A further milestone was reached in 1967 (‘Another Historic Day for the Chalet School’, as the newsletter puts it) when the firm William Collins (now HarperCollins) purchased the rights to publish a number of Chalet books in their ‘Armada’ paperback series. The first batch, consisting of four stories (nos. 1, 2, 14 and 30), appeared in May 1967, two more books were added that autumn, and from then onwards new titles were added each year. The rate of production has varied, but by the spring of 1995 ‘Armada’s’ republishing programme had covered the entire series. (It should be mentioned, in order to avoid possible confusion that a number of the original stories were divided into two parts for publication in paperback, the second part being then renamed, and hence the number of titles in the ‘Armada’ series exceeds the original fifty-nine.) Not all the titles are available at any one time, but it must be a tribute to the Chalet School’s remarkable hold on life that HarperCollins find it well worth while always to keep a large selection of them in print.
Nor is this surprising, for the books have an excellent selling record. As far as numbers go, the first year figures are the most remarkable: in the six months between May and October 1967, 198,539 copies of Chalet paperbacks were sold — 169,938 at home and 28,601 in the export market. But right up to the present day annual sales continue to top the 100,000 mark; and, despite the relatively modest price of paperbacks, the author’s annual percentage has always been a very respectable sum.
Elinor must have welcomed those royalties. For, contrary to what her fans may have imagined, she never made a great deal of money from her writing; and there are hints in correspondence that, up to the advent of ‘Armada’, Elinor often worried about financial matters. But perhaps she enjoyed the success even more. Certainly she would have rejoiced that the Chalet School was being introduced through ‘Armada’ to a completely new readership both at home and abroad. And, to begin with at any rate, she was delighted with this latest presentation of her stories. ‘I am so glad for everyone’s sake [she wrote to her ‘Armada’ editor] that the books are selling well. I think the “Armada” set-up is most attractive and I love the jacket illustrations. Will you please tell your artist this, and also how pleased I am about the way he/she is sticking to the descriptions of the various characters in the books.’
Perhaps it is fortunate that Elinor did not live to see some of the later jackets which portray her Chalet girls and even the grown-up Joey in mini-skirts, or she might have been less happy. She was, in fact, quite critical on occasion of the way in which some of the books had been abridged, and in particular of well-meaning attempts to update them:
As you will see I have had to make various alterations in the cuts [she wrote when returning the proposed revision of Mary-Lou of the Chalet School]. One or two made nonsense of the M.S. and quite a number used phrases and words that just are not me . . . One thing I do want to impress on whoever does the alterations. The Maynards never called their parents Mummy or Daddy. They were brought up from the first to say Papa and Mamma and, indeed, there are not only two or three pages explaining all this in The Chalet School in Exile [one of the first ‘Armada’ batch], but a brief explanation is given in the majority of the books into which . . . [the Maynard children] come.
After that it was arranged with Elinor that all alterations would be left to her; and for some years after her death this task was taken over by Mrs Matthewman. Some abridgement of the books was probably essential, for the originals had often run to 70,000 words and more. But many Chalet fans, in all age groups, have expressed regrets about the cutting; and this may partly explain why the ready availability of the paperback edition has not lessened demand in the second-hand market for Chalet School hardbacks, which are always unabridged. Nowadays the most ordinary ‘reading copies’ will fetch far higher prices than they did when new; and collectors are ready to pay sums in three figures for any of the early books in the original illustrated edition with dust wrapper, as well as for certain particularly scarce titles.
This boom in second-hand Brent-Dyers is just one facet of the whole extraordinary Chalet School legend — a phenomenon that one of Elinor’s readers has named ‘Chaletomania’, which will form the subject of the coming chapter. But one other piece of evidence about Elinor’s popular success may be given here. It was mentioned in a letter that Sydney Matthewman wrote to Collins on 21 February 1969: ‘I suppose you know that Elinor has now reached the summit of literary fame: she is (as we used to say) “given away with a pound of tea”. In other words, if you send up eight coupons from Lyons’ Harvest Pies you can have a copy of Rivals of the Chalet School.’
And, according to Sydney, Elinor ‘was tickled to death when . . . [she] discovered this’. Yet another Historic Day for the Chalet School?
CHAPTER XXI
‘A ROMANTIC WORLD IN ITSELf’
IN the late 1920s Elinor’s fan mail included a letter which began: ‘We hope you won’t mind two schoolgirls writing to tell you how much we appreciate your jolly Chalet Stories. They are all so ripping that we don’t know which book to say we like best . . . such a novel and delightful change from the ordinary school-story.’
That fan letter was to be quoted on the dust wrappers of all Chalet books published in the thirties and early forties. And the ‘two schoolgirls’, even though unnamed, thus became the best known of Elinor’s early fans.
Most likely the two were also quite typical of their generation — undoubtedly so, to judge from their choice of adjectives. Schoolgirls did naturally form the largest group among Elinor’s readers in the early days; and this continued to be the case during the pre-war period and right through to the 1960s. Even today, with the 21st century approaching, the selling record of Chalet School paperbacks (see previous chapter) indicates that Elinor still has plenty of youthful admirers.
Of course, critics and experts in children’s literature sometimes refuse to accept that book sales provide any evidence of children’s tastes. Books, as they eagerly point out, are bought not by children but by parents, who often choose their own childhood favourites. And this is undeniable. But the experts are perhaps forgetting the average child’s talent for resistance. The most nostalgic parents will hardly go on and on buying books that their children persistently refuse to read. And it is impossible to believe that the thousands upon thousands of Chalet paperbacks sold during the past twenty-eight years have all been bought by misty-eyed, middle-aged Mums, to be rammed down the throats of unwilling daughters.
It is true that Elinor’s older readers do include many ‘mothers who enjoyed the books in their own girlhood and have now passed them on to their daughters’ (Chalet Club News Letter 1); and that the majority of adult Chalet fans did first meet the Chalet School during their childhood. Nor is this surprising. The remarkable thing is that the adult group should contain so many people who had never so much as heard of the Chalet School until they were grown up. From this category, five may be singled out:
A Canadian school-teacher, who for some years lived and worked in Hertfordshire, in a local infant school; in 1975 she picked up a copy of The Princess of the Chalet School at a jumble sale for 5p, and enjoyed it so much that for the next year or two she gave much of her spare time to finding and reading the other fifty-eight stories.
An eighty-one-year-old New Zealand lady who became fascinated by the series when visiting her grandchildren.
A Scottish lady, Miss Georgina Moncrieff, who was already nearing sixty when the first Chalet story appeared; her greatest love was Dante (on whom she published a book at the age of eighty-four), but she remained an enthusiastic Chalet reader to the end of her life, caring nothing for the raised eyebrows of her friends and relatives.
A middle-aged Englishman, who used regularly to borrow the copies that belonged to his schoolgirl daughter — and not to send them up, either: he was quite put out when she later passed her collection to a younger reader, and he then devoted much effort to finding copies for himself.
Another Englishman,
the late Hilary Maurice Bray (oddly enough a descendant of the original Margaret Roper); he first encountered the Chalet series, as he himself recounts, when, ‘searching for The Secret Garden in a library under B for Burnett, I saw a book next to it with girls in ski-ing clothes on the cover . . . took it out . . . [and] since then . . . have been reading them, like painting the Forth Bridge, beginning again at the beginning when I have got to the end’. Later, although never blindly uncritical, he was to become one of Elinor’s most fervent admirers: ‘I think . . . the Chalet series is a unique achievement. I know nothing about school stories but suspect that E. B.-D. raises them to a new dimension.’
Hilary Bray must be among Elinor’s most un-expected fans. But then Chalet enthusiasts are to be found in an astonishing number of places, age groups, and walks of life. Fan letters used to reach Elinor from ‘England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Letters from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Barbadoes, India, France, Belgium, Switzerland, South Africa, Kenya and [as Elinor herself puts it] other places’; Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong were some of those she did not mention.
Nor did the stream of letters end with Elinor’s death. Throughout the twenty-five years since then people have gone on writing; in the first place to Elinor’s two main publishers, W.& R. Chambers and HarperCollins ‘Armada’; later, to the author of this book. And yet another tribute to the Chalet School’s enduring vitality is provided by the existence today, in the mid-1990s, of two successors to the original Chalet School fan club.
The older of the two, the Friends of the Chalet School, originally began in Australia, where it was founded in 1989 by Ann Mackie-Hunter, a committed fan of the Chalet School, who was then living in New South Wales. At first the group consisted only of a few dozen Australian enthusiasts; but the society’s reputation spread so quickly that by 1994, the year of Elinor Brent-Dyer’s centenary (more of this in the coming chapter), it had grown to over a thousand members, representing among them ten or more different countries. The other society, the New Chalet Club, which began only in June 1995, has grown at an even more remarkable rate. After barely two months it already had a worldwide membership of more than four hundred, and every week the list continues to grow.
Both societies issue quarterly magazines, and hold occasional meetings and other events. And although, not surprisingly, the majority of members live in the United Kingdom, Chalet fans have joined, just as in Elinor’s day, from Ireland, France and Switzerland, as well as from all around the English-speaking world, including more recently the USA.
Australia has always been particularly well represented in Chalet School circles — possibly because there was at one time an Australian edition of the books, published by Dymocks. And back in the mid-1970s, when Behind the Chalet School was first being written, a particularly interesting letter arrived from a young Australian school-teacher, Rosemary Gunn, aged then about twenty-six. Born and brought up in modern Australia, she had no personal links with Britain, or Europe, or with the English boarding-school tradition; but she became so caught up with the Chalet books and their author that she decided to base a thesis on the subject. This involved her, among other things, in persuading several of her friends to read through the series; and she furnished a most entertaining account of some forthright comments these friends had made, including the following:
‘The first exploded at one point: “Why, oh why are they always eating?”; and the second: “If another of them marries a doctor I shall scream!” But she didn’t — just reached for the next book.’
And later in her letter she confirmed that many schoolgirls in present-day Australia were reading and enjoying the Chalet series.
No doubt about it — the Chalet School appeals to an audience that is far wider than many of Elinor’s critics would acknowledge, or perhaps even realise. This point was emphasised by a fan in Scotland, who had always enjoyed the books as a girl, and became specially interested ‘when, as a school librarian I found that . . . [the stories’] popularity was as great as ever among girls of all grades of attainment and social class’.
Possibly ‘as great as ever’ could be a slight overstatement. But certainly there are inumerable Chalet enthusiasts today — albeit sometimes in secret — among the pupils at both independent schools and large comprehensives. Not so long ago, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl from Aberdeen proclaimed: ‘Apart from some of the expressions they use, like “top-hole”, I always think of the Chalet School as happening today’. And quite recently another twelve-year-old described the series as ‘Apsalootly [sic] wicked’ — a 1990s term of youthful approval for which some older readers may require a teenage interpreter.
Leaving the world of school, there are Chalet fans to be found today working in the BBC, and in the British Library. More than one young editor in go-ahead London publishing houses has confessed to being ‘an avid fan of the Chalet School’. One older reader in Hereford presented several of the books to her daily help ‘because her [the latter’s] mother always enjoys them so much’. One of Elinor’s lifelong fans, Judith Humphrey, was so full of admiration that, in the midst of looking after home, husband and two pre-school children (not to mention compiling French textbooks for schools and singing in a choir), she somehow found time to embark on a detailed 60,000-word survey, now the nucleus of a PhD thesis, which aims to establish Elinor’s pre-eminent place in the school-story genre. And a university librarian wrote of a friend, ‘the Head of a Science Department in a College of Technology, [who] . . . has even based a holiday in Switzerland and Austria on . . . descriptions of places in Chalet books’. Nor would this be unusual nowadays, for in the 1990s there have been several occasions when fans have joined organised group visits to Chalet School sites in both Austria and Switzerland.
Admittedly, many readers of the series could be decribed as middle-class, but the range of backgrounds is unexpectedly wide; and the memories of one fan, Mrs Sally Holloway, who grew up in a London working-class home, serve to underline the point that a child’s imagination can be unfettered by social boundaries. She recalled that, although she could not afford to buy the Chalet books, she would borrow them regularly from the public library — having originally been attracted by the red covers; and she would often stand in their Clapham Junction backyard, apparently watching the trains rumble past: ‘But I wasn’t looking at the trains — I was watching the Tiernsee steamers arrive at the landing-stage beside the “Kron Prinz Karl”.’
All in all, it would be quite impossible to put Chalet School readers, past and present, into any category — or even series of categories. They belong to no particular age-group. They come from various social backgrounds and from many different countries — although, for obvious reasons, the majority are British. Some have attended boarding-schools, others not. Some have travelled abroad and may have studied foreign languages; some have done neither. Many did first meet the Chalet stories during childhood, but a sizeable minority did not. A number go on reading the books with uncritical admiration; a few lose interest altogether; but many more, in all age groups, continue to enjoy the stories while remaining fully aware of their flaws.
The fans include children and teenagers and the whole age-range of adults up to at least the age of ninety (the oldest known to date was ninety-three); people married, unmarried, childless, with families large or small. They work in a variety of jobs, skilled, unskilled, intellectual or otherwise, paid or unpaid; attend schools or colleges (an interestingly high proportion of adult fans belong to the teaching profession). Many are housewives, with or without other jobs. Only a very few are ladies of leisure.
They include practising members of many different religious sects, and people without any religious affiliations — occasionally even an avowed atheist. They include people from widely different income brackets, and of opposing political views. They are certainly not all middle-aged women seeking to recapture their childhood. They are not even all females.
The one thing that unites all these people is their
enjoyment of the Chalet books. And most of them, although the warmth of their enthusiasm may vary, also join in remaining unimpressed by any derogatory pronouncements of critics, or librarians, or other so-called experts in children’s literature. But, apart from this basic agreement, the fans appear to hold very different opinions of the books, and especially about the reasons for their popularity.
For some, the sheer length of the series is part of its fascination. ‘It’s no good taking . . . [the Chalet Series] in small nibbles like cocktail biscuits . . .’ writes Hilary Bray; ‘It is a regimen, a diet’. Judith Humphrey thinks that ‘the cumulative effect of the Chalet Series’ would in itself entitle Elinor to a high place among children’s writers, for it was by this means that ‘she . . . created a living world with an imaginative reality [all its own]’. But a different angle is taken by another admirer, who considers that, since ‘Elinor had already achieved this “romantic world” quite early on, . . . it is at least questionable whether she added to her achievement, or perhaps even diminished it, by going on and on [with the series]’. And that view seems to be shared by many readers, for it is clear that a majority in all age groups prefer the earlier stories — although perhaps few would go as far as one who wrote: ‘I only ever liked the early Chalet books . . . Later on I think the long series got absolutely nutty.’
Behind the Chalet School: A biography of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer Page 25
