Rupert Bear and the Making of English Citizens

Abstract

This article links the normally distinct fields of children's literature and citizenship education. It explores how the Rupert Bear Annuals published in the UK between the mid-1930s and mid-1970s, which were mainly the work of Alfred Bestall and which were read by millions of British children, can be read as a form of implicit citizenship training and character education. Similarities and differences with more overt attempts to shape the character and identity of future British citizens are discussed.

Keywords:

• Children's annuals
• national identity
• character education
• citizenship

Acknowledgments

As a sociological interloper into the field of children's literature, I am grateful for the helpful comments and advice of two anonymous referees who reviewed an earlier draft of this article. Sociology is a subject notorious for its barbarous neologisms and tortured syntax, and I am especially grateful for the meticulous editing undertaken by one of the reviewers, who kindly corrected my tendency to over use hyphens, exclamation marks, and italics–and also introduced me to the concept of the “slap dash.”

Notes

1. These publications were not officially called “Annuals” until 1947, early volumes appearing under titles like “The New Adventures of Rupert” (1936) and “Rupert's Adventure Book” (1940). Rupert stories were also marketed in a variety of other book formats, some of them including stories that never appeared in The Daily Express. Where specific stories are referred to in the main text of my discussion, they are followed by the date indicating the year in which they appeared in an Annual, followed in most cases, by a second number indicating the date of their initial publication in the Express (e.g. 1947/45). A few stories appeared only in an Annual version, in which case there is only one date shown.

2. The “talking animals of choice” for those who possess cultural capital include, of course, the creations of A. A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, and Jean de Brunhoff (preferably in French). It is symptomatic of my own family's membership of the despised demographic, that I had never heard of Barbar the elephant until he happened to be mentioned one day in a Cambridge social anthropology lecture by Professor Edmund Leach, who simply took it for granted that everyone would know who he was talking about.

3. From 2008, both the illustrations and the texts of the annuals have been by Stuart Trotter.

4. In at least one place, Rocky Bay is said to be in Cornwall but this is not consistent; moreover, the same characters, including the Merboy and Captain Binnacle, crop up in both locations.

5. John Betjeman was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death in 1984.

6. In this respect Bestall differs sharply from Betjeman who abhorred the impact of the internal combustion engine, whether in cities or in the countryside, whilst retaining a sentimental attachment to the railways. Well, supposing you had to choose between Oxford and Morris cars? Well, I know nowadays, of course, everyone will say Morris cars are much more important than those old buildings, now that we live in barbarism (in Games, 2009, p. 216). And in a satire he wrote on the subject of mechanized farming, based on the hymn “We Plough the Fields and Scatter,” there is the chorus: “All concrete sheds around us/And Jaguars in the yard/The telly lounge and deep-freeze/Are ours for working hard” (pp. 56–57). In view of this it is worth noting the irony that some of Betjeman's most important TV series celebrating rurality would never have existed without the patronage of oil companies—notably, the Shell sponsored programs Discovering Britain with Betjeman, and the Our Natural Heritage series supported by state-owned National Benzole.

7. In some ways this actually becomes more marked in the later annuals, where the dialogue was probably not written by Bestall. In earlier tales, the Chinese characters sometimes omit the definite and indefinite article but they just as often use completely Standard English: for example, Ting Ling the Conjuror's son, who appears in a few early stories says: “My father has bidden me to give you this basket; it is a Chinese one and rather valuable” (“Rupert, Bill and the Bluebells,” 1940/38, p. 28). But in several stories in the post-war years, Tigerlily's language has turned into grossly stereotypical “stage” Chinese English:

Tigerlily says: “Rupert need new hearth-rug velly bad. We got many little carpet and me t'ink perhaps you give, please, yes?” And her father replies: “Him want little carpet. Velly well, shall have carpet. Me just going out … You go get um” (1961, pp. 6–7)

Equally stereotypical language is found in a 1963 story “Rupert and the Rivals” which was republished as late as 1978.

8. Character education was not only absent from English schooling, it has also seldom been discussed by UK academics: an important exception is James Arthur (2003, 2010).

9. This is taken from one of Watson's characteristically perceptive comments that is worth quoting in full:

Bestall's Rupert combines two almost impossible ideals: a child's ideal of perfect freedom in an expanding but ultimately safe imaginative world, and an adult's idea of perfect child behavior. Rupert is to children what they would like to be, and to parents what they would like their children to become. And … Nutwood is where we would like our children to spend their childhood, endlessly adventuring yet ultimately safe. (2001, p. 620)

10. It is relevant here that, at least to begin with, Bestall drew in some ways on the genre of boarding school stories epitomized by Frank Richards’ Greyfriars. Hero figures in these stories are ordinary (though of course upper middle-class) English “chaps,” like Bob Cherry and his chums, who, though much less virtuous than Rupert, are like him in being adventurous, “good at games,” not swots, and whose “others” included the hapless Billy Bunter: greedy, fat, devious, and cowardly. A further continuity with Greyfriars is that in the pre-war stories at least, Rupert and his chums employ the spoken English typical of this genre. Rupert's Pekinese friend Pong Ping, who is at once an insider and an outsider—“I was born in a far-off land where my father was one of the Emperor's favourites” (“Rupert and Pong Ping,” 1938/37)—is given “insider” status partly by the way he talks. In “Rupert and the Red Egg” (1941/40) he comments that “dragons have terrific appetites; these are Chinese eggs and they're topping to eat.” The post-war stories largely abandon this style of speaking, perhaps because it was both “over the top” and dated even when Richards first used it.

11. Some of Bestall's letters show that he felt acutely the moral and educational responsibility of his task, particularly because of his conviction that children identified with Rupert and saw him as a mentor:

I was given access to the children's letters. They shook me to my foundations. The way children in those days followed Rupert with affection, and as a mentor, terrified me … Rightly or wrongly, I realised that it might be the most important job in Fleet Street and its problems were such as to turn my outlook right round, making me regard Rupert as a major part of my Christian life. (letter of 1969, in Bott, 2003, p. 72)