SYDNEY CLARKE HOOK

(1857–1923)

The following article was kindly supplied by Nic Gayle. It would have been nice to have included a photograph of Hook with the article but unfortunately no photographs are known to exist. Until one can be found we will have to make do with a cover scan of the very first issue of the Boys Friend Library from 1906 which features his creation of Jack, Sam & Pete.

Sydney Clarke Hook had the honour of having Jack, Sam & Pete feature in the first three issues of the BFL, a title which would run for 1440 issues before becoming a victim of the paper shortage of 1940.

To compliment his article Nic has scanned a number of original Jack, Sam & Pete stories from series 1 of the the Boys Friend Library. You can access the scans from here.

SYDNEY CLARKE HOOK

(1857–1923)

Introduction

In October 1909, an advert appeared The Evening Standard in which a gentleman sought to rent a large country house with two acres or so of land, with the option to buy the freehold, if possible. An unremarkable request in itself perhaps, but one revealing to students of popular literature, for the gentleman who placed that advert (and who was successful, incidentally) turned out to be the star author of the Amalgamated Press, then an enormous organisation dedicated to the publication of story papers, comics and magazines. The writer’s name was Sydney Clarke Hook, a relative of the highly regarded artist, James Clarke Hook (1819–1907), and it is fair to say that, were one to indulge in a little fanciful speculation and imagine some unfortunate accident prematurely ending the lives of both S Clarke Hook and the up-and-coming writer Charles Hamilton in a single moment in say, 1909, then the fortunes—if not the very survival of the then burgeoning Amalgamated Press—would have looked very shaky indeed. True, that large organisation had scores of writers (some of them gifted professionals, others workaday hacks) on their books, but there simply was no one who could have stepped forward into the breech long-term to fill S Clarke Hook’s position: at that time he was their greatest money-spinner through his stream of humorous and exciting tales of adventure, and the coup de grace would have been delivered by a simultaneous loss of his younger contemporary Charles Hamilton, who was steadily breathing new life into the school story genre through the Magnet and the Gem.

Fortunately for all concerned, no such scenario ever took place—but its consideration does carry with it an important real-life corollary: Charles Hamilton went on to find great fame (and some fortune) in the following five decades, remaining something of a niche force to this day, largely owing to Billy Bunter and the wonderful supporting cast of Greyfriars School. Very different though has been the fate of S Clarke Hook’s famous trio Jack, Sam & Pete, which has virtually disappeared without trace—together with their creator’s name.

   Yet the erstwhile popularity of these characters cannot be overestimated: at the height of their fame, actors were employed to impersonate them during the summer holiday period and to stroll along various well-frequented seafronts to advertise the Marvel (in whose pages the rumbustious trio’s weekly adventures were recorded) in order to boost sales. Indeed, as late as 1919, a silent movie was made of their adventures called simply Jack, Sam and Pete, with follow up films planned—though it is not known whether these others were ever made. Yet according to the researcher Bill Lofts, their creator died four years later in 1923 in a Bournemouth nursing home, heartbroken at the loss of his characters’ popularity and their falling out of fashion.

   So, what went wrong—and why?

Jack, Sam & Pete

Charles Hamilton—creator of Billy Bunter, Greyfriars, St Jims and a host of other schools, a famously shy man who had little to do with any other authors at Fleetway House, made something of an exception of Sydney Clarke Hook, declaring him to be a ‘charming gentleman’ and Jack, Sam & Pete to be ‘delightful characters’. Bill Lofts even suggested that the two men went on holiday together—though he produced no evidence for this. Despite this uncharacteristic personal warmth on Hamilton’s part towards a fellow writer engaged in the same line of work, it was Hamilton who was to occupy Clarke Hook’s roost from World War I onwards, displacing the older writer from the pole position he had once occupied as the Amalgamated Press’ star author. But not before he had learned much from him. 

The key to this displacement lies in the huge societal changes that swept western Europe as a result of the Great War: the march of modernity was to defeat Clarke Hook and his trio of happy-go-lucky adventurers as school stories gradually emerged as the most popular vehicle for entertaining young readers. The old-fashioned (and essentially Victorian) adventure story set in different parts of the globe fell out of favour; it became an era of youth speaking to youth.         

