpot Academy with a basket of grub under his arm. He was taking the grub down to the boot hole to his new pal, Lord Bragg, and the chuckle was the funny way things had turned out.

A week ago, he had been an errand-boy in Bethnal Green. He had inherited some money and come to this Academy, but the joke was that he had met this real Lord, also called Bragg, and had changed names with him for a lark.’

Swankpot was one of many school stories that appeared in boys’ papers in the first half of the twentieth century. There was little to distinguish between many of the schools depicted in these stories (they were usually posh boarding schools featuring a group of chums and prefects and masters who wielded canes.)

Sometimes authors tried to find a different ‘angle’ for their stories and hence Swankpot was born.

But the cane was ever-present. But not always front and centre in the story, preferring to have the dreaded deed take place off-stage.

Swankpot Academy gave us many caning near-misses. In this story (21 September 1929, available to download here) the sixth-formers dumped headmaster Dr Poppleton in the duck pond, mistaking him for a burglar.

We met the Rover before here.

Nearly 400 editions of the Rover from the first one in 1922 onward are available to read or download from the Comic Book Plus website.

Credit: D C Thomson.

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