Elizabeth Gertrude Bunter, better known as Bessie Bunter, is a fictional character created by
Charles Hamilton, who also created her more famous brother
Billy Bunter
William George Bunter is a fictional schoolboy created by Charles Hamilton using the pen name Frank Richards. He features in stories set at Greyfriars School, a fictional English public school in Kent, originally published in the boys' weekly ...
.
History
Billy Bunter was a central character in the
Greyfriars School
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 of Frank Richards. Although the stories are focused on the Remove (or l ...
stories which appeared in the boys'
story paper
A story paper is a periodical publication similar to a literary magazine, but featuring illustrations and text stories, and aimed towards children and teenagers. Also known in Britain as "boys' weeklies", story papers were phenomenally popular ...
''
The Magnet
''The Magnet'' was a British weekly boys' story paper published by Amalgamated Press. It ran from 1908 to 1940, publishing a total of 1,683 issues.
Each issue cost a halfpenny and contained a long school story about the boys of Greyfriars Sch ...
'' from 1907 to 1940, and Bessie's first appearance was in a 1919 Greyfriars story.
She was a pupil of Cliff House School, a girls' school near Greyfriars.
In 1919, attempting to replicate the success of ''The Magnet'',
Amalgamated Press
The Amalgamated Press (AP) was a British newspaper and magazine publishing company founded by journalist and entrepreneur Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922) in 1901, gathering his many publishing ventures together under one banner. At one point the ...
decided to bring out a new magazine for girls called ''The
School Friend'' (later continued as ''
The Schoolgirl''), which included stories about Cliff House originally by Hamilton, using the
pen name
A pen name, also called a ''nom de plume'' or a literary double, is a pseudonym (or, in some cases, a variant form of a real name) adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of their works in place of their real name.
A pen na ...
"Hilda Richards," supposedly the sister of "Frank Richards." The stories were soon taken over by other authors, also using the name Hilda Richards. The most prolific of these substitute writers was John W. Wheway, who wrote well over 500 Cliff House stories between 1931 and 1940.
Hamilton wrote one more Cliff House story, in 1949, called "Bessie Bunter of Cliff House School", and published by Cassell.
The character also appeared in
comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...
format in the ''
School Friend'' comic book, which was published from 1950 to 1965; she later moved to ''
June
June is the sixth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and is the second of four months to have a length of 30 days, and the third of five months to have a length of less than 31 days. June contains the summer solstice in ...
'', and, when that title ended, moved to ''
Tammy''.
In addition, she featured as an adult character in ''
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier'' where she married the former Greyfriars schoolboy
Harry Wharton.
Character
Bessie Bunter was essentially a female counterpart to her brother Billy, sharing many characteristics with her brother, including her large size and large appetite. She was as unappealing as her brother Billy, being conceited, untruthful, gluttonous and obese, but she was rather more domineering than he was and would usually impose her will by nagging, or, in the case of her brothers, by administering hefty slaps to the head.
[.]
References
Sources
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External links
FriardaleHamilton material
MagnetsDetailed listing of Hamilton material
Enthusiasts’ Club
BunterzoneEnthusiasts’ site
Bessie Bunter and Cliff House School
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bunter, Bessie
Series of books
Characters in British novels
Literary characters introduced in 1919
Comics characters introduced in 1939
Child characters in comics
Female characters in comics
Female characters in literature
Child characters in literature
British comic strips
British comics characters
1939 comics debuts
Gag-a-day comics
Comics spin-offs
Comics about women
Comics set in the United Kingdom
School-themed comics
Children's comics