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

by Helen McClelland

  Starvation was never very far from the door when winter came early. (Rivals of the Chalet School, 1929)

  When that happened, as one of the herdsmen on the ‘Mondscheinspitze’ explains to Madge Bettany ‘in his curiously hoarse tones, . . .“We all go to our homes and pray . . . for an early spring. Last winter it did not come, and some of us went hungry for a time. [But] it will be as der liebe Gott wills.” ’

  The attitude implied in the last phrase — ‘the curious fatalism’ of people in the Tyrol — is also mentioned over and over again. And this is something not restricted to herdsmen, or farming people, or others who might be described as peasants. Herr Marani, a business man from Innsbruck (his actual occupation is in doubt, for it changes at one point between books), had ‘like all his race . . . a simplicity of faith which could understand [a] . . . child’s own belief’. And Elinor always lays great emphasis on the simple piety and strong religious feelings of all Tyroleans. Nor would many visitors to the Tyrol disagree with her. Even today the ordinary Tyrolean people do seem to possess these unfashionable qualities to an outstanding degree; and in the past this has often been remarked upon by writers. The latter include two very different ladies, one 19th and one 20th century, who both published books about journeys to the Tyrol.

  The first was an intrepid character, Miss R. H. Busk, who in the 1870s travelled extensively in Europe and the Far East to gather the legends of many nations. In her book The Valleys of Tirol (1874), which was one of Elinor’s treasured possessions, Miss Busk writes that, although ‘the description of . . . [engineering and hydraulic works] does not come within the sphere of my present undertaking, it does, however, to observe that over this, as over everything in Tirol, religion shed its halo’.

  The second, Miss Nina Murdoch, whose Tyrolean June (1936; an interesting if rather over-written account of ‘A Summer in Austrian Tyrol’) appeared sixty-two years later, says at one point that the Tyrolese are a ‘people who seem really to know the secret of weaving the philosophy of Christ into the fabric of their everyday life’. And she comments on their innocent cheerfulness and their gifts of being ‘quietly industrious, extraordinarily gentle, and . . . kind (amazingly kind!) . . . and [yet] shrewd, as the intelligent should be’.

  Nina Murdoch, in fact, appears to agree with Elinor on every point about the Tyrolean character. And Elinor’s own attitude is surely being expressed when Madge Bettany affirms: ‘As for the Tyrolese, I cannot say how much I like them’.

  This chapter, with its ragbag of quotations, torn out of context, does inevitably give an unbalanced impression of the books concerned. To Elinor’s readers everything looked different, for they were able to absorb the information over a period, in the course of incident and dialogue. And although Elinor’s descriptions can sometimes be flat or, at the other extreme, over-written, it cannot be denied that she was often most successful in recreating the scenery and special atmosphere of the Tyrol. Nor that — as put by one of Elinor’s most loyal fans, Judith Humphrey — ‘Miss Brent-Dyer certainly captured the imagination of vast numbers of girls to an incredible degree’.

  An anecdote may serve to illustrate this point — if only in a lighthearted way. It was related by another reader, in this case not a special fan, who visited the Achen See district some years ago. She recalled with amusement that on one occasion, when the ‘little white steamer’ crammed with tourists was approaching Pertisau, she heard an unknown fellow-passenger exclaim to her companion ‘There, look — that must be where Joey Bettany fell into the lake’.

  How delighted Elinor would have been. And Lilian too might have found the incident amusing. Unfortunately, though, there can be little chance now of learning anything about her possible reactions.

  CHAPTER XV

  OUR LOCAL AUTHORESS

  ACCORDING to Elinor, in the Chalet Club’s first newsletter, her idea of writing about a school beside the renamed Achen See came to her at some time following her return to England: ‘Later on in the year [she explains], I decided that . . . [Pertisau] would be a lovely setting for a school story.’ And maybe it did happen like that. However, in view of the extraordinary precision of the topographical details given in the early books, it seems more likely that she was still there on the spot when the plan first began forming in her mind.

