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

79 He had 25 pseudonyms and invented 105 fictitious schools. It has been calculated that he wrote some seventy million words, the equivalent of a thousand full-length novels. He is believed to be the most prolific writer there has been. He wrote two-thirds of the St Jim’s yarns for Gem and 1380 of the 1683 Greyfriars tales for Magnet. (My maths, unlike Cousin Wally’s, is Bunteresque but I reckon that is very approximately five-sixths.) At his peak, his several deadlines engaged him in producing 80,000 words a week. Although occasionally publishers were forced to call on replacement scribes, which Charles Hamilton, for once shifted from his usual equable composure to scornful ire, dismissed as ‘duds’ and ‘impostors’, the author sustained his ingenuity of invention and command of language throughout his adult life. Experts have traced derivations for Greyfriars, its staff and pupils in the earlier schoolboy classics. Charles Hamilton was the genuine inheritor of that proud tradition and a student of those previous books and stories. The pace, tone and potency of his writing is convincing and practised, owing something to his admiration of Charles Dickens and PG Wodehouse. Especially with Greyfriars, itself the school chosen by WH Thackeray in his novel The Newcomes to represent his own school, Charterhouse, but also more generally, Hamilton built a mental picture of the idealised school, full of fun even if beset by challenging difficulties. The fact that it was castigated by many ex-public school boys as a flawed picture is neither here nor there. Nor did it matter very much whether the tiny bunch of real-life public schoolboys even read the stories or whether they liked them or not. The appeal, both commercial and, in equal measure, moral, was to the larger audience, with the enduring message already forwarded by Thomas Hughes, Tibby Reed and their followers. Charles Hamilton may not have been as Muscular or as Christian as his two great predecessors but he self- confessedly stood by their essential creed and, such was the volume and persistence of his work, it is likely that his reach The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever