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

74 years before, the treasure was lost. I had to seek elsewhere. ‘Ripping Yarns’, the long-lived second-hand bookshop at Highgate devoted to the heritage of children’s comics and books, was the place. It was there that I armed myself for my research, marvelling the while that the interest in such literature still commanded so much affection and fascination. I recently noticed that the title ‘Ripping Yarns’ has also been cleverly adopted by a knitwear and crafts outlet. It was at Ripping Yarns, the bookshop not the haberdashery, that I bought my two copies of The Magnet , one genuine, one facsimile. They are typical of the whole. The facsimile – and the fact that such duplicates were being printed late in the 20 th century is a mark of the interest they still aroused – is dated January 1934, priced twopence. All but four of its 28 pages are devoted to its Greyfriars story, ‘Billy Bunter’s Diamond’, Of the other four pages, one is a continuation of a serial tale ‘When the Great Apes Came’, with London invaded by these members of the simean community and another is a regular feature of sporting questions and answers headed ‘Linesman Calling’, ruined in this edition for the orthodox religionist by a couple of unnecessarily lengthy paragraphs on Manchester City. The other two pages form the centre spread which is ‘The New Greyfriars Herald’, edited by Harry Wharton, with other pupils and even the school porter, Mr Gosling, contributing. The other copy, the original one, was published in October 1939, just after the outbreak of the SecondWorldWar. It cost twopence and again there are 28 pages. With the ‘Greyfriars Herald’ this time on the inside cover pages, the Greyfriars story occupies the rest of the space. It is Greyfriars in toto . The story - ‘The Black Prince of Greyfriars’ features the ‘Famous Five’ of the school, led by Harry Wharton, although its by-line – ‘all sorts of fellows come to Greyfriars but Prince Bomombo from Bongoland who doesn’t speak English is the weirdest kid of all! - might disturb the liberal mind. TheFamous Five, rather like cricket or theBeatles, personified The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever