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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
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