Jennings and Darbishire

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I enjoyed the books as a child but it was only when I later had the experience of teaching some all boys’ classes in our prep department that I realised how well-crafted they are. There was a time (I was aged eight or nine) when nothing was more important to me than the Jennings books. PC Herbert Honeyball – Linbury's gruff but kind-hearted village policeman, who has more than once had wearying encounters with Jennings and his classmates. There were 25 books, and I don;’t know how many radio broadcasts; they have been reissued and rebroadcast since I heard them as a child, and I hope they enliven and amuse children who read or listen to them now. Jennings and Darbishire set up their own newspaper, the Form Three Times, have a confusing chat with some French sailors, accidentally set a photography developing dish on fire, try a spot of fishing - down Old Wilkie's chimney - and get lost in the environs of Pottlewhistle Halt.

Darbishire patents his method of removing heads from park railings with the aid of Jack Carr's car jack. He is intelligent, impulsive and imaginative, and takes himself and his occupations incredibly seriously. I was extremely fortunate to be brought up by a mother who was determined to treat her son and daughter equally and my father agreed. Nor are there any references to ‘dramas’ or tragedies at home, and there are no ‘exotic’ characters like Carlotta or Claudine in St Clare’s, or even any ‘jokers’ like Alicia Johns in Malory Towers.

Their first mission, to recover a "stolen" sports cup, is the first of several bungled attempts to imitate super sleuth Sherlock Holmes. The first ten novels in the series were reprinted in the UK in paperback, by Armada Books, in the late 1960s; and many of the novels were translated from the original English into foreign languages. In the Jennings series, there is none of the ‘moralism’ of the Blyton stories where snobbish or spiteful girls get put in their places, and almost none of the inter-personal conflict or jealousies that give her school stories much of their plot.

The plot focusses on the chaos that ensues after Jennings receives a printing kit for his birthday and starts his own newspaper.I’ve read a few boys’ school stories before and never particularly enjoyed them, and as a result have given the Jennings series a wide berth.