Charles Hamilton (1876-1961) went under a number of pseudonyms during his life: Owen Conquest, Prosper Howard, Gordon Conway. There are at least a score of different names he assumed when writing. The best known is probably Frank Richards, the identity he took when producing the Billy Bunter series of stories in The Magnet children’s magazine from 1908 to 1940. Bunter to this day, along with his dysfunctional Greyfriars School, remains an iconic figure. Obese, slothful, dishonest, deeply selfish – all qualities which were somehow, just about, mitigated by his seemingly unquenchable optimism, and his ability to charm and mislead. In the 21st century, these qualities would be recognised as bordering on the sociopathological. They are ones we can recognise in some key contemporary figures, particularly in the political realm!
Hamilton was born in Ealing, London. But from 1926 to his death in 1961 he lived (and died) at Rose Lawn, Kingsgate, near Broadstairs. It was here that he continued producing a volume of work that has been calculated to amount to a staggering 100 million words. In view of the fact that a work as epic as Proust’s `Remembrance of Things Past’ comes to around one per cent of this, one can appreciate the fluency with which Hamilton wrote, and the time he must have devoted to filling the various periodicals and journals that he contributed to.
His work has been compared to that of P G Wodehouse, but at least as far as Bunter goes is more purely fictional – that is to say, unlike Wodehouse’s characters which have some root in social and political reality, Bunter belongs much more to the realms of caricature. This is not to belittle them. Despite being far less read today, they have a level of farce and display an energetic abandon that are often deeply comical. The work most linked to Hamilton’s own environment in his later life, `Bunter’ Holiday Cruise’ typifies this – a burlesque comedy in which the eponymous hero manages to lure some of his Greyfriars colleagues in the Fourth Form, along with a few in the year above, onto a yacht he claims is owned by a kind relative who is willing to take them on a vacation tour. Once captive on the boat, they have the skipper, a Captain Cook (!), about whom they had already wondered why he seemed to much like a hotel owner rather than a sailor, sitting them down and asking them how they intended to pay the 21 guineas tour fee! Bunter, as the middle sales person, goes free. Anger over this initial duping dissipates, until the next set of ructions. The scene, however, where Cook broaches the sensitive issue of their payment, for all its simplicity, is fairly representative of misunderstandings along these lines that have occurred many times before or since.
Hamilton/Richards’s approach to the landscape in which their tour is ostensibly located (when not all out at sea by the Godwin Sands in the Chanel) is along the same clear, uncomplicated lines as the characters in the story. `What about a run ashore,’ Bunter asks at one point. `Dover’s a frightfully historical place. There’s a castle – ‘ (Frank Richards, `Bunter’s Holiday Cruise’, Armada, London, 1965 edition, 67). Immediately, one of his `chums’ refers to `Shokeshave’s Cliff.’ `I mean Shakespoke’s – that is, Shakespeare’s. And – and lots of thing… I believe Dover was one of the Sunk Ports.’ (Ibid). As his friend ripostes, `Do you mean the Cinque Ports, fathead?’
Margate gets similarly jolly treatment. `Merry Margate, sir – brightest and jolliest place on the East Coast’ (112). `Everyone is good-natured at Merry Margate’, another says later (120). Bunter is most tempted by `that bright and entertaining spot, Dreamland’ (124). `Bright sunshine shone on Margate harbour, on the crowded pier, and the sands that were alive with trippers with innumerable small people with spades and pails. It was a happy and familiar sight.’ (148). The sole fly in the ointment in this cheerful environment is a crook from Folkestone who has somehow accidentally fled to their boat, and tries to hijack it. He, however, is soon dealt with. Their yacht, The Sea Nymph, after the brief excursion to the Kent coast `headed South, bound for the sunny shores of the Mediterranean Sea, where further cheery adventures awaited the Greyfriars tourists’ (159).
Hamilton himself never married, and lived with his housekeeper, increasingly isolated after the Second World War.