The Magnet
UK weekly boys' story paper
The Magnet was a British weekly boys' story paper published by Amalgamated Press. It ran from 1908 to 1940, publishing a total of 1,683 issues.
Each issue contained a long school story about the boys of Greyfriars School, a fictional public school located somewhere in Kent. The most famous Greyfriars character was Billy Bunter, of the Remove. The stories were written under the pen-name of "Frank Richards." The vast majority of the stories were written by author Charles Hamilton, although substitute writers were sometimes used when he could not supply copy. Most issues of The Magnet also included a shorter serial story (a variety of detective, scouting, and adventure yarns were featured), and many issues also included a newspaper ostensibly produced by the characters themselves and called the Greyfriars Herald. These parts of the paper were not written by Charles Hamilton.
History
The stories began in 1908, before the First World War, and continued through the privations of that war and the Great Depression of the 1930s that followed. The Magnet was aimed primarily at working-class boys who would never go to a public school themselves.
Red Magnet era – 1908–1915
So-called because of the colour of its cover in this period, The Magnet was created by an Amalgamated Press staff editor named Percy Griffiths, building on the success of the earlier boys' paper The Gem.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7749556. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1908, 1940 and 1915.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Magnet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.