’
Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily.
Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily.
Orwell
Yet in England, in spite of the intense interest the Spanish war has aroused, there
are very few people who have even heard of the enonnous struggle that is going on
behind the Government lines. Of course, this is no accident. There has been a quite
deliberate conspiracy (I could give detailed instances) to prevent the Spanish situation
from being understood. People who ought to know better have lent themselves to the
deception on the ground that if you tell the truth about Spain it will be used as Fascist
propaganda.
It is easy to see where such cowardice leads. If the British public had been given a
truthful account of the Spanish war they would have had an opportunity of learning what
Fascism is and how it can be combated. As it is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism
as a kind of homicidal mania peculiar to Colonel Blimps bombinating in the economic
void has been established more firmly than ever. And thus we are one step nearer to the
great war ‘against Fascism’ (cf. 1914, ‘against militarism’) which will allow Fascism,
British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the first week.
MARRAKECH (1939)
As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but
they came back a few minutes later.
The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no women — threaded their way across the
market-place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, wailing a
short chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here
are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a
rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends. When the friends get to the burying-
ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it
a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick. No gravestone, no name,
no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of
hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be
certain where his own relatives are buried.
When you walk through a town like this — two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at
least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in — when you
see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to
believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality
founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces — besides, there are so many of
them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they
merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral
insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they
si nk back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are
gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a
walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy
underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over
skeletons.
I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.
Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in
fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce. The gazelle
I was feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for though it took the
piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not like me. It nibbled rapidly at the
bread, then lowered its head and tried to butt me, then took another nibble and then butted
again. Probably its idea was that if it could drive me away the bread would somehow
remain hanging in mid-air.
An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe and sidled towards us.
He looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the bread to the gazelle, with a sort of
quiet amazement, as though he had never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he
said shyly in French:
“/ could eat some of that bread. ”
I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place under his rags. This man
is an employee of the Municipality.
When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval
ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to
own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have
ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six
feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster
everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street
there is generally running a little river of urine.
In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black
skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits
cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the
lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a
lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his
grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job.
I was just passing the coppersmiths’ booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a
cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews,
many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette.
Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of
cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a minute I
had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve
hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible
luxury.
As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs,
except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-
workers, tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters — whichever way you look you see
nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the
space of a few acres. A good job Hitler isn’t here. Perhaps he is on his way, however.
You hear the usual dark rumours about the Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the
poorer Europeans.
“Yes, MON VIEUX, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews!
They’re the real rulers of this country, you know. They’ve got all the money. They
control the banks, finance — everything. ”
“But,” I said, “isn’t it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer working for about a penny
an hour? ”
“Ah, that’s only for show! They’re all money-lenders really. They’re cunning, the Jews. ”
In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used to be burned
for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic to get themselves a square
meal.
All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the
work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In
northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a
second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances
are that you don’t even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical
landscape one’s eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up
soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the
peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less
interesting to look at.
It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are accepted as
tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But
where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does
Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to
an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and
bandits. One could probably live here for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of
the people the reality of life is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food
out of an eroded soil.
Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare can live on it.
Huge areas which were once covered with forest have turned into a treeless waste where
the soil is exactly like broken-up brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with
frightful labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women, bent double like
inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields, tearing up the prickly weeds
with their hands, and the peasant gathering lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk
instead of reaping it, thus saving an inch or two on each stalk. The plough is a wretched
wooden thing, so frail that one can easily carry it on one’s shoulder, and fitted underneath
with a rough iron spike which stirs the soil to a depth of about four inches. This is as
much as the strength of the animals is equal to. It is usual to plough with a cow and a
donkey yoked together. Two donkeys would not be quite strong enough, but on the other
hand two cows would cost a little more to feed. The peasants possess no harrows, they
merely plough the soil several times over in different directions, finally leaving it in
rough furrows, after which the whole field has to be shaped with hoes into small oblong
patches, to conserve water. Except for a day or two after the rare rainstorms there is never
enough water. Along the edges of the fields channels are hacked out to a depth of thirty
or forty feet to get at the tiny trickles which run through the subsoil.
Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my house, each
carrying a load of firewood. All of them are mummified with age and the sun, and all of
them are tiny. It seems to be generally the case in primitive communities that the women,
when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size of children. One day a poor old
creature who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a vast load
of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou piece (a little more than a farthing) into her
hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was partly gratitude but
mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I
seemed almost to be violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman,
that is to say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is quite usual to see a
father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys, and an old woman following on foot,
carrying the baggage.
But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For several weeks, always at
about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the house with their
firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say
that I had seen them. Firewood was passing — that was how I saw it. It was only that one
day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a
load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time
I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin,
bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on
Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it.
There is no question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The Moroccan donkey is
hardly bigger than a St Bernard dog, it carries a load which in the British army would be
considered too much for a fifteen-hands mule, and very often its pack-saddle is not taken
off its back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is the most willing
creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and does not need either bridle or halter.
After a dozen years of devoted work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it
into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold.
This kind of thing makes one’s blood boil, whereas — on the whole — the plight of the
human beings does not. 1 am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with
brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled
back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old
woman under her load of sticks.
As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching southward — a long, dusty
column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more infantry, four or five thousand men
in all, winding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels.
They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black that sometimes it is
difficult to see whereabouts on their necks the hair begins. Their splendid bodies were
hidden in reach-me-down khaki unifonns, their feet squashed into boots that looked like
blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes too small, ft was very
hot and the men had marched a long way. They slumped under the weight of their packs
and the curiously sensitive black faces were glistening with sweat.
As they went past a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my eye. But the look he
gave me was not in the least the kind of look you might expect. Not hostile, not
contemptuous, not sullen, not even inquisitive, ft was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look,
which actually is a look of profound respect. 1 saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is
a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch
syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has
been taught that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it.
But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn’t matter
twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past.
“How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their
guns in the other direction? ”
It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other
in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating
chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all
knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn’t know it. And really it was
almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of
anned men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them
in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper.
BOYS’ WEEKLIES AND FRANK RICHARDS’S REPLY (1940)
You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a
small newsagent’s shop. The general appearance of these shops is always very much the
same: a few posters for the DAILY MAIL and the NEWS OE THE WORLD outside, a
poky little window with sweet-bottles and packets of Players, and a dark interior smelling
of liquorice allsorts and festooned from floor to ceiling with vilely printed twopenny
papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours.
Except for the daily and evening papers, the stock of these shops hardly overlaps at all
with that of the big news-agents. Their main selling line is the twopenny weekly, and the
number and variety of these are almost unbelievable. Every hobby and pastime — cage-
birds, fretwork, carpentering, bees, carrier-pigeons, home conjuring, philately, chess —
has at least one paper devoted to it, and generally several. Gardening and livestock-
keeping must have at least a score between them. Then there are the sporting papers, the
radio papers, the children’s comics, the various snippet papers such as TIT-BITS, the
large range of papers devoted to the movies and all more or less exploiting women’s legs,
the various trade papers, the women’s story-papers (the ORACLE, SECRETS, PEG’S
PAPER, etc. etc. ), the needlework papers — these so numerous that a display of them
alone will often fill an entire window — and in addition the long series of ‘Yank Mags’
(FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, WESTERN SHORT STORIES, etc. ), which are
imported shop-soiled from America and sold at twopence halfpenny or threepence. And
the periodical proper shades off into the fourpenny novelette, the ALDINE BOXING
NOVELS, the BOYS’ FRIEND LIBRARY, the SCHOOLGIRLS’ OWN LIBRARY and
many others.