  She could then have talked over her plan with Lilian; and perhaps discussed with her a possible location for the Chalet School during some of their daily walks around Pertisau. To do this would have been quite in her character; for although Elinor was reserved, not to say secretive, about her personal life, it appears that she was always ready to pour forth about her books and their characters. It might even have been that Lilian unconsciously started the Chalet School rolling with some chance remark — ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely (or topping, or ripping) to be at a school here?’ — or ‘Why don’t you write your next book about a school in this gorgeous place?’

  The notion of placing an English school abroad was not altogether unusual in schoolgirl literature of the day. In the two years preceding Elinor’s Tyrolean holiday Angela Brazil had written of a school in Italy (The School in the South, 1922 — mentioned in Chapter XIII) and of studies in France (Schoolgirl Kitty, 1923). France is also the setting of Katherine Oldmeadow’s Princess Prunella. And May Baldwin had for many years been establishing fictional schools all over the place; two of her earlier stories, about Germany (1901) and France (1905), were mentioned in Chapter IV; and The School in the Wilds, set in Kenya, was to appear at the same time as Elinor’s first Chalet School book. Elsie Oxenham, too, had published several stories with continental settings: they include Expelled from School, The Two Form Captains (1921) and The Captain of the Fifth (1922), which all use Switzerland for their background. (And many Oxenham fans do point out, with some feeling, that when Elinor eventually linked her Chalet School with a nearby sanatorium the idea was not original, having already been used by Miss Oxenham in a number of the ‘Swiss’ books.)

  However no one prior to Elinor seems to have chosen the Tyrol. Thus The School at the Chalet added an element of novelty to the proven advantages enjoyed by all fictional schools in foreign lands. One of these advantages is commented upon by the Times Literary Supplement critic in the issue for 26 November 1925 — where The School at the Chalet and a May Baldwin story share the honours. ‘Adventures . . . ’, according to this reviewer, ‘seem more probable when they happen in Tyrol and in Kenya Colony than in Sussex, and those in these books arise naturally out of the circumstances.’ Although that sentence would win no prizes for its syntax, its meaning is clear enough and the point made is an important one. Often disbelief is more easily suspended when a story revolves around characters in an unfamiliar setting.

  The attitude of this 1925 reviewer to the whole enterprise of the Chalet School is strikingly different from that adopted in 1976 by Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig, in their sometimes entertaining but always heavily slanted survey You’re a Brick, Angela!

  Cadogan/Craig dismiss Madge Bettany’s multi-national ‘non-denominational school in the Alpine Tirol’ as a ‘preposterous undertaking’; and by 1970s thinking they may be right. But that was not how it struck people at the time. To quote again from the Times Literary Supplement review:

  [Finally] we have two delightful stories of small schools in foreign lands, started by Englishwomen who are left with children dependent on them, and who feel, as so many of their like have done from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft onwards, that school-keeping is the only way open to them of at once earning for their dependents and giving them a home. These are The School at the Chalet by Elinor Brent-Dyer, and The School in the Wilds by May Baldwin, both published by Chambers at 3s. 6d. net each . . . The chief characters . . . are well described; and these [two] books will, we think, be found interesting by some parents and teachers as well as by girls.

  In fact it is just possible that, given the special circumstances, a school like the Chalet School might have existed in the mid-twenti
es. No doubt it would have had a tougher struggle to survive in real life, and its success might have been far less spectacular. But there was after all a real school launched at about the same time as the Chalet School, which grew from an equally modest beginning in an equally astonishing fashion, and this school has now become known throughout Britain and far beyond.

