Jennings Follows A Clue

The rain hadn't abated all day. I was trapped indoors and didn’t know what to do with myself. “I ought to write a blog to pass the time”, I thought to myself. I didn’t know what to write about though. Looking on my bookshelves for inspiration my eyes alighted on Jennings Follows A Clue by Anthony Buckeridge. It is a first edition complete with dust jacket and published in 1951. One of my favourite books. Why is it so special? Well, my sister Margaret gave it to me as a birthday present on my 50^th birthday in 2001. It was published the year I was born in 1951 and Margaret knew that when I was a kid I was addicted to the Jennings books. A few weeks ago some Facebook friends were nominating each other to name their favourite books. I was itching to be nominated so that I could show off my book knowledge, but nobody nominated me, much to my chagrin. I would certainly have included a Jennings book along with Black Beauty, The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island as my favourite childhood books.

Jennings Follows A Clue was the second in the series of Jennings books. The first was Jennings Goes To School published in 1950. The books follow the adventures of Jennings and his short-sighted friend Darbishire at Linbury Court School. All the characters are only known by their surnames, as was the custom at British boy’s schools. There was a whole supporting cast of minor characters such as Temple, Venables, Binns, Blotwell, Atkinson and Bromwich (Major). The teachers were gruff Mr Wilkins, kindly Mr Carter and the headmaster known as the ‘Arch Beako’. Then there was Matron and many other characters. Flicking through the book this afternoon all the schoolboy slang terms came back to me. For example, if you made a mistake it was a ‘bish’, anything unpleasant was ‘ozard’. If Mr Wilkins was angry he was ozard, if he was really angry he was ‘ozard squared’ and if he was absolutely furious he was ‘ozard cubed’. Jennings was always getting Darbishire into all sorts of scrapes, such as when they found an old wheel with 2000BC written on it. Thinking they had found an ancient artefact they pushed it back to school only to find that BC stood for Borough Council.

Anthony Buckeridge died in 2004 aged 92, but his books were enjoyed by thousands of children and he educated them at the same time. I found out one very interesting fact today. When I looked on Wikipedia for info about Jennings I discovered that the Jennings books were serialised on Children’s Hour on BBC radio in 1958. Jennings was played by a child actor called John Mitchell who became famous in the 60’s as Mitch Mitchell drummer of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. You learn something new every day!

Mitch Mitchell as Jennings.