They have more in common with William Brown than those who pigeonhole her as a writer for children might think.
Her adult novels and short story collections are largely forgotten today and need, in my view, to be brought to a wider audience. I have been undertaking research in the Richmal Crompton Collection held at the university since 2014. I am currently Honorary Research Fellow in the Humanities Department at the University of Roehampton. Her books include ‘Just William’ collections, forty novels, ten other short story collections and radio plays. She subsequently gave up teaching to become a full time writer. Richmal Crompton contracted poliomyelitis in the summer of 1923. She was an experienced teacher and worked at Bromley High School until her life took a different direction. She was publishing ‘Just William’ stories from 1919. Following the death of her father, Richmal then followed her sister and mother to live in Bromley, Kent, in 1917.
Following her early life in Bury, Lancashire and life as a student at Royal Holloway, she became a teacher at St Elphins School in Warrington, where she had been a pupil. How can the story of her life grasp the scope and richness of her writing and bring her to life in a way that challenges some of the myths about both her life and writing? Facts about her birth and death say something about the period in which she lived, but what can they say about the characters she brings to life in her books? True, she writes about the world she knows. She was writing until the very end of her life. Richmal was born on 15 November 1890 and died in January 1969. In Richmal Crompton’s lifetime thirty collections of William stories sold over eight million copies but she once hinted that her ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ had ambushed recognition for her forty serious novels, of which Family Roundabout(1948) is perhaps the best.I am currently working on Richmal Crompton Lamburn’s biography, which is due for publication in 2022, the hundredth anniversary of the first Just William collection. For the next 45 years she was always at work on two books simultaneously, one for children (generally a William book) and one for adults. The first of the popular William books appeared in 1922. She published her first short story in 1918 (using her mother’s maiden name) after polio left her lame she became a writer full time. She then moved to Kent to live near her married sister and was a much-loved Classics mistress at Bromley High School. Richmal Crompton Lamburn (1890-1969), the daughter of a schoolteacher-curate, went to a Derbyshire boarding school, to which she returned as a teacher in 1914 after having read Classics at Royal Holloway College. Richmal Crompton, author of Family Roundabout, photographed in 1930 by Bassano © NPG
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