The Just William series is a sequence of thirty-eight books written by English author Richmal Crompton.
Throughout the series, the protagonist remains at the same eleven years of age, despite each book being set in the era in which it was written.
William Brown is a middle-class schoolboy of 11, who lives in a country village in Southern England.
It has also been suggested (in Margarey Disher's book Growing Up with Just William) that it is situated somewhere around Bromley, Kent.
Abridged editions became the standard versions of the books through the reprints by other publishers in the 1960s and 1970s, until the Macmillan reprints of the 1980s and 1990s restored the full texts, with the exception of William the Detective, which excluded the story William and the Nasties, the theme of the Outlaws imitating Nazism and Antisemitism being thought unsuitable for a modern audience.
Nearly half of the plays were original stories, not derived from the books: Though credited to Crompton, this was merely authorised by her, but not written by her.
He found his William in John Clark, the young actor who had played D'arcy Minor, and Charles Hawtrey, also from the Will Hay Programme, became Hubert Lane.
Violet Elizabeth was played by Jacqueline Boyer, who replaced the original, and Ginger by Tony Stockman.
And so it was that the 1947 radio series of Just William found a new life in a stage production, written by Alick Hayes and Richmal Crompton, produced by Violet Elizabeth's father Jack Boyer, opening in Birmingham, and for the next 2 years toured the British Isles on the Moss Empire music hall circuit, busting house records at most theatres it played due to the thousands of children who got their first taste of theatre from the gallery.
[citation needed] The closest it got to the West End was the Granville, Walham Green, owned by Jack Boyer, where it became one of the first plays to be televised by the BBC.
Shedload Theatre produced a stage adaptation of Just William's Luck that debuted in 2017 at The Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Underbelly, Cowgate.
The production was well received by critics and audiences alike who praised its imagination and energy; with many citing that it captured the enthusiastic essence of the source material.
[6][7] Just William's Luck subsequently toured theatres around Europe and Britain and returned again to Underbelly, Edinburgh in 2018.
In 1946 the BBC made a film based on their radio series, with the original cast, including John Clark as William, recreating their roles.
It also featured Howard Lever as Robert, Christopher Witty as Ginger, Kaplan Kaye as Henry, Carlo Cura as Douglas and Gillian Gostling as Violet Elizabeth.
Written by Allan Baker and directed by David Giles, it starred Oliver Rokison as William, Tiffany Griffiths as Violet Elizabeth Bott and featured Jonathan Hirst as Ginger, Alastair Weller (credited as Alistair Weller) as Douglas, Polly Adams as Mrs. Brown, David Horovitch as Mr. Brown, Ben Pullen as Robert Brown, Naomi Allisstone as Ellen the maid, and Olivia Hallinan as Susie Chambers.
For example, in one story, William's friend Henry paints his dog blue as a circus exhibit.
The atrocities committed in The Holocaust were not as well known (and indeed had mostly not yet happened) as they are in modern times, and the story was probably meant as parody.
This story appeared in all the 20 impressions of William the Detective published by George Newnes (1935–1967), and in all the editions brought out by Armada in the 1970s.