The Greyfriars Holiday Annual 1934

Discussion and Review area for things read and seen
Post Reply
User avatar
John
Site Admin
Posts: 579
Joined: Sat Apr 07, 2007 1:09 pm
Spam Protection: No

The Greyfriars Holiday Annual 1934

Post by John »

I acquired this because when I was but a lad I found a battered copy without a cover and at the time thought it was pretty good. It took a while to find out which year from 1920 to 1941 was the one I had, but it turns out to be 1934.

Substantially written by Frank Richards these adventure and school tales often feature the Remove at Greyfriars and many of us will be well aware of Billy Bunter and Harry Wharton & Co.

What is interesting is that here we have an annual that is relatively literary in style. The stories are short stories and even a novelette ("A Schoolboy's Honour" - not a bad bit of writing at all) and although very upper class in tone it expresses all the good themes and discusses emotions, honour, even girls...There are aver 250 heavy card type pages in this huge volume. The most literary find was a spoof poem based on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I don't see anything like it getting into a modern trivial annual full of colour and quick "sound bytes" of text.

It's quite clear that education in the 1930s was on a distinctly higher plane than now, and these stories reflect that. We are now so dumbed down as to be barely educated at all.

Cue Jade The Musical.....

But for The Greyfriars Holiday Annual: 5s
Post Reply