#1925Club: Richmal Crompton

“Richmal Crompton, I salute you.” That is the final sentence of Kate Atkinson’s afterword to her novel A God in Ruins. (2015). She is acknowledging, of course, her debt to Crompton’s William stories.

Atkinson’s novel follows the life of Teddy Todd – would-be poet, bomber pilot, husband, father, and grandfather – as he navigates the turbulence of the twentieth century. The story unfolds between 1925 and 2012, each chapter set in a different year.

Teddy has an Aunt Izzie who turns his childhood into bestselling stories.

“It was a Saturday, after lunch, and he had been mooching around in the garden, making paper planes with Jimmy, when Izzie had swooped on him and cajoled him into going for a walk… ‘Have you ever eaten a worm? Do you play at cowboys and Indians? What do you want to be when you grow up?’ (No. Yes. A train driver.)”

Izzie is mining these nuggets for a book:

“‘Oh ye gods,’ Teddy groaned, dropping the book to the floor.
Izzie has stolen his life. The book has pictures- cartoony things that make everything worse. Augustus, with his scuffed shoes, cowlick, cap glued to the back of his head, and catapult in his pocket, becomes Teddy’s fictional double. The cover reads The Adventures of Augustus by Delphie Fox—Izzie’s pen name. Inside, the inscription: ‘To my nephew Teddy. My own darling Augustus.’ What rot.”

Augustus will haunt him for the rest of his life – a permanent fictional doppelgänger. Like William, he remains eleven forever: a scamp, a rapscallion, a riotous, misunderstood boy embattled against comic vicars and outraged farmers. Unlike Teddy, Augustus inhabits an unchanging world.

Richmal Crompton published two books in 1925: Still William – the fifth in a series that would span six decades – and Anne Morrison. Her last William the Lawless, completed by her niece, appeared posthumously in 1970.

Crompton wanted to be taken seriously as a novelist and she wrote over forty books for an adult readership. At first, her William stories were tales about children written for adults, but they soon became popular with children, who skated over the satire and were not deterred by the sometimes demanding vocabulary.

For the #1925Club I wanted to read Anne Morrison, which is apparently autobiographical, but I was unable to find a copy. Still William – is still in print and easily available. 

Like many of my generation, William was a staple of my childhood reading. I remember the dusky maroon library books crammed with madcap adventures of the Outlaws gang and the Brown family: the ever-patient mother forever darning socks; the exasperated father who reads the paper and goes to “business”; and the older siblings, Robert and Ethel, who go courting, play golf, and are forever embarrassed and tormented by William’s antics. I feel lucky to own six such books, rescued from a school dumpster circa 1988.

Rereading them now, they remain entertaining. Crompton wrote about children for adults before children discovered them, and the vocabulary reflects that – children’s wits were sharpened and their word-hoards enlarged. Still William is full of sophisticated turns of phrase and satirical observations.

William the Anarchist

Richmal Crompton first based William on her brother Jack. The irrepressible, anarchic William was the voice of childhood resistance against adult authority, social expectations, and family restraint. He was the exemplar of child logic, and the predictable cause of disruption and chaos.  

While Enid Blyton’s  Famous Five had a good time – endless adventures, freedom from adults, and farmhouse teas – they complained about authority but did not rebel. William found holidays repressive. Freedom was to be found, and fought for, on home turf. William and his gang of Outlaws resisted the tyranny of respectability, family expectations, and the absurdities of adult behaviour. He is an anarchic, mud-splattered antihero whose imagination and good intentions always lead to mayhem and misunderstanding.

The William books satirise the very institutions Crompton herself held dear: family, Church, and school. She was the daughter of a clergyman-schoolteacher and – before she was stricken by polio- a much-liked classics teacher at a girls’ school in Bromley, Kent.

The Botts
Still William introduces Violet Elizabeth Bott – the pampered offspring of Mr Bott (of Digestive Sauce fame) and his socially ambitious wife. As a child, I remembered her as a lisping hanger-on with golden curls and frilly dresses, famous for using blackmail to get her way (“I’ll thcream and thcream till I’m thick”). Rereading, I find she’s just as mischievous as the Outlaws and quite ready to join in their escapades.

The Botts have taken over the Hall and invite the Browns – and William – for tea. The book’s first illustration shows William scrubbed, clean, and uncomfortable in his Sunday suit.

“Violet Elizabeth’s fair hair was not naturally curly but as the result of great daily labour on the part of the much-maligned nurse it stood up in a halo of curls round her small head.…
William gazed at this engaging apparition in horror.”

Later, she tags along with the gang as they go trespassing, slips delightedly into a bog, gets covered in mud, and escapes through a hedge chased by gamekeepers. It turns out the frilly little girl in white likes to play too.

William and Girls
William’s contempt for “soppy” girls is well known. Apart from Joan – the one girl allowed into the gang –  his mother, and the occasional love interest, he has little good to say about them. Yet while he professes to despise girls and mocks his brother’s romantic swoonings, he is easily infatuated.

“Miss Lomas lived at the other end of the village.… She held a Bible class for the Sons and Daughters of Gentlefolk every Saturday afternoon.”

William is required to attend and distracts her with a question about St Valentine:

“Well, I don’t think much of him’s a saint, writin’ soppy letters to girls instead of gettin’ martyred prop’ly like Peter an’ the others.”

When Miss Lomas’s cousin, the very pretty Miss Dobson, takes over the class, William is smitten. Instead of bible verses she reads them  reads them “Scalped by the Reds”. William “drew a deep breath of delight.” He decides to marry her when he grows up so he determines to study the art of courtship while gluing himself to Ethel and her new beau:

While  mourning the loss of a confiscated stag beetle named Albert – the cause of Miss Lomas’s sudden departure – he comes to his senses and recognises his true love and  realises, “there was no one quite like Joan.”