Probably the contents of these shops is the best available indication of what the mass of
the English people really feels and thinks. Certainly nothing half so revealing exists in
documentary form. Best-seller novels, for instance, tell one a great deal, but the novel is
aimed almost exclusively at people above the £4-a-week level. The movies are probably a
very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the film industry is virtually a monopoly,
which means that it is not obliged to study its public at all closely. The same applies to
some extent to the daily papers, and most of all to the radio. But it does not apply to the
weekly paper with a smallish circulation and specialized subject-matter. Papers like the
EXCHANGE AND MART, for instance, or CAGE-BIRDS, or the ORACLE, or the
PREDICTION, or the MATRIMONIAL TIMES, only exist because there is a definite
demand for them, and they reflect the minds of their readers as a great national daily with
a circulation of millions cannot possibly do.
Here I am only dealing with a single series of papers, the boys’ twopenny weeklies, often
inaccurately described as ‘penny dreadfuls’. Falling strictly within this class there are at
present ten papers, the GEM, MAGNET, MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH and CHAMPION,
all owned by the Amalgamated Press, and the WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR
and ADVENTURE, all owned by D. C. Thomson & Co. What the circulations of these
papers are, I do not know. The editors and proprietors refuse to name any figures, and in
any case the circulation of a paper carrying serial stories is bound to fluctuate widely. But
there is no question that the combined public of the ten papers is a very large one. They
are on sale in every town in England, and nearly every boy who reads at all goes through
a phase of reading one or more of them. The GEM and MAGNET, which are much the
oldest of these papers, are of rather different type from the rest, and they have evidently
lost some of their popularity during the past few years. A good many boys now regard
them as old fashioned and ‘slow’. Nevertheless I want to discuss them first, because they
are more interesting psychologically than the others, and also because the mere survival
of such papers into the nineteen-thirties is a rather startling phenomenon! .
The GEM and MAGNET are sister-papers (characters out of one paper frequently appear
in the other), and were both started more than thirty years ago. At that time, together with
Chums and the old B[oy’s] 0[wn] P[aper], they were the leading papers for boys, and
they remained dominant till quite recently. Each of them carries every week a fifteen — or
twenty-thousand-word school story, complete in itself, but usually more or less connected
with the story of the week before. The Gem in addition to its school story carries one or
more adventure serial. Otherwise the two papers are so much alike that they can be
treated as one, though the MAGNET has always been the better known of the two,
probably because it possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy. Billy Bunter.
The stories are stories of what purports to be public-school life, and the schools
(Greyfriars in the MAGNET and St Jim’s in the GEM) are represented as ancient and
fashionable foundations of the type of Eton or Winchester. All the leading characters are
fourth-form boys aged fourteen or fifteen, older or younger boys only appearing in very
minor parts. Like Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee, these boys continue week after week and
year after year, never growing any older. Very occasionally a new boy arrives or a minor
character drops out, but in at any rate the last twenty-five years the personnel has barely
altered. All the principal characters in both papers — Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry
Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy Bunter and the rest of them — were at Greyfriars or St Jim’s
long before the Great War, exactly the same age as at present, having much the same kind
of adventures and talking almost exactly the same dialect. And not only the characters but
the whole atmosphere of both Gem and Magnet has been preserved unchanged, partly by
means of very elaborate stylization. The stories in the Magnet are signed ‘Frank
Richards’ and those in the GEM, ‘Martin Clifford’, but a series lasting thirty years could
hardly be the work of the same person every week. Consequently they have to be written
in a style that is easily imitated — an extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style, quite
different from anything else now existing in English literature. A couple of extracts will
do as illustrations. Here is one from the MAGNET:
Groan!
‘Shutup, Bunter! ’
Groan!
Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter’s line. He seldom shut up, though often
requested to do so. On the present awful occasion the fat Owl of Greyfriars was less
inclined than ever to shut up. And he did not shut up! He groaned, and groaned, and went
on groaning.
Even groaning did not fully express Bunter’s feelings. His feelings, in fact, were
inexpressible.
There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered sounds of woe and
lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter, uttered enough for the whole party
and a little over.
Harry Wharton & Co. stood in a wrathy and worried group. They were landed and
stranded, diddled, dished and done! etc. , etc. , etc.
Here is one from the Gem:
‘Oh cwumbsT
‘Oh gum! ’
‘Oooogh! ’
‘Urrggh!
’
Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily. He grabbed his handkerchief and pressed it to his
damaged nose. Tom Merry sat up, gasping for breath. They looked at one another.
‘Bai Jove! This is a go, deah boy! ’ gurgled Arthur Augustus. ‘I have been thwown into
quite a fluttah! Oogh! The wottahsl The wuffians! The feahful outsidahs! Wow! ’ etc. ,
etc. , etc.
Both of these extracts are entirely typical: you would find something like them in almost
every chapter of every number, to-day or twenty-five years ago. The first thing that
anyone would notice is the extraordinary amount of tautology (the first of these two
passages contains a hundred and twenty-five words and could be compressed into about
thirty), seemingly designed to spin out the story, but actually playing its part in creating
the atmosphere. For the same reason various facetious expressions are repeated over and
over again; ‘wrathy’, for instance, is a great favourite, and so is ‘diddled, dished and
done’. ‘Oooogh! ’, ‘Grooo! ’ and ‘Yaroo! ’ (stylized cries of pain) recur constantly, and so
does ‘Ha! ha! ha! ’, always given a line to itself, so that sometimes a quarter of a column
or there-abouts consists of ‘Ha! ha! ha! ’ The slang (‘Go and cat coke! ’, ‘What the
thump! ’, ‘You frabjous ass! ’, etc. etc. ) has never been altered, so that the boys are now
using slang which is at least thirty years out of date. In addition, the various nicknames
are rubbed in on every possible occasion. Every few lines we are reminded that Harry
Wharton & Co. are ‘the Famous Five’, Bunter is always ‘the fat Owl’ or ‘the Owl of the
Remove’, Vemon-Smith is always ‘the Bounder of Greyfriars’, Gussy (the Honourable
Arthur Augustus D’Arcy) is always ‘the swell of St Jim’s’, and so on and so forth. There
is a constant, untiring effort to keep the atmosphere intact and to make sure that every
new reader learns immediately who is who. The result has been to make Greyfriars and St
Jim’s into an extraordinary little world of their own, a world which cannot be taken
seriously by anyone over fifteen, but which at any rate is not easily forgotten. By a
debasement of the Dickens technique a series of stereotyped ‘characters’ has been built
up, in several cases very successfully. Billy Bunter, for instance, must be one of the best-
known figures in English fiction; for the mere number of people who know him he ranks
with Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and a handful of characters in Dickens.
Needless to say, these stories are fantastically unlike life at a real public school. They run
in cycles of rather differing types, but in general they are the clean-fun, knock-about type
of story, with interest centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging roasters, fights,
canings, football, cricket and food. A constantly recurring story is one in which a boy is
accused of some misdeed committed by another and is too much of a sportsman to reveal
the truth. The ‘good’ boys are ‘good’ in the clean-living Englishman tradition — they keep
in hard training, wash behind their ears, never hit below the belt etc. , etc. , — and by way
of contrast there is a series ofbad’ boys, Racke, Crooke, Loder and others, whose
badness consists in betting, smoking cigarettes and frequenting public-houses. All these
boys are constantly on the verge of expulsion, but as it would mean a change of personnel
if any boy were actually expelled, no one is ever caught out in any really serious offence.
