Early life and career (1876–1906)

Plaque to Charles Hamilton at 15 Oak Street, Ealing, W5 London, now the site of Ealing Broadway Shopping Centre

Hamilton was born in Ealing, London, one of the eight children of Mary Ann Hannah (née Trinder - born 1847) (Lofts & Adley 1975:16) and John Hamilton (1839-1884), a master carpenter.^[1] Charles Hamilton was privately educated at Thorn House School in Ealing, where he studied Classical Greek among other subjects.^[2] He then embarked on a career as a writer of fiction, having his first story accepted almost immediately. According to W.O.G. Lofts (Collectors Digest, no. 239, 1966, p. 30) it appeared in 1895.

Over the following years he was to establish himself as the main writer with the publisher Trapps Holmes, providing several thousand stories on a range of subjects including police, detectives, firemen, Westerns as well as school stories. In 1906 he started to write for the Amalgamated Press and although he continued to have stories published for Trapps Holmes until 1915 (many of which were reprints), his allegiance was gradually to move (Lofts & Adley 1975:25–42).

Heyday (1907–1940)

Hamilton in 1912

Amalgamated Press started a new story paper for boys called The Gem in 1907 and by issue number 11 it had established a format: the major content was to be a story about St Jim's school, starring Tom Merry as the main character and written by Charles Hamilton under the pen name of Martin Clifford. This paper rapidly established itself and, to capitalise on its success, a similar venture was launched in 1908. This was to be known as The Magnet. The subject matter was a school called Greyfriars and Hamilton was again to be the author, this time using the name Frank Richards (Lofts & Adley 1975:43–51).

In 1915 Hamilton started a third school series for Amalgamated Press, Rookwood, this time under the name Owen Conquest and featuring a leading character called Jimmy Silver. These appeared in the Boys' Friend Weekly, and were shorter than the Greyfriars and St Jim's stories (Lofts & Adley 1975:52–55).

These three schools absorbed most of Hamilton's energies over the following 30 years and constitute the work for which he is best remembered. In the early part of this period the St Jim's stories were more involved and more popular. The Greyfriars stories, however, evolved gradually over the early years of The Magnet, eventually becoming Hamilton's main priority. His "golden age" is generally regarded as lasting from about 1925 to about 1935. In all he provided stories for 82 per cent of the issues of The Magnet and two thirds of the issues of The Gem. If a Hamilton story was not available, the story was provided by another author but still using the Clifford or Richards name (Lofts & Adley 1975:52–72).

By the late 1930s the circulations of both The Gem and The Magnet had declined, partly because of competition from publications by D.C. Thomson. In December 1939 The Gem was cancelled, in the traditional manner of British comics, by being merged with another paper, the Triumph. There is reason to believe that the same fate would have overtaken The Magnet in the summer of 1940,^[3] but in the event a sudden shortage of paper, caused by the progress of the war, led to its ceasing publication abruptly and without notice in May that year. The final issue contained the opening story of a new series.

Later career (1940–1961)

Following the closure of The Magnet in 1940 Hamilton had little work, but he became known as the author of the stories following a newspaper interview he gave to the London Evening Standard. He was not able to continue the Greyfriars saga, as Amalgamated Press held the copyright and would not release it. He was obliged to create new schools such as Carcroft and Sparshott, as well as trying the romance genre under the name of Winston Cardew.

By 1946 Richards had received permission to write Greyfriars stories again, and obtained a contract from publishers Charles Skilton for a hardback series, the first volume of which, Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School, was published in September 1947. The series continued for the rest of his life, the publisher later changing to Cassells. In addition, he wrote further St Jim's, Rookwood and Cliff House stories, as well as the television scripts for seven series of Billy Bunter stories for the BBC.(Lofts & Adley 1975:146–151)

Frank Richards died on 24 December 1961, aged 85, and was cremated at the Kent County Crematorium at Charing in Kent. (Lofts & Adley 1975:153).

Pen-names

At least 25 pen-names have been identified as having been used by Hamilton.^[7] These are listed below.

Style and content

Hamilton employed a lightly ironic voice, often studded with humorous classical references which had the effect of making the stories both accessible and erudite. In this respect, he has been compared to P. G. Wodehouse, who emerged from a similar period and was also a prolific author in a light-hearted genre (Cadogan 1988:56). His extraordinary output has been suggested as arising from a very fluent style that came naturally to him and, in turn made the stories very readable (Cadogan 1988:1), while at the same time being somewhat wordy.

Much of his popularity derives from his ability to allow the reader to participate vicariously in the ongoing adventure. As with many later children's writers, the stories centred on a small core group of characters who form a close knit unit – at St Jim's there was the Terrible Three, at Rookwood the Fistical Four and at Greyfriars, The Famous Five. Such groups, while being closed to other pupils, are implicitly open to readers who are subliminally invited to include themselves amongst their number, thereby establishing their involvement with the story.

The stories also uphold a moral code of honesty, generosity, respect and discipline, while condemning Hamilton's own weaknesses of smoking and gambling. There is also a strong message against racism in the inclusion of an Indian schoolboy, Hurree Singh, into the core group of the Famous Five in 1908, and by subsequently introducing a Jewish boy, Monty Newland, as a respected member of the Remove (the main form featured in the stories). Both of these 'foreign' characters personify 'British' values of honesty and sportsmanship, and were extremely popular with readers. This attitude did not extend to Africans, however, whom Hamilton describes in racist stereotypes (Sell 2000).

Charles Hamilton was a keen gambler at continental casinos before the First World War. Although his stories always had a strong anti-gambling message, such conduct being described as 'sweepy' or 'shady', Hamilton often introduced gambling storylines, such as horserace betting or casinos, and warned of its compulsive dangers.

The moral message throughout is subtly tempered through comic characters, of whom Billy Bunter is the most famous. Bunter is the antithesis of everything the stories value: lazy, greedy, dishonest, and self-centred. However, he is tolerated because of his extreme incompetence and (usually) good nature and lack of malice. His absurd interventions deflate the high seriousness of authority figures, and frequently reduce their efforts to farce.

The public school is a world where adult supervision is light, allowing the juvenile characters to create a society of their own, and dare to adventure beyond the experience of the young readers. This formula became standard in juvenile fiction, though Hamilton's originality and technique were seldom equalled.

Substitute writers

During the 1910s Hamilton's input dropped during his frequent trips to the Continent and the gambling tables of Monte Carlo, and for about 20 years nearly 35 other authors wrote stories for publication under the pen names 'Martin Clifford' and 'Frank Richards'; these included Edwy Searles Brooks (1889–1965), Hedley Percival Angelo O'Mant (1899–1955), William Edward Stanton Hope (1889–1961), Julius Herman (1894–1955) John Nix Pentelow (1872–1931) and George Richmond Samways (1895–1996), the last writing nearly 100 Greyfriars stories among others. Hamilton disparagingly referred to this pool of substitutes as "the Menagerie". The last substitute-written story appeared in The Magnet in 1931; all subsequent stories were solely written by Hamilton.^[8]