Richmal Crompton: the William books.

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I’m enjoying Richmal Crompton’s William stories as much now as I did as a child. The situations are funny and William and his friends are utterly real, but the witty and perceptive writing about certain kinds of adults in certain kinds of situations (from afternoon tea to amateur dramatics) can only be fully appreciated as one gets older. Grown-ups in William stories are either forbidding or oblivious, sometimes both at the same time; they are often ridiculous and they are often, too,understandably angry – William, Ginger, Henry and Douglas have no respect for private property or fine feelings. There are some sympathetic adults like Patsy, the AT (women’s Auxiliary Territorials) in ‘Youth on the Prow’ (William and the Brains Trust), or Archie, the Irish odd-job-man who appears in the later books, or the bored playwright relative of the hated Georgie Murdoch who encourages them to bring down that odious child. An occasional elderly person like Aunt Jane in ‘Aunt Jane’s Treat’ (William the Conqueror) or the 99-year-old lady in ‘William the Reformer’ (Sweet William), is energised by William’s exuberance, only to be reined in again by disapproving middle-aged relatives.

When I was young, I knew William Brown and his friends were English (most story- people were), but I imagined them living in my own time. Like the Outlaws, we had strict and often irascible elders and unfathomable and bossy older siblings/cousins, and we also had the freedom (in the school holidays and after school) to play away off on our own as long as the light lasted.(I wrote about this in a blog last summer). We wondered (but not a lot) about ‘Cook’ and the gardener, but the vicar and vicar’s wife were easily translated as the priest and the priest’s housekeeper. And there was no shortage of Miss Miltons – authoritative and fussy single women – in 1960s and ’70s Ireland.

William is the acknowledged (but constantly challenged) leader of the gang, Ginger is his often resentful and argumentative second-in-command, Henry is the intellectual and Douglas, the realist. They are occasionally accompanied by Joan, who joins satisfactorily in all their games, but they are more often tormented by the lisping and wilful Violet Elizabeth Bott, who blackmails them into accepting her (‘I’ll thcream and I’ll thcream until I’m thick. I can, you know.’) Jumble, William’s mongrel dog, is well-meaning but doesn’t quite understand racing, hunting and all the other activities the Outlaws fondly plan for him. At least three of the boys have brothers in their late teens/early twenties whose temporary enthusiasms for a range of activities from poetry to Bolshevism are ruthlessly exploited by the Outlaws. Every volume contains between 10 and 14 stories and there isn’t a dud amongst them. That is why it is hard to pick favourites, but I’ve picked two of my top twenty or thirty, which I’ll discuss below.

But first, I’d like to give a flavour of Crompton’s narrative style. This is when the Outlaws are deciding what to do about the afore-mentioned Georgie Murdoch, who is being held up as an example to them by their mothers:

Henry, with a sudden gleam of inspiration,suggested haunting the Murdoch household by night, robed in a sheet, till the Murdochs should depart in terror to some other part of England…but it was decided, after a brief and acrimonious discussion, that this was not feasible. It was more than likely that the Murdochs would investigate the alleged ghost and discover the concealed Outlaw, and also it might prove difficult to gain egress from the parental home and ingress into the Murdoch home at the rather awkward hours suitable for haunting. (‘Georgie and the Outlaws’ in William – the Outlaw).

Or when the Outlaws, inspired by a Sunday School sermon decide to become Crusaders:

They held a parade. William drilled them for a few minutes. The drilling was not an entire success, owing to the divergence of opinion as to the relative positions of right and left, and each order entailed several minutes’ argument on the subject. (‘William the Bold Crusader’ in William – the Conqueror.)

Or, when the vicar’s wife decides, despite her misgivings, to entrust the Outlaws with the task of gathering holly for the church for Christmas:

[In a 20-minute speech] she impressed upon them what an honour it was to be allowed to collect holly for the Christmas decorations. She painted in glowing colours their pride and pleasure on Christmas morning, when they would see the holly they had gathered adorning the pillars and choir stalls…..It was, she thought, a speech calculated to inspire anyone to pious effort. She’d have been amazed and horrified had she known that the only impression the Outlaws gained from it was that they were to be allowed a whole day in the woods with the vicarage wheelbarrow.

(‘The Outlaws Fetch the Holly’ in William.)

Crompton is such a skilled writer that the placing of an adverb can change the whole meaning of a sentence:

It was the time when the Brains Trust movement, so rashly started by the BBC, was sweeping England. (‘William and the Brains Trust’ from volume of the same name.)

