Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

73 The Gem ran for 1711 issues until 1939 when, because of wartime paper shortage, it was incorporated into the Nelson Lee Library. The Magnet scarcely outran its stablemate, ending, for the same reason, in 1940, after 1683 editions. Around the time of the First World War The Magnet was selling over 200,000 copies a week and The Gem only slightly less. With constant exchanges and borrowings and family sharings, one might estimate that over 2m youngsters were reading one or both periodicals. As a rough guide the proportion of the UK population aged ten to fifteen at that time was about three million. The penetration of the Magnet/ Gem cult was very intense. Although BOP was not quite so popular at this stage as in the 1890s, it still had a strong following, so that, in concert, a huge majority of youngsters were reading one or more of these kinds of ‘story papers’. These two newcomers to the periodical fray upped the ante. Where the earlier magazines had majored on school stories but had also included other tales of detection and derring- do, this later duo concentrated almost entirely on school- based tales. The Gem featured in almost every issue a tale by Martin Clifford, a pen name for Charles Hamilton, about St Jim’s School. The leading character was the indomitable Tom Merry, the ordinary, sharp-witted, honest-to-goodness, sporting schoolboy. The toff was Arthur Augustus D’Arcy, nicknamed Gussy, while Skimpole was another regular character. In the first hundred issues of The Gem there were no less than 80 St Jim’s yarns. The Magnet was the vehicle for Greyfriars, most famous of all fictional boarding schools, and the creation of Frank Richards, most renowned of all school story authors. At some point in the early years of World War Two, I discovered a bound volume of Magnet among the domestic bric a brac of home. I cannot recollect the date, except to say that, as my father explained, these comics had been part of his childhood reading just before the First World War. This was my introduction to Greyfriars and I devoured the contents avidly. I never thought of this discovery until, years later, when, my parents were dead and the house had been cleared The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever