Actor Denis Gilmore as 'William' from the 'Just William' books (Image: John Drysdale/Keystone Features/Getty Images)
The may upset diehard Richmal Crompton fans: I discovered her wondrous creation, William Brown, through Martin Jarvis's 1990s radio series, and then read the Just William books, rather than the other way around. But since Jarvis has been hailed the Laurence Olivier of book readers, and his William is just exactly as I imagine Crompton would have wanted him, I think they'll forgive me. Just William's appeal spans the generations.
My 12-year-old daughter is a fan and while she listened to an episode narrated by Jarvis downloaded onto my iPhone, I leafed through my father's well-thumbed 1922 copy of William, with illustrations by Thomas Henry, which he read as a boy in the 1940s.
I asked my daughter for her favourite story: "That's impossible," she said. "I can't single out one."
Try as we might, we could not pick out one adventure which towered above the others in superiority of characterisation, plot or humour because too many reach those heights.
Despite the years - it is a century this month since Crompton's first Just William story, Rice Mould, appeared in Home Magazine - and changes in society so profound that my daughter doesn't understand some of the terminology (lawn roller, lorgnette and gun carriage, to name but a few), the stories endure, because of that perfectlydrawn, 11-year-old anti-hero.
BOY ZONE: Just William played by Daniel Roche (Image: BBC)
In The Outlaws And The Triplets (a personal favourite) William and his friends, Ginger, Douglas and Henry end up with a surfeit of babies after losing Henry's little sister in her pram outside the grocer's.
William finds himself in a garden with three prams just as a baby show is getting under way.
Planning to dump the prams and their sleeping cargo, William, appearing utterly guileless, is instead drawn into registering the triplets for the show by its secretary who asks whether any of the babies suffers from any illnesses.
An artist never given to doing anything by halves, William tries to recall which ailment had recently had his father laid up for weeks.
"Lumbago," he says.
"Lumbago?" repeats the secretary with consternation.
Clearly lumbago is the wrong answer, concludes William, and searches for the name of the illness which had struck down the irascible old Colonel Fortescue. "Gout," declares William, confi-dently.
The magic of Crompton's stories lies not just in the unexpected twists in the plot but in their moral tone too: stealing babies is wrong and so William must be punished, and punishment comes, as it does all too often, in the form of an enforced stay with a maiden aunt.
Bonnie Langford as Violet Elizabeth (Image: ITV/Rex Shutterstock)
Crompton herself was a maiden aunt and an unlikely international bestselling author. Indeed, her success came almost by accident since the William stories were incidental to her real writing passion: dark adult fiction.
The Just William series, comprising 38 books written over 50 years, sold 12 million copies in Britain alone, has been translated into 17 languages and at one stage was outsold only by the Bible.
TV adaptations include two by the BBC, starring Denis Gilmore (1963) and Daniel Roche (2010) and a 1977 ITV series with Bonnie Langford as Violet Elizabeth Bott.
Crompton wrote 41 novels for adults and published nine