   In fact, the rise (or more accurately, the re-emergence) of the school story had begun with the popularity of the early Gem (1907) and the Magnet (1908), both papers from Hamilton’s stable; Clarke Hook showed he was aware of this (or at least was alerted to it by a canny editor) as early as 1911 by introducing a fourth permanent companion to the trio, the lad Algy, perhaps as a sop to younger readers. The doyen of Jack, Sam & Pete collectors, the late Bill Thurbon, was always adamant that this proved to be fatal to the internal balance of the three central characters, as much as the introduction of Talbot was to the balance of Tom Merry and Co. in the Gem, which occurred around the same time. The comic play now largely depended upon Pete’s interaction with the knowing and (it has to be admitted) often witty lad Algy, but this left his two companions, Jack Owen and Sam Grant, somewhat out in the narrative cold. Still, with that said, Jack and Sam had never been more than lightly drawn characters (albeit useful ones), their chief function being to allow the hugely comic and idiosyncratic nature of Pete to shine through more brightly. In effect, with the introduction of Algy, they became mere ciphers.

   It would be unfair though to suggest that by 1911 all the best stories in the Boys’ Friend Library and the Marvel had come to an end: there were many fine tales to come. But the anachronisms of the stories that had somehow slipped through the net unregarded by eager readers prior to World War I now showed through all too clearly in the altered post-war landscape, with the result that the once-famous trio slowly began to lose their dominant appeal.

The stories’ appeal

Clarke Hook was essentially a Victorian adventure writer, who at his best wrote with great gusto and comic élan; his style in the early years of the Halfpenny Marvel was somewhat crude, but he soon honed it to changing Edwardian sensibilities and created a kind of bewitching throwback to a late Victorian world whose frontiers were still waiting to be explored, but siting it in the first twenty years of the 20th century instead. In one thing though Clarke Hook has proved to be surprisingly modern, as far as our modern sensibilities are concerned: he not only made his comic hero Pete black and a model of honesty, chivalry and frightening good humour in a world where colour prejudice and outright racism were endemic and unconscious, but daringly also made him the lead character in a trio that sported an Oxford educated upper class Englishman (Jack) and an American huntsman and crack-shooter (Sam), and doing so without any hint of racism or patronisation on the part of these two white characters. (Hamilton was to do the same with Hurree Jamset Ram Singh of course, making him a member of the Famous Five of Greyfriars.) Together these three toured all over the world—not infrequently going to remote parts of South America and Mexico, Clarke Hook’s day job having once been that of a Spanish translator—but also as far afield as Siberia, Japan and the Sahara. Nor was Great Britain neglected: at the height of the characters’ popularity they toured different towns and cities in England for about half a year in 1905 in the pages of the Marvel, it being advertised in advance where they were headed to in order to boost local sales. Probably readers looking for descriptive local colour were disappointed, as Clarke Hook was famously careless about geographical details; one assistant editor at Fleetway House once claimed that Clarke Hook took more liberties in this area than any other writer he knew.

   But this is to miss the point. Clarke Hook offered his readers—who were probably located at the older end of the youth market—something new in entertainment all those years ago, something that the young Charles Hamilton was to take to heart: an easy-going breezy comedy employing tricks, japes and the thwarting of opponents situated within an exciting and dramatic story arc, where the good triumph and the bad are justly punished. Pete’s characteristic laugh ‘yah, yah, yah!’ became Bunter’s ‘he, he, he!’ and the Famous Five’s ‘ha, ha, ha!’; his employment of skilful ventriloquism was used for both comic entertainment as well as to get out of dangerous situations, just as Bunter’s was to do; and the adventurous trio format was adopted many times as a working unit for multiple schoolboy friendship groups created by Hamilton. Indeed, in 1910, in a famous series in the Gem when Tom Merry left St Jims and was destitute in London, he meets Jack, Sam & Pete there who rescue him. Hamilton’s adoption of Clarke Hook’s voice is accurate in these scenes. Although Hamilton in later years incorporated heroes from other story papers for individual series, they were all his own creations, such as boys from other schools or the Rio Kid. It is difficult to imagine his borrowing any other writer’s creation, aside from S Clarke Hook’s famous trio. 

