Geoffrey Willans


Herbert Geoffrey Willans, RNVR,, an English author and journalist, is best known as the co-creator, with the illustrator Ronald Searle, of Nigel Molesworth, the "goriller of 3B" and "curse of St. Custard's".
Willans was born in Smyrna in Turkey, where his father was a superintendent of the Ottoman Aidan Railway.
He was educated at Blundells School in Tiverton, and became a schoolmaster there. He enjoyed sailing in small boats. During the Second World War he took part in the Greek campaign and the Battle of Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean, serving on the corvette. He later joined the carrier.
Molesworth first appeared in Punch in 1939, and later became the protagonist and narrator of four books: Down with Skool!, How to be Topp, Wizz for Atomms and, after Willans's death, Back in the Jug Agane. All four were collected in The Compleet Molesworth. Comic misspellings, erratic capitalisation and schoolboy slang are threads running through all the books.
According to Ronald Searle in his obituary of Willans in The Times: "His cunning was more refined than Bunter... Willans was delighted that schoolmasters, far from feeling publicly disrobed, were in fact giving away his books as end of school prizes."
Willans wrote other books as well. A review in The Times described his novel The Whistling Arrow as having a futuristic aeroplane as the 'heroine'; "It is his apparent strength in writing about planes and the people that flew them." The reviewer compared it with one of Evelyn Waugh's earlier novels. The idea of a 'whistling arrow' was popularised by the Walt Disney Studio film The Story of Robin Hood, starring Richard Todd, where arrows that whistled were used as signals between Robin and his outlaw band.
Willans also co-wrote the screenplay for the film The Bridal Path, which starred George Cole, but he died of a heart attack in London at the age of 47 before the film was released. He also wrote a number of other, mostly humorous, books, including The Dog's Ear Book, My Uncle Harry, Fasten Your Lapstraps! and Admiral on Horseback. He was a keen amateur botanist and spent so much time in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew that the staff gave him a key.

Molesworth