He died on 28 June 2004 after a spell of ill health with his second wife Eileen and three children, two from his first marriage, surviving him. What I liked most about it was the humour, and it came as no surprise to me to learn recently that one of Buckeridge’s writing heroes was P G Wodehouse. I’m so torn though – I was a child of the Jennings behaviour and logic type, but later became a teacher….

Meanwhile, Darbishire discovers a link between Pythagoras and travelling arrangements for fat and thin Red Indian women - much to Old Wilkie's despair! The headmaster, Mr Pemberton-Oakes, rather like Miss Theobald in St Clare’s and Miss Grayling in Malory Towers, is a consistent but remote figure of whom the pupils are rather in awe. Darbishire makes his one and only appearance in an inter-house cricket match and makes a memorable last wicket stand. It strikes me, now, that in both Buckeridge and Blyton stories all the teachers appear to be unmarried.His nickname is obviously a pun on the nightwatchman's nickname of Old Nightie (a shortening of nightgown). Either author Anthony Buckeridge was a very clever man or I still have an infantile sense of humour. Unfortunately it leads to his involvement with the dubious Wally Pink, while Linbury Court school is rocked by the affair of the missing toadstall-eating gerbils and the mysterious refusal of the birds to eat seventy-nine burnt breakfasts. In Jennings’ Little Hut, the headmaster decides that the huts near the pond in the school grounds which the boys have constructed with diligence and care, are unsafe; as a result Jennings and Darbishire are in rather bad odour with their schoolmates. I probably don’t find him as exciting as eleven-year-old me did as I have done more exciting things during my own life!

Darbishire duly practises his fingering-technique on his toothbrush - a pity that he tries to play said toothbrush on the night of the concert! To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Ozard’ that the boys use derives from ‘Wizard of Oz’ and was used to describe anything the boys disliked or dreaded. The plot focusses on the chaos that ensues after Jennings receives a printing kit for his birthday and starts his own newspaper. Jennings couldn’t keep up with the times, and Collins, the original publishers, dropped the series in the late seventies.

Lieutenant General Sir Melville Merridew DSO MC Bart – retired general, the school's most distinguished alumnus, and frequent bestower of half-holidays.

It was natural, too, for Jennings to climb on to the gym roof in pursuit of a lost ball, but in doing so he sparked off a chain of happenings which disrupted the smooth-flowing routine of the school for weeks to come! Jennings turns journalist when he receives a printing kit for his birthday, and dubs himself Editor of the Form Three Times. If you’d like to be amused for a few hours, you couldn’t do better than spend it in the company of Jennings and his friends. E. Johns; there’s no need for the silent surgery I have seen in one 1912 children’s classic in which a black horse that once had a six-letter name starting with “N” has now been renamed “Ebony.Everything ghastly is ozard; being a new chap’s pretty ozard for a bit, but you’ll get used to it when you’ve been here as long as I have. Not particularly convenient for review purposes, I’m afraid, especially as I’d much rather read the trilogy as a whole, but of course that would cost 3x as much! I read the Jennings books at around the same age as Alison, maybe a year older – the girl next door (then in her school’s sixth form) was having a clear-out of childhood, and they were passed to me – I was having bronchitis and needed something to read!

The first ten novels in the series were reprinted in the UK in paperback, by Armada Books, in the late 1960s; and many of the novels were translated from the original English into foreign languages. There have been two BBC TV series based on the books, Jennings at School, which ran for ten thirty-minute episodes between 6 September and 8 November 1958, and Jennings, which ran for six episodes between 5 September and 10 October 1966. Nostalgia Central covers the period 1950 to 1999 and contains some words and references which reflect the attitudes of those times and which may be considered culturally sensitive, offensive or inappropriate today.

Fiona, I have another contemporary of Enid Blyton for you, Norman Dale aka Norman Denny who wrote blytonesque books in the 1940’s to 1960’s. To understand the Jennings books, it’s necessary to understand the context in which they were being written. Instead he took to acting including an uncredited part in Anthony Asquith's 1931 film 'Tell England'. Their first mission, to recover a "stolen" sports cup, is the first of several bungled attempts to imitate super sleuth Sherlock Holmes. The long chain of events that leads to the fish up the chimney begins with Aunt Angela sending Jennings a printing kit; each step between that and the fish in the chimney is, to the boys, utterly obvious and logical.