William George Bunter (Billy Bunter), is a fictional character created by Charles Hamilton using the pen name Frank Richards. He featured originally in stories set at Greyfriars School in the boys weekly story paper The Magnet first published in 1908, and has since appeared in novels, on television, in stage plays, and in comic strips.Charles Hamilton invented the character for an unpublished story in late 1890s. He claimed Bunter was derived from three persons; a corpulent editor, a short-sighted relative, and another relative who was perpetually trying to raise a loan on the strength of the anticipated arrival of a cheque. The name Bunter was in common use at that time, due to the popularity of a patent medicine known as Bunter's Nervine Tonic. The name Billy Bunter was used by Hamilton for a story in The gem only months before the launch of the Magnet. There was a previous character called Billy Bunter, created by H Philpott Wright, who appeared in a series of stories in the Vanguard Library from 1907, but whose character bore no resemblance to his more famous namesake.
Billy Bunter was not a major figure in the earliest days of The Magnet. Within a few years, however, Hamilton realised the comic potential of the character and made him the focal point of many of the stories.
Following the closure of The Magnet in 1940, Hamilton had little work but he became known as the author of the stories following a newspaper interview he gave to the London Evening Standard. Although Hamilton had written many thousands of stories published by the Amalgamated Press between 1900 and 1940, he had written them under various pen names, so he himself was quite unknown prior to the appearance of that newspaper article.
Hamilton was not able to continue the Greyfriars saga immediately, as the Amalgamated Press claimed ownership of the rights to the name Greyfriars (though not to Bunter himself). However, by 1946 they had relented and hamilton was then able to obtain a contract from publishers Charles Skilton for a series of hardback novels. The first of these, Billy Bunter of Greyfriars school, was published in September 1947. It was to prove the first of a series which was to continue for the rest of his life. Subsequently, in the 1950s, the initial novels were reprinted by Cassells, who took over publication of the series, which continued until 1967, with the final novels being published posthumously.
Billy Bunter was played by Gerald Campion in a BBc television series. 40 half hour episodes were broadcast over seven series between 1952 and 1961: as well as three television specials. There were also Christmas stage shows with different casts , performing the shows between 1958 and 1963.
The Bunter family home is Bunter Villa in Surrey, which Bunter frequently mis-describes as Bunter Court, representing it as a stately home. Billy Bunter is essentially a comic anti-hero, whose actions puncture and deflate the serious world of the English public school. His main physical characteristics are obesity, brought about by over-eating, and short sightedness. He is dishonest, greedy, pathologically self-centered, snobbish, conceited, lazy cowardly, mean spirited and stupid. Nevertheless, he succeeds in achieving reader sympathy by virtue of the humour the character generates.
