writing in The Magnet, he launched Greyfriars and the Famous Five of Harry Wharton,
Frank Nugent, Bob Cherry, Johnny Bull and Hurree Jamset Ram Singh together with the
bounder, Herbert Vernon-Smith, and the famous fat boy of the Remove, Billy Bunter.
In 1919, as Hilda Richards, he introduced Billy’s sister, Bessie Bunter, to Cliff House
in the School Friend; the Cliff House stories were then taken over by other writers and
the characters developed into more realistic personalities with Bessie herself becoming a
still fat but loyal and popular friend. The other famous girls’ school in magazine fiction
was Morcove, a boarding school on Exmoor; the Morcove stories, which appeared in
Schoolgirls’ Own (1921–1936), were also written by a man, Horace Phillips, using the
pseudonym of Marjorie Stanton.
Many school stories in the 1920s and 1930s were badly written with banal and
carelessly constructed plots, unconvincing characters and situations, and a lack of
attention to detail. It is not surprising that the genre was poorly regarded by adults who
cared about what children read. There were few outlets for the criticism of children’s
literature and the fact that some school stories might be better than others was easily
overlooked in view of the amount of material that was being published.
The years of the Second World War provided a watershed, after which the gaps
between school, domestic and adventure stories began to close. The changes are well
illustrated by looking at the work of Geoffrey Trease, who is both a critic and a writer of
children’s books. He paid tribute to A.Stephen Tring’s The Old Gang (1947) as a ‘good
story about Grammar School day-boys which broke new ground’ (Trease 1964:111) and
he himself began a series of books about day schools with No Boats on Bannermere
(1949). He wrote this because two girls whom he met when he gave a talk to a group of
school children in Cumberland in 1947 at a ‘book week’ asked him for stories about real
boys and girls going to day schools (Trease 1974:149). Later, beginning with Jim Starling
(1958), E.W.Hildick published a series of books set in and around Cement Street
secondary modern school, in which school is seen as an integral part of the boys’ lives.
The boarding school story was not dead, even for boys. Anthony Buckeridge’s
schoolboy, Jennings, first appeared in a radio play on the BBC’s Children’s Hour in
1948; Jennings Goes to School (1950) followed, the first in a series of books about the
pupils of Linbury Court, a preparatory school for boys. The humour of these, which
sometimes borders on farce, made them very popular and Buckeridge shows a good
understanding of how small boys talk, and very shrewdly invented his own, dateless,
slang. In 1955, William Mayne, educated at a choir school himself, published A Swarm
in May, the first of three books set in a Cathedral choir school. In most of his books,
however, the children attend day schools. The day schools are still largely single-sex,
but there is more communication between boys and girls, and sometimes co-operation is
important to the plot as in Trease’s Bannerdale books and in William Mayne’s Sand.
There are few examples of stories set in mixed boarding schools. Enid Blyton set her
first series of school stories about the ‘Naughtiest Girl’ in the mixed Whyteleafe School
with its two headmistresses, Miss Belle and Miss Best (an echo of Miss Beale and Miss
Buss or, more probably, names which lend themselves to the nicknames, Beauty and
the Beast?). Whyteleafe is also a progressive school with a School Meeting at which all
the children are involved in making rules and deciding on appropriate awards and
punishments. It seems likely that Enid Blyton was aware of the existence of progressive,
TYPES AND GENRES 351