(1939) are all free-standing. Some of her fictional schools are the newly established county
high schools, in one of which she taught, which educated both children who passed the
11+ examination and were given scholarships, and those whose parents could afford
modest fees. Most of her books have strong plots, and many contain detailed accounts
of school plays; they are also fascinating social documents, reflecting the snobbish and
class-conscious attitudes of the period. In The New School and Hilary (1926), for
example, Hilary, who has to leave her expensive independent school on the death of her
father, and Judith Wingfield, a successful ex-pupil of the same school, both arrive at a
new county high school for girls, Hilary as a pupil, Judith as a young teacher. The
school is rather despised in the town, but through their combined efforts and a
successful production of As You Like It, it is established as a real asset among the local
people.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a high proportion of British girls joined the Girl Guide
movement, which recruited from all sections of society. It offered girls some of the same
opportunities as an all-girls’ school, an environment in which friendships and
competition flourished, and in which they could develop skills and interests, and
experience leadership. Many of the fictional schools had Guide companies; Catherine
Christian, editor of The Guide magazine in the 1940s, specialised in Guide stories and in
at least two of her books, The Marigolds Make Good (1937) and A Schoolgirl from
Hollywood (1939), the plot develops from the fact that schools which have grown slack
or fallen on hard times, are brought up to standard with the help of the Guides in their
midst.
There were many popular stock characters, such as the ‘wild’ Irish girl; another was
the Ruritanian princess who, sent to an English boarding school for safety, was
frequently kidnapped (Trease 1964:107). Elinor Brent-Dyer’s The Princess of the Chalet
School (1927) and F.O.H.Nash’s Kattie of the Balkans (1931) both use this theme; a
typical set piece has the brave English girl who has rescued the princess riding in state
to receive the grateful thanks of the Ruritanian citizens. Authors were well aware of their
readers’ fantasies and did their best to fulfil them.
The Ruritanian theme was also used by boys’ writers. In A.L.Haydon’s His Serene
Highness (1925), Prince Karl of Altburg arrives at Compton Prior, a famous boys’ public
school, and earns the respect of his fellow pupils by beating up one of the school bullies.
He is kidnapped and it then transpires that he is only a look-alike cousin of the real
Karl and has been sent to Compton Prior as a decoy. However, the real Prince Karl does
visit the school to thank both his cousin, and the English schoolboys who had saved his
life. Apart from this, the book is typical of its time, with a subplot concerning two rival
gangs of younger boys, each trying to make the other believe that the school is haunted.
Harold Avery, Richard Bird, Hylton Cleaver, R.A.H.Goodyear, Gunby Hadath and
Michael Poole were the most prolific among the many authors who supplied the steady
demand for stories set in boys’ public schools, but none of them achieved the popularity
of the writers for girls already mentioned, with the exception of Frank Richards (1876–
1961), whose work appeared in The Gem (1907–1939) and The Magnet (1908–1940). It is
estimated that Charles Hamilton, using over twenty pseudonyms, of which ‘Frank
Richards’ is the best known, wrote over sixty million words (Richards 1988:266). As
Martin Clifford, he created Tom Merry and St Jim’s for The Gem; as Frank Richards,
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