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jennings (writer - anthony buckeridge)
29. Jun 2004 at 08:32
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ANTHONY Buckeridge, the author of the hugely popular Jennings series of childrens’ books, has died at the age of 92.

He was at his home in Barcombe, Lewes, in Sussex, yesterday afternoon when he died following a long illness.

His wife of 42 years, Eileen, was with him, having nursed him following a blood transfusion and the onset of Parkinson’s Disease.

Buckeridge leaves his wife, three children - Sally, Timothy and Corin - and four grandchildren.

Mrs Buckeridge said yesterday: "I kept him at home, nursed him at home and it has been a very, very peaceful end."

The widespread popularity of the schoolboy series followed the radio success of Jennings At School on Children’s Hour.

The first book in 1950, Jennings Goes To School, was followed by a further 24 in a series which was translated into 12 languages and gained international acclaim selling millions of copies around the world.

Buckeridge also penned plays, musicals and his autobiography, continuing to write until he became unwell in 2002.

But he lived to see a revival of interest in the tales of the schoolboy and his sidekick Darbishire at Linbury Court School.

He visited the Edinburgh Festival in 2000, and was awarded an OBE in last year’s New Year’s Honours List, for services to literature.

Mrs Buckeridge said that recognition for his life’s work had brought an "evening glow to a life’s work".

She added: "One of the things I have always been pleased about for him was the retrospective view of his books.

"The old stuff on Children’s Hour always concentrated on the humour - which is there and added to the popularity - but he has lived long enough to get a reassessment of the literary worth of his writing."
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Obituaries

Author of the Jennings stories which never seemed to date either as BBC scripts or on the printed page

IF I HAD been an undertaker,” Anthony Buckeridge once wrote, “I would write funny stories about funerals.” The words point not only to his inherently cheerful disposition but also to his need to ground his writing in things that he knew about. So, as schoolmaster rather than undertaker, he turned naturally to the foibles of boys for his source material and, in the creation of Linbury Court School and its inhabitants, he shared with several generations of young readers his delight in the ridiculous.

But he took some time to discover his metier. Born in 1912, Anthony Malcolm Buckeridge had rather a fraught childhood, since his father, a bank clerk, was killed on the Western Front in 1917 after just half an hour on active service, and his mother (unusually for the period, a university graduate) determined to take his place as breadwinner.

The young Anthony was thus looked after by various relations until, through the Bank Clerks’ Orphanage charity, he was dispatched to Seaford College, where he gained a pupil’s-eye view of boarding-school life over ten not-unenjoyable years. A couple of forms ahead of him in the school was a “mildly eccentric” boy by the name of Diarmaid Jennings, whose japes were to be of notable significance for his younger contemporary in years to come.

After Seaford, Buckeridge, as seems to have been expected of him, went to work in a bank. But he did not relish being cooped up all day and, having harboured thoughts of becoming a teacher, he took advantage of a £500 legacy and worked for a place at University College London.

Here too though, he could not settle, and he left during his final year, “defeated by Latin”, and in 1936 took up a post at a prep school in Suffolk. For the next 15 years, with a break during the war, when he served in the Auxiliary Fire Service, he continued schoolmastering, and although he was a lifelong socialist who favoured state schooling, he ending up as head of English in the junior school of St Lawrence College, Ramsgate. (He sent his son to Lancing on a music scholarship.)

A constant element in this unexceptional progress had been in the opportunities it afforded Buckeridge to enjoy his love of theatre. As a boy he had been to see the Casson-Thorndike Merchant of Venice, and from that time on playgoing, playwriting and acting were a vital part of his life. (A first full length-play, Industrial Front, had been written for a drama group in the Fire Service, but its production was scuppered by D-Day and the departure of his cast to action elsewhere.)

After the war, at Ramsgate, he managed to fit some repertory acting into his timetable, along with the composition of several plays for the BBC. Among these was the one that drew upon recollections of the exploits of Diarmaid Jennings, and Jennings Learns the Ropes so impressed David Davis, the producer of Children’s Hour, that he commissioned five more scripts to go with it. Thus was Linbury Court established, to be fixed in time through 62 episodes over 16 years. Such was the popularity of the scripts that Buckeridge soon found himself kitting them out to join the ranks of the English school story, with the first book, Jennings Goes to School, appearing in 1950.

Twenty-four volumes were to follow, with the author having to tinker with 1930 details within Linbury’s 1950s time-warp to keep pace with the world’s changing mores (“chaps” become “blokes”; pocket money increases from a pound to a fiver; events both gay and queer require new descriptions). Buckeridge was therefore decidedly miffed when some “flighty girls” at his publishers decided in 2000 that his hero “doesn’t quite translate for today’s children” — a rather inept verb since the series is to be found in at least 12 languages, including Indonesian, with the Norwegians having a particular affection for “Stompa”.