Stealing, for instance, barely enters as a motif. Sex is completely taboo, especially in the
form in which it actually arises at public schools. Occasionally girls enter into the stories,
and very rarely there is something approaching a mild flirtation, but it is entirely in the
spirit of clean fun. A boy and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides together — that is all it
ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance, would be regarded as ‘soppy’. Even the bad boys
are presumed to be completely sexless. When the GEM and MAGNET were started, it is
probable that there was a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden
atmosphere that pervaded so much of the earlier literature for boys. In the nineties the
BOYS’ OWN PAPEr, for instance, used to have its correspondence columns full of
terrifying warnings against masturbation, and books like ST WINIFRED’S and TOM
BROWN’S SCHOOL-DAYS were heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the
authors were not fully aware of it. In the GEM and MAGNET sex simply does not exist
as a problem. Religion is also taboo; in the whole thirty years’ issue of the two papers the
word ‘God’ probably does not occur, except in ‘God save the King’. On the other hand,
there has always been a very strong ‘temperance’ strain. Drinking and, by association,
smoking are regarded as rather disgraceful even in an adult (‘shady’ is the usual word),
but at the same time as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of substitute for sex. In
their moral atmosphere the GEM and MAGNET have a great deal in common with the
Boy Scout movement, which started at about the same time.
All literature of this kind is partly plagiarism. Sexton Blake, for instance, started off quite
frankly as an imitation of Sherlock Holmes, and still resembles him fairly strongly; he
has hawk-like features, lives in Baker Street, smokes enormously and puts on a dressing-
gown when he wants to think. The GEM and MAGNET probably owe something to the
old school-story writers who were flourishing when they began, Gunby Hadath,
Desmond Coke and the rest, but they owe more to nineteenth-century models. In so far as
Greyfriars and St Jim’s are like real schools at all, they are much more like Tom Brown’s
Rugby than a modem public school. Neither school has an O. T. G. , for instance, games
are not compulsory, and the boys are even allowed to wear what clothes they like. But
without doubt the main origin of these papers is STALKY & CO. This book has had an
immense influence on boys’ literature, and it is one of those books which have a sort of
traditional reputation among people who have never even seen a copy of it. More than
once in boys’ weekly papers I have come across a reference to STALKY & CO. in which
the word was spelt ‘Storky’. Even the name of the chief comic among the Greyfriars
masters, Mr Prout, is taken from STALKY & CO. , and so is much of the slang; ‘jape’,
‘merry’, ‘giddy’, ‘bizney’ (business), ‘frabjous’, ‘don’t’ for ‘doesn’t’ — all of them out of
date even when GEM and MAGNET started. There are also traces of earlier origins. The
name ‘Greyfriars’ is probably taken from Thackeray, and Gosling, the school porter in
the MAGNET, talks in an imitation of Dickens’s dialect.
With all this, the supposed ‘glamour’ of public-school life is played for all it is worth.
There is all the usual para-phernalia — lock-up, roll-call, house matches, fagging, prefects,
cosy teas round the study fire, etc. etc. — and constant reference to the ‘old school’, the
‘old grey stones’ (both schools were founded in the early sixteenth century), the ‘team
spirit’ of the ‘Greyfriars men’. As for the snob-appeal, it is completely shameless. Each
school has a titled boy or two whose titles are constantly thrust in the reader’s face; other
boys have the names of well-known aristocratic families, Talbot, Manners, Lowther. We
are for ever being reminded that Gussy is the Honourable Arthur A. D’Arcy, son of Lord
Eastwood, that Jack Blake is heir to ‘broad acres’, that Hurree Jamset Ram Singh
(nicknamed Inky) is the Nabob of Bhanipur, that Vemon-Smith’s father is a millionaire.
Till recently the illustrations in both papers always depicted the boys in clothes imitated
from those of Eton; in the last few years Greyfriars has changed over to blazers and
flannel trousers, but St Jim’s still sticks to the Eton jacket, and Gussy sticks to his top-
hat. In the school magazine which appears every week as part of the MAGNET, Harry
Wharton writes an article discussing the pocket-money received by the ‘fellows in the
Remove’, and reveals that some of them get as much as five pounds a week! This kind of
thing is a perfectly deliberate incitement to wealth-fantasy. And here it is worth noticing
a rather curious fact, and that is that the school story is a thing peculiar to England. So far
as I know, there are extremely few school stories in foreign languages. The reason,
obviously, is that in England education is mainly a matter of status. The most definite
dividing line between the petite -bourgeoisie and the working class is that the fonner pay
for their education, and within the bourgeoisie there is another unbridgeable gulf between
the ‘public’ school and the ‘private’ school. It is quite clear that there are tens and scores
of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly
thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that mystic world of quad-rangles and
house-colours, but they can yearn after it, day-dream about it, live mentally in it for hours
at a stretch. The question is, Who arc these people? Who reads the GEM and MAGNET?
Obviously one can never be quite certain about this kind of thing. All I can say from my
own observation is this. Boys who are likely to go to public schools themselves generally
read the GEM and MAGNET, but they nearly always stop reading them when they are
about twelve; they may continue for another year from force of habit, but by that time
they have ceased to take them seriously. On the other hand, the boys at very cheap private
schools, the schools that are designed for people who can’t afford a public school but
consider the Council schools ‘common’, continue reading the GEM and MAGNET for
several years longer. A few years ago I was a teacher at two of these schools myself. I
found that not only did virtually all the boys read the GEM and MAGNET, but that they
were still taking them fairly seriously when they were fifteen or even sixteen. These boys
were the sons of shopkeepers, office employees and small business and professional men,
and obviously it is this class that the GEM and MAGNET are aimed at. But they are
certainly read by working-class boys as well. They are generally on sale in the poorest
quarters of big towns, and I have known them to be read by boys whom one might expect
to be completely immune from public-school ‘glamour’. I have seen a young coal miner,
for instance, a lad who had already worked a year or two underground, eagerly reading
the GEM. Recently I offered a batch of English papers to some British legionaries of the
French Foreign Legion in North Africa; they picked out the GEM and MAGNET first.
Both papers are much read by girls, and the Pen Pals department of the GEM shows that
it is read in every corner of the British Empire, by Australians, Canadians, Palestine Jews,
Malays, Arabs, Straits Chinese, etc. , etc. The editors evidently expect their readers to be
aged round about fourteen, and the advertisements (milk chocolate, postage stamps, water
pistols, blushing cured, home conjuring tricks, itching powder, the Phine Phun Ring
which runs a needle into your friend’s hand, etc. , etc. ) indicate roughly the same age;
there are also the Admiralty advertisements, however, which call for youths between
seventeen and twenty-two. And there is no question that these papers are also read by
adults. It is quite common for people to write to the editor and say that they have read
every number of the GEM or MAGNET for the past thirty years. Here, for instance, is a
letter from a lady in Salisbury:
I can say of your splendid yams of Harry Wharton & Co. of Greyfriars, that they never
fail to reach a high standard. Without doubt they are the finest stories of their type on the
market to-day, which is saying a good deal. They seem to bring you face to face with
Nature. I have taken the Magnet from the start, and have followed the adventures of
Harry Wharton & Co. with rapt interest. I have no sons, but two daughters, and there’s
always a rush to be the first to read the grand old paper. My husband, too, was a staunch
reader of the Magnet until he was suddenly taken away from us.
