Greyfriars School
A map of Greyfriars School
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| Established | 1540s |
|---|---|
| Type |
Independent fictional boarding school Public school |
| Religion | Church of England |
| Headmaster | The Rev Herbert Henry Locke, D.D. |
| Chairman of the Board of Governors | Sir Hilton Popper |
| Founder | Henry VIII |
| Location |
Kent England |
| Gender | Boys |
| Ages | 13–18 |
| Publication | The Greyfriars Herald |
| Created by | Charles Hamilton writing as Frank Richards |
Greyfriars School is a fictional English public school used as a setting in the long-running series of stories by the writer Charles Hamilton, who wrote under the pen-name Frank Richards. Although the stories are focused on the Remove (or lower fourth form), whose most famous pupil was Billy Bunter, other characters also featured on a regular basis.
From 1908 to 1940, the stories appeared in The Magnet, in a total of 1,683 weekly issues. After 1940, the stories continued to appear in book form until Hamilton's death in 1961. Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School was broadcast as a BBC television series from 19 February 1951 to 22 July 1961. A comic strip was published in Knockout (drawn by Frank Minnitt) from 1939 to 1958, and then drawn by various other artists until Knockout merged with Valiant, in which comic strips continued to appear from 23 February 1963 to 16 October 1976.
Greyfriars School is situated in the county of Kent. The school lies on the fictional river Sark, upstream of the nearby village of Friardale and downstream of the market town of Courtfield. It is near the coast: the fishing village of Pegg is described as being within a mile (1.6 km). There are two other public schools nearby, Cliff House girls school and Highcliffe. Farther away are the towns of Lantham and Wapshott.
The school consists of seven forms, loosely based on age groups. Each form has its own Form Master, who take the majority of the lessons. Specialist masters are used for French, sports and mathematics.
Unusually, both in terms of real-life public schools and their fictional counterparts, Greyfriars School does not have a House system. In the early Magnet stories, this created a problem for the author in that inter-house rivalries are a useful source of plot conflicts in many fictional school stories. To compensate for this, Frank Richards created three separate forms of similar age groups at Greyfriars (the Lower Fourth, the Fourth and the Upper Fourth) as well as rival characters in the neighbouring Highcliffe School. As the stories developed, the time would come when plot conflicts would arise naturally from the minutely detailed characters that were fleshed out over the years.
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