“The year is 1910 — or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailor-made clothes, sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage after an exciting game of football which was won by an odd goal in the last half-minute. There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay. Lord Mauleverer has just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts.”

George Orwell’s criticism of the artificial world represented in the Billy Bunter stories of boys’ weeklies like the Gem and the Magnet is almost a tirade. After outlining a long list of defects, he ends by hoping that popular imaginative literature, long absorbed in chronicling upper-class values, moves to depicting a truer version of life in something more left-leaning and thought provoking. Orwell’s essay provoked a short retort from Charles Hamilton, the creator of the Billy Bunter stories who argued that “Boys’ minds ought not to be disturbed and worried by politics. Even if I were a Socialist, or a Communist, I should still consider it the duty of a boys’ author to write without reference to such topics; because his business is to entertain his readers, make them as happy as possible, give them a feeling of cheerful security, turn their thoughts to healthy pursuits, and above all to keep them away from unhealthy introspection…”

Hamilton’s reply, published in the Horizon, the very same magazine in which Orwell had published his essay, is the first public acknowledgement of his pseudonym. Frank Richards was one of the many pen names taken by Hamilton in his long career as a writer though today he is known chiefly as the creator of Billy Bunter and the other boys of his school. Remembered, however, is probably untrue. Like Enid Blyton, the Billy Bunter stories have been frowned upon for being sexist and racist, and over time, with fewer and fewer children actually reading in the age of the internet, have slipped out of public memory. Once upon a time most of us who read British fiction while growing up knew exactly what Malory Towers and Greyfriars School meant, today I suspect only some fully understood the Scottish Police’s hasty change of code name from Operation Bunter to Operation Aeration in Boris Johnson’s visit to Scotland in 2021.

Frank Richards had never attended an elite school himself, but used reminiscences to create one of the most famous public schools of children’s fiction in 1908. Greyfriars was filled with boys from a particular class-the upper middle or aristocracy, whose lives were a posh medley of tuck boxes and cricket, waiting for a generous bank note from privileged parents and then generously spending it on a staggering tea, diligently swotting at Latin and doing well at examinations to escape the beady gaze of Quelch the Form Master. The Magnet wound up in 1940 due to paper shortage at the outbreak of World War II but Richards gained the rights to using the template in novels. Billy Bunter at Greyfriars was the first such, published in 1947, while the last one was Bunter the Sportsman, published in 1965. By then the world had changed. But Bunter and his friends, the Famous Five of the Remove or the Lower Fourth lived their lives in unchanging fashion. Was this anachronistic? Orwell would probably agree. But if Bunter and his world are, for argument’s sake, to be dismissed as unhealthy remnants of an outmoded social and world order, then so also must we sneer at Wooster or Freddy Threepwood, at Gwendolyn and Jack. The world of Greyfriars, like the world of Restoration Comedy, is an artificial world with real-life features. Certainly the boys lead lives of privilege and snobbery, but this is a world with its own conventions and traditions. There are elaborate codes of conduct which ultimately hold up a certain kind of appropriate behaviour. Wrong-doing must be punished and even the mean -spirited, lazy, greedy, fat and self-obsessed Bunter must be saved from peril. Deceit and wickedness are not British and must be dealt with.

Re-reading a favourite from my childhood collection titled Billy Bunter Among the Cannibals, I tried to review it from the stance of our time and age. There is surely a sense of moral unease at the depiction of race. Bunter is sent by his father to an island in the South Seas to work in a company trading in copra. The Famous Five, Bunter’s friends, are sent by the Senior Bunter to travel with him and make it something of a holiday. Bob Cherry, Frank Nugent, Johnny Bull and Hurree Jamset Ram Singh are overjoyed at the prospect of an unusual holiday. They move from London to Karachi (or Scratchy, as Bunter calls it) to Singapore and thence to the beautiful Kamakama and finally to the atoll of Lololo. The descriptions are somewhat typecast but to a young reader possibly evocative of a wide and exciting world beyond : “The sun was well up in the sky, and already it was hot. The lagoon glistened like a sheet of silver, and beyond the reef the Pacific rolled bright and blue to infinity. Blue sky, blue sea, dazzling white sand, palm trees nodding in the breeze of the morning, tropical flowers of almost unbelievable colour…” But the people of the islands are thoroughly Orientalised. They are at the mercy of wicked White traders and live their lives caught between fear and childlike devotion: “Suloo busied himself getting breakfast for the white masters. In the happy-go-lucky way of the South Sea Islanders, Suloo forgot danger when it was not visible, and his brown face was cheerful“. All the characters speak pidgin which is racially humiliating, but thoroughly inventive and exuberant: ” Sposee no wantee Mefoo comey along house, me come along house all same, kill-dead all white feller! Makee head belong white feller go along smoke, along canoe-house belong me“.

The plot hinges on Bunter and his friends being tricked by an unscrupulous Copra trader into landing on an island overrun by cannibals. Bunter is taken hostage and the cannibals pinch his cheeks and arms, delighted at a potentially delectable feast. The cover illustration captures this moment, when Bunter is overwhelmed by the laughter and jollity of the tribals without any inkling of his impending end in a cooking pot.

Harry Wharton and Co, showing the true bravery of the sanctimonious Empire builder, save Bunter, the heroic Suloo and other childlike islanders who have helped the boys resist the dangerous cannibals. In particular they risk all to save the servant Suloo from the wicked Ezra Huck and his cruel cane with which he beats and torments his servant. The islanders are grateful and Bunter repents, discovering that a term’s labour at Latin and prep is preferred to the unstable lives and hard work of the White trader in the Tropics. God’s in his heaven and all is right with the world as the boys sail back home to England. Published in 1950, Frank Richards deliberately puts the rigours of a post-War world away in what is essentially a tale of adventure and heroism in the New World. As adult fiction the book would have been a disaster in the world of political correctness, but as young adult fiction it is all escape and children’s adventures. This is how Frank Richards defended himself in his answer to Orwell. The real world is cruel and rather unforgiving, perhaps, in the Five of the Remove one can experience some pure moments of child-like delight without bothering about questions of fat-shaming, racial tensions, Othering, being non-inclusive etc.

Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Prince of Bhanipur and one of Bunter’s friends, has been criticised by Salman Rushdie for being a deliberately satirical and rather sad typecasting of the imaginary Indian. “The ghost of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh walks among us still”, he had said in his essay Imaginary Homelands in 1982. For Rushdie, the idea of England made us look upon characters such as Hurree with amused indulgence although England itself was a lie. Certainly, as a child, I was both excited at the inclusion of an Indian in the Famous Five and a little bewildered by his conspicuously mannered speech. None I knew spoke like him, although we were Indians too.

Today, I am at peace with representations of Indians in British fiction. To be upset by Hurree is to be annoyed by the characters of The Moonstone, of Sarah Crewe’s bitter past in The Secret Garden, of Ram Das in A Little Princess, of Mr Hoho-Ha of Bong Castle, India in Enid Blyton, of most of Kipling, Rumer Godden, Louis Bromfield, to name a few. One has to give up H.R.F Keating and Gerald Hanley, two forgotten writers dear to me. I look beyond the sanitising, as someone called it, and look for a good story and much fun during a two hour read, both of which the Bunter stories supply.

The fun-fullness is terrific, as Hurree himself would say.