Crompton’s mockery of every kind of unusual intellectual, political, physical or spiritual activity would take longer than a blog post to analyse. But she has no time for ‘mainstream’ intellectual, political, physical or spiritual authorities, either. Her own ‘class’ is default-English-middle-class, but if she caricatures the nouveau-riche Botts of Botts’ Sauces, she is equally savage about her own milieu. The amateur dramatic society, for example, is composed entirely of females, because as Miss Featherstone points out, ‘ ‘[men] aren’t literary. It’s no good pretending they are.’ The Society sighed and agreed.’ (‘William the Great Actor’ in William – the Good.) Curates and Sunday School teachers, and teachers generally, are either despots or fools. Parents are there to be outwitted and for the most part, avoided; no sentimentality whatsoever enters into family relationships.

The Outlaws aren’t really bad boys, and it is when they try to do good that things go most horribly wrong – like finding a job for the father of a weeping little girl, in ‘William Finds A Job’ (William – the Outlaw), or when, inspired by an ‘old boy’ speech at his school, William decides to lead a life of ‘self-denial and service’ for his unappreciative family and gets entangled in the complicated romantic life of his sister Ethel. (‘William Turns Over A New Leaf’ in Still- William). In ‘William Leads A Better Life’ (William the Conqueror) he decides to follow the example of St Francis, and the Outlaws become Williamcans, who, following the example of the saint, begin by selling something of their fathers’ – Ginger has two ties, Henry, a pair of gloves and Douglas an inkstand, while William has abstracted a pair of slippers. (They wear dressing-gowns to represent monks’ robes, despite Henry’s firm objections that dressing-gowns are what detectives wear.) The Outlaws’ money-making schemes include putting on plays and waxwork shows, dog-racing with betting, and circuses for the unappreciative and derisive junior inhabitants of the village. Plot twists lead William to impersonate musical prodigies, artists’ models, old men in ‘bath chairs’ and even – in the very funny story I describe below – a film star’s daughter. They steal into houses to retrieve confiscated items, they run away from farmers, they catch the occasional criminal, they pool their meagre resources to buy sweets and constantly think up plans for social change.

So – two of my favourite stories, as promised. In ‘William the Showman’ (in William), the Outlaws’ waxwork show (in which the Outlaws impersonate waxworks of historical figures, with predictably feeble results) is given a boost when William, wearing a Mary Queen of Scots costume, meets Rosemary, about his own age, also dressed in a Mary Queen of Scots costume. He immediately wants her for the show. The daughter of a famous actress, she is pretty and also very friendly and down-to-earth, and she jumps at the chance to escape being interviewed and photographed for a magazine. William agrees to take her place for this ordeal. Miss Perkins, from Woman’s Sphere, gets a fright when she sees William:

Extraordinary how standards were changing all the world over. That this child should be considered beautiful! It was amazing. The effects, of course, of jazz and Cubism….

When William goes to the photoshoot with the actress, the latter is so intent on getting her own pose right that she never looks at her ‘daughter’ at all. Meanwhile, Rosemary is such a novelty at the waxwork show that the Outlaws actually make money (by their standards). When the photographs are published in the magazine the actress has a nervous breakdown. Mrs Brown, scrutinising the photograph, thinks the little girl has a look of William, but Ethel says she can’t be that bad, surely…

‘William and the Brains Trust’ from the volume of the same name, is set in wartime, and William has his hands full helping the airmen at the local base to sell tickets for their variety concert in aid of the RAF Benevolent Fund. The village branch of the Brains Trust, meanwhile, are looking forward to a forthcoming lecture by the eminent Professor Knowle, familiar to everybody from the radio and from newsreel films. Both events are scheduled for the same evening. But the airmen are badly let-down a few days before the concert when their best comedian, their conjurer, tap dancer, crooner and ‘deepest bass’ are posted away at the last minute. William, who has overheard his headmaster describe Professor Knowle as someone who holds audiences spellbound, decides to capture him for the airmen’s show. Unknown to William, at the last minute, the airmen’s second-best comedian’s brother has agreed to come to the RAF show give his impression of Professor Knowle, ‘Professor Know-all.’ The real professor – intercepted by William -goes to the airmen’s show and the comedian, Professor Knowle’s impersonator, ends up at the Brains Trust gathering. The RAF audience can’t get over the accuracy of the ‘impersonation’ and Professor Knowle is intrigued rather than put off by the loud laughter that greets his every utterance:

He was not accustomed to country audiences, and he had fully expected their reactions to be different from those of a town audience. They were pleased to see him, gratified at his coming, and their laughter was merely an expression of their feelings.

