In a 1992 interview, Andy Partridge admitted that this name was a mistake:
"I had a brain road accident when writing the lyrics. There's a line that says, `Dream you're Frank L. Richards and this is the great land of Oz.' I realised after I'd finished that I'd mixed up Frank Richards, the author of the Billy Bunter books in England, with L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Oz books. But that makes it all the more interesting, doesn't it?"
So here's information on what he really (sort of) meant ...
'Frank Richards' was the most familiar of the many pseudonyms employed by English author Charles Hamilton (1876-1961). For 50 years, Hamilton churned out an astounding volume of stories for boys -- some 7,000 stories of varying lengths, with a tally of 72 million words. At his peak, he was writing the equivalent of an average-length novel each week (about 70,000 words).
... like most Amalgamated Press 'hacks' he filled his pages largely by means of short paragraphs and a good deal of repetition. As E.S. Turner has pointed out in Boys Will Be Boys, 'a sub-editor surgically disposed could have cut out every other sentence without impairing continuity.' Yet the repetition was the essence of the style, and had an almost hypnotic effect on devotees. Hamilton's plots were usually crafted skilfully.
(Source: Carpenter and Pritchard, pp.236-237.)
Writing for the Magnet betwee 1908 and 1940 as 'Frank Richards', Hamilton created Greyfriars School, an upper class boys school populated by Billy Bunter and his school mates. After WWII Hamilton resumed writing Greyfriars stories, and between 1952 and 1962 Billy appeared in a BBC television series.
Hamilton was not without his critics. Many libraries boasted of not having any Billy Bunter books, and George Orwell "objected to the snobbery, insularity, dated slang, and tedious style of this exclusively male world". Hamilton responded by saying it was his job to entertain, and that introspection in youth was unhealthy.
L. Frank Baum (1856-1919)
is a figure of great importance in the history of children's fiction in the United States, being the first writer to create an unforgettable full-length original American fantasy.
(Source: Carpenter and Pritchard, p.51.)
This fantasty, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), is one
of the most familiar and justifiably famous of modern children's
tales. The book (and the famous 1939 movie based on it, The
Wizard of Oz) tells the tale of Dorothy, who gets swept by a
tornado from her home in Kansas to the fantastic world of Oz. The
success of the book encouraged Baum to write further Oz stories;
by the time of his death he had written 14 novels and a
collection of short stories that dealt with his imaginary land.
It has been suggested that Baum modelled the character of the Wizard of Oz upon himself, and that his personality bore something of a resemblance to P.T. Barnum.
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