"Frank Richards"
The name signed to the Greyfriars stories in the Magnet, alongside "Martin Clifford" in the Gem. Orwell argued in 1939 that thirty years of them could not be one man's work, which is why the house style had to be so easy to imitate. A footnote dated 1945 calls that quite incorrect: the two names belonged to the same person, who had answered Orwell in Horizon in May 1940.
The book
At a glance
- Discussed throughout "Boys' Weeklies", the second essay, dated 1939
- The Magnet, published by the Amalgamated Press
- "Martin Clifford", who signed the Gem's St Jim's stories
- That no one writer could have produced thirty years of weekly stories
- Charles Hamilton wrote both, and said so in Horizon in May 1940
- A footnote dated 1945, printed under the claim it withdraws
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-free"Frank Richards" is the byline on the weekly Greyfriars school story in the Magnet, and "Martin Clifford" is the byline on the matching St Jim's story in the Gem. George Orwell treats both as trade names rather than people. A series running for thirty years, he reasons, could hardly be the work of the same person every week, so the stories have to be written in a style that is easily imitated, and that requirement explains the papers' extraordinary prose.
Both names in fact belonged to one man, Charles Hamilton, who had written the overwhelming majority of the stories himself. He asked Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, for space to answer, and the reply appeared in May 1940, two months after the essay was first collected in Inside the Whale. It is the first place he acknowledged in public that the two bylines were the same writer.
By the time "Boys' Weeklies" was reprinted here in 1946, Orwell had conceded the point in the book itself. A footnote dated 1945 hangs off the sentence that makes the claim and calls it quite incorrect, adding that the two are one and the same person and pointing readers to Horizon for May 1940 and to Summer Pie for the summer of 1944. The sentence it demolishes is left standing.
How the book draws them
- A style built to be copiedOrwell's explanation of the papers' tautology, repeated catchphrases and stylised cries of pain: an artificial manner that a stable of writers could all reproduce, keeping the atmosphere identical from week to week and decade to decade.
- Thirty years without ageingUnder this byline Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Johnny Bull and the rest were at Greyfriars long before the Great War and are exactly the same age when Orwell writes in 1939, using slang already out of date when the papers started.
- The one real creationOrwell rates Billy Bunter, the fat boy of the Magnet, one of the best-known figures in English fiction, and the probable reason the Magnet has always been the better known of the two papers.
- Borrowed, and Orwell says soThe manner descends from Kipling's Stalky & Co., down to the name of a Greyfriars master and much of the slang, with a debasement of the Dickens technique behind the stock characters. The name Greyfriars, he thinks, comes from Thackeray.
- The footnote that withdraws itAdded for this collection and dated 1945. It calls the claim quite incorrect, states that "Frank Richards" and "Martin Clifford" are one and the same person, and sends the reader to Horizon and Summer Pie for the proof. Orwell did not amend the paragraph above it.