Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings stories continued the traditional boys' boarding school novel to the end of the twentieth century.
The Jennings books, by Anthony Buckeridge, are a series of boys’ boarding school stories by Anthony Buckeridge. The first in the series, Jennings Goes To School, was published in 1950, and the last, That’s Jennings, appeared in 1994, ten years before Buckeridge’s death. They feature Jennings, the enthusiastic and misguided schoolboy hero, with trailing shoelaces and inky fingers, alongside his sidekick Darbyshire, the anxious and rather pedantic scholar, conspicuous by his glasses and concerned expression.
The series falls squarely into the tradition of the British boys’ school story, with similar setting and conventions to Billy Bunter, or even Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Though the novels only started being published when the traditional boarding school was on the way out, Linbury Court Preparatory School kept it alive in fictional form. In fact Buckeridge wrote some novels about a state school, the Rex Milligan series, but these were nowhere near as successful as the Jennings books.
The plots of the Jennings series revolve around the concerns of the prep school: shirking games, sneaking out of bounds to see a film, doing homework, etc. They are less concerned with manliness, truth and sportmanship than Tom Brown or Eric, but nonetheless divorced from reality. There is, for example, no bullying, smoking or bad language in the books – they fail to even achieve the level of realism of Kipling’s Victorian school story Stalky and Co. These are definitely children’s books, and they don’t stray outside the long-established conventions of their genre.
The Jennings series does however mark itself out with its verbal inventiveness. Boarding school stories are famous (or notorious) for their use of slang, with phrases like “ripping”, “topping” and “beak” appearing with unerring frequency. Buckeridge takes this to a new level, having his characters exclaim “fossilised fish-hooks!”, “petrified paint-pots!”, complaining “what a frantic hoo-hah” and calling each other “you gruesome specimen.” In fact wordplay is a large part of the books’ appeal, with many plots hinging on the boys’ ability to spectacularly misunderstand a teacher, or to rigidly obey the letter of the school rules whilst flouting their spirit. (For example, the scene where Jennings tries to explain to Mr. Wilkins that taking buses wasn’t strictly prohibited in the terms of the cross country run...)
Though the Jennings stories take place in the fifties (mentioning Westerns and space comics), it’s a completely different world to that of Willans and Searle’s Molesworth books, with their schoolboy antihero who jokes about Communism, modern jazz and nuclear reactors. Their world is part of a tradition that stretches back into the nineteenth century, but still apparently maintains its appeal at the beginning of the twenty-first.
