This first essay won't tell you anything you don't already know, I'm fairly confident of that. In fact you probably already know a heck of a lot more than I do - I'm not a newcomer to the genre, but I am a newcomer to researching and collecting it, except that I used to have a vast collection in the 1950s, when I was a young boy! This is more of a personal reminiscence. When I've done my research, I'll start pulling things together better ~ I'm not setting out to cover ground already covered by people far more knowledgeable than me ~ I'm just interested in school stories, and if, in the course of my reading them and about them, I find something I want to share with you, I will do so.

When you're as old as I am you tend to search further back into your memory for the good times, the good things, even though there are some good things going on right now. I think it's a conditioned reaction to the terrible start to the new century we've had ~ in the last half of the last century we lived in constant fear that the two super-powers would go to war against each other and annihilate the human race once and for all. Doomsday scenarios were fashionable both in film and literature. And then, when the Cold War defrosted, it was doomsday of another kind that grabbed the headlines ~ the vast majority of us were going to die from AIDS or some other global epidemic.

Even Stephen Hawking believes that we should be heading for other planets sooner rather than later. He gives us another millennium on this planet before life becomes untenable. That other merchant of doom, my favourite author, Stephen King, had 99% of us depart this mortal coil in 1998/9 following the outbreak of the plague.

Small wonder, indeed that those of us with long memories search for a time when there were no such threats ~ when everything was sweet, life was good. When I was a lad, the war had ended, rationing had just about finished, the welfare state was starting to take care of those of us who needed it but could not afford it, and there was a Golden Age of children's literature on the market ~ all of it published by companies that no longer exist, swallowed up by the giant multiglomerates that control our lives in the here and now. It seemed as though nothing had changed for almost a half century, despite two world wars. George Newnes, Blackie & Son, Sampson Low, Hodder and Stoughton (still around....but renamed), Victor Gollancz, Hutchinson - they all seemed to have existed since the beginning of time for the express purpose of bringing good, popular literature to the masses at prices they could afford.

Now they're gone, and the Golden Age, which lasted just as long as it did and no longer (I'll qualify that in a moment) ended quietly and peacefully. Right, now to qualify that last rather baffling statement. For me, the Golden Age of children's Literature began when I was old enough to read, and finished when I finally got to sit in front of a television that belonged to us, rather than having to go, cap in hand, to my Aunt Grace, a most hateful old woman, given to sarcasm and dry wit. There have been many Golden Ages, of course. I experienced them all. Because they're all very subjective eras. The Golden Age of Comics for me was not the 1930s and 1940s in the USA, with the advent of the two other superheroes, Batman and Superman, to follow in the footsteps of the original and best superhero of them all, Tarzan of the Apes. I still read avidly, and I write, too. But then I also love watching movies and listening to CDs. Some days there just aren't enough hours in the day!

My Golden Age of Comics was in the 1950s, when I collected them all. The Lion, The Tiger, The Sun, The Comet, The Eagle - I bought them all. And then, every week, my sister and I would walk the three miles to the next village where our Uncle, the one with the seven children, would have a huge pile of comics ready for us to bring home and devour. My Golden Age of Literature also began in the 1950s, when I grew into Enid Blyton's "Adventure" series, then graduated to The COMMANDER BOOK FOR BOYS and, incidentally, and interestingly enough, the CORONET BOOK FOR GIRLS. These 500+ page tomes were my pride and joy, the one Christmas present every year I genuinely looked forward to above all else. They were treasure-troves of stories I read over and over again, and when I'd finished mine, I'd borrow my sister's Coronet. It didn't matter that hers was orientated towards the opposite sex. I was interested in the opposite sex, for goodness' sake. I was equally at home reading about the girls in the Upper Fifth as I was about Totty. Yes, that's a capital "T". Totty was a schoolboy.

Most of my pocket money went on books. Bunter books, Blyton books. Boots the Chemist in the High Street in Gloucester had a good line in second-hand books, books withdrawn from their lending library. Oh, yes, I'm not making it up. Boots the Chemist used to run a lending library. I can't say I ever borrowed from it. We had a good public library in Gloucestershire, and a man who brought books to the house in the back of his car. The Alpha-Ro Library man. He it was who introduced me to Dennis Wheatley. But I'm getting ahead of myself, and into territory I don't mean to cover in this essay. Commander and Coronet had the whole gamut of stories, western, spy, historical, everything you could possible want. But my favourites were the school stories. They were always set in boarding schools. And stories about boys, or girls, in boarding schools held an undefinable mystique for me and thousands of other young readers. Maybe it was the mystique of the "other world", of servants, and men born to be rulers.....I'm not sure.

