page_title: Charles Hamilton (writer)
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Hamilton (writer) / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Blue plaque house at 131 Percy Avenue, Kingsgate, Broadstairs. Frank Richards, the creator of Billy Bunter, lived here.
context_page_description: Charles Harold St. John Hamilton was an English writer, specialising in writing long-running series of stories for weekly magazines about recurrent casts of characters, his most frequent and famous genre being boys' public school stories, though he also dealt with other genres. He used a variety of pen-names, generally using a different name for each set of characters he wrote about, the most famous being Frank Richards for the Greyfriars School stories. Other important pen-names included Martin Clifford, Owen Conquest and Ralph Redway. He also wrote hundreds of stories under his real name such as the Ken King stories for The Modern Boy.
  He is estimated to have written about 100 million words in his lifetime and has featured in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most prolific author. Vast amounts of his output are available on the Friardale website.
context_section_description: Hamilton never married, but some details of one romance are provided in a biography, and another is briefly mentioned in his autobiography.  Early in the 20th century, he was briefly engaged to a lady called Agnes, and later he formed a brief attachment to an American lady whom he alluded to as Miss New York.
  His life interests were writing stories, studying Latin, Greek, and modern languages, chess, music, and gambling, especially at Monte Carlo.  The Roman poet Horace was a particular favourite. He travelled widely in Europe in his youth, and only left England after 1926 to France, living in a small house called Rose Lawn, at Kingsgate, a hamlet in St Peter parish, now part of Broadstairs, Kent, looked after by his housekeeper, Miss Edith Hood.  She continued to reside in Rose Lawn following his death in 1961.
  While Hamilton was reclusive in later years, he had a prolific letter correspondence with his readers. He generally wore a skull cap to conceal his hair loss and sometimes smoked a pipe.
  He had a close relationship with his sister Una, and her daughter, his niece, Una Hamilton Wright, who produced her own biography of Hamilton in 2006 (Hamilton Wright & McCall 2006).  He also got along very well with Percy Harrison his brother-in-law, and the husband of his sister Una.
  His stories were typed using a purplish ribbon and with little revision on a Remington Standard 10 typewriter. Two of these typewriters once owned by him (dating from 1922 and 1923) are still in known existence today.  Previously, from around the year 1901 to 1922, he used a Remington Standard 7 typewriter.
  Portraits of Hamilton were painted by the artist Norman Kadish.
caption: Rose Lawn, Kent
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