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

by Helen McClelland

  And this, it appears, she did gain by her return home; for although the evidence is scanty, what there is indicates that, in the period between 1926/27 and 1933, Elinor did no regular teaching. She did apparently undertake occasional supply work in different local schools; and she actually spent a while teaching English, singing and country dancing at her own old school, the Misses Stewart’s in Westoe Village. Whether this was an entirely happy experience for either side is questionable. Elinor possibly found some satisfaction, even wry amusement, in returning to St Nicholas’s as a ‘local-girl-makes-good’, with the right to be accepted where before she had perhaps felt something of an outsider. But was she really accepted? By the children, quite probably. One ex-pupil, Lucy Grimes, then about ten years old, who has now become a professional writer herself, remembers being encouraged by Elinor, who awarded her the prize in an essay competition. The subject was ‘Kindness to Animals’; the prize, a copy of the latest Chalet book.

  Nevertheless even she, young as she was, looked upon Elinor as ‘quite a bizarre character’. Nor was she alone in this: another former pupil recalled with great amusement how Elinor used to stand on a chair when conducting their singing class, to the delight of the small boys seated on the floor in front of her, since they were thus afforded a splendid view of her scarlet bloomers . . . And there is no lack of evidence that people in South Shields continued to think of Elinor as ‘a very eccentric and different sort of person’. Mrs Olga Hargreaves, who as a schoolgirl was one of the dedicatees of Rivals of the Chalet School, retains vivid memories:

  I can see her now, striding into the room, her Alsatian at her heels. [This was ‘Bryn’, a much loved Alsatian bitch of Elinor’s, of whom more in Chapter XIX.] Elinor, with her wandering eye, flamboyant manner and bizarre clothes was often a source of amusement, though never malicious, but also of pride. She was ‘our’ Authoress. And we didn’t expect her, as an authoress, to be ‘normal’!

  On the other hand, the two Miss Stewarts appear to have had grave reservations about Elinor, which is hardly surprising in view of their circumstances and background. In their eyes it would have mattered little that their former pupil was now a qualified teacher; still less that she had been dubbed by the press ‘our local authoress’.

  This, at any rate, was the impression conveyed by a very much younger relative of the two old ladies (she had long ago left South Shields, but was still living there during the twenties and thirties). When asked about Elinor’s connection with St Nicholas’s, she wrote: ‘I’m afraid that I am not able to help you about May Dyer . . . She returned [to the school] for one term, I think . . . to teach country dancing . . . But I am sure my aunts would not have considered having her [permanently] on the staff. And she added the somewhat deflating comment: ‘I know that she wrote books, but my children did not care about them.’

  And that would appear to be that. But then Elinor’s methods would hardly have appealed to teachers of the Victorian generation. Although apparently her classroom technique was effective, as an ex-pupil of Western House recalled in the 1970s to Marjorie Jewell: ‘My friend did not like Elinor but admired her capacity for dominating a class. As she put it, Elinor did not so much teach as act in front of the class.’

  Anyway, successful or otherwise, Elinor’s days as a teacher at St Nicholas’s seem to have extended to only about a term, for there is no doubt that during the late twenties and early thirties most of her time and energies went into her writing (apart from one activity, of which more in a moment). And to Elinor’s credit she did at least make good use of all the free hours she gained once re-installed in that attic bedsitter at 5 Belgrave Terrace. The chronological list of her publications shows that until this point she had managed only one book a year, making a total of five published between 1922 and 1926 — no bad effort either, in the midst of a busy teaching career, especially when the shortest contained 248 pages. But now, in 1927 alone, she was to produce three books, all extremely full-length (around 75,000 words); and in 1928 another three. Moreover she was also involved during this period in editing, and frequently writing herself, a column for the Shields Gazette, the local daily newspaper. This, rather surprisingly, quite often required her attendance at social functions, such as the annual Ingham Infirmary ball, and the writing of the detailed reports on the ladies’ dresses.