“But I like you better than any insect, Joan,” he said generously.
“Oh, William, do you really?” said Joan, deeply touched.
“Yes—an’ I’m goin’ to marry you when I grow up if you won’t want me to talk a lot of soppy stuff that no one can understand.”

A Reformed William Turns Over a New Leaf

When William earnestly decides to reform and “turn over a new leaf,” things of course go wildly wrong. Pragmatically, 

“He decided to start first thing next morning—not before.… It would be jolly nice to have a happy, grateful and admiring family circle, and William only hoped that if he took the trouble to be self-denying and self-sacrificing his family circle would take the trouble to be happy and grateful and admiring.”

He attempts to help his brother Robert with his romantic affairs and sister Ethel with her social arrangements result in disaster. 

“Suddenly William had yet another brilliant idea. He’d make a proper pudding for his father. It wouldn’t take long. The cookery book was on the dresser. You just did what the book told you. It was quite easy.”

The outcome is that William is sent to bed without any supper while:

“Downstairs William’s family circle consumed a meal consisting of sardines and stewed pears. They consumed it in gloomy silence, broken only by Mr. Brown’s dry, “I suppose there must be quite a heavy vein of insanity somewhere in the family for it to come out so strong in William.” And by Ethel’s indignant, “And epilepsy! Why on earth did he fix on epilepsy?” And by Robert’s gloomy, “Engaged to be married to her … twenty-four … chained to her for life.”
Upstairs the cause of all their troubles sat on the floor in the middle of his bedroom with his little pile of eatables before him.
“Come on, my gallant braves,” he said addressing an imaginary band of fellow captives. “Let us eat well and then devise some way of escape or ere dawn our bleached bones may dangle from yon gallows.”
Then quite happily and contentedly he began to eat the fluffy stick of toffee….”

The spirit of William triumphs in spite of all disaster.

Truthful William 
At Christmas with relatives visiting William applies the vicar’s Christmas sermon on honesty too literally and offends everyone in sight.

In the end, William’s energy and optimism triumph.

The Endurance of William
The William stories retain their satirical edge even today. It’s remarkable, considering Crompton regarded them as “pot-boilers.” She wanted to be known for her adult novels – she wrote forty-one of them, plus short stories – but they never achieved the fame of William.

Crompton was unmarried, family-oriented, conservative, churchgoing daughter of a clergyman-schoolteacher. There’s an element of self-parody in her depiction of William’s world which is populated by batty and hypocritical eccentrics, aesthetic curates, self-important social climbers, peppery ex-military gentlemen, irascible landowners, nervous clerics, disapproving spinsters, and vapid “bright young things”.

Children were not deterred  by the sophisticated vocabulary and social satire. They relished the anarchic adventures and victories over silly, stuffy and insufferable adults and authority.  By the early 1980s, over nine million copies had been sold worldwide, and new editions continue to appear.

William’s adventures proved timeless. Crompton parodied middle-class  with William as an irrepressible insurgent  disturbed the universe of middle-class domesticity and respectability. He was the scruffy disreputable antidote to saintly, sentimental Lord Fauntleroys .

A Vanished Childhood
William’s world evokes a nostalgic pastoral of interwar childhood: vicars and squires, tennis clubs, golf, hedgerows and fields, peardrops and bullseyes, and endless unsupervised freedom. Though he must go to school and dress for church, William roams freely, climbs trees, builds bonfires, sneaks out at night, falls into ditches, trespasses, and invents wild games and escapades. His mischief is rarely malicious – more often the result of misunderstanding or misplaced good intentions.

Over fifty years, Crompton published more than 300 William stories and forty novels. She was halfway through her 359th story when she died in 1969.

Not everything has aged well. One rather cringy story, “William and the Nasties” in William the Detective (1935), was withdrawn for antisemitic overtones (though it was intended as a satire of fascism). Reading it now, it feels more clumsy and dated than hateful. Elsewhere, and there’s the usual dressing-up as “natives” or “Red Indians,” and a casual attitude to animal welfare that jars today. In Still William there’s liberal application of boot black and the gang dress up as various “natives” and “Red Indians” an activity something much relished by Violet Elizabeth Bott.

In a 1968 interview, Crompton said: “I often refer to him as my Frankenstein monster. I’ve tried to get rid of him, but he’s quite impossible to get rid of.” William became an international success – especially in Germany, the Netherlands, and India, where he was studied in English classes. Crompton found this amusing: “I don’t think William would have approved at all.”

A Child Who Never Ages
Reading the stories again, I find comfort in their familiarity – the wild, muddled schemes, the improbable triumphs, and the chaotic consequences of good intentions gone awry. The backdrop of village life evokes a long-vanished, half-imagined Britain that never really existed. What endures is William’s boundless energy and infinite imaginative capacity for mischief.

William is now well over a century old, but in spite of all the social change, political upheaval, and literary fashion, he will always be eleven.
And here’s sister Ethel at the end of “William the Matchmaker”:

​​Ethel flounced out of the room and slammed the door. She found her mother in the dining-room darning socks.
“Mother,” she said, “can’t we do anything about William? Can’t we send him to an orphanage or anything?”
“No, darling,” said Mrs. Brown calmly. “You see, for one thing, he isn’t an orphan.”
“But he’s so awful!” said Ethel. “He’s so unspeakably dreadful!”
“Oh, no, Ethel,” said Mrs. Brown still darning placidly. “Don’t say things like that about your little brother. I sometimes think that when William’s just had his hair cut and got a new suit on he looks quite sweet!”

An interview with Richmal Crompton from 1968.

Still William is my second book for he #1925Club is hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, The first was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.