Behind the Chalet School: A biography of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

by Helen McClelland

  ‘I — I don’t know,’ faltered Gerry alarmedly. [As well she might in the face of that Red-Queen-like questionnaire] . . . ’

  ‘What history did you use, child?’

  ‘Mrs Markham and Little Arthur,’ replied Gerry, with a horrible feeling that Miss Hamilton would be surprised. In point of fact that young lady had much ado to keep her countenance.

  Things then go from bad to worse when French and geography are touched on. But the climax came when:

  [Miss Hamilton] inquired, more in fun than anything else . . . ‘And did you use Magnall’s Questions, too?’

  ‘Ye-yes,’ faltered Gerry.

  ‘You did! Good gracious!’

  Miss Hamilton was silent for a moment with sheer wonder. The tears came into the child’s eyes. Oh, how terribly old-fashioned she must seem, she who had never done any algebra, or geometry, or physical geography, and who had been taught out of such a book as Magnall’s Questions!

  This latter book, the Historical and Miscellaneous Questions, for the Use of Young People, by Miss Richmal Mangnall — to give the author her correct spelling — was originally published in 1800 and frequently revised and reissued. (And Elinor is not alone in misspelling the name: James Joyce also refers to Magnall’s Questions.) Much beloved of Victorian governesses, the little catechism ranged undaunted over world history, beginning very properly with ‘the creation of the world by the Almighty . . . 4,004 years before the birth of Christ’. It touched also on Science, Astronomy and Heathen Mythology, as well as providing ‘Questions on Familiar Subjects’. There is no possible doubt that the Misses Stewart would have known this book; and could still have been using it during Elinor’s time in their school.

  In the above extract from Gerry Goes to School, the situation is shown mainly from the pupil’s (Gerry’s) angle. In Jo Returns to the Chalet School (1936) a similar situation is presented from the viewpoint of the staff:

  ‘Polly Heriot is a nice bright child,’ declared Miss Wilson . . . ‘But oh, my goodness! her prior methods of education leave a good deal to be desired.’ And she surveyed the young lady’s botany exercise with a rueful smile.

  ‘What’s wrong with it, Nell?’ asked Miss Annersley . . . ‘It looks neat enough.’

  ‘That’s as may be. The trouble is that it’s at least fifty years behind the times!’ retorted Miss Wilson. ‘Just look at those niggling little sketches!’

  ‘Oh, she’s out of date,’ agreed the English mistress [Miss Annersley]. ‘Her essays aren’t essays at all — they’re good little “compositions”, all nicely spelled, written, punctuated, and paragraphed, and without an original idea in them. Polly Heriot is an original young person when she isn’t trying to express herself on paper.’

  ‘Her arithmetic is enough to turn anyone’s hair white!’ groaned Miss Leslie from the other side of the room. ‘Oh, beautifully neat, and set down with ruled lines and carefully formed figures. But I’d give a bookful of all this meticulous working for one untidy page of to-day’s methods!’

  ‘She’s a problem,’ commented Miss Wilson . . . ‘She doesn’t even know how to do arithmetic. Her science is conspicuous by its absence; botany, mid-Victorian; geography, the limit — have I shown you the centipedes she draws for mountain-ranges? What’s her history like, Con?’

  ‘Oh, matches with the rest. Just what you’d expect — fearfully biased stuff, and no idea of standing back and taking a good, general view of things,’ said Miss Stewart. [No connection with the ladies of Elinor’s first school.] ‘She knows all the dear old stories . . . As for anything outside of English history, Europe and the rest of the world might never have existed, so far as she’s concerned!’

  ‘Well, she’s a problem,’ repeated Miss Wilson.

  And ten years later, in The Lost Staircase (1946), Elinor was still thumping the same tub. Only here the sides are reversed, for now it is not the pupil but Miss Mercier, the teacher who suffers from out-dated ideas:

  ‘We had better begin by going through the books you have been using,’ she said. ‘Please bring them here.’

  Jesanne . . . laid them before her governess. Inwardly she wondered what that lady would make of them, for already she knew that Miss Mercier’s ideas of education were based on her own schooldays, while these books were modern of the modern.

  Miss Mercier picked up the first and looked at it. ‘H’m! Empire history. Have you gone far in this?’

  ‘Just up to the conquest of Canada,’ said Jesanne.

  ‘I see. What else have you done in history?’

  ‘A general survey of the history of England — more detail when it deals with New Zealand, of course; and history of New Zealand up to the present day.’

  ‘I see. Well, for the present I think you had better do detailed work in English history. It is shameful for an English girl not to know the history of her own country.’

  ‘But I am not English,’ said Jesanne demurely, ‘I’m a New Zealander.’

  ‘You will be English now,’ said Miss Mercier, shortly — the demureness was not lost on her.

  So far the honours are fairly even. But, alas for Miss Mercier, methods of teaching even English history have undergone transformations:

  To begin with . . . [this book] was not divided up into reigns, but into great movements. For example, the whole of one chapter dealt with the Reformation, and covered the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth. The position of England with regard to the Continent formed the subject of another chapter, and covered the same period. It was very distracting.

