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Post by dem bones on Jan 16, 2014 19:03:27 GMT
Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle - Back In The Jugg Agane (Armada, 1968: originally Max Parrish, 1959) aways did love the st. custards books, but this remains my absolute favourite, most likely because it was the first I encountered. altho written in the fifties, nigel molesworth's sage advice on how to survive skool and its attendant horrors - e.g., sadistic masters, examms, grown-ups, muddy futball pitches and the strange and terrifying subjekt of gurls, etc - still resonate with common sense. also pearson, grabber, fotherington-thomas, molesworth 2, GRIMES, matron and sigismund the mad maths master are all present and correkt making BACK IN THE JUGG AGANE a perfect introduction to a super series. the st trinians terrors were much harder, tho, chiz chiz chiz. Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle - Down With Skool!! (Armada, 1973: originally Max Parrish, 1958)
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Post by pulphack on Jan 17, 2014 6:08:11 GMT
The four Willans & Searle books are possibly the greatest books in the English language ever - well, they are for me - and after forty plus (ahem) years I still find them so to be. One of my earliest 'literary' efforts was a story (with illustrations, for Gods sake - I can't draw, but that didn't stop me scrawling a very rough approximation of the Molesworth visage) in primary school that was a direct rip-off - sorry, homage. I was gratified that I was proved right when I saw the complete Molesworth in Penguin Classics a few years back. (Though Penguin Classics has been a little devalued by Morrisey going straight into it - I thought the whole idea of 'classics' was that the book had a history and reputation? Anyway, as it's Moz - who I do like, by the way - chances are the best bits might be copped from other people's life-stories, like the best of his lyrics are 'homages' to others' work...)
Molesworth was, I still think in moments of lurking dread, right about everything - especially GURLS. I would like to be Grabber, but fear I am Fotherington-Thomas. I always suspect that F-T turned into Steve Hillage when he grew up.
Wot I kno: Searle only did the pictures as a favour to Willans and because Max Parrish was pestering him about another St Trins book. Willans had written a couple of books before, one of which - Fasten Your Lapstraps - I was lucky enough to find years back and is a very funny book about air travel, illustrated by someone else entirely. Molesworth started, sans pics, in Punch some years before, which does explain the somewhat haphazard nature of the books, but this only adds to their charm. Simon Brett did two Molesworth-as-an-adult follow-ups in the eighties that are quite funny in themselves, but can't match the original for me - though Willie Rushton illustrated one, which is a plus. Willans died all too young - before hitting fifty. I wonder if he would have followed Molesworth into adulthood, or left alone something that is - in its own way - perfect.
Also - whisper this - St Custards is better than St Trins for me. The best bits about St Trins come from the films, and Searle actually did much better work at the same time illustrating books like 'London, So Help Me' - a single girl's memoir of living alone, which is a funny text, but has stunning cartoon work. I can understand why St Trins frustrated him, seeing as his best draughtmanship came after, yet he was always Ronald 'St Trins' Searle in the UK.
Oh, and I also remember Alan Coren writing a very funny piece (for a change - I didn't get him most of the time)in the eighties where St Custards rang with the news that Molesworth was going to have cruise missiles stationed on him...