It is well worth getting hold of some copies of the GEM and MAGNET, especially the
GEM, simply to have a look at the correspondence columns. What is truly startling is the
intense interest with which the pettiest details of life at Greyfriars and St Jim’s are
followed up. Here, for instance, are a few of the questions sent in by readers:
What age is Dick Roylance? ’ ‘How old is St Jim’s? ’ ‘Can you give me a list of the Shell
and their studies? ’ ‘How much did D’Arcy’s monocle cost? ’ ‘How is it that fellows like
Crooke are in the Shell and decent fellows like yourself are only in the Fourth? ’ ‘What
arc the Fonn captain’s three chief duties? ’ ‘Who is the chemistry master at St Jim’s? ’
(From a girl) ‘Where is St Jim’s situated? COULD you tell me how to get there, as I
would love to sec the building? Are you boys just “phoneys”, as I think you are? ’
It is clear that many of the boys and girls who write these letters are living a complete
fantasy-life. Sometimes a boy will write, for instance, giving his age, height, weight,
chest and bicep measurements and asking which member of the Shell or Fourth Form he
most exactly resembles. The demand for a list of the studies on the Shell passage, with an
exact account of who lives in each, is a very common one. The editors, of course, do
everything in their power to keep up the illusion. In the GEM Jack Blake is supposed to
write answers to correspondents, and in the MAGNET a couple of pages is always given
up to the school magazine (the GREYFRIARS HERALD, edited by Harry Wharton), and
there is another page in which one or other character is written up each week. The stories
run in cycles, two or three characters being kept in the foreground for several weeks at a
time. First there will be a series of rollicking adventure stories, featuring the Famous Five
and Billy Bunter; then a run of stories turning on mistaken identity, with Wibley (the
make-up wizard) in the star part; then a run of more serious stories in which Vernon-
Smith is trembling on the verge of expulsion. And here one comes upon the real secret of
the GEM and MAGNET and the probable reason why they continue to be read in spite of
their obvious out-of-dateness.
It is that the characters are so carefully graded as to give almost every type of reader a
character he can identify himself with. Most boys’ papers aim at doing this, hence the
boy-assistant (Sexton Blake’s Tinker, Nelson Lee’s Nipper, etc. ) who usually
accompanies the explorer, detective or what-not on his adventures. But in these cases
there is only one boy, and usually it is much the same type of boy. In the GEM and
MAGNET there is a model for very nearly everybody. There is the nonnal athletic, high-
spirited boy (Tom Merry, Jack Blake, Frank Nugent), a slightly rowdier version of this
type (Bob Cherry), a more aristocratic version (Talbot, Manners), a quieter, more serious
version (Harry Wharton), and a stolid, ‘bulldog’ version (Johnny Bull). Then there is the
reckless, dare-devil type of boy (Vernon-Smith), the definitely ‘clever’, studious boy
(Mark Linley, Dick Penfold), and the eccentric boy who is not good at games but
possesses some special talent (Skinner Wibley). And there is the scholarship-boy (Tom
Redwing), an important figure in this class of story because he makes it possible for boys
from very poor homes to project themselves into the public-school atmosphere. In
addition there are Australian, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Yorkshire and Lancashire boys to play
upon local patriotism. But the subtlety of characterization goes deeper than this. If one
studies the correspondence columns one sees that there is probably NO character in the
GEM and MAGNET whom some or other reader does not identify with, except the out-
and-out comics, Coker, Billy Bunter, Fisher T. Fish (the money-grabbing American boy)
and, of course, the masters. Bunter, though in his origin he probably owed something to
the fat boy in PICKWICK, is a real creation. His tight trousers against which boots and
canes are constantly thudding, his astuteness in search of food, his postal order which
never turns up, have made him famous wherever the Union Jack waves. But he is not a
subject for day-dreams. On the other hand, another seeming figure of fun, Gussy (the
Honourable Arthur A. D’Arcy, ‘the swell of St Jim’s’), is evidently much admired. Like
everything else in the GEM and MAGNET, Gussy is at least thirty years out of date. He
is the ‘knut’ of the early twentieth century or even the ‘masher’ of the nineties (‘Bai Jove,
deah boy! ’ and ‘Weally, I shall be obliged to give you a feahful thwashin’! ’), the
monocled idiot who made good on the fields of Mons and Le Gateau. And his evident
popularity goes to show how deep the snob-appeal of this type is. English people are
extremely fond of the titled ass (cf. Lord Peter Wimscy) who always turns up trumps in
the moment of emergency. Here is a letter from one of Gussy’s girl admirers;
I think you’re too hard on Gussy. I wonder he’s still In existence, the way you treat him.
He’s my hero. Did you know I write lyrics? How’s this — to the tune of Goody Goody’?
Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.
’Cos I’m wise to all those bombs you drop on me.
Gonna dig myself a trench Inside the garden fence;
Gonna seal my windows up with tin
So the tear gas can’t get in;
Gonna park my cannon right outside the kerb
With a note to Adolf Hitler: ‘Don’t disturb! ’
And if I never fall in Nazi hands
That’s soon enough for me
Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.
P. S. — Do you get on well with girls?
I quote this in full because (dated April 1939) it is interesting as being probably the
earliest mention of Hitler in the GEM. In the GEM there is also a heroic fat boy. Fatty
Wynn, as a set-off against Bunter. Vemon-Smith, ‘the Bounder of the Remove’, a
Byronic character, always on the verge of the sack, is another great favourite. And even
some of the cads probably have their following. Loder, for instance, ‘the rotter of the
Sixth’, is a cad, but he is also a highbrow and given to saying sarcastic things about
football and the team spirit. The boys of the Remove only think him all the more of a cad
for this, but a certain type of boy would probably identify with him. Even Racke, Grooke
& Co. are probably admired by small boys who think it diabolically wicked to smoke
cigarettes. (A frequent question in the correspondence column; ‘What brand of cigarettes
does Racke smoke? ’)
Naturally the politics of the GEM and MAGNET are Conservative, but in a completely
pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge. In reality their basic political assumptions are two:
nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny. In the GEM of 1939 Frenchmen are still
Froggies and Italians are still Dagoes. Mossoo, the French master at Greyfriars, is the
usual comic-paper Frog, with pointed beard, pegtop trousers, etc. Inky, the Indian boy,
though a rajah, and therefore possessing snob-appeal, is also the comic babu of the
PUNCH tradition. (“The rowfulness is not the proper caper, my esteemed Bob,” said
Inky. “Let dogs delight in the barkfulness and bitefulness, but the soft answer is the
cracked pitcher that goes longest to a bird in the bush, as the English proverb remarks. ”)
Fisher T. Fish is the old-style stage Yankee (“Waal, I guess”, etc. ) dating from a peroid of
Anglo-American jealousy. Wun Lung, the Chinese boy (he has rather faded out of late,
no doubt because some of the MAGNET’S readers are Straits Chinese), is the nineteenth-
century pantomime Chinaman, with saucer-shaped hat, pigtail and pidgin-English. The
assumption all along is not only that foreigners are comics who are put there for us to
laugh at, but that they can be classified in much the same way as insects. That is why in
all boys’ papers, not only the GEM and MAGNET, a Chinese is invariably portrayed
with a pigtail. It is the thing you recognize him by, like the Frenchman’s beard or the
Italian’s barrel-organ.
are very few people who have even heard of the enonnous struggle that is going on
behind the Government lines. Of course, this is no accident. There has been a quite
deliberate conspiracy (I could give detailed instances) to prevent the Spanish situation
from being understood. People who ought to know better have lent themselves to the
deception on the ground that if you tell the truth about Spain it will be used as Fascist
propaganda.