  The ladies who founded this establishment started off, like Madge Bettany, with very little money (incredible as it may seem now), and also in a large, sparsely furnished house in the country — in their case, in Kent. Fifty years later, on 23 June 1973, their school celebrated its Golden Jubilee, and one of the three founders recalled the early days in words which often underline the parallel with the Chalet School:

  We started with faith and hope and very little else. We wanted to create a happy school, with personal integrity and service for others always in mind; and where everyone would be given the chance to follow her own bent, whether it was in academic or physical activities, or in the creative arts, such as drama, music, art and embroidery, or in the more practical side of life, the domestic arts.

  This extract might easily come from some speech made by Madge Russell or Mademoiselle Lepattre, the co-founders of the Chalet School. But here the words were being pronounced by Miss Anne Hindle, who, with her two friends Miss Sheldon and Miss Bird, had begun the now famous Benenden School for girls half a century earlier.

  Of course the remarkable and undisputed success of Benenden gives no warrant that the Chalet School, too, would have succeeded in real life; but it does provide a heartening example of one ‘preposterous undertaking’ that thrived against all odds.

  In any case it hardly mattered to Elinor at the time whether the Chalet School was really a practical proposition or not, just so long as her readers accepted that it was. The School at the Chalet seems to have found an immediate welcome, being well received both by the press and — more important — by the schoolgirl audience to whom it was addressed.

  Favourable comments began to arrive at the publishers; and Elinor was encouraged to plunge straight into a sequel. In fact this idea must already have been at the back of her mind, to judge from the last sentences of The School at the Chalet: ‘ “I expect we’ll have some more adventures presently,” said Joey. And so they did. But that, as Mr Kipling says, is another story.’ Naturally it is impossible even to guess Elinor’s reactions could she, at that moment, have been told there would be not just ‘another story’ but fifty-eight others — not to mention several related books. The prospect might well have shaken her a little, even though she was always what could be called series-minded, as shown by her first three books: these all have characters in common, many of whom appear again later in this loosely named ‘La Rochelle’ series. A number of the La Rochelle characters also turn up eventually in the Chalet School books. But there is one rather odd exception: Gerry Challoner, the heroine of Elinor’s first book, vanishes in rather the same way as did Lilian and the real-life Madge Russell. Gerry does play a minor role in the second book, A Head Girl’s Difficulties, but from then onwards, apart from one tiny appearance in The Rivals of the Chalet School (1929), she is lost to view.

  Possibly Elinor felt that Gerry’s character was not strong enough to stand expansion. Perhaps she simply got bored with her. And of course she did soon become much involved with, first, Janie Temple (later Mrs Lucy), the quaint-looking, quaintly spoken little heroine of The Maids of La Rochelle, and then with Joey Bettany, later Maynard.

  In fact Joey, from near the beginning of her existence, was to absorb the greater part of Elinor’s interest and to come first in her affections; unquestionably first in so far as her writings were concerned, and to a certain extent in real life, for with Elinor the line between fiction and reality was often blurred.

  Joey, paradoxically, was to provide both strength and weakness in the Chalet series. As a schoolgirl she is convincing and likeable, with plenty of faults to balance the talents and virtues lavished upon her. Her character, as Margery Fisher remarks in Who’s Who in Children’s Books, is treated in some depth; and the early books contain a leaven of humour which allows her to remain a human schoolgirl.

  So long, then, as Joey is of school age, or near it, all is well. Unfortunately by the fourteenth book she has reached the age of twenty-two and is married with three small children. (The grown-up heroines of schoolgirl fiction frequently produce twins but Joey trumps all aces by having triplets.) This by rights should debar her from playing the lead in a school story. Yet because Joey is Elinor’s dearest character, and moreover has always been the lynch-pin of the stories, she cannot be allowed to go into retirement and get on with producing her own books — and children. With the result, aptly described by the Cadogan/Craig team as the ‘artificial prolongation of Joey’s connection with the school’, that Joey is condemned to spend the next forty-four books as an ever less and less convincing adult.

