Greyfriars School
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Greyfriars School is a fictional English school used extensively as a setting in the Billy Bunter series of novels by the writer Charles Hamilton who worked under the nom de plume of Frank Richards. Although focused on the Lower Fourth (or "Remove") form, the stories also draw on other forms for their characters: the bull-headed Coker of the Fifth, for example, and the despised prefect Loder. The masters are also well realised, as are various characters of the neighbourhood.
The school's grounds lie just to the north of the fictional village of Friardale and south of the equally fictional Courtfield Common. Its proximity to the sea and the nearby location of hop fields indicate that the author very clearly had a location in Kent in mind, and this is borne out in the school's address.
The school appears in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier by Alan Moore in which in 1958 Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain investigate the ruins of the school, which they learn was used to train spies (many familiar old boys have risen to prominent positions in the intelligence establishment). In Kim Newman's The Bloody Red Baron, one of the main characters (also an intelligence operative, of the Diogenes Club) was also a Greyfriars graduate.
Grey Friars School appears as a fictionalised version of Charterhouse School in some of the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray, particularly The Newcomes. Thackeray was himself an Old Carthusian. Greyfriars is also the name given to the school attended by Myles na gCopaleen's fictional creations Keats and Chapman.
