A Boys’ Author

Press, Volume C, Issue 29707, 28 December 1961, Page 8

A Boys’ Author

The news from London that Frank Richards has died will awaken fond boyhood memories for many men of mature years. He wrote stories about boys in imaginary English public schools—Greyfriars and St Jim’a and successive generations of schoolboys regularly spent their pennies on the “Magnet” and the “Gem ”. Of Frank Richards’s creations, one has passed into the tradition of literary characters living with the community: as surely as “ Bill Sikes ” attaches itself to the burglar, so does “ Billy Bunter ” to the boy, or man, of excessive avoirdupois. Indeed. Billy Bunter is an international figure, for was it not a Frenchman who once described someone as “ gros “ comme le Bunterr "? In an article written in 1940 about Frank Richards (who was also Martin Clifford and Owen Conquest, though his real name was Charles Hamilton), George Orwell said Frank Richards wrote in a style “ easily imitated ” But Frank Richards continued to receive more demands from publishers that he could fulfil (and to earn regularly between £2500 and £3OOO a year) while would be imitators k failed - O1 ’ w ’ell (a little sur- ■ prising ly for him) comF plained in the same article that in the long “ Magnet •• scries there was no mention of God. Frank Richards, a man of deep religious convictions, replied that it was a Victorian custom to put pills in the jam. but his own

experience as a boy was that the pills in the jam made him feel sick. He remembered his own feeling of “ utter distaste ” when he came upon religion m the “ Boys’ Own Paper ” and in Kingston and Ballantyne. Frank Richards felt that he knew what boys wanted to read; literally, millions of boys helped to prove his claim. Modern prescribers of children’s fare would probably disapprove of his work on the ground that it was not “ improving "; but it at least had the merit of being wholesome and entertaining. In retrospect the greatest value many adults will accord to his work is that by showing what read ing could do for them, it helped to lead them easily and surely into the love of books. Frank Richards wrote for several generations of boys who, as adults, know he served them well. They will cherish his memory.