Author: Frank Richards

Charles Hamilton wrote under about two dozen names and produced something like a hundred million words, most of them for boys' weeklies, which makes him arguably the most prolific author in English. As Frank Richards he invented Greyfriars School and Billy Bunter, the fat, greedy, cowardly, perpetually broke Owl of the Remove, and wrote the Magnet's weekly Greyfriars story almost single-handed from 1908 until paper rationing closed the paper in 1940. Bunter's second life came after the war in a run of hardback novels for Charles Skilton and then Cassell, which is where Billy Bunter's Benefit and Billy Bunter's Postal Order belong, and in a BBC television series. George Orwell used the Magnet in his 1940 essay on boys' weeklies to argue that the stories quietly taught a class settlement; Hamilton wrote a reply that Orwell printed, which is the rarer half of the exchange. He lived from 1876 to 1961.