It is easy to see where such cowardice leads. If the British public had been given a
truthful account of the Spanish war they would have had an opportunity of learning what
Fascism is and how it can be combated. As it is, the News Chronicle version of Fascism
as a kind of homicidal mania peculiar to Colonel Blimps bombinating in the economic
void has been established more firmly than ever. And thus we are one step nearer to the
great war ‘against Fascism’ (cf. 1914, ‘against militarism’) which will allow Fascism,
British variety, to be slipped over our necks during the first week.
MARRAKECH (1939)
As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but
they came back a few minutes later.
The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no women — threaded their way across the
market-place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, wailing a
short chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here
are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a
rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends. When the friends get to the burying-
ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it
a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick. No gravestone, no name,
no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of
hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be
certain where his own relatives are buried.
When you walk through a town like this — two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at
least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in — when you
see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to
believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality
founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces — besides, there are so many of
them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they
merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral
insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they
si nk back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are
gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a
walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy
underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over
skeletons.
I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.
Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in
fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce. The gazelle
I was feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for though it took the
piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not like me. It nibbled rapidly at the
bread, then lowered its head and tried to butt me, then took another nibble and then butted
again. Probably its idea was that if it could drive me away the bread would somehow
remain hanging in mid-air.
An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe and sidled towards us.
He looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the bread to the gazelle, with a sort of
quiet amazement, as though he had never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he
said shyly in French:
“/ could eat some of that bread. ”
I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place under his rags. This man
is an employee of the Municipality.
When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval
ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to
own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have
ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six
feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster
everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street
there is generally running a little river of urine.
In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black
skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits
cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the
lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a
lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his
grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job.
I was just passing the coppersmiths’ booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a
cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews,
many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette.
Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of
cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a minute I
had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve
hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible
luxury.
As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs,
except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-
workers, tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters — whichever way you look you see
nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the
space of a few acres. A good job Hitler isn’t here. Perhaps he is on his way, however.
You hear the usual dark rumours about the Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the
poorer Europeans.
“Yes, MON VIEUX, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews!
They’re the real rulers of this country, you know. They’ve got all the money. They
control the banks, finance — everything. ”
“But,” I said, “isn’t it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer working for about a penny
an hour? ”
“Ah, that’s only for show! They’re all money-lenders really. They’re cunning, the Jews. ”
In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used to be burned
for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic to get themselves a square
meal.
All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the
work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In
northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a
second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances
are that you don’t even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical
landscape one’s eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up
soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the
peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less
interesting to look at.
It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are accepted as
tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But
where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does
Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to
an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and
bandits. One could probably live here for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of
the people the reality of life is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food
out of an eroded soil.
Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare can live on it.
Huge areas which were once covered with forest have turned into a treeless waste where
the soil is exactly like broken-up brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with
frightful labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women, bent double like
inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields, tearing up the prickly weeds
with their hands, and the peasant gathering lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk
instead of reaping it, thus saving an inch or two on each stalk. The plough is a wretched
wooden thing, so frail that one can easily carry it on one’s shoulder, and fitted underneath
with a rough iron spike which stirs the soil to a depth of about four inches. This is as
much as the strength of the animals is equal to. It is usual to plough with a cow and a
donkey yoked together. Two donkeys would not be quite strong enough, but on the other
hand two cows would cost a little more to feed. The peasants possess no harrows, they
merely plough the soil several times over in different directions, finally leaving it in
rough furrows, after which the whole field has to be shaped with hoes into small oblong
patches, to conserve water. Except for a day or two after the rare rainstorms there is never
enough water. Along the edges of the fields channels are hacked out to a depth of thirty
or forty feet to get at the tiny trickles which run through the subsoil.
Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my house, each
carrying a load of firewood. All of them are mummified with age and the sun, and all of
them are tiny. It seems to be generally the case in primitive communities that the women,
when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size of children. One day a poor old
creature who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a vast load
of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou piece (a little more than a farthing) into her
hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was partly gratitude but
mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I
seemed almost to be violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman,
that is to say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is quite usual to see a
father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys, and an old woman following on foot,
carrying the baggage.
But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For several weeks, always at
about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the house with their
firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say
that I had seen them. Firewood was passing — that was how I saw it. It was only that one
day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a
load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time
I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin,
bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on
Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it.
There is no question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The Moroccan donkey is
hardly bigger than a St Bernard dog, it carries a load which in the British army would be
considered too much for a fifteen-hands mule, and very often its pack-saddle is not taken
off its back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is the most willing
creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and does not need either bridle or halter.
After a dozen years of devoted work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it
into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold.
This kind of thing makes one’s blood boil, whereas — on the whole — the plight of the
human beings does not. 1 am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with
brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled
back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old
woman under her load of sticks.
As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching southward — a long, dusty
column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more infantry, four or five thousand men
in all, winding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels.
They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black that sometimes it is
difficult to see whereabouts on their necks the hair begins. Their splendid bodies were
hidden in reach-me-down khaki unifonns, their feet squashed into boots that looked like
blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes too small, ft was very
hot and the men had marched a long way. They slumped under the weight of their packs
and the curiously sensitive black faces were glistening with sweat.
As they went past a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my eye. But the look he
gave me was not in the least the kind of look you might expect. Not hostile, not
contemptuous, not sullen, not even inquisitive, ft was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look,
which actually is a look of profound respect. 1 saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is
a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch
syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has
been taught that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it.
But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn’t matter
twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past.
“How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their
guns in the other direction? ”
It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other
in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating
chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all
knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn’t know it. And really it was
almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of
anned men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them
in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper.
BOYS’ WEEKLIES AND FRANK RICHARDS’S REPLY (1940)
You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without coming upon a
small newsagent’s shop. The general appearance of these shops is always very much the
same: a few posters for the DAILY MAIL and the NEWS OE THE WORLD outside, a
poky little window with sweet-bottles and packets of Players, and a dark interior smelling
of liquorice allsorts and festooned from floor to ceiling with vilely printed twopenny
papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours.
Except for the daily and evening papers, the stock of these shops hardly overlaps at all
with that of the big news-agents. Their main selling line is the twopenny weekly, and the
number and variety of these are almost unbelievable. Every hobby and pastime — cage-
birds, fretwork, carpentering, bees, carrier-pigeons, home conjuring, philately, chess —
has at least one paper devoted to it, and generally several. Gardening and livestock-
keeping must have at least a score between them. Then there are the sporting papers, the
radio papers, the children’s comics, the various snippet papers such as TIT-BITS, the
large range of papers devoted to the movies and all more or less exploiting women’s legs,
the various trade papers, the women’s story-papers (the ORACLE, SECRETS, PEG’S
PAPER, etc. etc. ), the needlework papers — these so numerous that a display of them
alone will often fill an entire window — and in addition the long series of ‘Yank Mags’
(FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, WESTERN SHORT STORIES, etc. ), which are
imported shop-soiled from America and sold at twopence halfpenny or threepence. And
the periodical proper shades off into the fourpenny novelette, the ALDINE BOXING
NOVELS, the BOYS’ FRIEND LIBRARY, the SCHOOLGIRLS’ OWN LIBRARY and
many others.
