Geoffrey Willans

Who was 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".

He was educated at Blundells School in Tiverton, and became a schoolmaster there. He enjoyed sailing in small boats, and during the war took part in the Greek Campaign and the Battle of Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, serving on the corvette HMS Peony. He later joined the carrier HMS Formidable.

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.