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Post by dem bones on Jan 17, 2014 8:43:31 GMT
thanks for all the additional info, mr. hack. It was craig's nightmarish BELLPORT HIGH stories in The Heaven Maker & Other Gruesome Tales provided all the excuse necessary for a molesworth thread. quite by chance, shortly before xmas i found a bound volume of Punch in local charity shop covering July 1970-Jan. 1971. It is v. intriguing stuff, especially the proliferation of full-page colour ads for CIGS and BOOZE, which are sure to be sampled on here in near future. Also landed the first of the s. brett paperbacks (illustrated by w. rushton) in which our hero shares his thorts on such adult matters as wives, the office (esp. charleen, his secretery at Grabber Bulk Holdings), sport, and - now lets be grown up about this snigger snigger - sex. we also learn that somehow, don't ask me how, basil fotherington-thomas and his equally wet wife araminta are parents, eg. they have had CHILDREN. Simon Brett - Molesworth Rites Again (Arrow, 1984) Illustrated by William Rushton Blurb: MOLESWORTH RITES AGAIN The unwashed monster from St Custard's is still trying to be top - but making his customary lack of headway. Entering middle age now, Nigel Molesworth is at last an adult in an adult world. Husband, father, invoice docketer and hapless voyeur, it daily becomes more and more obvious that the real world is awfully like'skool' Older but no wiser, Nigel Molesworth picks up his pen once more - to give us the definitive survival guide to the enigmatic eighties. Women, children, secretaries, bosses...hav to say i agree with you that molesworth books are miles better than st. trins books, though i love searle's illustrations for both. the movies - esp. the b/w ones - were such a suksess you have to wonder why nobody thort to adapt the st. custards books ( - or did they ). Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle - How To Be Topp! (Puffin 1962, originally Max Parrish, 1954) Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle - Whizz For Atomms! (Max Parrish, 1956) Blurb You kno wot they say the future is in the hands of YOUTH i.e. clots wets and weeds like grabber, peason, my bro molesworth 2 (chiz the disgrace of it) and fickle pretty fotherington-tomas. Well i ask you. So i have tried to give others the fruits of my xperience at skool and also of the various chizzes which take place in the world outside the skool wails. Not to mention a few tips from the coarse.
My thanks are due to grabber for the use of his blotch, geoffrey willans for the introduction to his publishers, and ronald searle for his magnificent super-colossal drawings i don't think.
NOW READ ON.'
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jan 17, 2014 13:46:19 GMT
I read some of these as a sprog and I've suddenly realised that they might have formed a little bit of the inspiration. Damn the vault again. I used to love these books and feel a 'must have' situation coming on.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Jan 17, 2014 19:05:06 GMT
I LOVE the Molesworth books - Penguin Modern Classics did an omnibus a few years back so I could replace my tatty old paperbacks. Not very Vault I know, but at least I have them with me for another 40 years
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Post by dem bones on Jan 17, 2014 19:17:45 GMT
I read some of these as a sprog and I've suddenly realised that they might have formed a little bit of the inspiration. damn the vault again. I used to love these books and feel a 'must have' situation coming on. I LOVE the Molesworth books - Penguin Modern Classics did an omnibus a few years back so I could replace my tatty old paperbacks. Not very Vault I know, but at least I have them with me for another 40 years Ha! Been meaning to give them a thread for AGES, but could never think of an excuse. At our rotten skool, these books were massively popular, even among the kids who didn't/ wouldn't/ couldn't read. i'm not sure he was much into horror, but the unwashed monster of st. custards was a massive fan of sci-fi and tarzan of the apes, and he also say things like 'open in the name of beelzebub' to scare fotherington-thomas. pity he hated foopball so much, but perhaps that goes with the territory when you attend a posh, fee-paying skool?
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Post by valdemar on Jan 28, 2014 20:01:23 GMT
Construction of the Whizzo Rocket - possibly one of the funniest things I have ever read. I was almost tempted to go to a hobby shop to enquire about 'Crabbing Pins', 'Envelops', and 'Cormthrusters'. I love all the Molesworth books and the sly adult humour hidden within them. Many things have stuck with me through the years, such as; The table of grips and tortures for masters, including the 'single hair extraction for non-attenders'; the 'side hair tweak [exquisitely painful]'; 'Masters I Hav Known', including the classic, and truthful; "I might not know much, but I am good at football". The mutilation of 'Football' to 'Foopball', Grabber, head of everything, and the winner of the 'Mrs Joyful Prize For Rafia Work'; Fotherington-T[h]omas - "Hello Clouds, Hello sky" Uterly wet and a weed, as ane fule kno. Remember; now is not the time to say: "Ooh look sir, your eggs all runny".
