Just William, Head Boy of Fiction: A Mid 20th Century Pin-up Boy in Britain and the Empire

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If we could travel in the Tardis back to my primary school days, the place you’d find me most lunchtimes is the school library, with my head in the fiction section habitually rifling through the ‘Cs’ on the shelves – ‘C’ for Richmal Crompton. Once I’d discovered my first Just William book (by Crompton) around the age of nine or ten I was hooked on William, the 1920s to 1960’s version of Harry Potter...William became as integral to my childhood as plasticine and chocolate malted sundaes. With more energy than I could ever summon for obligatory class work, I dedicated myself with missionary zeal to devouring every single Just William book I could lay my hands on! Fortunately for me there was plenty of scope for that ambition, Crompton having written 39 Just William books in all. 

 

William (Brown) is 11, and like Peter Pan he doesn't age, despite the Just William series stretching over a period of nearly half a century!✙ William in appearance is scruffy-haired and untidy, in nature straight talking, anarchic and rebellious – which often lands him and his own small gang of school friends "The Outlaws" in hot water. Guy Mankowski attributes the series’ success (12 million books sold in the UK alone) to the English love of the rebel. My recollection of the general tenor of mainstream Western society circa 1965, before the ripples caused by the Counterculture and Vietnam, was still very conformist and strait-jacketed. I delighted in the character of William, his rebellious free spirit and sense of fun, constantly waging a war against the rules of adults which stop children like him enjoying the fun things in life (like unlimited ice cream). What also endeared me was William’s sheer inventiveness, constantly coming up with sometimes zany always hilarious schemes to make money or to teach grown-ups a lesson or two, and so on. And I might add just quietly, William’s anti-school rhetoric didn’t lose him any popularity in my books as well.

Two things I found out about Just William in my adulthood. I had from the start assumed that the author of the William books was a man, he just had to be a man to write about a mischievous if good-natured boy with such authority, I thought (plus, though ‘Richmal’ was a weird first name it just didn’t sound like a female name). Wrong on both counts! Miss Richmal Crompton Lamburn was in fact a school mistress (ironically – in an all-girls school!) who contracted polio and spent the rest of her life writing the William series of books as well as 41 separate adult novels✜. The second discovery was that John Lennon harboured a similar all-consuming passion for the Just Williams stories growing up in Forties and Fifties Liverpool. Had I known at the time that no less a cultural global luminary of the Sixties than Beatle John hero-worshipped the fictional rebel William, my own cup of infatuated fandom for “Britain’s favourite naughty boy” may have runneth over even more. 

Something else that went unappreciated by my 11-year-old self was the topicality of the William stories. In the 1940s in William and the Brains Trust William responds to the publication of the Beveridge Report—the blueprint for radical social policy change that profoundly affected postwar UK—with a list of his own child-centred demands. William the Dictator reflected the world's concern with the rise of fascism and National Socialism. The US/USSR space race in the Fifties prompted the Just William titles William and the Moon Rocket and William and the Space Animal.  Occasionally Crompton strayed onto edgy and even highly controversial turf. In the short story ‘William and the Nasties’ William and his Outlaws copy Hitler’s jackbooted Nazis by harassing and persecuting a local Jewish sweet-shop owner .... passages such “There came to William glorious visions of chasing Jew after Jew out of sweetshop after sweetshop” in particular definitely wouldn’t pass the politics pub test in our times.

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✙ next year, 2022, marks the centenary of the publication of Just William, the first of the William books 

✜ Lamburn apparently based the character of William on a combination of her younger brother Battersby and her nephew Tommy

The “Sword and Sandal” Epic Film: A Golden Epoch in My Teenage Mind’s Eye

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As a kid, I was wholly immersed in what the film industry calls ”Epic films“...mega-large scale production, sweeping scope and spectacle, unfettered extravagance, lavishly costumed, a cast of thousands, exotic locations, loosely within a historical context be it Viking raiders, Sinbad the Sailor / Arabian Nights adventures, Spanish Conquistadors or 12th century Crusaders or from countless other pages in the chronicles of history. Even movies which mix myth with history like the Robin Hood saga or the Arthurian legend drew me to their flame. But it was the world of antiquity on screen that most fired my imagination. My all-time favourite viewing entertainments were "Sword-and-sandal" movies, also known as ‘Peplum’§ movies  (okay, when we got a TV set watching Westerns started to consume the lion’s share of my leisure time, but in the early Sixties there was just so many damn “horse operas”/ “oaters” monopolising air time on the box!). 

In that less prescriptive age when no one fretted much about the adverse effect on juveniles of their maxing out on screen time, my penchant was to binge on an assortment of Hollywood epic blockbusters—the usual suspects, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments and Spartacus of course—if I had to nominate one ancient world epic as my all-time favourite though I’d probably plump for Jason and the Argonauts – admittedly a smaller scale ‘indy’ production without the big name star drawing power (maybe more “epic-lite?”). It’s stellar appeal lay in part, like its more famous fellow Greek myth story of “The Odyssey”, in the adventure-packed extravaganza of its Classical heroic tale, its virtuous protagonist’s quest and ultimate triumph against the longest of odds stacked against him. But what elevated Jason and the Argonauts above the pack for my 11-year-old self was undoubtedly the film’s fantasy special effects. I was captivated by the myriad of fearsome legendary creatures (Ray Harryhausen’s SFX wizardry)—though to more discerning adult eyes they must have looked decidedly “hokey”—the glorious highlight of which was the iconic scene where Jason battled the frenetic army of animated sabre-wielding skeletons (and emerged triumphant of course!) 

Later on I developed a particular fondness for Italian Sword-and-sandal flicks,  something which I still find hard to explain. These are films, made primarily between the late Fifties and the mid Sixties, with hollow and meaningless translated titles like Goliath and the Vampires, Hercules Against the Sons of the Sun, Samson Against the Sheik and Ursus in the Valley of the Lions. Most are set vaguely in Ancient Greece or Rome or in that neck of the woods, and sometimes with story lines full of anachronisms. Sloppily dubbed into halting English, atrociously woodenly acted, scenes lacking continuity, the plots are ludicrously formulaic, typically involving the strongman hero having to run through his repertoire of superhuman feats of strength while rescuing a beautiful but defenceless heroine (wearing the briefest peplum imaginable) and liberating the oppressed masses at the same time£. The Italian Pepla was indeed a curious passion on my teenage part. My fascination with this Continental movie sub-genre was precisely because even then I knew that they were so egregiously bad! Like being drawn, against your better instincts, in not being able to stop yourself from looking at something horrific like a car crash, the fact that the Sword-and-sandals were such thoroughly execrable, perfect ‘turkeys’ of films was, perversely, what made them essential viewing during my teen and adolescent years!

This 1964 ”Sword-and-sandaller” was released in English as Hercules Against the Moon Men

PS. In adulthood I lack the patience to sit through any more than about 10 minutes max of a Peplum movie...but even with my diminished enthusiasm I still hold a soft spot for the flawed sub-genre...I guess that’s called nostalgia – the remembrances of things past which felt better then (ie, in my youth) than they do now.  

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§ tthe peplum (pl: pepla) was a type of tunic worn in Ancient Greecee

£ sso as the lead convincingly looked the part, former bodybuilders transformed into actors were often cast as the Herculean protagonist