FORGOTTEN AUTHORS
William Cook on Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings
When I was a schoolboy, in the 1970s, Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books were just as popular as Richmal Crompton’s Just William. Yet while William remains a familiar figure, Jennings has virtually disappeared. Why? I’m not quite sure. Of course Buckeridge’s quaint and charming prep school stories belong to a bygone age, but then again so does William. And though William deserves first place in the comic pantheon of unruly schoolboys, JCT Jennings is a worthy runner-up, and well worth a second look.
Anthony Buckeridge was born in 1912, in Hendon, Middlesex. His father, a bank clerk, was killed in action during the First World War (his war lasted half an hour and his death achieved nothing, observed his only child). The Bank Clerks’ Orphanage fund subsequently paid for Buckeridge to attend a boarding school in Sussex called Seaford College, where he met a boy called Diarmaid Jennings, who inspired his greatest creation.
When he left school Buckeridge became a bank clerk, like his father, but banking bored him. Instead, he drifted into acting, and then into teaching, working at various provincial prep schools. To get the boys to settle down for bed, he told them stories. The tales he told about Diarmaid Jennings were especially popular, prompting Buckeridge to write a radio play for Children’s Hour. That BBC play became a series, and the series spawned a set of books, enabling him to give up teaching and write full time.
Buckeridge didn’t enjoy his schooldays much (‘No music, no drama, no art – and I remember always being hungry’). Conversely Linbury Court, where Jennings goes to school, is a warm and happy place. Buckeridge was aghast that so many of his young fans were so enamoured by his escapist stories that they implored their parents to send them away to boarding school, but you could hardly blame them (I was one of them). Linbury Court was the sort of prep school that every boy would love to go to – a place where the masters and the boys are kind, and every day is full of drama.
Like all the best comic fiction, each story follows a tried and tested pattern. A prepubescent Don Quixote, Jennings has an insatiable yearning for adventure, but his escapades inevitably end up in a hopeless muddle. His Sancho Panza is a shortsighted vicar’s son called CEJ Darbishire, who usually foresees the flaws in Jennings’s hairbrained schemes, but is far too timid to dissuade him. ‘Why do these frantic hoo-hahs always have to pick on us to happen to?’ he wails. Together, they cause chaos, for themselves and all around them – but their scrapes and japes are harmless, and it all works out in the end. Jennings’s nemesis is Mr Wilkins, a teacher full of bluster. His redeemer is Mr Carter, a wise old owl who invariably saves him from disaster.
The thing that makes these stories sing is their daft and joyous wordplay. The dialogue is adorned with schoolboy howlers and absurd malapropisms, but Buckeridge never sets out to mock or sneer. He cares about his characters and wishes them no harm. What’s so moving about rereading these jolly, gentle tales is what a reassuring little world this is, so safe and yet so thrilling. In these troubled times, they make you yearn to be a child again.
You might think Jennings would have no appeal beyond the British Isles – a purely British pleasure, like warm beer and pantomime. Well, you’d be wrong. He was a big hit in France and Germany. In Norway he became a boy called Stompa. Like PG Wodehouse, Buckeridge created a cosy nirvana which was unique yet universal. ‘Absent minded aunts ranked high amongst the problems of modern times to which there was no real answer,’ reflects Jennings, ruefully. It could almost be Bertie Wooster talking.
So what became of Diarmaid Jennings? He became an engineer and ended up in New Zealand, where he turned to farming. Only when he was an old man did he discover he’d been the inspiration for JCT Jennings. He became pen pals with Buckeridge, whom he hadn’t seen since their prep school days, and of whom he had no recollection whatsoever. He died in 2009, at the grand old age of 96, five years after the man who immortalised his name.
Jennings wasn’t Buckeridge’s only literary creation. He also wrote a few books about Rex Milligan, a boy at Sheldrake Grammar School. As a grammar school boy myself, by rights I should have preferred these books, but I didn’t like them half as much, and it seems my reaction was fairly typical. These stories didn’t sell nearly so well, even though they were just as good. It was the idea of boarding school which attracted me, and countless day boys like me. For oiks like us, this was a world elsewhere. Eventually my parents gave in, and sent me away to school. They were glad to see the back of me, but I was sorely disappointed. It was nothing like Linbury Court, after all.
‘Together they cause chaos, but their scrapes and japes are harmless, and it all works out in the end’