Frank Richards (8 August 1876 – 24 December 1961) was an English writer, best known for a long-running series of stories for weekly magazines about recurrent casts of characters. His most frequent and famous genre was boys’ public school stories, though he also wrote in other genres. He also wrote hundreds of stories under his real name, such as the Ken King stories for The Modern Boy.
Why is Frank Richards featured in the Guinness Book of Records?
Frank Richards is estimated to have written about 100 million words in his lifetime and has been featured in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most prolific author.
What is the real name of Frank Richards?
The real name of Frank Richards is Charles Hamilton.
What are some of the pen names Frank Richards used?
Charles Hamilton wrote under several pen names, usually adopting a different name for each group of characters he wrote about, the best known being Frank Richards for the Greyfriars School stories that featured Billy Bunter. Other important pen names were Martin Clifford for St. Jim’s, Owen Conquest for Rookwood, and Ralph Redway for The Rio Kid.
Early life
Hamilton was born in Ealing, London, one of the eight children of Mary Ann Hannah and John Hamilton (1839-1884), a master carpenter. Charles Hamilton was privately educated at Thorn House School in Ealing, where he studied classical Greek among other subjects. He then went on to become a fiction writer, and his first story was accepted almost immediately and appeared in 1895.
Start of Career
Over the following years, he was to establish himself as the main writer with the publisher Trapps Holmes, providing several thousand stories on a range of subjects, including police, detectives, firemen, Westerns, as well as school stories. In 1906 he started to write for the Amalgamated Press, and although he continued to have stories published for Trapps Holmes until 1915 (many of which were reprints), his allegiance was gradually moved.
Later career (1940–1961)
When The Magnet was eventually closed in 1940, Hamilton was hard put to obtain work. A newspaper interview that he gave the London Evening Standard helped establish his name as that of the creator of the stories. He couldn’t, of course, pick up where The Magnet had ended the Greyfriars saga because Amalgamated Press retained the rights and would not give them back. He was forced to establish new schools like Carcroft and Sparshott, and he even attempted the romance genre under the pseudonym Winston Cardew.
By 1946, Richards had been given permission to write Greyfriars stories again and obtained a contract from publisher Charles Skilton for a hardback series, the first volume of which, Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School, was published in September 1947. The series continued for the rest of his life, the publisher later changing to Cassells. He wrote additional stories for St. Jim’s, Rookwood, and Cliff House in addition to seven series of Billy Bunter television scripts for the BBC.
Heyday (1907–1940)
In 1907, Amalgamated Press launched a story paper for boys called The Gem. The contents of its No. 11 were established, with major content forming part of the work being a serialized story based upon St. Jim’s school starring Tom Merry, authored by Charles Hamilton under his popular pen name, Martin Clifford. This series quickly became very popular, and, to ride on its coattails, a comparable enterprise was developed in 1908. This would be called The Magnet. This would focus on a school named Greyfriars, and again Hamilton would pen it, but under the pseudonym Frank Richards.
Did Frank Richards marry?
Hamilton never married, but some details of one romance are provided in a biography, and another is briefly mentioned in his autobiography. Early in the 20th century, he was briefly engaged to a lady called Agnes, and later he formed a brief attachment to an American lady whom he alluded to as Miss New York.
What Were the Interests of Frank Richards?
His interests were the writing of stories, the study of Latin, Greek, and modern languages, chess, music, and gambling at Monte Carlo, particularly. Horace, the Roman poet, was one of his favorite writers. He had traveled much throughout Europe during his youth but never went out of England after 1926 except to visit France. He stayed in a small house known as Rose Lawn at Kingsgate, a hamlet in St Peter parish, now a part of Broadstairs, Kent, where he was cared for by a housekeeper, Miss Edith Hood. She remained at Rose Lawn after his death.
What was Frank Richard’s writing style like?
He used a facetious voice, strewn with witty classical allusions that ended up making the tales simultaneously intelligible and learned. In this regard, he has been compared to P. G. Wodehouse, who also came from a similar era and was an extremely prolific writer in a genre that was not too serious. His phenomenal productivity has been put down to a very flowing style that seemed to come naturally to him and in turn made the stories very readable [19], at the same time being a bit verbose.
Why is Frank Richards popular?
Much of his popularity derives from his ability to allow the reader to participate vicariously in the ongoing adventure. As with many later children’s writers, the stories center on a small core group of characters who form a close-knit unit—at St. Jim’s there was the Terrible Three, at Rookwood the Fistical Four, and at Greyfriars, the Famous Five. Such groups, though closed to other pupils, are implicitly open to readers who are subliminally invited to include themselves amongst their number, thereby establishing their involvement with the story.
Criticism
Before World War II, all of Hamilton’s writing was for weekly papers, produced on cheap paper and lacking any suggestion of permanence; it had nonetheless attracted a loyal following but, unsurprisingly, no critical attention from the mainstream media. However, in 1940, a privately printed publication called the Story Paper Collector emerged.
It was printed at irregular times in Canada until 1966, when the founder, originally from Croydon, England, died. Distributed around the world, it contained critical discussions and articles about the work of Charles Hamilton and other storypaper writers. In November 1946, another magazine, the Collectors’ Digest, began. Created by Herbert Leckenby, and in due course edited by Eric Fayne and Mary Cadogan.