Education: Forever Bunter

Of all the public schoolboys in Britain —not even excluding Tom Brown—none is better known or more persistent than Billy Bunter of Greyfriars. A round, owlish fellow, he is forever stealing other chaps' "tuck" (cakes, cream puffs, tarts, toffee). He is hopeless at athletics, can't seem to spell ("I wood have toled you myself but you wood not lissen . . ."), is perpetually in a "digamma," and is constantly delivering such Bunterisms as "How sharper than a thankless child it is to have a toothless "serpent."

Billy Bunter is always in trouble: he is "whopped" ("Wow! Oh! Oh. crumbs! Wow!"), smacked ("Yarooh! Ow! Wow! Ooogh! Beast! Wow!"), and "spiflicated" unmercifully ("Ow! I say—wow! I say—oh. crikey!"). But in spite of such misadventures, Billy Bunter has managed to survive—at the same age and in the same school—for 45 years. Last week Britons were once again reading all about him in a new book called Billy Bunter's Brain-Wave, by Charles Hamilton.

Mostly Richards. Over the years, Author Hamilton has turned out an estimated 70 million words about Bunter and others like him. A wispy, monkish little man of 82 who wears a black skull cap and translates Horace, he has used a number of pen names: Martin Clifford, creator of Tom Merry of St.. Jim's; Hilda Richards, creator of Bessie Bunter; Ralph Redway for the Rio Kid; Peter Todd for Herlock Sholmes; and Owen Conquest for Jimmy Silver. But mostly, Charles Hamilton is Bunter's creator, Frank Richards. "To relatives and bankers and the inspector of taxes," says he. "I am still Charles Hamilton; to everybody else, including myself, [I am] Frank Richards."

Charles Hamilton first turned into Frank Richards in 1908, when at 37 he began publishing his Bunter stories in a halfpenny weekly called the Magnet. To his own astonishment, Bunter soon became a household word, and the entire British Empire seemed to take Greyfriars to its heart. It was a quiet, stiff-upper-lip sort of world where sex and politics were never mentioned, and no gentleman ever thought of tattling on another. Missionaries read about it in Malaya; traders took the Magnet along to Australia; soldiers snatched it up in their canteens in India. Eventually the time came when Charles Hamilton was forced to declare that Frank Richards had become a "public character." He wrote Richards' autobiography, even started a new school series with a younger Richards as the hero.

Fifty a Minute. According to the autobiography, Richards-Hamilton had "a tremendous memory. He learned the Lay of the Last Minstrel by heart before he was twelve." He could also recite huge chunks of Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante and Keats, could play the "immortal game" of chess in his head, learned to write at the rate of 50 words a minute. Not even his arrest in Austria as an enemy alien during World War I could keep him from his typewriter. "Military fatheads," declared Richards-Hamilton, "might come and go, but Billy Bunter went on forever."