Search SFE    Search EoF

  Omit cross-reference entries  

Willans, Geoffrey

Entry updated 20 February 2023. Tagged: Author.

Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

pic

Working name of Herbert Geoffrey Willans (1911-1958), UK schoolmaster, author and journalist who served in the Royal Navy during World War Two. He is best remembered for his comic squibs and sketches narrated as by the archetypal 1950s schoolboy Nigel Molesworth, memorably illustrated by Ronald Searle (1920-2011) in the vein of the artist's St Trinian's girls'-school cartoons though with less savagery and more whimsy. Molesworth made his debut in Punch in 1939 (without Searle); his exploits are assembled in the four profusely Searle-illustrated volumes Down with Skool! (1953), How to Be ­Topp (1954), Whizz for ­Atomms (1956; vt Molesworth's Guide to the ­Atommic Age 1956) and – published after Willans's death – Back in the Jug ­Agane (1959) [see Checklist for subtitles and omnibus editions]. Young Molesworth's cynically dyslexic style, strewn with RANDOM CAPITALIZATION and idiosyncratic catchphrases ("as any ­fule ­kno ... he is ­uterly wet and a weed ... he hav a face like a squashed tomato ...") is a vehicle for much effective Satire of contemporary relationships both within and outside the crumbling pile of St Custard's School for Boys. Daydreams and future extrapolations are frequently shaped by nuclear Physics, by visions of Space Flight and by sf – in particular Frank Hampson's Dan Dare saga in the Eagle Comic, whose inimical Little Green Man the Mekon becomes the ­PUKON while his vassals the Treens have entered the language in their own right: Searle's drawing of an unwell-looking lad who has been smoking a pipe in Whizz for ­Atomms is captioned "You hav caught me, sir, like a treen in a disabled space ship." The same volume imagines St Custard's in the Far Future where boys and masters are egg-shaped beings composed mostly of brain – as in H G Wells's essay "The Man of the Year Million" (6 November 1893 Pall Mall Budget) – and enjoy Flying with gyro-packs; but otherwise all too little has changed. Further sf props include a planned Spaceship and "­electronick brane" (see Computers) in Down with Skool!; the recasting of "Sigismund arbuthnot the mad maths master" as an sf Supervillain surrounded by his sycophantic rhomboids in How to be ­Topp, which also features a Disintegrator ray and confident nonsense about Life on Other Worlds; and a spider-Monster with the face of Molesworth himself ("Nearer and nearer crept the ghastly THING"), a home-made plutonium reactor and First Contact with mushroom-shaped Moon-dwellers in Whizz for ­Atomms. Readers exposed in youth to the Humour of Molesworth's diaries remember them fondly as adults and can then enjoy their insights even more.

Works by Willans alone include the novel The Whistling Arrow (1957), whose eponym is a then-futuristic aeroplane. [DRL]

Herbert Geoffrey Willans

born England: 4 February 1911

died 6 August 1958

works (highly selected)

series

Nigel Molesworth

individual titles

links

previous versions of this entry



x
This website uses cookies.  More information here. Accept Cookies