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dramatist (1803–185 7).
Boys' Weeklies
1. Boy's Own Paper (not Boys', as sometimes printed), founded in 1879 by the Religious
Tract Society, was a weekly to 1912, then monthly. It outlived Orwell. Chums, founded in 1892, was
published by Cassell as a rival to Boy's Own Paper.
2. In fact, the stories were not all the work of "Frank Richards" (Charles Hamilton,
1876–1961). He is credited with 1,380 of the 1,683 stories in Magnet; there were some twenty-five
substitute writers. Nevertheless, he wrote some 5,000 stories, "created" more than a hundred schools,
used two dozen pen names (including Hilda Richards, for girls-school stories, and Martin Clifford).
He probably published some 100 million words.
3. John Edward Gunby Hadath (c. 1880–1954), author of Schoolboy Grit (1913), Carey
of Cobhouse (1928), and other school stories.
4. Desmond Francis Talbot Coke (1879–1931), author of The House Prefect (1908) and
other books for children.
5. Officers' Training Corps, the army cadet force maintained in many public schools.
6. "Hilda Richards" is Frank Richards.
7. Mons, in Belgium, marked the limit of a British advance in August 1914. The German
army under von Kluck was badly mauled, but success was short-lived. In what became a famous
fighting retreat, the British II Corps held the Germans at the costly battle of Le Cateau.
8. Air Raid Precautions.
9. Ruby M. Ayres (1883–1955) was a prolific and popular romantic novelist and shortstory
writer, many of whose novels were made into films. Despite writing in this vein, she gave
down-to-earth advice in her column in Oracle, the more convincing, perhaps, because her stories
were so widely read.
10. The Navy League was founded in 1895 to foster national interest in the Royal Navy.
Orwell was a member when he was seven years old.
11. Sapper was Herman Cyril McNeile (1888–1937), adventure-story writer and creator
of the popular hero Bulldog Drummond. Ian Hay (John Hay Beith) (1876–1952) was a Scottish author
and dramatist. His The First Hundred Thousand (see "Inside the Whale," 367, n. 35) gave a
propagandist account of Kitchener's First Army in France at the beginning of World War I and was
widely read.
12. William Ewart Berry (1879–1954; Baron Camrose, 1929; Viscount, 1941) began his
working life as a reporter and rose to control (with his brother, Lord Kemsley) a newspaper and
periodical empire that included the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, twenty-two