ACHUKA Book of the Day 27 Aug 2025
ACHUKA Book of the Day 28 Apr 2025
PUBLISHED 50 YEARS AGO
A special 50th anniversary edition of this classic children’s novel with an introduction by Michael Morpurgo. A modern classic of children’s fiction, the novel won the CILIP Carnegie Medal and has been in print ever since.
Here is the ending to Westall’s Carnegie acceptance speech:
If I had my fondest wish, then I would like Chas, the hero of ‘The Machine Gunners’, to become a myth, like Brer Rabbit, or El-Ahrairah in ‘Watership Down’, or Max in his wolf-suit or, best of all, a kind of mini-Ulysses. (I mean the Greek and not the James Joyce variety). A boy already in the vacuum that starts the day you start protecting your parents against the cruel facts of life. A boy too sharp to believe everything that self-seeking adults will tell him. But a boy who recognises that not every part of every adult is self-seeking. A boy often knocked down, but never knocked out. Who will go away and brood and ponder and come again. Above all, a boy who leads his readers into moral dilemmas to which there is no easy answer. Dilemmas they must solve for themselves. The best moment in the reading of ‘The Machine Gunners’ to Christopher [his son] was the moment when he shouted ‘Chas is a fool – I would have done this. I would have done that in the situation.’ He was morally involved. And as Stephen Vincenzy, author of that fine book ‘In Praise of Older women’ has said, the worthwhile book is not the one full of moral teaching, but the book that leads its readers into one moral dilemma after another. For them to solve for themselves.
To ensure this, the teenagers in any worthwhile teenage novel must have power. Power to change their own lives; power to ruin the lives of others, even adults. This is not an unrealistic claim. In the course of my Samaritan work I came across several children who had succeeded in breaking up their parents’ marriages. We want no more teenage-heroes or heroines who are mere helpless spectators. No more ‘I was Kaiser Bill’s Batman’. Or Richard III’s page-boy. Or the kid who fastens King Alfred’s shield on before the Battle of Ethandun. Alfred Duggan made this genre popular in that fine book ‘The Cunning of the Dove’. But that was a book for adults. To teach children, even by implication, that they are helpless victims, that their actions do not matter, is to be a liar of the worst kind.
Chas McGill has the second-best collection of war souvenirs in Garmouth but wants it to be the best. When he stumbles across the wreckage of a downed German bomber, he finds the ultimate trophy – a working machine gun.
Hiding his discovery from the local police, Chas recruits his friends and together they build a fortress for their prize. But war is not a game and soon both friendships and loyalties are tested when the gang’s actions have dangerous consequences.
Observation on ‘classics’ in children’s lit. We seem to think ‘classics’ were written 100+ yrs ago, so we loop over the top of great books written in 1970s and 80s eg Robert Westall’s ‘The Machine Gunners’ and miss them. Do we celebrate ‘the new’ and revere the very old?
— Michael Rosen NICE 爷爷 (@MichaelRosenYes) February 2, 2025
Four covers for The Machine Gunners, by Robert Westall. pic.twitter.com/Uw3hm3UZQw
— Pulp Librarian (@PulpLibrarian) April 6, 2025
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