‘Just William’ represents a time when rebellious boys reigned supreme

One hundred years ago Home magazine published the first Just William story. How do the books about the rambunctious 11-year-old hold up today, asks David Barnett

Adrian Donnatt as William and Bonnie Langford as Violet Elizabeth Bott in the 1977 TV adaptation (Getty)

Looking back, the February 1919 edition of Home magazine seems perhaps an odd place for the adventures of William Brown to begin.

The periodical was aimed at women, with the associated features and tips on successful domesticity, and while it did run fiction, it was generally the sort of story likely to appeal to the interwar homemaker.

So what did they make of this scruffy little 11-year-old, who seemed to devote his life to usurping authority, getting involved in all manner of unwholesome escapades, and generally being a pain in the neck to his parents and any other adults within catapult shot?

Well, it seems they liked him, because the William stories were incredibly popular, and after a run in Home magazine they were picked up by another periodical, called Happy, before they were collected together in 1922 in the first book, Just William. And a British literary classic was born.

William was the creation of Richmal Crompton Lamburn, who was perhaps as unlikely an author to come up with the adventures of an anarchic scallywag as Home magazine was to run them. Crompton was a curate’s daughter, born in 1890 in Bury, Lancashire.

She studied at London University then, like her father, became a teacher, taking up at her old school the post of senior classics mistress, before moving on to Bromley High School for Girls. She taught until 1923, when she was forced to give up her job after contracting polio. The first William book being a roaring success by this time, she devoted herself to full-time writing.

It was while a teacher that she conjured up William Brown in her spare time, and he was taken to the hearts of the Home magazine readership in such a great way that she wrote 40 stories for them, and more for Happy magazine. There were 38 William books written in all, the last one published in 1970, the year after Crompton’s death.

William was, by any measure, what we’d probably call an anti-hero today, with his wilful disobedience and often close-to-the-edge pranks… painting a dog blue, setting his own hound, Jumble, on a pen full of rats, from which it emerges “foaming at the mouth, with a lust for murder”, and borderline bullying (if you can call covering a younger boy with mud and making him swear in front of his uptight parents “borderline”, that is).

Given his first audience was adult women, perhaps Crompton wrote William as a kind of safety valve for them, maybe his extreme misadventures sending the message that no matter how at the end of the tether they were with their own offspring, it could be far, far worse.

Or perhaps there was a sense of freedom in the William stories. They appeared in the year after the horrors of the First World War, when young men – some of them not that much older than William – had gone away to fight and never come home.

Richmal Crompton, the unlikely author of the Just William series (Getty) (Getty Images)

William and his gang, the Outlaws, perhaps represented that newfound liberty and a feeling that it was time to let children be children again, and that the strictures of wartime life and the terrors that were taking place just across the Channel were over.

By the time Just William was published in 1922, the stories had been repositioned, either as a deliberate marketing plan or just by finding their own natural audience, as children’s literature. And William continued to get in as much trouble as he ever did.

In fact, to make no bones about it, William was a little s***. And the sort of little s*** who, had he not come from a middle-class household, would have today been given the appellation “Rat Boy” or similar and splashed across the tabloids as a prime example of broken Britain.

And more than that, he was dangerous. There’s a story that you will not find in any collections today, as it has been excised from the canon by the mutual agreement of Crompton’s estate and the publishers Macmillan. It’s called “William and the Nasties”, and it was published in 1934, and a cursory glance of it (you can find the text online if you wish) will show you why.

In the story, William and his gang discover that over in Germany there’s a political party sweeping to power which they think, in their childish ways, is called the Nasty Party. William understands that the main activity of the Nasties is clearing Jews out of their property and seizing their assets, and rather handily the village sweet shop has just been taken over by the “hook-nosed” Mr Isaacs, who fails to give the Outlaws what they see as their right – free sweets.

Thus, the Outlaws restyle themselves as “Nasties” and William takes on the role of “Him Hitler” – he doesn’t want to be “Herr Hitler” because that sounds like a girl. They make a banner with a swastika on it and call themselves “storm troops”, and William has a misty-eyed, Aryan vision of “chasing Jew after Jew out of sweetshop after sweetshop”.

It’s quite breathtaking to modern sensibilities, and Crompton’s reasons for writing it are not particularly clear. But good triumphs in the end, and William and the Outlaws come to their senses, especially after they foil a burglary at the sweet shop (admittedly, by accident) and the grateful Mr Isaacs gives them a barrow-load of free sweets. And William comes to realise that the “Nasty” way of doing things is not the right one.

It’s actually plausible that Crompton was attempting to write an anti-racist story here, but the subtleties of that will be lost on most children, with the focus on the fervour with which the gang get caught up in the idea of kicking out the Jews, and the redemption, such as it is, being largely dependent on Mr Isaacs placating the Outlaws with freebies. It’s a rare misstep in the William stories, and it was a wise decision all round, when made a few years back, to remove it from any collections.

That said, there are other aspects of the William stories which haven’t found favour with modern mores. For example, the RSPCA put out a statement when a new 80th anniversary edition of the William stories was being put out to take issue with the aforementioned incident of the dog being painted blue. That appeared in the story “The Show”, in which the Outlaws wanted to raise cash for new bows and arrows, and thought that a painted fox terrier would be a good crowd-puller.

In “The Stolen Whistle”, William quite deliberately sets his dog Jumble on a field full of sheep, and in “William and the League” the rat incident occurs, as well as Jumble being put into an enclosure to fight another dog – something that could earn a five-year prison sentence today.

The RSPCA expressed concern about the stories, pointing out that “children will have access to paint. We need to teach them that animals do deserve respect and are sentient beings. What is important is that William does not get away with mistreating animals.” And the National Canine Defence League added: “The publishers should seriously consider the changes in social mores and the unacceptability of ill-treatment, especially as fun, by today’s readers no matter how well intentioned.”

This was all back in 1999, and as the editor of the series for Macmillan at the time, Sarah Davies, pointed out, the William stories were from a very different era. She said: “The stories were written at a very different time with different opinions about things. We are aware of that but strongly feel you can’t take the guts out of these stories. That is part of their appeal.”

“William and the Nasties”, it should be pointed out, had already been removed from the books by this point, which few will, hopefully, disagree with. But on the other matters, it definitely does come down to the old argument of something being “of its generation”, and which side of the fence you fall on with regards to that.

It hardly needs saying that the William books, in their original form, would not find much traction today if presented to a publisher as a new body of work. But that’s down to the details; one thing Richmal Crompton and William did was to embed in our culture the idea of the very naughty boy as a protagonist.

There had been others before him, of course; Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer predates William by more than half a century. And more came after, especially in the anarchic, knockabout world of comics. Dennis the Menace debuted in the Beano in 1951, forever up to mischief and generally on the receiving end of his dad’s slipper for his misdemeanours. Like William, Dennis had a faithful hound – Gnasher to William’s Jumble – on hand for their petty crimes, and had his own gang of Outlaws to aid and abet him.

The comics of the time also threw up a raft of other naughty characters – Minnie the Minx, a distaff version of Dennis, Roger the Dodger, a young con artist in the making, and the Bash Street Kids, a terrifying gang of lawless, out-of-control kids.

But though Dennis’s popularity never waned (indeed, with a new TV show, he’s as popular as ever), he and his comic cohort did soften with the times, getting up to mild mischief rather than proper menacing.

If William begat Dennis, then Dennis probably begat Horrid Henry, Francesca Simon’s character who began life on the page and leapt to TV cartoon and big screen movie. Though not really the sort of kid you’d necessarily want to look after for a day, Henry’s horridness was often directed at well-deserving teachers, or bullies, or gentle joshing of his younger brother.

While characters such as these have adjusted to be more representative of modern life, with Richmal Crompton dying in 1970, William’s adventures are preserved in amber, of their era and never really to be updated or reimagined under modern sensibilities.

And his popularity endures, no doubt partly due to his TV appearances alongside the books. The 1977 show featuring Adrian Dannatt as William and Bonnie Langford’s unforgettable turn as his posh foil Violet Elizabeth Bott, who famously proclaimed that she would “thcweam and thcweam and thcweam until I’m thick” endeared William and Co to a new generation.

In 2010 there was another small screen adaptation, starring Daniel Roche, best known as Ben from Outnumbered, as William. It kept the stories firmly in their era rather than updating them.

And that’s the way we have to look at William. Although there have been moves to update the covers from their original school cap and catapult imagery, the essence of William is that he’s a thing from the past, and his adventures and misdemeanours need to be viewed through the prism of the passage of time.

Naughtiness is inherently funny to children, and not necessarily something to aspire to, just something fun to read about. But being bad for its own sake can pale a little; perhaps what’s funniest about William is when he’s thumbing his nose at authority rather then terrorising smaller children and animals.

Maybe it’s rebelliousness which we find more appealing, and there are many characters, before and after William, who embody that spirit – and while the boys find painting dogs blue such a wheeze, perhaps it’s the girls who truly rebel.

I’m thinking of Roald Dahl’s Matilda, or Dick King Smith’s Sophie, or Pippi Longstocking, Anne of Green Gables, Marmalade Atkins, Beryl the Peril.

William might have been going for a century this month, and happy birthday to him and all, but it seems like the girls are smarter than the boys in knowing which battles to fight, how to tackle injustice, and not getting caught with it, and that certainly seems something to celebrate.