Jennings couldn’t keep up with the times, and Collins, the original publishers, dropped the series in the late seventies. Not particularly convenient for review purposes, I’m afraid, especially as I’d much rather read the trilogy as a whole, but of course that would cost 3x as much!

When Jennings arrives at Linbury Court Preparatory School as a new boy, he soon discovers how much he has to learn, especially when the other boys seem to be talking in a different language! The only book in the series whose jacket illustration depicts action that doesn't occur in the same story.He wrote a novel The Millionaire and in 1885 edited, in three volumes, the papers of John Wilson Croker. And although Jennings is impetuous and sees the world in a very specific way, I still find him endearing and, in his own way, logical. As a result of this, when I beame a widower 30 years after leaving school, I vowed that no son of mine would ever have to go through what I did. Louis John Jennings (12 May 1836 – 9 February 1893) was an English journalist and Conservative politician.

Following the death of his grandfather, the family moved to Welwyn Garden City where his mother worked in promoting the new suburban utopia to Londoners.

At Linbury Court, it's certainly a case of remember, remember the fifth of November when Jennings copyrights his famous plan for members of Form 3 to act as Public Relations Officer to G Fawkes Esq (deceased) to raise funds for Famine Relief, undergoing an emergency haircut, an accidental mis-use of Old Wilkie's sports coat, and a day out in Dunhambury with a honky tonk piano in tow. Instead he took to acting including an uncredited part in Anthony Asquith's 1931 film 'Tell England'. By the seventies his days were numbered, and the last books are, alas, lamentable in their attempts at modernity (notably Jennings at Large, in which eccentric Aunt Angela has been transformed into a social worker, living in a tower block in south London, and Jennings spends much of the book not only away from school but in the company of a girl). Jennings and Darbishire are thrilled with their construction, which even includes a patented prefabricated ventilating shaft, a special irrigation drainage canal and a pontoon suspension bridge!