Education: Forever Bunter

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Today Bunter's immortality seems assured. He is a constant topic of conversation at London's Old Boys' Book Club —a society of 400 greying authors, schoolmasters, actors and civil servants who collect juvenilia and have as their motto Puer Manebit. Billy Bunter is on TV and appears in a comic strip, and since 1947 the twelve volumes about him have sold 180,000 copies.

Toffees to Stickers. In spite of wars and depressions, he and his schoolmates go right on talking their 50-year-old slang (running is "cutting"; a bicycle is a "jigger"; spectacles are "gig lamps"; toffees are "stickers"; a cad is a "tick"; and whopping lies are "crammers"). In 45 years not one of them has grown a day older or changed one jot. Quelch is still the stern master of the remove or lower fourth form; "Mossoo" Charpentier is still the excitable French teacher; young Loder is still the rotter of the sixth. The captain of the school is still "Good Old Wingate," who always manages to kick the winning goal ("Ain't he a nut? Ain't he a prize-packet? Ain't he the jolly old goods, and then some? Ain't he a Briton? Good old Wingate!").

In his neat, little Kent cottage, where he lives with an aging cat, Charles Hamilton-Frank Richards allows no criticism of either Billy Bunter or Greyfriars. Once when the late George Orwell, in a solemn essay, accused Richards of being snobbish, Hamilton snapped back: "It is an actual fact that, in this country at least, noblemen generally are better fellows than commoners." To the criticism that he makes all his foreigners "funny," he replied: "I must shock Mr. Orwell by telling him that foreigners are funny." Once a friend asked him: "Don't you ever think of doing anything better?" Stroking his cat and blinking myopically, Charles Hamilton gave a typical Frank Richards reply. "No," said he, "you see, there isn't anything better."