  For many readers Joey, when grown-up, gradually becomes less a character than a collection of stereotypes, designed to evoke admiration: a woman of unusual insight and boundless compassion; an incredibly successful writer and at the same time a wife and mother of inexhaustible patience (she needed to be with eleven children, but nothing in her girlhood would have led one to expect it); a friend of wonderfully sympathetic understanding and steadfast loyalty (which does at least constitute a logical development); a mature adult, though still at heart a schoolgirl with a would-be delicious dottiness and sense of fun. It is all quite simply too good to be true. Or so it might seem; although it does have to be conceded that Joey — and the adult Joey Maynard as well as the schoolgirl Joey Bettany — has remained fantastically popular with Elinor’s readers.

  But all this is running much too far ahead. At the time of the second Chalet School story — which could be considered among the best of them all — Jo was only thirteen, and still very much a lively and amusing schoolgirl.

  This book, Jo of the Chalet School (1926), contains less that is obviously autobiographical than its predecessor did; but certain things may plausibly be linked with the author’s personal life. For instance, it is during this story that the Chalet School is introduced to folk dancing, still a fairly new hobby of Elinor’s at the time. And it is here that the first reference to Ernest Farrar (quoted in Chapter VII) can be found — though not as yet by name.

  The book contains also the first mention of Girl Guides, which makes it likely that at this period Elinor was herself beginning to take an interest in the Guide movement. And it could be that during 1925 or 1926 she, like Madge Bettany, attended a course at Foxlease — the Girl Guide training centre in the New Forest. Foxlease was just round the corner from Fareham, and even during term-time Elinor could easily have gone there for a weekend.

  Guiding was to be important in one of her books that is unconnected with any series, Judy the Guide, published in 1928. It was also to be a regular feature of the earlier Chalet School stories, including some of those written in the 1940s. Later on Elinor seems characteristically to have lost interest in the subject.

  How far Elinor was personally involved with the Guide movement, and for how long, is not clear. She writes in one of the Chalet Club newsletters: ‘I greatly enjoyed my own Guiding days’, which could imply that she had herself been a Girl Guide in her youth. But the Girl Guides did not come into existence until 1909, by which time Elinor was fifteen; and although it is not impossible that South Shields was among the first places in Britain to start a Guide company, it seems unlikely on the whole that Guiding was available locally during Elinor’s schooldays.

  However it now appears that, following her return to the north-east in or around 1926, Elinor briefly ran a Guide company, connected with St Michael’s Church. This information was imparted by an elderly lady in South Shields, who had been in her early teens at the time, and recalled that Elinor had often tried to persuade her into joining the company, but with no sucess because, as a great fan of Elsie Oxenham, she ‘wanted only to be a
Camp Fire girl’. And later Elinor did also act as Captain of the ‘1st Herefordshire Lone Ranger Company’ — ‘Lone Guides’ being the branch established for girls living in isolated places, without access to regular meetings, who were sent a monthly circular letter to keep them in touch with Guiding.

  Apart from this, Elinor must also have had personal experience of a Guide camp, for underneath one of her poems — ‘A Guide Hymn’ — appear the words: ‘In camp. 6.viii.26’. And this helps to explain why the eighth story in the Chalet School series, The Chalet Girls in Camp, succeeds in creating a sufficiently authentic atmosphere to convince many readers who are themselves active and experienced in Guiding.

  For the most part, Elinor’s books tell little about Girl Guides that could not have been learnt secondhand. Nor do they reveal why, or at what point exactly, she decided that the time had come for her to leave Hampshire and take herself back home to South Shields — for this in fact is what she did, most probably in the autumn of 1926.

  Her reasons for leaving Western House are not hard to deduce: by all accounts she had been growing more and more discontented with her job there for some time past. And she must surely have jumped at the chance of bidding her landlady farewell. But it does seem odd that once again she should throw away independence and run back to mother, not to mention stepfather. The conclusion must be that Elinor found certain other things more important than independence: foremost among them, an opportunity to concentrate on her writing, unfettered by the demands of a full-time job.