I attended the Crypt Grammar School for Boys in Gloucester from 1957 to 1962, and all the time I was there, right up until I left, it was Greyfriars as far as I was concerned. Me and my "chums" were the famous five (the original famous five, not the ones that Enid pinched for her books) - Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Hurree Singh - and the other two. It's a bit like the Seven Dwarfs, really. No one can remember all of their names. But at that time, everyone loved school stories, and to a certain extent, they did, at least up until the late 1990s, when they were still appearing in Bunty - I haven't checked out The Three Marys for a while, maybe they're still going strong, though I suspect modern Misses would not find them as appealing as we did.

Anyway, I suspect that school stories stayed in Girls' comics because the editors had a penchant for them, just as I do, and not because people clamoured for them. I believe they really went out of vogue in the 1960s, and only a particular "set" of girls still enjoyed them. Certainly that was the case for boys. They had James Bond and an upsurge in interest in Science Fiction to become interested in; that and the recently published blockbuster, The Lord of the Rings. For girls, as I say, school stories continued to appear in weekly comics for quite a while, but they were maybe not as popular as they had been in the 1950s and early 1960s.

As comprehensive education took off, the glamour and appeal of boarding school and the stories that glorified them nosedived. There was a new and urgent belief in the equality of the classes as working-class people elevated themselves to white-collar and blue-collar positions that made them believe they were middle class. The mystique of the upper class boarding school was no longer appealing to the nouveau riche who were now able to afford to send their children to those establishments, and the loyal working-classes drifted further away from admiration of the upper classes than had previously been the case.

The sixties was a time of rebellion, when the masses dared to talk back, dared to question the right of the ruling class to rule. Now, for the most part, the dinosaurs of the British class system are held in ridicule, and quite rightly, in my opinion. The class system should have gone in Cromwell's time - sadly it did not. Boarding schools, particularly boys' boarding schools in the 1960s began to be seen as breeding grounds for homosexuals and spies. And the kinds of adventures that we were used to reading about could only take place in boarding schools. Sneaking out of your bedroom on the council estate hardly had the same appeal as sneaking out of the upper fifth dormitory at St Malory's, and to chase after a hooded monk in the priory in the school grounds, did it?

So, boarding schools were generally not the cool places they used to be. That had to wait for an unknown author, J K Rowling to come along with Harry Potter and Hogwarts. It seems that boarding school numbers are still in decline despite HP, but interest in them has apparently resurfaced. The glamour of boarding school mixed with the interest in magic and mystery has returned, full circle.

Today, as I write this article, people are bidding for clues as to what's going to happen in the unpublished Harry Potter books. People have gone Potter-mad, and part of the appeal must be that it is set in a double-sex boarding school. For me, it never lost its appeal. As soon as I started working in the public library service, in 1963, a book that was to become a firm fabourite of mine (and still is) was published: Roger Longrigg, writing under the name of Rosalind Erskine wrote The Passion Flower Hotel and brought the boarding school "adventure" into the swinging Sixties . But that was something of a diversion from the real thing, which in reality has been one of the major literary phenomena of the twentieth century. My personal belief is that it should be preserved and promoted. I know there are thousands of you out there who are devoted to collecting and reading school stories, and it is with pride that I announce a major new series of stories to be published in Gateway Children's Stories. Obviously the age-old problem of copyright will prevent me from publishing anything other than really old works and totally new ones. But I'm willing to have a go, and the first issue of GATEWAY CHILDREN'S STORIES in February will contain at least two school stories, both written by me.

While I'm not writing (which is rare, these days) I'll curl up with a dog-eared Commander or Coronet and do some more research.......happy days! By the way, for those of you who are interested in school stories, here's a superb and very comprehensive site run from Oz with a very nice, lively e-mail list run by Anita and her "chums" (all of whom have been extraordinarily helpful) - check it out at:

and while I'm at it, I'd also like to thank Barbara, who with John runs the Collecting Books and Magazines website in Australia. This site is probably the most comprehensive work of reference on the web for anything to do with children's literature. Again I have to thank Barbara for helping me with material for this first essay in what I hope will turn into a major (if occasional) series on school stories. Check out Barbara's website here: http://www.penrithcity.nsw.gov.au/usrpages/collect/welcome.htm