  Of course the quality of that whirlwind half-dozen books of 1927 and 1928 is uneven. Two of the six are frankly poor (Judy the Guide and The New House-Mistress); but two are vintage Chalet School examples (The Princess of the Chalet School and The Head Girl of the Chalet School); and both the others (Seven Scamps and A Thrilling Term at Janeways) are good average.

  The last named, set in a school which Elinor would use again ten years later in Caroline the Second, is of passing interest because of its dedication ‘To Mother and Dad’. In this context and at this date (1927) ‘Dad’ can only mean Septimus Ainsley — although in fact Elinor seems always to have spoken of, and to him, as ‘Steppy’. So perhaps Elinor at this time had softened the tiniest bit towards her stepfather. Or perhaps, and more likely, she thought this a politic gesture towards the owner of the house where she was now living again.

  After all it was undoubtedly due, at least in part, to Septimus Ainsley that Elinor could devote so much time during these years to writing. Not only was she able to produce fifteen published books between 1927 and 1933, she also wrote a full-length novel, Jean of Storms, which was serialised during the spring and summer of 1930 in the Shields Gazette. This story, which to date has not been published in book form, has several features that are unusual for Elinor. In the first place, it is set in the north-east, in the country around South Shields; and indeed the advance publicity in the paper made much of the fact that this was ‘A Local Serial by a Local Writer’, and that the author was ‘a South Shields Lady, an accomplished writer who has a number of books to her credit’. This novel, they proclaimed, ‘has a strong local colouring [and] . . . will make appeal to both young and old’. But perhaps the greatest surprise comes at the end of the advance announcement, which promises that the story has ‘AN ABSORBING LOVE INTEREST’.

  Jean of Storms is definitely not a children’s book. Nor does it, despite its local north-east setting, follow the Catherine Cookson tradition, but is best described as a light romantic novel. It embraces many of Elinor’s pet subjects, including folk dancing, Girl Guides, illness (a bout of influenza being apparently regarded as quite a serious event), and a characteristically dramatic cliff-top rescue scene. It is of interest, too, that many of the principal characters have had connections with India; raising the unanswered question of why India held such an extraordinary fascination for Elinor. No personal connection has ever been traced, but the Chalet School stories show frequent mentions of India: Madge, Dick and Joey Bettany, not to mention Juliet Carrick and others, have all been born there, and Dick continues to work in the Indian Forestry Commision until nearly half-way through the series. But this is digressing . . .

  Yet another opportunity Elinor enjoyed during this period of the late twenties and early thirties — and once again this opportunity could perhaps be credited to Mr Ainsley — was that of finding time for further study in music, something which had always been one of her castles-in-the-air. There seems no question that Elinor had any great practical abilities in music. According to one of her franker and more musically expert friends, ‘she never played at all well. It was always very inaccurate, with faults both in notes and time values’. (A possible link here between Elinor and Joey Bettany, at whom the Chalet School’s irascible Herr Anserl ‘raved for her lack of a sense of time’.) But Elinor’s sheer enthusiasm for music is not in dispute. And it is no surprise that she should now, even at thirty-plus, have embarked on a formal course of music study in Newcastle — which is only eleven miles from South Shields.

  At this time there was a rather grandly named institution there, the Newcastle Conservatoire of Music. It was really just a smallish private school of
music, but it did have as its director Dr Edgar Bainton, a musician of considerable standing. Under his guidance the school had achieved a good reputation and it can safely be assumed that there were some promising performers among the students in Elinor’s day. And it was, in all probability, this rubbing shoulders with the talented young that helped more than anything to open Elinor’s eyes musically. Thus, although her studies in singing, cello and of course piano, which she was taught by Edgar Bainton himself, wrought no miracles in her own performances, they did give her far more insight than she could ever have gained in any other way. (See Chapter IV.)

  The Newcastle Conservatoire has also a tenuous link with Elinor’s books in that one of them, The School by the River (1930), is dedicated ‘To my music master, Edgar L. Bainton’. And the book itself possibly owes something to Elinor’s studies in Newcastle, for it centres round a music school, although in this case a residential one in an imaginary land, the Balkan Kingdom of Mirania. (This fictional kingdom was to reappear many years later in the Chalet School series, when, in one of the involved link-ups Elinor enjoyed so much, Elisaveta, the Princess of the Chalet School, would marry Raphael Mirolani, a nephew of the Queen of Mirania.)

