Jennings creator goes PC
Thirty years ago, the author Anthony Buckeridge rewrote his bestsellers for the modern age. He gave one annotated copy to Mark Edmonds
Nearly 70 years after they first appeared, the Jennings novels by Anthony Buckeridge (1912-2004), set in a Sussex prep school in the Fifties, remain defiantly in print, offering a comforting snapshot of a seemingly forgotten post-war idyll.
This was a gentle and benign preadolescent world, free of social media, computer games, vulgarisms and knife crime. When I worked at the Daily Mail, the editor Paul Dacre would hold his head in his hands and say in response to the latest report of gang violence or school shootings, ‘It wouldn’t have happened to Jennings and Darbishire.’
But it was the inventive comic language of Jennings that made the series so memorable for me and thousands of other readers. The lingua franca of Jennings and his blond half-witted sidekick, Darbishire, was peppered with phrases such as ‘ozard prang’, ‘ruinous oik’ and ‘old Wilkie’s in a terrible bate’. From an arsenal of Premier League insults, you could take your pick from such classics as ‘you prehistoric clodpoll’ or ‘you newt-brained shrimpwit’. ‘Go and boil yourself’ was about as rude as it got. Jennings’s only vice was an addiction to jam doughnuts.
I met Anthony Buckeridge 30 years ago when I interviewed him for the Observer. We remained in touch for several years afterwards. The Buckeridge I knew was very different from the Buckeridge I had imagined. A former prep-school master, he had given himself a role in the books in the shape of Mr Carter, the decent and humane history teacher for whom administering corporal punishment was anathema.
When we met, the Jennings books had been out of print for a while and were just about to go through another impression, published by John Goodchild. It was down to Buckeridge, then in his 70s, to bring the books into the modern age by means of judicious editing.
Jennings would no longer rely on the innocent exclamations of Fifties Britain; he was to become a little more streetwise. Among the expressions blue-pencilled
out by Buckeridge were ‘gosh’ and ‘golly’. They were replaced by equally colourless ejaculations such as ‘wow’, ‘phew’ and ‘hey’. And the ‘wheezes’ the boys had trumpeted with such gusto had by the Eighties morphed into ‘great ideas’.
Buckeridge sold more than six million books – and they remain in print, albeit now with a niche publisher, House of Stratus. Jennings gave Buckeridge a decent living. The 24 Jennings stories (published from 1950 until 1994) attracted a huge following at the height of their popularity in the Sixties and Seventies.
Among Jennings’s unlikely fans is the actor Neil Pearson ( Bridget Jones, Drop the Dead Donkey), who was so enraptured by the books that he insisted his working-class parents send him to a state boarding school, Woolverstone Hall in Suffolk.
‘I loved the language of Jennings and I persuaded my parents to send me to a school where there were midnight feasts and boys like Jennings would have adventures,’ Pearson told me. ‘As it turned out, my school had 80 per cent of pupils from broken homes and 20 per cent whose parents were in the armed forces. It was the opposite of conventional boarding schools, but it was inculcated into us that we could make progress in life.’
Pearson, 60, now combines his film and TV work with a business collecting
rare books. Of Jennings books, he told me, ‘There is a demand, but it is always cyclical. Most of the people buying Jennings books as collectors are from the same generation as me – they read them the first time round and want to be reminded of them.’
Buckeridge himself was as intriguing as he was charming. A man of the Left, he was a lifelong pacifist who in the Second World War had served in the Fire Service rather than the military. When I first met him, at his rambling East Sussex house in the Downs just outside Lewes – a town known for its nonconformism – I found a man who was a member of CND and was steaming with genteel rage at the devastation wreaked on the country by Margaret Thatcher. To my surprise, he was also a vegetarian – relatively unusual in the late Eighties – and I recall a memorable Sunday nut roast, accompanied by a couple of bottles of jolly decent claret.
Although Buckeridge (and thus Jennings, his most famous comic creation) was very much a creature of the Forties, he was aware that he and his books had to move with the times. While some of the more pungent Jenningsisms – such as ‘bazooka’ (rhyming slang for verruca) and ‘ozard as a coot’ (extremely bad) – remained in the updated versions of the books, Buckeridge realised in the Eighties that there was no scope for casual racism.
In an early title, Jennings and Darbishire, first published in 1952, Jennings and his pal, strolling along a quayside on the south coast, come across a fishing boat crewed by a group of French fishermen. They attempt to have a conversation in schoolboy French. They later reflect on their encounter.
Darbishire opens the conversation:
‘Bon idée! There you are, you see! My French is masses better already, just from having a little informal chat with a few natives.’
‘Those chaps weren’t natives – they were Frenchmen,’ Jennings returned curtly. ‘Natives don’t speak French; they say things like wallah-wallah and m’bongo m’bongo.’
‘No; you’re thinking of Africans. Our fishermen-geezers were natives of France, so of course they spoke French.’
Buckeridge knew that this would understandably be deemed offensive – and the exchange was dropped from all subsequent editions.
As prep school boys of the Fifties, Jennings, Darbishire and his pals at Linbury Court would have been almost exclusively drawn from the upper middle class. But the language the boys use has a much wider provenance. Much of the syllabus at Linbury Court revolves around Latin – the sciences barely feature in the curriculum – which explains why Latin words such as cave, quis and ego become part of their everyday lexicon.
Thanks to the ground-breaking work of Professor Graeme Davis of the University of Buckingham, we now know that the Jennings register was formed also from other, more surprising influences – those of the lower orders. To
all intents and purposes, Jennings and Darbishire were Britain’s first mockneys.
Professor Davis’s study identifies the boys at Linbury Court emulating some elements of working-class diction, long before the advent of the mockney practised by politicians such as Tony Blair, Ed Miliband and George Osborne. Jennings and Darbishire use words such as ‘smashing’ (from Irish navvy slang) and ‘cove’ which has its origins in thieves’ cant. Similarly, the word ‘prang’ – a Jennings favourite – derives from Second World War slang which Professor Davis says is working class in origin.
‘It was a form of inverted cockney,’ he told me, ‘and, although it was not quite mockney as we know it, it certainly had its origins in working-class language. Jennings and his pals would borrow from cockney rhyming slang. We have to remember that the Fifties was a period of time when society was levelling out and class differences were beginning to become less obvious.’
That can’t have been a bad thing. Or as Jennings himself might have put it – ‘Fossilised fish-hooks!’ – the world was changing.