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Post by pulphack on Jan 29, 2014 6:48:19 GMT
I'm feeling a bit that way this morning, so thanks for that (...). It is funny how things from St Custards stay with you - I can't see David Cameron without thinking of Grabber, and still say 'hello sky, hello trees' etc as a shorthand description for some people I meet - though not always unkindly. I suppose it's because it was originally for Punch and so had that adult slant that it reads so well when you're older, but it really was quite a feat to make a joke about schoolboys that also appealed to schoolboys. I do still wonder what else Geoffrey Willans might have written, and I'm also glad that it was never translated to movies or tv: St Trins was vague enough to allow Launder&Gilliat to work on it, but Molesworth was too carefully refined - any changes would have been a let down. It was as unfilmable as Stephen Potter's One-upmanship books - School For Scoundrels was not too bad (Alastair Sim being more Potter than the man himself) but the cruelty of it was tempered by the need for a narrative.
(edit - I seem to have put this in the wrong thread - see first sentence for possible explanation - sorry Dem, can you move this? I don't know how!)
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Post by valdemar on Jan 29, 2014 18:36:37 GMT
This thread reminded me of other 'school' books, and that made me think of the 'Jennings' books. Not as clever as the 'Molesworth' books, but often featuring surreal situations. The most memorable bit of weirdness is from 'Jennings' Little Hut', where the Headmaster ['Archbeako' in Jenningspeak], attempts to type a sign, to keep the boys away from a pond. His results are not a success, and made me, and my brother cry with laughter the first [and subsequent many times] of reading. It goes: [as near as I can remember, without having any of the books to hand]
NOT ICE In fiYuture nO Buys wILL be Premnitted TO bLuilD NutS in The A£5rEa uF tHe pOND? AnD the wHolE A£5rEa wilL bE plAVced OU98t Of hOunds 1/2%.
I also remember that in 'Jennings Goes To School', Jennings' first postcard home is hilariously badly written. Does anyone out there have it to hand? I'd love to read it again.
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Post by pulphack on Jan 30, 2014 7:05:04 GMT
Jennings! Loved him, too, when I was young. About fifteen years ago I bought a whole bundle of them at a jumble sale and enjoyed them second time around - they don't have the extra depth of Molesworth as they were specifically written for boys, but Anthony Buckeridge does have a nice line in the vaguely surreal, building situations to points of absurdity that are just about feasible, but only from a kid's perspective. I used to read a lot of things like Billy Bunter when I was kid, too, and coming back to try them again they were stilted and dull (how did a nasty little toerag like BB become such a hero? Vile character and the most cartoonish of all those in the stories.). The masters in them were also stereotypes, whereas in Jennings stories, masters like Mr Carter had some depth - despite his tendency to apoplectic rage and incoherence, he was actually a nice guy who had the interests of the kids at heart.
Maybe this was because AB had been a schoolmaster when he started writing the stories for radio, and so had experience that grub street hacks like Charles Hamilton (aka Frank Richards and about a dozen other names) lacked. When I was a member of the Old Boys Book Club he came to talk to us about his work. He must have been pushing 90, and was out of print at that time. His wife was with him as he was a bit frail physically, but otherwise sharp as he explained how his teaching days got him writing for his pupils, and the characters in the Jennings books were all drawn from boys he had taught and some of their exploits. He seemed a nice old chap, and it's a pity he passed away without seeing the books back in print - Prion have done a couple of collections over the last five or so years.
God help me, I even investigated girl's school stories, and they were a mixed bag. I'll admit this was partly prodded by Arthur Marshall's autobiography, where he recalled being at school in the '20's and reading Bulldog Drummond and the works of Angela Brazil aloud to comic effect, accentuating their most ridiculous aspects. I knew this to be true of Sapper, and it certainly was of the sainted Brazil, who was massively successful but bloody awful. I did, however, discover Terence Stamp's favourite childhood reading - the Dimsie books of Dorita Fairlie Bruce, which followed one Dimsie Maitland from her first term at senior school through to leaving and getting married. DFB as a writer could have put many an 'adult' writer to shame with her finely drawn characters that actually seemed to walk off the page and still live in the spaces bedfore walking back in another chapter. Elsie J Oxenham, on the other hand, was a kind of breathless and twee girl guide of a writer, whose books were not those I would ever look at again, but were strangely compelling - I heard someone once say that Catherine Cookson was successful not because she was a great writer technically, but because she had such a driving belief in her stories and characters that this leapt off the page and grabbed the reader. That's also a fairly good summation of EJO.