  The School by the River, which has the distinction of being the rarest title among all Elinor’s books, relates the fortunes of a gifted young music student, Jennifer Craddock, and of other starry talents at the Collège des Musiciens. Here, in the words of one critic, ‘The pupils are too busy practising sonatas to play the usual pranks on Mademoiselle, and it is refreshing to read about a heroine who does not save the school from fire or flood, and distinguishes herself on the concert platform instead of the hockey field’. This critic, who was writing in The Tablet in the issue of 28 June 1930, obviously liked The School by the River, for the review ends ‘We recommend this book because it is a story about really nice young folks, and also because of the virtue — rare in modern school tales — that every incident is not only possible but probable.’

  But in sharp contrast the Observer of 27 June 1930 wrote The School by the River . . . is rather silly and rather snobbish but, fortunately, quite improbable’. Which goes to show that it all depends on where you’re standing. And Elinor must have appreciated the joke, for she placed the two notices prominently side by side in her book of press cuttings. Probable or improbable, The School by the River is now completely unobtainable — partly as a result of air-raids suffered by the publishers during the last war. But this is no great matter, for today the book’s only real significance in Elinor’s life story is that it appeared during the year 1930. And that, for her, was to be a specially important year.

  CHAPTER XVI

  ‘IT’S ONLY ONE OF THE ROADS TO GOD’

  THE School by the River, which was published in June 1930, was followed two months later by the sixth of the Chalet series, Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School. ‘This story . . . should receive a warm welcome’, said the Journal of Education; and The Spectator agreed that, ‘All who have enjoyed the Chalet School series will welcome [it] . . . ’

  ‘Distinctly better than the average school story [said Scottish Country Life], for . . . there are real live characters.’ And The Scotsman, with true Edinburgh briskness, announced that this was ‘An exhilarating story in every respect, with plenty of open air about it’.

  The Guardian (then the Manchester Guardian) thought it ‘among the best of the [year’s] school stories’, adding that ‘Those unfortunates who have not yet visited the Chalet School are advised to do so without further delay’.

  ‘Miss Elinor Brent-Dyer . . . has given us a book of the high quality we expect from her,’ said the Irish Times. And certainly Elinor and her publishers could not have complained of any lack of press coverage, for by this time newspapers as far afield as Christchurch, New Zealand, were giving her reviews.

  The Christian World summed up Elinor’s position at the time in saying: ‘Quite a number of readers will need nothing more than the mention of the title and authoress to send them flying round to the nearest bookshop’; and this review gives some measure of how fast things had moved for Elinor. It was still not quite eight years since the publication of Gerry Goes to School, but she had now travelled from total obscurity to join the best-known writers of schoolgirl fiction. Not, it is true, the most prolific: fifteen books in eight years left her well behind Elsie Oxenham, for instance, who had published twenty-four during the same period. Nor had Elinor yet reached the position she would eventually hold, alongside Angela Brazil, Elsie Oxenham and Dorita Fairlie Bruce, as one of schoolgirl literature’s Big Four. Nevertheless, by 1930 she could justifiably have claimed to be in the Top Ten.

  There were other ways in which her life had changed since those Christmas holidays of 1922 when she had been writing Gerry Goes to School and reading it aloud, chapter by chapter, to the small Hazel Bainbridge. And her thinking, in particular in one important direction, had altered significantly, as proved by the step she took on Friday 12 December 1930. That day, at the Church of St Bede’s in Westoe Road, South Shields, she was formally received into the Roman Catholic Church.

  Elinor had been brought up in the Church of England and, on the evidence of various friends, had always been a practising member of that Church. And it is not possible to trace with certainty the path she followed in arriving at her decision to change. Nor to say with absolute assurance that the decision was reached, not suddenly, but over a period of some years. However, there are indications in her books that she may have been considering the idea for a long time, possibly ever since her visit to Austria in 1924.

