A new type of schoolboy story emerged after the First War, very different to the public school sort of which Frank Richards was the most famous, if subversive, exponent. The values such books celebrated – in general, if not in the person of Billy Bunter – were those the ruling classes were expected to uphold in the service, in particular, of the British Empire. However, both the Empire and the ruling classes were less supremely in control after the War, and titles such as Play Up, Royals and Our Fellows at St Mark's, redolent of exhortations to a collective to live up to common ideals, had to compete with the different priorities of the emerging middle class. Of course, it may be argued that I am reading too much into different tastes amongst different groups at different periods, but to me, the title of the first book in a series that dominated schoolboy fiction over the half century after the war sums up the very different approach to life that took Britain over during this period.

I refer to Just William, in which Richmal Crompton brought alive in 1922 the irrepressible highly individualistic scamp who ran riot amongst his own family and his village. This was a life closer in background, if not in its frenetic activity, to that of most schoolboy readers, as opposed to the rarefied context of a public school with chaps exclaiming ‘My giddy aunt’ and schoolmasters more at home in Vergil's world than the twentieth century.