Probably the contents of these shops is the best available indication of what the mass of
the English people really feels and thinks. Certainly nothing half so revealing exists in
documentary form. Best-seller novels, for instance, tell one a great deal, but the novel is
aimed almost exclusively at people above the £4-a-week level. The movies are probably a
very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the film industry is virtually a monopoly,
which means that it is not obliged to study its public at all closely. The same applies to
some extent to the daily papers, and most of all to the radio. But it does not apply to the
weekly paper with a smallish circulation and specialized subject-matter. Papers like the
EXCHANGE AND MART, for instance, or CAGE-BIRDS, or the ORACLE, or the
PREDICTION, or the MATRIMONIAL TIMES, only exist because there is a definite
demand for them, and they reflect the minds of their readers as a great national daily with
a circulation of millions cannot possibly do.
Here I am only dealing with a single series of papers, the boys’ twopenny weeklies, often
inaccurately described as ‘penny dreadfuls’. Falling strictly within this class there are at
present ten papers, the GEM, MAGNET, MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH and CHAMPION,
all owned by the Amalgamated Press, and the WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR
and ADVENTURE, all owned by D. C. Thomson & Co. What the circulations of these
papers are, I do not know. The editors and proprietors refuse to name any figures, and in
any case the circulation of a paper carrying serial stories is bound to fluctuate widely. But
there is no question that the combined public of the ten papers is a very large one. They
are on sale in every town in England, and nearly every boy who reads at all goes through
a phase of reading one or more of them. The GEM and MAGNET, which are much the
oldest of these papers, are of rather different type from the rest, and they have evidently
lost some of their popularity during the past few years. A good many boys now regard
them as old fashioned and ‘slow’. Nevertheless I want to discuss them first, because they
are more interesting psychologically than the others, and also because the mere survival
of such papers into the nineteen-thirties is a rather startling phenomenon! .
The GEM and MAGNET are sister-papers (characters out of one paper frequently appear
in the other), and were both started more than thirty years ago. At that time, together with
Chums and the old B[oy’s] 0[wn] P[aper], they were the leading papers for boys, and
they remained dominant till quite recently. Each of them carries every week a fifteen — or
twenty-thousand-word school story, complete in itself, but usually more or less connected
with the story of the week before. The Gem in addition to its school story carries one or
more adventure serial. Otherwise the two papers are so much alike that they can be
treated as one, though the MAGNET has always been the better known of the two,
probably because it possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy. Billy Bunter.
The stories are stories of what purports to be public-school life, and the schools
(Greyfriars in the MAGNET and St Jim’s in the GEM) are represented as ancient and
fashionable foundations of the type of Eton or Winchester. All the leading characters are
fourth-form boys aged fourteen or fifteen, older or younger boys only appearing in very
minor parts. Like Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee, these boys continue week after week and
year after year, never growing any older. Very occasionally a new boy arrives or a minor
character drops out, but in at any rate the last twenty-five years the personnel has barely
altered. All the principal characters in both papers — Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry
Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy Bunter and the rest of them — were at Greyfriars or St Jim’s
long before the Great War, exactly the same age as at present, having much the same kind
of adventures and talking almost exactly the same dialect. And not only the characters but
the whole atmosphere of both Gem and Magnet has been preserved unchanged, partly by
means of very elaborate stylization. The stories in the Magnet are signed ‘Frank
Richards’ and those in the GEM, ‘Martin Clifford’, but a series lasting thirty years could
hardly be the work of the same person every week. Consequently they have to be written
in a style that is easily imitated — an extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style, quite
different from anything else now existing in English literature. A couple of extracts will
do as illustrations. Here is one from the MAGNET:
Groan!
‘Shutup, Bunter! ’
Groan!
Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter’s line. He seldom shut up, though often
requested to do so. On the present awful occasion the fat Owl of Greyfriars was less
inclined than ever to shut up. And he did not shut up! He groaned, and groaned, and went
on groaning.
Even groaning did not fully express Bunter’s feelings. His feelings, in fact, were
inexpressible.
There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered sounds of woe and
lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter, uttered enough for the whole party
and a little over.
Harry Wharton & Co. stood in a wrathy and worried group. They were landed and
stranded, diddled, dished and done! etc. , etc. , etc.
Here is one from the Gem:
‘Oh cwumbsT
‘Oh gum! ’
‘Oooogh! ’
‘Urrggh!
’
Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily. He grabbed his handkerchief and pressed it to his
damaged nose. Tom Merry sat up, gasping for breath. They looked at one another.
‘Bai Jove! This is a go, deah boy! ’ gurgled Arthur Augustus. ‘I have been thwown into
quite a fluttah! Oogh! The wottahsl The wuffians! The feahful outsidahs! Wow! ’ etc. ,
etc. , etc.
Both of these extracts are entirely typical: you would find something like them in almost
every chapter of every number, to-day or twenty-five years ago. The first thing that
anyone would notice is the extraordinary amount of tautology (the first of these two
passages contains a hundred and twenty-five words and could be compressed into about
thirty), seemingly designed to spin out the story, but actually playing its part in creating
the atmosphere. For the same reason various facetious expressions are repeated over and
over again; ‘wrathy’, for instance, is a great favourite, and so is ‘diddled, dished and
done’. ‘Oooogh! ’, ‘Grooo! ’ and ‘Yaroo! ’ (stylized cries of pain) recur constantly, and so
does ‘Ha! ha! ha! ’, always given a line to itself, so that sometimes a quarter of a column
or there-abouts consists of ‘Ha! ha! ha! ’ The slang (‘Go and cat coke! ’, ‘What the
thump! ’, ‘You frabjous ass! ’, etc. etc. ) has never been altered, so that the boys are now
using slang which is at least thirty years out of date. In addition, the various nicknames
are rubbed in on every possible occasion. Every few lines we are reminded that Harry
Wharton & Co. are ‘the Famous Five’, Bunter is always ‘the fat Owl’ or ‘the Owl of the
Remove’, Vemon-Smith is always ‘the Bounder of Greyfriars’, Gussy (the Honourable
Arthur Augustus D’Arcy) is always ‘the swell of St Jim’s’, and so on and so forth. There
is a constant, untiring effort to keep the atmosphere intact and to make sure that every
new reader learns immediately who is who. The result has been to make Greyfriars and St
Jim’s into an extraordinary little world of their own, a world which cannot be taken
seriously by anyone over fifteen, but which at any rate is not easily forgotten. By a
debasement of the Dickens technique a series of stereotyped ‘characters’ has been built
up, in several cases very successfully. Billy Bunter, for instance, must be one of the best-
known figures in English fiction; for the mere number of people who know him he ranks
with Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and a handful of characters in Dickens.
Needless to say, these stories are fantastically unlike life at a real public school. They run
in cycles of rather differing types, but in general they are the clean-fun, knock-about type
of story, with interest centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging roasters, fights,
canings, football, cricket and food. A constantly recurring story is one in which a boy is
accused of some misdeed committed by another and is too much of a sportsman to reveal
the truth. The ‘good’ boys are ‘good’ in the clean-living Englishman tradition — they keep
in hard training, wash behind their ears, never hit below the belt etc. , etc. , — and by way
of contrast there is a series ofbad’ boys, Racke, Crooke, Loder and others, whose
badness consists in betting, smoking cigarettes and frequenting public-houses. All these
boys are constantly on the verge of expulsion, but as it would mean a change of personnel
if any boy were actually expelled, no one is ever caught out in any really serious offence.