The tales

In the realm of story papers probably only Henry T Johnson and Charles Hamilton himself were more prolific than Sydney Clarke Hook, who wrote under many pen-names (viz, Hampton Dene, Maurice Merriman, Edgar Hope, Captain Lancaster, Captain Maurice Clarke, Innis Hale, Owen Monteith, Ewen Monteith being some of them—the list is almost certainly incomplete). It is worth noting that Clarke Hook also occasionally wrote entertaining school stories—the Stormpoint series serialised in the Gem in 1907 and in the Boys’ Friend Library there were four long tales in issues 20, 130, 321, 456—but these were not really his forte; action and adventure in wild or mysterious foreign parts with an admixture of comedic slapstick was what he really excelled in. And as with Hamilton, there is a discernible bipolarity of approach: stories are either essentially dramatic with subordinate comedic scenes for light relief, or essentially pure comedy.

   The distinctive difference however between the two writers lies in their use of description: in Hamilton it is detailed, sometimes repetitive and always present, even in the smallest sub-scene, whereas in Clarke Hook’s universe it is nominal, sparing and perfunctory, the action usually being ‘described’ or inferred through live (and often lively) dialogue. Characters are often introduced after they have appeared through spoken reference or direct address; they vanish just as quickly. Dialogue is the conduit of much of the action, be it dramatic or comedic, and Clarke Hook is very good at this, but it does make the reader pay close attention, for it is easy to miss an important detail this way—something impossible in Hamilton’s leisurely and even hypnotic style. There are no surprises in Hamilton; there are many in Clarke Hook.

   It would be unfair though to give the impression that Clarke Hook is unable to supply atmospheric descriptions when required; when they do appear, you notice them. Take for example this unusually expansive opening from a once very famous early tale in the Marvel called The Phantom Chief, from 1904, reprinted many times:

‘A stormy day had changed to a stormier night; distant thunder rolled through the black havens, echoing amongst the towering peaks of the Andes where that vast chain ends in Patagonia, the land of giants and dwarfs. And here, on the mountain slope, sheltered by a huge boulder from the gusts of wind which howled mournfully amongst the ragged crags, stood the three comrades—Jack, Sam and Pete.

   At the base of the mountain lay a forest of cedar and cypress trees, where the howling of wolves could be heard, and the roar of the puma and the ocelot, as they slunk away to their lairs to escape the rising storm.

   Between black boulders raged a mountain torrent, barring the comrades’ further progress, for no man could have crossed those rushing waters which were churned to a mass of foam as they tore round the jagged rocks that rose above the surface of the flood.

   As the storm rolled up, the lightning played more frequently, and angry jags of forked lightning darted towards the earth.’

This is the work of an accomplished writer who not only knows how to set a scene, but how to do so in a way that rivets our attention. And with what comes out of that storm he does not disappoint.

   The first tale of the comrades (The Eagle of Death—Clarke Hook always had an arresting ear for a good title) appeared as far back as in 1901 in the Marvel; the last one written by their creator appeared posthumously in the BFL in 1924, called Volcano Island. Though long past both their sell-by date and  their creator’s death, the adventurous trio was miserably exhumed by Walter Shute, writing under the pen-name Gordon Maxwell, in five BFLs published intermittently from 1925–1929; the comrades’ final bow came as late as 1936, when a BFL adapted and revised four very early original stories under the title Jack, Sam & Pete in Africa— ironically more or less the same title of issue number one of the BFL thirty years before.

   For thirty-five years—longer even than the lifespans of Hamilton’s Gem and the Magnet—Jack, Sam & Pete had rollicked and fought their way across the farthest reaches of the globe, usually on foot or by boat—sometimes by hot air balloon (affectionately nicknamed ‘De Old Hoss’)—trouncing bullies and confounding dictators, rescuing political prisoners and discomforting the proud, not to mention starting a variety of institutions such as newspapers, a parliament, a school for backward boys, a flying school, a detective agency and a cinema company along the way. Their adventures were counterpointed by the sometimes ingenuous, sometimes ingenious bonhomie of the genial, ever noble and often stubborn Pete, whose extraordinary physical strength proved to be a useful and an often necessary deus ex machina, a man who feared only three things in the world: ghosts, ladies of a certain age (particularly sharp-tempered landladies) and the possibility of his friend Jack Owen falling in love with a pretty girl and breaking up the trio to get married. He need not have worried on that score, for that was accomplished by the passing of time, the disappearance of a vanished Edwardian world and the changing of youthful tastes. But in their heyday, they were unbreakable.   

   That their passing into an almost complete oblivion—together with the vanishing of their once so popular author’s name—is perhaps the saddest observation to be made in the history of popular literature of this country. 

Nic Gayle