  And then Jesanne had been taught to think for herself; to reason from cause to effect, and to find out effect from cause. She asked questions, as she had been trained to do . . . and they were questions that Miss Mercier, who had never bothered with logical reasoning, found difficult to answer.

  Nor were things any better when it came to mathematics; while geography was to prove equally bothersome, ‘what with land-tilts, continental shelves, and influence of climate and so on.’

  For, as Elinor sums up the matter, ‘Miss Mercier’s schooldays belonged to the beginning of the century, before methods were revolutionised.’

  And that last goes for Elinor too. That her schooldays, like Miss Mercier’s, had ‘belonged to the beginning of the century’ is beyond dispute. But whether the teaching methods in the Misses Stewart’s school could justly be condemned as inadequate — that can only remain a matter for speculation. However, one thing stands out if a comparison is made between the first and third of the above extracts: Elinor has far more sympathy with Gerry’s predicament than she has with Miss Mercier’s. Clearly she identified more with Gerry. And it might also be that she looked down, just the tiniest bit, on Miss Mercier. After all she, unlike the governess, did manage eventually to rise above probable deficiencies in her early schooling.

  Perhaps that in part was just her good fortune: Elinor was eventually to continue her education at an establishment very different from the Misses Stewart’s. But no doubt the achievement had demanded also a great deal of effort on her part, as well as much sheer hard work in the way of self-education.

  Ogle Terrace to Westoe Village

  From the very beginning she had been ready, even anxious to learn. ‘At three I taught myself to read [she relates in ‘Something about Me’], and by four I was reading fluently . . . That year my mother also taught me to print.’ Of course Elinor is sometimes unreliable about dates and ages, and there is no hard evidence to back up these statements. On the other hand, a very old friend does have it well established in her memory that ‘Elinor, like my sister and myself, was a fluent reader from the age of four’. So, on balance, it is probable that she really was well advanced for her age when she first arrived at the Misses Stewart’s school.

  During her early years there the school was housed in Ogle Terrace, a solidly built Victorian street that was not far from, and not altogether unlike, Winchester Street. Ogle Terrace was, however, considered to be a trifle
superior. The houses were in fact larger; the curtains over the windows were possibly of better quality Nottingham lace; there may, in the sombre living-rooms have been fewer ships-in-bottles and more busts of Shakespeare; larger aspidistras, taller whatnots, yet more massive marble clocks on the ornamental mantlepieces. But in both roads the style of house decoration was undoubtedly similar, with browns and greens the favourite colours; and the pictures would almost certainly have included The Soul’s Awakening or The Stag at Bay.

  Westoe Village, 1906, where Elinor attended St Nicholas’s School

  In adult life Elinor was to acquire very different ideas about houses, rooms and decorations, as her books make clear with their many detailed and affectionate descriptions: living-rooms that are light, spacious and simply furnished, bedrooms that are white-painted and flowery-chintz-curtained are to be found in the homes of all her favourite characters. Nevertheless that dark heavy Victorian setting at Ogle Terrace was one where the small Elinor could have felt quite at home.

  Until Elinor was about twelve, the Misses Stewart’s school — it was almost always called just that, although its proper name was St Nicholas’s — remained in Ogle Terrace. But then, sometime during the year 1906, a great day arrived when the two ladies moved out, taking their school with them, to a large house in Westoe Village. And that, as everyone knew, was quite the most desirable residential district in all South Shields.

  In 1906, Westoe Village really was a village; the central part, which is all that now remains, was surrounded by farmlands; and stately homes were not lacking: Westoe Manor House, then the residence of a wealthy iron founder, and Westoe Hall, home of Sir James Readhead and his family, were close at hand. Even as lately as 1951 the district retained a rural character. Then in that year the last farm vanished beneath the new Marine and Technical College buildings. However the street where the Misses Stewart had their school (incredibly, until the 1930s) is now part of a conservation area, and from outside their house has changed little in appearance since Elinor’s school-days. The street itself, too, with its cobbled road and line of handsome trees in the centre, still looks much as it did. And although that narrow lane at the far end no longer leads into real countryside both Manor House and Hall have managed to survive the years.

  Westoe Village in 1906 must have been a revelation to the twelve-year-old from Winchester Street. These houses were of impressive size, many of them villas with large gardens, some even had stables and coach-houses. The families who lived in the village were the best families: they had staffs of servants; they drove round in carriages; their gardens were tended by gardeners and under-gardeners, their children by nannies and under-nurses. It was a new world. And it was also Elinor’s first introduction, even at second-hand, to gracious living. She was never to forget it.

  And to think that some of the girls in her school actually had their homes in Westoe Village, and lived there all the time . . .

  One of these lucky beings was called Olive Mason (later she was to marry a gifted young composer whom Elinor greatly admired); and for a time Olive, six years the older, became Elinor’s idol. ‘Your name may be Olive but you’re as fair as fair’ was a typically phrased compliment that the small Elinor often repeated. And she would follow Olive round devotedly, carrying her books and occasionally offering a posy of wild flowers.