When his ‘turn’ is over, Professor Knowle sits down and thoroughly enjoys the rest of the RAF variety show.

The comedian, meanwhile, ‘Professor Know-all’ finds his audience to be a ‘queer-looking lot of buffers’. And when nobody in the audience laughs at his opening impersonations, he reflects that country audiences are slow like that: ‘It took a lot to make them laugh, but that didn’t mean they weren’t amused.’ He decides to invite questions from the audience as a way of loosening them up and giving crazy answers, but the questioners go on for so long that he doesn’t get a chance, and when he tries to answer one question he is immediately interrupted by another person asking another question, so he sits down and says nothing, and the vicar in his summing-up concludes that the Professor is lost in thought, solemnly weighing all the different arguments being made. At the end of the proceedings the Professor and the comedian meet each other at a communal gathering, and enjoy the joke thoroughly, and all is revealed – or almost all. The name William Brown is mentioned, but he is nowhere to be found.

Both stories expose vanity – the vanity of the actress who is so self-absorbed she treats her daughter as a mere prop, and the vanity of the local Brains Trust branch (but not, interestingly, of the Professor himself ) who just want to hear themselves talking. But they’re also very, very funny and there’s a lot more to them than I’ve described, here.

Although William and his Outlaw friends are frozen at the age of 11, Crompton very wisely moved with the times, from interwar to wartime to postwar to the age of TV and pop. I have a few of the old hardbacks, and about 20 years ago I came across a set of red 1980s paperbacks of the first ten, with all the original illustrations by Thomas Henry. I find them really good bedside reading, and they never fail to cheer me up if I’m down in the dumps. Bringing them on a journey doesn’t work, though, because I keep laughing out loud and people keep looking at me.

Crompton also wrote over 40 novels for adults, and she considered her William books to be just an entertainment, something she did for a few bob. Her novels – I’ve read a few – are interesting and well-written, if a little dated. Her William stories are timeless.

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The first William volume, Just -William, was published by George Newnes in 1922. I’m just going to cite the volumes I’ve mentioned in the blog, but bear in mind that there are many, many more (I am lucky enough to possess 14 of them and I’m still collecting).

Richmal Crompton, Still – William (London: George Newnes 1925:Macmillan Children’s Books 1984))

_______William – the Conqueror (London: George Newnes 1926: Macmillan Children’s Books 1984).

________William – the Outlaw (London: George Newnes 1927: Macmillan Children’s Books 1984)

________William – the Good (London: George Newnes 1928: Macmillan Children’s Books 1984).

_______William (London: George Newnes 1929: Macmillan Children’s Books 1984).

_______Sweet William (London: George Newnes 1936).

__________William and the Brains Trust (London: George Newnes 1945).

__________Family Roundabout (London: Hutchinson 1948: Persephone 2001). This novel, which I’ve re-read several times, is about two very different matriarchs, Mrs Fowler and Mrs Willoughby, and their families, in a northern industrial town from 1919 to 1939 or thereabouts. A great read.

NEW BOOK: I read a lot of new fiction but am rarely struck enough by any book to write about it in this blog. An interview with the author in which she came across as a very pleasant and modest person led me to Virginia Evans, The Correspondent (London: Penguin 2025). Sybil van Antwerp, a retired lawyer in Maryland, U.S.A, writes letters all the time – it is acknowledged that this is unusual, in the early twenty-first century, but then, Sybil is an unusual person. Apart from a short introduction, the book consists entirely of letters from her to her friend Rosalie, to Harry, a young boy she has befriended, to her brother in France, to authors whose books she has read (this doesn’t quite work, I think), to her daughter and her son and to many other people including a very courtly German neighbour she brushes off rather rudely for a long time. Their letters to her are also included, which is necessary for the plot developments. Her story emerges gradually. She and her Belgian husband (hence her surname) Daan separated 25 years before, after the accidental death of one of their children, Gilbert. Sybil herself, born in 1941, was adopted, and part of the story is her discovery of her biological relatives. Her fraught relationship with her daughter is also explored. Towards the end we come to see that letter-writing has been, always, her way of coping with the world and dealing with it exclusively on her terms, but the author manages to do this without ‘problematising’ letter-writing in itself. It’s a delightful, heart-warming book and I thoroughly enjoyed it.