  The manner in which she writes of religious matters in her recently discovered adult novel, Jean of Storms, conveys a hint that Elinor could at this time have turned against certain more fundamentalist ideas; and this story was of course written during exactly the period when Elinor was finally deciding to become a Roman Catholic. It has also been suggested that during the late 1920s Elinor may have had some contact with the nuns of the La Sagesse convent in Newcastle — perhaps at the time when she was visiting the city regularly in connection with her musical studies. Today this cannot be definitely established, but a personal contact with the La Sagesse nuns would certainly help to explain why, later on in the Chalet School series, Robin Humphries chooses to join this particular order of religious sisters, which has never previously had any connection with the stories.

  On one point there can be no doubt: Catholics in the Tyrol must have given Elinor an entirely new impression of their Church. She had grown up as a Protestant in Tyneside, where at the time there was little understanding between Protestants and Catholics. Indeed, bigotry and sheer ill-will often existed on both sides — as may be gathered from some of the books of Catherine Cookson, a best-selling writer — very different from Elinor — who also grew up in South Shields during the early decades of this century.

  Mrs Cookson was brought up on the Roman Catholic side of the fence. And probably she would be among those few who can really understand the magnitude of the step that Elinor took when, brought up as she had been, she crossed that fence in the year 1930. For most people of the present time it is difficult to appreciate this fully.

  Nowadays the word ecumenical is hard-worked. An Archbishop of Canterbury visits the Pope, and the Pope pays a return visit to Canterbury Cathedral, where a joint Church of England and Roman Catholic service is held. A Roman Catholic cardinal preaches in Westminster Abbey, and interdenominational services have now become familiar in most parts of Britain. Hence there is a tendency today to forget that the active, even violent expression of sectarian prejudice has not always been confined to Northern Ireland. Liverpool and Glasgow, for instance, have long records of interdenominational clashes, and in the latter city feelings between the supporters of two famous football clubs, one Protestant, one Catholic, can still run so high that it was considered a remarkable event when a Roman Catholic was appointed to a high office in the Protestant club. And surely it must be significant that
football clubs should have religious affiliations at all.

  On the other side of the country, in Edinburgh, there was considerable anti-Catholic rioting during the 1930s — only a few years after Elinor joined the Catholic Church. Contemporary newspapers give startling accounts of violence at public meetings; and it appears that, in the summer of 1935, the schoolchildren at a convent in the suburbs of Edinburgh actually had to have police protection during a religious procession through the convent’s own private grounds.

  Prejudice, of course, works both ways. And that it has not altogether disappeared even in more recent times is the unhappy experience of many. Among them a Roman Catholic nun, Sister Prudence Wilson RSCJ, who, after twenty years teaching in the south of England, went in the 1970s to be head of a college in Elinor’s native Tyneside. Here she was ‘often astonished and saddened to see the lack of understanding that could be shown by apparently good Catholics towards their Protestant neighbours’.

  But perhaps it is hardly surprising that goodwill between the Churches should be slow in growth. After all, until the mid-1960s Roman Catholics were strictly forbidden to attend the services of other denominations — as any Catholic over a certain age will undoubtedly recall. What is more, they were enjoined with much severity that if ever they found themselves obliged to enter a Protestant church, perhaps for the wedding of a relative or close friend, they must hold themselves aloof from the service and let no word of any hymn or prayer — even the Lord’s Prayer — escape their lips.

  In schools, too, there were invariably barriers set up between Protestant and Catholics; and, today anyone reading The School at the Chalet must bear this in mind in order to understand Madge Bettany’s dilemma at the opening of the Chalet School. On that morning, the nine girls who then made up the school’s entire complement have assembled in ‘the first of the big schoolrooms’. And their headmistress, having ‘ welcomed them all . . . [found that] prayers were something of a difficulty, since all the Tyrolese girls, and also Simone [French], were Roman Catholics, while she and Joey and Grizel were Church of England. For the present, she solved it by a short reading from Thomas à Kempis, and the Lord’s Prayer said in Latin. “But I must hurry up and decide what we are going to do about it,” she thought.’