In the Floreat Greyfriars LP recording, released in 1965, Charles Hamilton’s sympathy for the Edwardian world of Greyfriars, which he had created in print between 1908 and 1940 (writing as Frank Richards), comes across strongly.
It is difficult to see why one would expect the author to move with the times. He spent his entire life writing about Greyfriars — a school which never emerged from the Edwardian Age of the pre-First World War. Even in the novels of the 1950s, Greyfriars is set firmly in the world as it was before 1914. Hamilton had fossilised that world within the Public School setting, and his style never approached that of more modern boys’ fiction.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Anthony Buckeridge was writing space-age boys school stories for Jennings and Derbishire. But the world of Linbury Court school, with its crazes for space travel and space-hoppers, was worlds away from the old quadrangle at Greyfriars. And Mr Carter and Mr Wilkins were worlds apart from Billy Bunter’s form master, Henry Samuel Quelch.
There is, for one thing, Hamilton’s fondness for Latin. If there was one thing above all else which separated the world of 1908 from that of the 1960s, it was the teaching of Latin, which had gone out of fashion entirely in the intervening 60 years. Hence, about the only common factor between the two schools is a keen interest in cricket and football.
Hamilton’s stories represent a romantic nostalgia for what must have appeared to him a lost golden age of the Edwardians; an age that existed before the horrors of the Great War and the Second World War came along, bringing with them the slaughter of the young men whom he had known in his youth. In his writings he tries to preserve the best features of the world as it was in 1908, despite the changes which had come afterwards.
In the years immediately following 1914 – and 1939 – it must have been hard to discern anything resembling progress in the changes which he experienced in the state of the world. So there must have been a certain attractiveness about the Edwardian era, in his eyes, with its optimism about the future; for, like the Victorians, the Edwardians viewed history as a steady progress to a more technologically advanced condition, in which each new invention arising out of the industrial revolution brought greater prosperity (and happiness).
Ultimately, that revolution betrayed them, by industrialising not merely commerce but also warfare, creating conditions in which scientific developments (the machine-gun, poison gas, the Atomic bomb) ceased to represent progress towards a happier and more prosperous future.
To boys like Jennings and Derbishire, who were too young to have experienced either of the World Wars, the 1960s, with its emphasis on space exploration, offered hope about the future; but one can’t reasonably expect Hamilton, a man who had experienced both World Wars first-hand, to be unaffected by those experiences; and it is, therefore, over-optimistic to expect him to favour change, when he had lived a life in which change had so often been change for the worse.
For Hamilton, the most optimistic outlook was a world without change; and he wrote accordingly. The Greyfriars of 1965 is essentially the same as that of 1908. It is a world without change, seeking to preserve the best aspects of the age into which it was born. And perhaps we can appreciate why.
28 March 2012
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