In August 2021 Boris Johnson (remember him?) was due to come to Scotland. Police set up the usual security operations always associated with the visit of a British Prime Minister. And of course it had to have a codename. Some genius suggesting calling it Operation Bunter.
The name Billy Bunter probably won’t mean much to anyone who wasn’t around before the late nineteen fifties. He was originally an ever present but but fairly minor character in the stories about Greyfriars School created by Frank Richards. To members of my generation the codename was the perfect choice for an overweight public schoolboy to whom the truth was often a stranger. Disappointingly the Scottish police chickened out and used a different code name.
Bunter’s creator Charles Hamilton (the real name of Frank Richards) sold his first short story at seventeen, continuing uninterrupted for the next 68 years and probably wrote around 60 million words (the equivalent of at least 1000 full length novels). The leading characters are all schoolboys aged fourteen or fifteen — Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy Bunter and the rest — who were at public schools (Greyfriars or St Jim’s) long before the Great War.
Hamilton produced the majority of the stories for the magazines The Magnet and The Gem. Hamilton’s prolific input dropped for about 20 years after 1910 when he made frequent trips to Monte Carlo to feed his gambling habit, and something like 35 other authors wrote stories for publication under the pen names ‘Martin Clifford’ and ‘Frank Richards’. After 1931 all stories were solely written by Hamilton.[8]
By the late 1930s the circulations of both The Gem and The Magnet had declined, partly because of competition from publications by Dundee-based D.C. Thomson. In December 1939 The Gem was merged with another paper, the Triumph. By the summer of 1940 the Magnet was living on borrowed time when a sudden wartime shortage of paper, caused led to its abrupt closure in May that year.
In the same year Orwell cast his eye over publications like The Gem and The Magnet in his essay Boys’ Weeklies:
The year is 1910 — or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailor-made clothes, sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage after an exciting game of football which was won by an odd goal in the last half-minute. There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel. . .
Orwell suggested that stories like these – written to a formula – could easily be created by a panel of authors and that Frank Richards was thus a fiction. Hamilton’s reply included his first public acknowledgement of himself as author: “Mr Orwell finds it difficult to believe that a series running for thirty years can possibly have been written by one and the same person. In the presence of such authority, I speak with diffidence : and can only say that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, I any only one person, and have never been two or three.”
He rebutted most of Orwell’s criticisms; challenged the accuracy of many of his assertions’ and generally, and good-humouredly defended the wholesome nature of his stories.
Following the closure of The Magnet in 1940 Hamilton became generally known as the author of the stories following a interview he gave to the London Evening Standard. During the war copyright issues stopped him from publishing Greyfriars stories but once these were resolved in 1946 he signed a contract with publishers Charles Skilton for a hardback series. The first of the series, Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School was published in September 1947. Within weeks it had sold 25,000 copies.
By 1965 Hamilton had produced 38 books featuring the world of Greyfriars School plus scripts for seven BBC tv series of Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School which appeared from 1952-1962. It was in those shows that I first encountered Bunter. never having read any of the stories. He was always portrayed by Gerald Campion (below) who was aged 29 – playing a schoolboy half his age – when the shows started in 1952.
A number of genuine child actors were featured in the other schoolboy roles in the show, some of whom went on to become famous – including Anthony Valentine, Michael Crawford, Melvyn Hayes, and Kenneth Cope. Only 9 of the show’s 52 episodes are known to exist, some of which are available on YouTube. I strongly doubt they would have much appeal to kids today. You can check that for yourself by watching the video at the end of this post.
Gyles Brandreth recalled it being his favourite tv show when a boy during a one man show at the Edinburgh Festival. Audience members of his vintage murmured their approval or even applauded. However:
When I explained to the younger members of the crowd that much of the comedy in the TV series revolved around Bunter’s obesity and that the ‘Fat Owl of the Remove’ , as he was known, was routinely bullied by the other boys (including Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Nabob of Bhanipur) and regularly beaten by the masters, they were aghast. At one performance, someone even hissed.
Brandreth recalls that he once tried pitching a revival of the series to the BBC, who considered it for a while but in the end opted for a wholesome family show called Jim’ll Fix It. Whatever happened to that?
So how did such an obnoxious character become such a success? I’m talking about Bunter here, not Jimmy Savile. Apart from his gluttony, he’s lazy, nosy, deceitful and conceited. Of course in his own head he’s a fine, upstanding, much misunderstood chap. He’s cheerily optimistic, blatantly untruthful, but for a while at least can be comically entertaining. But that entertainment value would be short-lived. If he’d managed to get into politics maybe some quirk of fate would make him Prime Minister – but he wouldn’t have been there long….
On the other hand his creator had a long innings. Charles Hamilton died on 24 December 1961, aged 85, and was cremated at the Kent County Crematorium at Charing in Kent.