Stealing, for instance, barely enters as a motif. Sex is completely taboo, especially in the
form in which it actually arises at public schools. Occasionally girls enter into the stories,
and very rarely there is something approaching a mild flirtation, but it is entirely in the
spirit of clean fun. A boy and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides together — that is all it
ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance, would be regarded as ‘soppy’. Even the bad boys
are presumed to be completely sexless. When the GEM and MAGNET were started, it is
probable that there was a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden
atmosphere that pervaded so much of the earlier literature for boys. In the nineties the
BOYS’ OWN PAPEr, for instance, used to have its correspondence columns full of
terrifying warnings against masturbation, and books like ST WINIFRED’S and TOM
BROWN’S SCHOOL-DAYS were heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the
authors were not fully aware of it. In the GEM and MAGNET sex simply does not exist
as a problem. Religion is also taboo; in the whole thirty years’ issue of the two papers the
word ‘God’ probably does not occur, except in ‘God save the King’. On the other hand,
there has always been a very strong ‘temperance’ strain. Drinking and, by association,
smoking are regarded as rather disgraceful even in an adult (‘shady’ is the usual word),
but at the same time as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of substitute for sex. In
their moral atmosphere the GEM and MAGNET have a great deal in common with the
Boy Scout movement, which started at about the same time.
All literature of this kind is partly plagiarism. Sexton Blake, for instance, started off quite
frankly as an imitation of Sherlock Holmes, and still resembles him fairly strongly; he
has hawk-like features, lives in Baker Street, smokes enormously and puts on a dressing-
gown when he wants to think. The GEM and MAGNET probably owe something to the
old school-story writers who were flourishing when they began, Gunby Hadath,
Desmond Coke and the rest, but they owe more to nineteenth-century models. In so far as
Greyfriars and St Jim’s are like real schools at all, they are much more like Tom Brown’s
Rugby than a modem public school. Neither school has an O. T. G. , for instance, games
are not compulsory, and the boys are even allowed to wear what clothes they like. But
without doubt the main origin of these papers is STALKY & CO. This book has had an
immense influence on boys’ literature, and it is one of those books which have a sort of
traditional reputation among people who have never even seen a copy of it. More than
once in boys’ weekly papers I have come across a reference to STALKY & CO. in which
the word was spelt ‘Storky’. Even the name of the chief comic among the Greyfriars
masters, Mr Prout, is taken from STALKY & CO. , and so is much of the slang; ‘jape’,
‘merry’, ‘giddy’, ‘bizney’ (business), ‘frabjous’, ‘don’t’ for ‘doesn’t’ — all of them out of
date even when GEM and MAGNET started. There are also traces of earlier origins. The
name ‘Greyfriars’ is probably taken from Thackeray, and Gosling, the school porter in
the MAGNET, talks in an imitation of Dickens’s dialect.
With all this, the supposed ‘glamour’ of public-school life is played for all it is worth.
There is all the usual para-phernalia — lock-up, roll-call, house matches, fagging, prefects,
cosy teas round the study fire, etc. etc. — and constant reference to the ‘old school’, the
‘old grey stones’ (both schools were founded in the early sixteenth century), the ‘team
spirit’ of the ‘Greyfriars men’. As for the snob-appeal, it is completely shameless. Each
school has a titled boy or two whose titles are constantly thrust in the reader’s face; other
boys have the names of well-known aristocratic families, Talbot, Manners, Lowther. We
are for ever being reminded that Gussy is the Honourable Arthur A. D’Arcy, son of Lord
Eastwood, that Jack Blake is heir to ‘broad acres’, that Hurree Jamset Ram Singh
(nicknamed Inky) is the Nabob of Bhanipur, that Vemon-Smith’s father is a millionaire.
Till recently the illustrations in both papers always depicted the boys in clothes imitated
from those of Eton; in the last few years Greyfriars has changed over to blazers and
flannel trousers, but St Jim’s still sticks to the Eton jacket, and Gussy sticks to his top-
hat. In the school magazine which appears every week as part of the MAGNET, Harry
Wharton writes an article discussing the pocket-money received by the ‘fellows in the
Remove’, and reveals that some of them get as much as five pounds a week! This kind of
thing is a perfectly deliberate incitement to wealth-fantasy. And here it is worth noticing
a rather curious fact, and that is that the school story is a thing peculiar to England. So far
as I know, there are extremely few school stories in foreign languages. The reason,
obviously, is that in England education is mainly a matter of status. The most definite
dividing line between the petite -bourgeoisie and the working class is that the fonner pay
for their education, and within the bourgeoisie there is another unbridgeable gulf between
the ‘public’ school and the ‘private’ school. It is quite clear that there are tens and scores
of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly
thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that mystic world of quad-rangles and
house-colours, but they can yearn after it, day-dream about it, live mentally in it for hours
at a stretch. The question is, Who arc these people? Who reads the GEM and MAGNET?
Obviously one can never be quite certain about this kind of thing. All I can say from my
own observation is this. Boys who are likely to go to public schools themselves generally
read the GEM and MAGNET, but they nearly always stop reading them when they are
about twelve; they may continue for another year from force of habit, but by that time
they have ceased to take them seriously. On the other hand, the boys at very cheap private
schools, the schools that are designed for people who can’t afford a public school but
consider the Council schools ‘common’, continue reading the GEM and MAGNET for
several years longer. A few years ago I was a teacher at two of these schools myself. I
found that not only did virtually all the boys read the GEM and MAGNET, but that they
were still taking them fairly seriously when they were fifteen or even sixteen. These boys
were the sons of shopkeepers, office employees and small business and professional men,
and obviously it is this class that the GEM and MAGNET are aimed at. But they are
certainly read by working-class boys as well. They are generally on sale in the poorest
quarters of big towns, and I have known them to be read by boys whom one might expect
to be completely immune from public-school ‘glamour’. I have seen a young coal miner,
for instance, a lad who had already worked a year or two underground, eagerly reading
the GEM. Recently I offered a batch of English papers to some British legionaries of the
French Foreign Legion in North Africa; they picked out the GEM and MAGNET first.
Both papers are much read by girls, and the Pen Pals department of the GEM shows that
it is read in every corner of the British Empire, by Australians, Canadians, Palestine Jews,
Malays, Arabs, Straits Chinese, etc. , etc. The editors evidently expect their readers to be
aged round about fourteen, and the advertisements (milk chocolate, postage stamps, water
pistols, blushing cured, home conjuring tricks, itching powder, the Phine Phun Ring
which runs a needle into your friend’s hand, etc. , etc. ) indicate roughly the same age;
there are also the Admiralty advertisements, however, which call for youths between
seventeen and twenty-two. And there is no question that these papers are also read by
adults. It is quite common for people to write to the editor and say that they have read
every number of the GEM or MAGNET for the past thirty years. Here, for instance, is a
letter from a lady in Salisbury:
I can say of your splendid yams of Harry Wharton & Co. of Greyfriars, that they never
fail to reach a high standard. Without doubt they are the finest stories of their type on the
market to-day, which is saying a good deal. They seem to bring you face to face with
Nature. I have taken the Magnet from the start, and have followed the adventures of
Harry Wharton & Co. with rapt interest. I have no sons, but two daughters, and there’s
always a rush to be the first to read the grand old paper. My husband, too, was a staunch
reader of the Magnet until he was suddenly taken away from us.