Mind you, the only 'children's' books I've ever kept were The Wind In The Willows, Alice In Wonderland & The Loooking Glass (and Hunting Of The Snark)- which may explain why Syd Barrett chimed the first time I heard him back in 1978 - Fleming's original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and all the Paddington books I've ever come across (which may also explain early habits of wearing a duffel coat habitually). Michael Bond is very under-rated, but I won't bang on any more right now...
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Post by pulphack on Jan 30, 2014 19:52:34 GMT
Washing up just now, it struck me (as it does) that Mr Carter was the very reasonable pipe-smoking voice of reason in the Jennings books - it was 'Old Wilkie' (who was actually not that old, but that's kids for you) who had the kindly nature masked by incandescent rages. Can't remember if he was Mr Wilkins or Mr Wilkinson, though. I should cheat and use Google!
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Post by valdemar on Jan 30, 2014 21:10:13 GMT
Mr Wilkins - apt to rotate in tottering circles on the spot, when too exasperated for mere words. There was a maths teacher at my secondary school who did EXACTLY the same thing.
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Post by pulphack on Dec 9, 2021 7:12:42 GMT
Coo! Gosh! It turns out that Molesworth in Punch had NOTHING TO DO with the books after all... Having just accepted the bits written in introductions for years, it was a bit of a surprise when, a couple of months ago, I came across an article about 'The Lost Diaries Of Nigel Molesworth' published last year. It appears that Geoffrey Willans created Molesworth for Punch in 1939 and wrote diaries of the goriller of 3B for three years before war, family, work, etc got him to put this on one side for over a decade. Then Collins had a kids mag edited by Kaye Webb (who met Searle when they were both working on the magazine Lilliput and married him before founding Armada for Collins) called The New Elizabethan, and she asked Willans to write some stuff. He went back to Molesworth, and the rest is history - Searle illustrates because of connection with wife and need to appease Max Parrish as killed off St Trins, etc...
Anyway, the original pieces were never reprinted apart from one or two in Punch anthologies at the time. Hence the confusion, I suppose. Anyway, a chap called Robert Kirkpatrick spent a decade tracking them all down getting rights sorted, and eventually publised them privately to rave reviews (which I missed). When Mrs PH tried to get me a birthday copy, there was not one to be found. But she is persistent, and Mr Kirkpatrick has a few available via ebay. Less the one that she nabbed for me. Thank you, dear... I will do the hoovering in a bit...
So, what was the early Nigel like? Pretty much the same, actually - he does not cast a philosophical eye widely, being much more focused on skool, life with gran in hols (tuough), and the war (skool buzzed by bombs, evakuated to skool so haf two headmasters - chiz - and even spend time at gurls skool where gurls wet and soppy about pash on games mistress who haf face like nanny goat). The skool is St Cypranes, the headmaster is not as tuough as Grimes and a running joke is his ability to predict the exact opposite of what actually happens, but Peason and Molesworth 2 are there (complete with ability to play Fairie Bells on piano), as is Fotherington-Tomas, who is called David (first name only mentioned once) and is the same but has not fully evolved 'hello trees, hello sky, etc' catchphrase. Given what I'd read about it, I wasn't expecting Nigel to be so far down the evolutionary chain (though he gets enough comments about his looks to suggest evolution stopped at goriller) but he came out almost fully formed, and its the world around him that was developed for the later books.
It's a tenner inc p&p, only 68pp of Nigel but an excellent 20+ pages of introduction and biographical detail (Willans' novels sound worth a search). I say ONLY 68pp but they are priceless and sit nicely alongside the St Custards years. I realise that only Dem, Lord P and Valdemar (if the latter two are still about) will be interested, but they would find this vital stuff to nab before it disappears again.
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