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

78 school. It was a great victory for Greyfriars, and it was all due to Bunter’. That well-used device of the double, even if rather more fantastical with Bunter than, say, Rudolf Rassendyll’s adoption of the name and title of the King of Ruritania in Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda , published during 1894 just before the Greyfriars era, has been a common fictive one. But yet again the choice of cricket as the defining factor and climax even of this purposefully comedic book is noteworthy. It might, therefore, be the moment to review the life and work of the progenitor of this and hundreds of other ripping yarns; Charles Hamilton, directly descended in the lineage of Thomas Hughes and Tibby Reed in terms of credo and Hercules in terms of work-rate. Charles Harold St John Hamilton was born in 1878, the son of a drunken master carpenter, and went to Thorn House, a small private day school in Ealing something to his later embarrassment, given his seeming authority as a writer on boarding schools; indeed, it has been suspected that he never once set foot inside such an institution. Nonetheless, he was a bright scholar, having a good grasp of Latin and Greek. In 1961 The Times Educational Supplement published a Bunter story he had couched in Latin. A Nugent-like diffident child but a voracious reader, he had his first story published when he was seventeen. He was soon having boys’ stories printed in Smiles, Vanguard, Funny Cuts, Picture Fun and Pluck , before being recruited for service in the Gem/Magnet cause. In 1919 under the pen-name of Hilda Richards he introduced the stories of Bessie Bunter and her associates to The School Friend, a magazine aimed at the schoolgirl market. When Magnet and Gem withered, he sought a new line in Bunter novels after World War Two, 33 of them in all, usually with print runs of 40,000 copies. He also revived some of the St Jim’s stories and wrote all the Greyfriars television episodes. He died in comfortable bachelor harness in 1961, still busy at his desk, having written furiously for 54 years. The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever