A SEEMINGLY no-nonsense, gritty Lancastrian market town, Bury is a remarkably fertile nest of creativity.
It is the home town of not only the black pudding, but also of the former Prime Minister and father of the modern police force, Robert Peel, comedienne extraordinaire Victoria Wood and the late Richmal Crompton, author of the fabulous Just William stories, which celebrate their 90th anniversary this year.
These exquisitely written short stories enthralled my second son (a latter-day William himself) when he was younger. Their power to reach out over the decades from his inception in 1919 is undiminished.
Like all the great fictional writers, Crompton gets the psychology of human behaviour right, proving that, while circumstances and society changes, people do not.
Then there’s the great humour of the Just William books, pricking pomposity and poking fun at poodle-fakers in a classically British way. My son and I even had discussions on what became of William, with his derring-do and effortless leadership skills, deciding that he was bound to have excelled himself as a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain.
Whether he survived into the post-war world or remained forever the charismatic youthful rebel is a moot point. I suspect, in spite of his unerring survival instincts, he made the ultimate sacrifice and remains forever young.
Unlike JK Rowling’s decision to age Harry Potter, William Brown remains resolutely 11 years old, forever boisterously getting into scrapes in a golden village setting.
Typically, as a high-thinking novelist, Richmal Crompton, like Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, or Sir Arthur Sullivan with WS Gilbert, she was dismissive of her world-famous creation, disparaging her short stories as “potboilers”.
This very success and mass acclaim seemed to chill their creators, especially as they failed in achieving equivalent triumphs with their “serious” artistic endeavours.
All the more surprising to learn that William was not originally written for children, but first appeared in Home Magazine, aimed at adults. Crompton, an award-winning classics scholar, was the daughter of a Bury vicar. A victim of polio in her mid-thirties, she had to give up teaching.
Looking after her widowed mother, she never married or had children, but doted on her nephews and nieces, explaining: “I am probably the last surviving example of the Victorian professional aunt.”
Instead, her fertility was poured into writing, with a tally of 41 adult novels and nine volumes of short stories, producing two books a year.
Yet, in spite of her highly-accurate observational eye, the post-war revolution in literary tastes forced her into retirement after publishing The Inheritor, in 1960, albeit as a very wealthy woman, thanks to Just William.
Although the idyllic, unchanging rurality suits the William stories so well, it was her downfall in adult fiction, she realised: “There’s not much call nowadays for quiet stories about families and village life – that’s rather a vanished world.”
Only one of her 50 titles remains in print, the novel Family Roundabout, reprinted by Persephone. Alongside this is the storming 10m-plus best-seller sales of her 37 collections of William stories, published in multiple languages, including Icelandic.
Among Crompton’s files after her death was a newspaper cutting reporting the Just William stories had been banned from Lancashire libraries by the county librarian.
Doubtless, the Brown family’s upper middle class world of servants and village fetes was deemed meaningless to new generations of British children. How wrong this do-gooder was. It is the enduring power of literature which allows us to enjoy living beyond our experiences and broadening our horizons.
The 90th-birthday special editions of More William, William Again and William at War are published by Macmillan.
peterelson