  However it is plain that her beloved’s name, Olive, displeased Elinor; perhaps it recalled those gloomy Victorian drawing-room walls. And doubtless she would have liked to see it changed. She herself was to change her name at several points during the first thirty years of her life. Christened Gladys Eleanor May, she does not appear ever to have been known by the first of these names, although as late as 1913 she was still using it in her signature. At school, and at home in the early days, she was always called May — the name by which her mother addressed her to the end. Later she took to Eleanor, with that spelling; at college she proclaimed herself to be Patricia Maraquita, and wrote this name in all her books; after college she reverted to Eleanor, but usually shortened it to ‘Len’. And it was really only in the mid-1920s that she finally settled into Elinor. Thereafter (apart from her time as headmistress, when the nickname B.D. was much used by her schoolgirls) it was as Elinor that she remained.

  But, to return to the days of the Misses Stewart’s school — what kind of child was Elinor (or May) at this stage in her life?

  Elinor and/or May

  First of all, what did she look like? The earliest photograph available (apart from that discussed in Chapter I) was taken about 1908, and shows her in the St Nicholas’s School group. The only other evidence is hearsay, and it is not easy to get an exact description of her colouring. Some friends have called her hair brown, others light brown; and one actually used the word ‘corn-coloured’, which would have delighted Elinor, who frequently used it herself in her books. All agree that the hair was straight by nature, and later pictures confirm this; so obviously a curling agency of some kind, tongs or papers, must have been at work before that school photo was taken.

  From the photo it can be seen that Elinor’s hair was thick to the point of being bushy, and was at least shoulder-length. But of course at that time no girls ever had their hair cut short. Or rather — no girls who went to schools like the Misses Stewart’s. ‘The girls from the workhouse were the only ones with short hair’ wrote an ex-pupil of another South Shields school, then in her seventies: ‘We always felt sorry for them.’

  As to build, Elinor looks quite well-grown for her age (thirteen or fourteen in the photo) and she is described as being ‘on the solid side’. This she undeniably was in later life. However she did share the knack some plump people have of being able to move very lightly on her feet; and later this was to be a great asset when she became interested in folk dancing.

  Her best point, according to several people, was her complexion — described by one acquaintance as ‘a really lovely pink-and-white’. But this apart it seems that Elinor was considered to be plain. For one thing, her features were very large — something not revealed by this early photograph, but clear in later ones. Elinor seems to have taken after her father in appearance, and it could be that she inherited her heavy physiognomy and sturdy build from Charles’s mother, Christianna Dyer, who came from a South African Dutch family. Besides, Elinor did have — not exactly a squint, but one eye that was ‘slightly turned’, or ‘wandering’ or ‘swivelled round’ (there are various descriptions). Later she was to undergo an operation which partially corrected this. But she never lost a habit which may originally have been connected with the eye trouble, of holding her head a little to one side. This tendency can be seen both in the St Nicholas’ school photograph and in one taken about 33 years later with her own school group.

  And that Elinor was not indifferent to her lack of beauty can be deduced from her stories. In all

  of them, outstandingly good looks are lavished on a majority of the characters, but with two significant exceptions. Neither Joey Bettany in the Chalet books, nor Janie in the so-called La Rochelle Series, is in the least pretty. Yet these two are among Elinor’s preferred heroines, Joey being unquestionably her prime favourite; and there is surely self-revelation beneath such passages as the following (from Jo of the Chalet School, 1926), where Joey, aged thirteen, has just given a Christmas parcel to her (much) older sister, Madge:

  She opened it, and there lay a little miniature of Joey, set in a narrow silver frame. ‘Joey!’ she cried. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘Miss Durrant did it,’ explained Jo through a mouthful of chocolate.’ . . . ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Like it!’ Madge . . . looked from Joey of the picture to the pyjamaed figure curled up beside her . . . ‘It is just what I most wanted, and exactly like you!’

  Joey considered it with her head on one side. ‘No one on earth could call me beautiful, could they?’ she said with unexpected wistfulness in her voice.

  Joey, of course, was to grow up ‘striking-looking
’, even ‘distinguished’. And according to Mrs Phyllis Matthewman, who saw things with the unclouded eyes of a childhood friend, Elinor too, in later life, could sometimes look distinguished — ‘when she took the trouble to get herself up properly’.

  However, there is no denying that, back in her school-days, Elinor was not pretty; and it is possible that a feeling of inferiority about her looks may have contributed to making her self-conscious. Opinions about her do differ, but the general impression seems to be that she was not very popular among her contemporaries at the Misses Stewart’s school. Perhaps an account Phyllis Matthewman gives of their early acquaintance may help to explain this: ‘Elinor was introduced to me as someone I could play with — my aunts were friends of her mother. I’m afraid I wasn’t very pleased. She was, at that time, very loud in her manner and apt to attract a good deal of amused attention from people who overheard her. It rather made me curl up.’

  Now it would certainly come as a shock to anyone who knew Elinor only through her Chalet books to hear that she could, even at eleven years old, have been so noticeably ‘loud’. At the Chalet School such emphasis is always laid on the importance of quiet good manners and gentle voices. Particularly in public: