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

by Helen McClelland

  On one point, though, there seems to be no disagreement: Nelly Ainsley was devoted to her daughter and immensely proud of her achievements as a writer. So it does seem possible that when Nelly undertook such tasks as the catering in the school — perhaps also the teaching of Sybil Griffiths — she had the very best of intentions. It might well have seemed wrong in Nelly’s eyes that her gifted Elinor should have to spend time in anything other than writing.

  But this cannot exonerate Elinor. It was her school. Sybil Griffiths had been her pupil. Elinor did at the very least show a lack of responsibility in letting control pass from her hands (if this was, in fact, the way things happened). She had, of course, always tended to get bored with things once they were no longer new. Hence it appears only too likely that, as time passed, Elinor became less and less interested in the Margaret Roper School. Especially when the numbers began to fall, as they did dramatically during the years immediately after the war.

  Nor was the decline in numbers the only trouble. At this time there was also (in the words of Mrs Margaret Mann, an ex-pupil, who first apologised for sounding snobbish) ‘a marked change in the social class of girls coming to the school’. And in the mid-1940s that mattered; enough at any rate to put off any parents who were looking for an ‘exclusive’ school. Elinor had often written against snobbery, and at times with a fervour that suggests she may have known how it felt to be at the receiving end. There is, for instance, a scene in Exploits of the Chalet Girls where the aristocratic Thekla von Stift is rebuked for her attitude to girls who belong, as she considers, to ‘the trading classes’. That book appeared in 1933, a couple of years after The Feud in the Fifth Remove, where there had been an outpouring against snobbish attitudes; one which can be matched almost exactly in A Problem for the Chalet School, written twenty-five years later, where Joey Maynard speaks forcibly and at some length on the subject, concluding:

  ‘It’s a pleasant thing to know that one comes from a long line of gentle folk,’ Joey used the words separately, ‘but it only means you’ve a lot to live up to . . . when you come to the root of matters, it’s you — you — You that matters all the time — what you are!’

  In that discourse Joey, who ‘had never had the slightest use for snobs’, is undoubtedly stating her author’s own sincerely held convictions. Nevertheless there are signs that in real life Elinor’s attitude to social class was less broadminded than she perhaps imagined. One of her least critical friends thought of her as ‘not without a touch of snobbery’. Another remembers Elinor remarking that one of their acquaintances had let herself down by marrying outside ‘her class’. And there is a revealing moment in Three Go to the Chalet School (1949), where Mary-Lou is told by one of Joey Maynard’s children: ‘There isn’t any other [school] near, ‘cept the village school; and you [with the accent on you] won’t go there.’

  One way and another, it is unlikely that Elinor would have favoured her own school’s becoming more mixed socially. Of course the change was almost inevitable in the post-war period; and to a certain extent so was the fall in numbers. Once the bombing had ended there was a general drift of city-dwellers back to their homes; and a general tendency for people to try and resume old habits, which among the better-off would frequently include sending their daughters to boarding-schools.

  It is only fair to record that by general agreement Elinor’s school did some good work during the ten years of its existence, and that, in the words of one Hereford lady, ‘it filled a local need’. This does not alter the fact that Elinor was simply not cut out be a headmistress. And it is plain that she cannot have found the life congenial. All in all she was perhaps not really sorry in 1948 when the Margaret Roper School finally closed its doors.

  Now at last she could give her undivided attention to the Chalet School.

  CHAPTER XIX

  MOTHER — DAUGHTER — AND MARRIAGE

  DURING the ten-year life of the Margaret Roper School, Elinor had managed, despite all her commitments (variously discharged) to write and publish fourteen books. In the decade that followed, her output rose to the remarkable total of thirty-eight — sixteen of the books being completed within two years.

  That speaks for itself about the change in her circumstances. And yet it would be wrong to assume that Elinor found endless time available once the school had closed down. Apart from anything, since she and her mother had for some reason decided against moving to a new home, Elinor’s daily life continued to include all the problems of running an enormous house with, almost certainly, inadequate help.

  In a way it is difficult to see why she and Mrs Ainsley did not at this point look for a smaller and more practical house, even bearing in mind that they still needed rooms for a number, unknown, of ‘Elinor’s old ladies’. But possibly Elinor was reluctant to subject her mother to the upheavals of a house removal. Nelly, after all, had been nearing eighty at the time of the Margaret Roper’s demise. And undoubtedly she was beginning to grow frail, for there are signs that her health quite often gave cause for anxiety. One indication of this can be found in a letter Elinor wrote on 24 September 1950 to the elder of Hazel Bainbridge’s two children — now the well-known actress Kate O’Mara of Dynasty and Triangle fame; and this letter is worth quoting also for the picture it gives of Elinor, and her own life at the time:

  . . . so delighted to hear from you, as my last letter (written in May or thereabouts — but it might have been June!) was returned, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea where to get hold of you . . .

  Tell Mummy that Auntie Nelly [Mrs Ainsley] has been very ill this year with heart trouble. She was in bed for 9 weeks in the spring, and then only up in her room for the next month, so I had my hands full — especially as I was trying to finish my geographical readers. She is better now; but it was rather a hair-raising time. The readers were done, too, and the first two may come out any time now — Verena Visits New Zealand, and Sharlie’s Kenya Diary. The other two are Bess-on-her-own, about fruit-farming in British Columbia; and A Quintette in Queensland, which describes life on a sugar plantation.

  What lovely presents you had for your birthday! I am sending another Chalet book as my offering . . .

  Poor Mummy! What a fright she must have had when Binny [Hazel’s younger daughter] fell into the river! I should have wanted to tie her up after that!

  I like your picture of Bessie. She must be a very sweet-tempered little dog . . .

  How are you getting on at school? . . .

  The letter, which is signed ‘Auntie Len’, finishes: ‘I am quite well and working very hard on a new book’. And the second part of that sentence more or less sums up Elinor’s life during the fifties and sixties. No one could deny that her writing achievements were impressive in terms of quantity. And those thirty-eight books she produced in the 1950s show also a considerable variety of styles. Twenty-three of them were, of course, additions to the Chalet series (among them Tom Tackles the Chalet School, which will be the subject of a special note in Appendix II, since there has been much confusion about the proper place in the series of this title). But the others included a number of adventure stories (some unisex; a couple definitely Boys’ Own Paper tradition); a recipe book, with Chalet School trimmings; a final addition to the La Rochelle series; a ‘doggy’ story (Kennelmaid Nan); three school stories (not Chalet School), all with a specifically religious slant; and four educational books, the geographical readers (mentioned in Elinor’s letter).

  The latter books represent an entirely new departure for Elinor. And it is not suggested that she had personal knowledge of the countries in question — Kenya, New Zealand, Canada and Australia — although she did apparently have relatives in the two latter, and by this time was getting fan mail from all four. But it had struck Mr Thomas Collocott, one of her editors at W. & R. Chambers — her main publishers throughout her life — that, since Elinor was both an experienced teacher and a popular children’s author, she was particularly well qualified to undertake this kind of work. The
background research could easily be done in libraries; the illustrations would be provided by Chambers — and each of the four little books contains a generous number of photographs. Altogether there seemed no question that ‘Miss Brent-Dyer [who] had been able to produce all those Tyrolean Chalet books after only one visit to Austria’ would cope with any difficulties presented by this assignment. The readers were in fact to be quite popular, at least at the time, when there was a certain vogue for this type of educational story. Nowadays none of them could be classed as thrilling reading; but all are instructive in a quiet way, and, at 2s. 6d. each (121/2p) in 1951, they undoubtedly represented good value for money.

  So far, then, as concerns quantity and variety, it would be hard to fault the work Elinor did during the years after she gave up her school. But from the point of view of quality things look different. To take only those twenty-three books which were added to the Chalet series, it is no doubt possible for Chalet School addicts to find good things in all these stories, but in themselves they are undoubtedly inferior, not only to the early Tyrolean books (which might be expected), but to those written during the 1940s when Elinor’s life was apparently far more difficult. So it does appear that Elinor’s imagination had thrived the more when time to express herself was in short supply. In Three Go to the Chalet School, for instance, which was published in 1949 (and is dedicated ‘To the Staff and Girls of the Margaret Roper School. A Farewell Gift from their Head Mistress’), Elinor’s creative faculties were still very much alive; enabling her to produce a new character in ten-year-old Mary-Lou Trelawney with enough stamina to last out the series; and enough personality, like it or not, to take a leading part as she grows older, thus allowing Joey Maynard to get off the stage from time to time. But later on, although Elinor writes a multitude of new people into the series, few have any real interest. Perhaps it can be allowed that the Maynard triplets show signs of life, as does one newly introduced grown-up, Kathie Ferrars, who is The New Mistress at the Chalet School (1957), but these are exceptions. And a question naturally arises: was the change for the worse due in any way to Elinor’s having withdrawn from active day-to-day school life? The famous Angela Brazil would not have thought so. Or, at least, she had written of herself in My Own Schooldays — and with some fervour: ‘I have always had the strong feeling that had I . . . forced myself into a scholastic mould, and become a headmistress, I should never, never, never have written stories about schoolgirls, at any rate not from the schoolgirl’s point of view.’

  That theory was not put to the test in her own case for at no time did Miss Brazil teach in a school. And with Elinor it seems more likely that the opposite was true and that something actually vanished from her writing after she gave up her school. But then no one can be surprised that these two writers show different reactions. for their ideas and attitudes were in so many ways unalike. There is, too, a fair presumption that Elinor did not greatly admire her best-known rival. For one thing, it is noticeable that when Elinor’s characters talk of school stories, as they do in various books, there is never a word about Angela Brazil. Not a single Brazil appears in the bedroom of thirteen-year-old Gwensi Howell, described in some detail in The Chalet School Goes to It (1941): and yet Gwensi’s bookcase contains ‘a whole shelf of Elsie Oxenham, and another of Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Winifred Darch’. Not to mention all the works to date of Josephine M. Bettany — that being about as near as Elinor could get to putting herself on Gwensi’s bookshelves.

  The three authors favoured by Gwensi are often mentioned appreciatively, as are various other school-story writers, including Elinor’s friend Phyllis Matthewman, whose Daneswood series gets more than one nice little ‘puff’ from the Chalet girls. But none of them ever breathes the name of Angela Brazil.

  And it can hardly have been jealousy that caused Elinor to make this exclusion, for both Elsie Oxenham and Dorita Fairlie Bruce were among her most successful competitors. A possible explanation would seem that Elinor found something off-putting in the type of extravagantly sentimental utterance to which Miss Brazil and her schoolgirls are frequently prone. Examples can easily be found. First, from A Fourth Form Friendship (in its way an absolutely splendid school story): ‘ “I’d have given my life for you gladly!” gulped Aldred. “I know, and I feel almost unworthy of such love.” “Will you kiss me to show you can forget what’s past?” Mabel bent her head. It was a kiss of complete reconciliation and forgiveness.’ Then, in The Fortunes of Phillipa, the heroine has ‘simply fallen in love with Catherine Winstanley’. In Bosom Friends, Isobel ‘was ready . . . to offer her utmost in way of friendship’ and to find her idol’s ‘pretty thanks and kisses a sufficient reward’. And in The Third Class at Miss Kaye’s, a younger child protests to the heroine (albeit falsely)

  ‘ “I’ll love you always . . . I don’t want anybody but you”. . . she clasped her arms round Sylvia’s neck, and kissed her again and again.’

  It all contrasts sharply with the twelve-year-old Joey Bettany’s horrified reaction when one of her contemporaries, a French girl, treats her to a sentimental outburst: ‘I don’t kiss anyone very much. You mustn’t go feeling hurt ’cos I don’t kiss you every day. We don’t in England.’ That comes from The School at the Chalet. And it would not seem impossible, although this is only guessing, that Elinor had some of Miss Brazil’s more flowery paragraphs in mind when, later in the same book, she contrived that imaginary school story Denise of the Fourth by Muriel Bernardine Browne, a book that Joey is shown one day by Gisela Marani, then Head Girl of the Chalet School.

  Joey . . . skimmed through the chapter with a widening grin on her face.

  ‘It is amusing?’ queried the Head Girl [a Tyrolean, with a fair knowledge of English but very little of schoolgirl fiction]. ‘You find it funny?’

  ‘It’s a shriek . . . just listen to this!’ And Joey read aloud: “The glory of the sun lingered long o’er tree and flower; his molten rays kissed the silvery river as it slid silently past, crooning a tender lullaby to the fragile flowers which bent to kiss their reflections on . . . ” [she broke off]. Is there a lot of kissing in the book?’

  ‘They do kiss each other very often,’ returned Gisela.

  ‘I thought so!’

  And, although this proves nothing, there is unquestionably a deal of kissing in Angela Brazil’s books; even the short extracts quoted above furnish some evidence.

  Nevertheless, however little Elinor may have liked this, and possibly other things, in Miss Brazil’s writings, there is one point on which she and that other giant of the school story were in full accord. Both had an absolute belief in the reality, not to say the almost independent existence, of their fictional characters. ‘All the characters in my books became as absolutely real as were my friends in actual life,’ Angela Brazil explains in her autobiography; (although, characteristically, she had expressed regret at an earlier point in the book that ‘The dream children are not solid and I can’t kiss them’).

  Elinor is yet more emphatic: ‘Make no mistake! [she wrote in the first Chalet Club newsletter] So far as I am concerned, the people [in the books] are there, just out of sight, but otherwise alive and panting to tell their stories. I am merely the loudspeaker through whom they broadcast to the world of girls who have made friends with them and wish to know what happens next. It is they who tell the stories. I am merely the instrument.’

  That paragraph tells much about Elinor. And in particular her choice of words is revealing: for she had already used many of the same phrases and images in a book she wrote more than five years earlier — only in the book, Joey Goes to the Oberland (1954), Elinor was not, at least not avowedly, writing about herself:

  ‘Oh, I suppose a day will come . . . [Joey Maynard explains to her adopted sister Robin Humphries] when . . . I’ll have to sit down at my typewriter and be a loud-speaker again.’

  ‘That’s what you always say,’ Robin returned thoughtfully. ‘Do you really and truly feel that way about it, Jo?’


  Jo nodded. ‘Exactly that. The people in my stories are there, alive and kicking, and longing to make friends in this world. They tell their own story. I’m just the — the instrument used for broadcasting it.’

  The two passages are substantially the same. And there can be no possible question that Elinor had by this time become inextricably mixed with Joey. Yet, interestingly, she herself always denied that a close connection existed; more than that, she appeared even to resent any suggestion that it did.

  ‘Jo is not based on myself nor anyone in particular,’ she states firmly in a Chalet Club newsletter (July 1964); in another, ‘Jo is based on no one in particular, and certainly not on Jo March’ (June 1965); the following year, ‘Joey isn’t me any more than half-a-dozen other characters’ (September 1966; a slightly involved statement, but the intended denial is plain). And much earlier Elinor had discussed the matter at some length, in the Chalet Club’s second newsletter (November 1959). ‘People have accused me [she begins, with a choice of phrase that could be significant] of writing myself into Joey. I haven’t done so consciously. It’s true I always loathed maths [as Joey does] . . . I also dislike needlework, though I am very keen on knitting. And, of course, Joey and I both write. Apart from that I don’t think there is much likeness. Oh, yes; we are both musical. I used to play the piano and ’cello, and sang too.’