Such widespread popularity bears witness to a truth found in other instances: that the circumstances of an unfamiliar setting are incidental to the comedy of the plot. Buckeridge saw his success in the Jennings books — and to a lesser extent in those about Rex Milligan, pupil at a day school — as stemming from the way he allowed “the normal routine of school” to develop one stage further than it might do in real life. (In the first play, Jennings and Darbishire, as new boys, try to finance an escape home with sixpence each.) But thespian experience also played a part, the ravelling-up of misunderstandings and the mistimed efforts to solve them owing much to the techniques of stage farce.

As may be guessed from his books, Anthony Buckeridge was a man of modest but winning temperament — some seeing Linbury Court’s Mr Carter, with his “shrewd knowledge of the youthful mind”, as something of a self-portrait. He took his craft seriously despite its small compass, and he was a keen member of the Society of Authors, helping to found its Children’s Writers Group in the 1960s.

He also persevered with his acting and was fortunate enough to be contracted to play small non-speaking, non-singing parts at Glyndebourne.

A staunch and unswerving socialist, Buckeridge had demonstrated against Franco in his youth, and later joined CND and supported the Sandinistas by donating a signed Jennings first edition. He saw no paradox in his support of state schooling. “I think children should be educated at day-schools,” he said, “except in special circumstances. If you’ve got a musical child, for example, at boarding school you’ve got all your music under one roof.” His own son went to Lancing on a music scholarship.

Despite the judgment of the flighty girls, his final years found him much fêted. Some of the early books, in fine collectors’ condition, change hands for as much as £500. The original scripts for his Jennings plays have been published, along with an autobiographical memoir, While I Remember (1999), and in a radio interview in 2001 he gave his blessing to Harry Potter — though he felt that appointing a children’s author OBE was “way over the top”. He was himself appointed OBE last year.

His marriage to his first wife, Sylvia, was dissolved. He is survived by their son and daughter, and by his second wife, Eileen, and their son Corin who has composed accompaniments to some of his father’s plays.

Anthony Buckeridge, OBE, schoolmaster, author and playwright, was born in London on June 20, 1912. He died on June 28, 2004, aged 92.

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Anthony Buckeridge, who has died aged 92, will be remembered by generations of children as the creator of the irrepressible prep school heroes Jennings and Darbishire - endlessly trying to disentangle themselves from terrible scrapes amid cries of "fossilised fish hooks!"

The stories, first produced on radio and later published in book form and adapted for television, spanned a period of almost half a century but the schoolboy world Jennings and Darbishire inhabit is timeless. Fire drill? Inevitably Jennings undertakes to call the fire brigade. A newspaper headline tells of a goldfish's Amazing Feat and Jennings agrees - it would be amazing for a goldfish to have feet, wouldn't it?

It was while Anthony Buckeridge was a teacher at St Laurence's prep school in Ramsgate that his story-spinning developed. As a bribe to his pupils he would promise to tell them a story if they "finished up their prunes and custard in 30 seconds flat" or, at bedtime, got equally speedily into bed.

Jennings was a robust, inquisitive 11-year-old with an insatiable taste for adventure, a vivid imagination and boundless enthusiasm for the many projects he originated, such as learning ventriloquial skills for a school concert, creating a time-capsule, starting a sleuthing agency or using a snorkel to clean a fish-tank.

He and his faithful lieutenant, Darbishire, do not deliberately rebel against authority. Rather their apparent anarchy and flouting of school rules spring from their fervent desire to be helpful and their inclination to take the words of adults literally.

Anthony Malcolm Buckeridge was an only child, born in London in 1912. His bank-clerk father was killed in the first world war and the Bank Clerks' Orphanage, a charitable organisation, sent him to Seaford College. This, like the fictional Linbury Court Jennings was to attend, was an independent fee-paying boarding school in Sussex.

After studying at University College London he became a teacher until the second world war when he joined the fire service. In 1948, he made one of his Jennings stories into a play which he submitted to the BBC. Their Children's Hour programme demanded a series and Jennings plays ran until 1964, often topping the lists of listeners' favourites. Buckeridge reworked the plays and the first of 25 books, Jennings Goes to School, was published in 1950. Since then several million English language copies have been sold and the stories have been translated into over a dozen languages.

Anthony Buckeridge married Sylvia Broon, a niece of Emmeline Pankhurst, in 1936: they divorced in the early 1960s. He married Eileen Selby, a teacher, in 1962. He is survived by his widow and their son and by the son and daughter of his first marriage.

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Re: jennings (writer - anthony buckeridge)
Reply #1 - 30. Jun 2004 at 09:23
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I see the listing for the TV series at IMDb.

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It doesn't seem to be on vhs or anything, though, that I can find.   Cry

Buying a hardback copy of the "Jennings Goes to School" book might be out of the budget of most, but there were a couple of paperback copies at Amazon if anyone wants'em for their collection.  Smiley

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It sounds like my kind of series anyway, apple!  Thanks for mentioning it.   Smiley

Love,
Sir J
  
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Re: jennings (writer - anthony buckeridge)
Reply #2 - 01. Jul 2004 at 03:35
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Hurrah for men in tights

When he created Jennings, Anthony Buckeridge captured the essence of English boarding school life

Hywel Williams

Thursday July 1, 2004

The Guardian

"I think we should all dress up as women. The boys will enjoy that." This judgment in favour of a liberal, if inexpert, application of mascara and eyeliner was the invariable conclusion to an annual discussion. And, delivered with the full authority of a former rugger international, it brooked no contradiction.

