Cripes! Up With School

Another triumph for JK Rowling. A television company wants to acquire the rights for the Jennings stories of Anthony Buckeridge, which are set in a boarding school.

His publishers have discontinued the books, apparently taking the view that the stories had lost their appeal now that so very few children are going to boarding schools. But that was before Hogwarts Academy. Such are Rowling's magical powers that suddenly, boarding schools are back in.

This all seems rather extraordinary. To disqualify boarding school stories on the calculation that they will not appeal to children who have never attended one makes about as much sense as pulling the plug on Rupert on the grounds that so very few children live in places called Nutwood and have parents who are bears.

The most famous boarding school in the country is Eton; but for at least half a century it was run pretty close by a school called Greyfriars, as portrayed week by week by Frank Richards, initially in a magazine called the Magnet. If you took a rival publication, The Gem, you found equivalent stories about a school called St Jim's, written by Martin Clifford.

Later, new institutions opened their doors in response to public demand: Owen Conquest wrote about Rookwood, Hilda Richards about the thrills and spills of life at Cliff House school for girls. Almost all these tales, we now know, were the work of one man, whose real name - never used - was Charles Hamilton. At his peak he was churning out some 100,000 words every week. And although his later creations included Herlock Sholmes, the famous detective, and the south seas adventures of boy skipper Ken King, at least 90% of his action took place in the distant, rarefied world of the boarding school.

But Hamilton would never have made the impact he did had these books only been read under the bedclothes at Rugby and Charterhouse. His addicts included thousands of working-class children who had never set eyes on a boarding school, let alone been incarcerated in one. His publishers had far too much sense to tell Hamilton to stick to the real world in which he'd grown up and where most of his readers lived.

It was precisely because the world of the fictional boarding school was so self-contained and detached from the lives of most readers that the formula worked so well. Had Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Arthur Augustus D'Arcy, Billy and Bessie Bunter gone home at night to semi-detacheds down the road, the whole essence of the invention would have collapsed.

Richards was no great stylist. His world was almost exclusively middle class, spiced with an occasional upper-class figure like the juvenile peer Lord Mauleverer or Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, Nabob of Bhanipur, with his lordly ways and his prettily mangled English. The characters on whom he initially focused - his Famous Five, led by Harry Wharton, captain of the Remove - were the stuff of subaltern sacrifice in the war which began some seven years on from the launch of the Magnet; or failing that, material for the Tory back-benches between the wars.

It was other, initially more peripheral characters who progressively took over the stories, delighting a clientele which had never met anyone like them: especially Billy Bunter, with his lust for postal orders and tuck and his feeble self-exculpations and his cries of "cripes" and "yarooh", and the form master Quelch, with his gimlet eye, his Latin tags and his regularly exercised cane.

You won't find Greyfriars stories in most bookshops today. There's a version on tape by Martin Jarvis, though even here some of the writing seems dated: it is only in the confrontations between Bunter and Quelch that the stories blaze back into life. And the persecution of the obese, in the shape of the Bunter siblings, is no longer as much of a jape as it was. Today there are fresh, more appropriate fantasy worlds to explore, especially Hogwarts.

What remains unchanged is the truth which Hamilton knew: that, whatever some publishers think, young readers long for submersion in worlds they will never inhabit.

d.mckie@guardian.co.uk