Apparently, the dog belonged to my grandfather's cousin, Orlando Drew, and the dog was called Bonzo after William Studdy's cartoon dog and the radiator mascot made by Lejeune. It's not quite as fascinating a story in the event as it initially promised. Orlando Drew used to play solitary, early morning rounds of golf at Carlyon Bay golf links and, although I am sure that dogs are not exactly encouraged on golf courses (for any number of reasons), Bonzo used to go with him and, if Orlando missed a short put, then and only then, Bonzo would push it into the hole with his snout; so there we are: Bonzo the golf-playing bulldog.

Last edited by NJS (2011-03-10 08:50:23)

Good, good.

^My wife made the cogent point while discussing the incessant controversy that seems to boil about Huckleberry Finn that is really not a children's book. Few pre-adolescents could probably get most of the irony and satire that pervade the book. It's a strange book in that it just lapses into downright silliness after the arrival of Tom Sawyer.

The popularity of Harry Potter among American youth is quite amazing when one considers that the "school story" is such British genre, a rather tiny percentage of Americans having attended boarding schools. In the classic American series like Tom Swift, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, school seems to have been very incidental.

For all Rowling's success, I question how original her creation is. I believe there were earlier stories that blended school with magic. There was one series that had a bespectacled kid that looked a helluva lot like Harry Potter. He wasn't a magician but he was amazingly lucky. Most of what I know about this stuff I garnered back in the days of my young manhood while lounging in the Junior Common Room at Balliol reading comic strip adaptations of these stories that appeared in the Eagle comic magazine.

Harry Potter is Billy Bunter after the Cambridge diet - and his postal order did eventually arrive.