Teaching at a boys' boarding school in the 1980s was a daily education in that gift for the surreal which is never far beneath the surface of English institutional life. And never more so than at the end of the advent term, when boys and masters improvised dramatic sketches in order to entertain each other. It meant a few hours of licensed anarchy - as opposed to the unlicensed kind which always seemed about to engulf us.

Historians and anthropologists study such officially approved periods of "misrule", when usual boundaries are transgressed. And the theory behind the practice is always the same: the letting off of steam may liberate energies that could otherwise turn nasty. The boys' shows would tease and mock their elders, who would then conspire to show on stage their human side - quite often by letting the feminine angle into their lives. And so strapping chaps and golden lads alike camped it up in wigs and tights. Gosh, how we laughed.

Quite what should happen next once the twinset and pearls were firmly in place often seemed uncertain. Sometimes it seemed as if the dressing up was the sole point of the performance. But farce carries with it an inner momentum - and that genre's gift for deflation, for the improbable that turns into the credible, took over on stage because it was the ambit of daily term-time lives and not just that of one early December evening.

This truth of the perpetual boarding school farce was well understood by the author Anthony Buckeridge, who died earlier this week. His creation Jennings - the most engaging, well-intentioned and persistently baffled of all boys' boarding school heroes - first came to life as a radio play in 1948, and only then did Jennings and his best chum Derbyshire move into print. Their creator was always a man of the theatre, combining acting in rep while also teaching at a series of boys' schools on the south coast. It was that dual experience that gave him an aesthetic, but also a particularly realistic view of the institutional world in which he served.

Jennings is a character based on a schoolmaster's experience and observation of real boys. In this respect he is very different from other earlier fantasies of the literature of boyhood such as Wodehouse's Mike, Frank Richards's Bunter or Benson's David. Mike is a one-dimensional sportsman, Bunter is a grotesque, and the angle on David is one distorted by homoeroticism.

Buckeridge's Jennings is different because he captures the literal-mindedness of childhood, its willingness to take what adults say seriously and its vulnerability as a result of that fact. He is seen sympathetically by an author who knows that an adult and a child are two completely different kinds of beings. But there is no sentiment about this. Buckeridge is not offering an English equivalent of Rousseau or updating Wordsworth with a 1950s version of the privileged, innocent child. Jennings's problem is that he has no talent for metaphor, analogy or equivocation, for these are adults' techniques. When one master loses a cuff link, the helpful Jennings writes a reminder to himself of that fact so he can go and search for it. But the discovery by officialdom of "Mr Carter - the missing link", written in Jennings's scrawl, seems more of a Darwinian slur than a sign of a helping hand. Punishment therefore attends the best of this boy's earnest intentions.

He is perpetually 11 - before the storms of adolescent suspicion break the capacity to take the world on trust. His life is a series of scrapes, but they are not the result of awkward mischief - as in the case of Crompton's Just William. He is an inquisitive, bright and resourceful character who genuinely wants things to go well in the world. And, as a 1950s boy, he is especially interested in gadgetry and technology. Linbury Court is not some timeless Arcady where the leaves rustle on the close. It is very much postwar Britain, where class is becoming porous and the future will be more interesting than the past.

Buckeridge, a lifelong socialist, doubtless brought something of his own style into Linbury Court. Sociologically, the place is gentler than most boarding schools of that time. But the invented institution captures the innocence of a milieu where the unnatural has been written into the very terms of reference. Women and girls are absent. Boys' families have walk-on parts for speech days. The masters correspond to the 1920s Oxford division between "hearties" and "aesthetes". Gruff ones coach the rugger. Sensitive types retire to listen to Beethoven on the third programme after supper. Few of them seem to be "family men". It was all a long time ago and Mr Macmillan was prime minister. But I bet that at Linbury Court they too thought that men in tights were a real hoot.

author's email address :<a href="mailto:taliesin.hywel@virgin.net">taliesin.hywel@virgin.net</a>

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Re: jennings (writer - anthony buckeridge)
Reply #3 - 02. Jul 2004 at 00:44
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Fascinating stuff.

I've never seen any Jennings books or even heard of Jennings before.  I think that's sad...!!

A boy that is perpetually 11.

... What more could one want?
  
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Re: jennings (writer - anthony buckeridge)
Reply #4 - 26. Oct 2005 at 05:12
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Sat 22 Oct, 20:00 - 21:00

Fossilised Fish Hooks! Jennings at the BBC

Miles Kington explores the influence of Anthony Buckeridge, creator of Jennings, on classic radio comedy, talking to writers and fans from Alan Ayckbourn to Simon Hoggart.


can be heard online until saturday 29 october.

click latest edition.

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