It is well worth getting hold of some copies of the GEM and MAGNET, especially the
GEM, simply to have a look at the correspondence columns. What is truly startling is the
intense interest with which the pettiest details of life at Greyfriars and St Jim’s are
followed up. Here, for instance, are a few of the questions sent in by readers:
What age is Dick Roylance? ’ ‘How old is St Jim’s? ’ ‘Can you give me a list of the Shell
and their studies? ’ ‘How much did D’Arcy’s monocle cost? ’ ‘How is it that fellows like
Crooke are in the Shell and decent fellows like yourself are only in the Fourth? ’ ‘What
arc the Fonn captain’s three chief duties? ’ ‘Who is the chemistry master at St Jim’s? ’
(From a girl) ‘Where is St Jim’s situated? COULD you tell me how to get there, as I
would love to sec the building? Are you boys just “phoneys”, as I think you are? ’
It is clear that many of the boys and girls who write these letters are living a complete
fantasy-life. Sometimes a boy will write, for instance, giving his age, height, weight,
chest and bicep measurements and asking which member of the Shell or Fourth Form he
most exactly resembles. The demand for a list of the studies on the Shell passage, with an
exact account of who lives in each, is a very common one. The editors, of course, do
everything in their power to keep up the illusion. In the GEM Jack Blake is supposed to
write answers to correspondents, and in the MAGNET a couple of pages is always given
up to the school magazine (the GREYFRIARS HERALD, edited by Harry Wharton), and
there is another page in which one or other character is written up each week. The stories
run in cycles, two or three characters being kept in the foreground for several weeks at a
time. First there will be a series of rollicking adventure stories, featuring the Famous Five
and Billy Bunter; then a run of stories turning on mistaken identity, with Wibley (the
make-up wizard) in the star part; then a run of more serious stories in which Vernon-
Smith is trembling on the verge of expulsion. And here one comes upon the real secret of
the GEM and MAGNET and the probable reason why they continue to be read in spite of
their obvious out-of-dateness.
It is that the characters are so carefully graded as to give almost every type of reader a
character he can identify himself with. Most boys’ papers aim at doing this, hence the
boy-assistant (Sexton Blake’s Tinker, Nelson Lee’s Nipper, etc. ) who usually
accompanies the explorer, detective or what-not on his adventures. But in these cases
there is only one boy, and usually it is much the same type of boy. In the GEM and
MAGNET there is a model for very nearly everybody. There is the nonnal athletic, high-
spirited boy (Tom Merry, Jack Blake, Frank Nugent), a slightly rowdier version of this
type (Bob Cherry), a more aristocratic version (Talbot, Manners), a quieter, more serious
version (Harry Wharton), and a stolid, ‘bulldog’ version (Johnny Bull). Then there is the
reckless, dare-devil type of boy (Vernon-Smith), the definitely ‘clever’, studious boy
(Mark Linley, Dick Penfold), and the eccentric boy who is not good at games but
possesses some special talent (Skinner Wibley). And there is the scholarship-boy (Tom
Redwing), an important figure in this class of story because he makes it possible for boys
from very poor homes to project themselves into the public-school atmosphere. In
addition there are Australian, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Yorkshire and Lancashire boys to play
upon local patriotism. But the subtlety of characterization goes deeper than this. If one
studies the correspondence columns one sees that there is probably NO character in the
GEM and MAGNET whom some or other reader does not identify with, except the out-
and-out comics, Coker, Billy Bunter, Fisher T. Fish (the money-grabbing American boy)
and, of course, the masters. Bunter, though in his origin he probably owed something to
the fat boy in PICKWICK, is a real creation. His tight trousers against which boots and
canes are constantly thudding, his astuteness in search of food, his postal order which
never turns up, have made him famous wherever the Union Jack waves. But he is not a
subject for day-dreams. On the other hand, another seeming figure of fun, Gussy (the
Honourable Arthur A. D’Arcy, ‘the swell of St Jim’s’), is evidently much admired. Like
everything else in the GEM and MAGNET, Gussy is at least thirty years out of date. He
is the ‘knut’ of the early twentieth century or even the ‘masher’ of the nineties (‘Bai Jove,
deah boy! ’ and ‘Weally, I shall be obliged to give you a feahful thwashin’! ’), the
monocled idiot who made good on the fields of Mons and Le Gateau. And his evident
popularity goes to show how deep the snob-appeal of this type is. English people are
extremely fond of the titled ass (cf. Lord Peter Wimscy) who always turns up trumps in
the moment of emergency. Here is a letter from one of Gussy’s girl admirers;
I think you’re too hard on Gussy. I wonder he’s still In existence, the way you treat him.
He’s my hero. Did you know I write lyrics? How’s this — to the tune of Goody Goody’?
Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.
’Cos I’m wise to all those bombs you drop on me.
Gonna dig myself a trench Inside the garden fence;
Gonna seal my windows up with tin
So the tear gas can’t get in;
Gonna park my cannon right outside the kerb
With a note to Adolf Hitler: ‘Don’t disturb! ’
And if I never fall in Nazi hands
That’s soon enough for me
Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.
P. S. — Do you get on well with girls?
I quote this in full because (dated April 1939) it is interesting as being probably the
earliest mention of Hitler in the GEM. In the GEM there is also a heroic fat boy. Fatty
Wynn, as a set-off against Bunter. Vemon-Smith, ‘the Bounder of the Remove’, a
Byronic character, always on the verge of the sack, is another great favourite. And even
some of the cads probably have their following. Loder, for instance, ‘the rotter of the
Sixth’, is a cad, but he is also a highbrow and given to saying sarcastic things about
football and the team spirit. The boys of the Remove only think him all the more of a cad
for this, but a certain type of boy would probably identify with him. Even Racke, Grooke
& Co. are probably admired by small boys who think it diabolically wicked to smoke
cigarettes. (A frequent question in the correspondence column; ‘What brand of cigarettes
does Racke smoke? ’)
Naturally the politics of the GEM and MAGNET are Conservative, but in a completely
pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge. In reality their basic political assumptions are two:
nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny. In the GEM of 1939 Frenchmen are still
Froggies and Italians are still Dagoes. Mossoo, the French master at Greyfriars, is the
usual comic-paper Frog, with pointed beard, pegtop trousers, etc. Inky, the Indian boy,
though a rajah, and therefore possessing snob-appeal, is also the comic babu of the
PUNCH tradition. (“The rowfulness is not the proper caper, my esteemed Bob,” said
Inky. “Let dogs delight in the barkfulness and bitefulness, but the soft answer is the
cracked pitcher that goes longest to a bird in the bush, as the English proverb remarks. ”)
Fisher T. Fish is the old-style stage Yankee (“Waal, I guess”, etc. ) dating from a peroid of
Anglo-American jealousy. Wun Lung, the Chinese boy (he has rather faded out of late,
no doubt because some of the MAGNET’S readers are Straits Chinese), is the nineteenth-
century pantomime Chinaman, with saucer-shaped hat, pigtail and pidgin-English. The
assumption all along is not only that foreigners are comics who are put there for us to
laugh at, but that they can be classified in much the same way as insects. That is why in
all boys’ papers, not only the GEM and MAGNET, a Chinese is invariably portrayed
with a pigtail. It is the thing you recognize him by, like the Frenchman’s beard or the
Italian’s barrel-organ.
