Her father Colin was in his eighties and beginning to need more and more care. He and Elizabeth had now lived together for over twenty years as adults, and had managed to find ways to co-exist harmoniously. Colin, a hard-working and ambitious man who had spent his childhood caring first for his parents, then his siblings, then his nephews and nieces – in addition to his wife and daughters – could be demanding. He had dedicated his life to his family, and was proud of his three daughters and what they had achieved. Now that they were all grown up, he sometimes wished that they had not been so ambitious and that their work had not taken them so far from Inverness. His middle daughter didn’t write to him as often as he would have liked, and he rarely saw his youngest daughter and his new grandson, who were based in London. He respected Elizabeth’s work, and was glad that she stayed in Inverness with him, but he and Elizabeth were too close in character to have an entirely peaceable relationship. Elizabeth’s love of literature and learning came from both her parents, but, despite her attachment to her beloved mother, it was her father that she most resembled in character: they had the same drive and ability; they were both dedicated to hard work, with a similar sensible, practical outlook – which could sometimes seem unfeeling, sarcastic or even harsh to outsiders, but which was born, at least in Colin’s case, from a true understanding of what poverty was, and what could happen only too easily if you didn’t work hard.
Despite his age, Colin was relatively fit and healthy, a dedicated angler who was proud of his career as a fruiterer. He still went down to his fruit shop on the town’s Castle Street every morning, though he now employed one or two shop assistants to help out. Elizabeth was left alone in Crown Cottage and could settle down to work. She wrote whenever she was able, bashing out her novels on a typewriter which she either set on the kitchen table, or took out to a little writing shed at the bottom of the garden. This was the life of Beth MacKintosh, dutiful daughter in Inverness.
However, at least twice a year Beth hired a housekeeper to look after Colin, and would set off on holiday. Because of Colin’s age, her holiday time was now limited, but she aimed to recapture the freedom of her early twenties and thirties. Her usual destination was London, and she could easily walk the ten minutes down the hill from her house to Inverness station, where she caught the London sleeper train that features so memorably in many of her stories.
Always smartly dressed, for her trips to London Beth would wear a tweed suit, with smart yet practical brogues, gloves, and, of course, a hat to finish off the ensemble. No beauty – her youngest sister Moire was the belle of the family – Beth was, however, striking. Always interested in fashion, she knew how to dress to her advantage. The famous costume and set designers the Motleys, who made their name working on Beth’s first play Richard of Bordeaux, always remembered Beth by her clothes: interviewed much later in life they were shaky on her real name and her former profession, but had a vivid memory of what she was wearing. A petite woman, Beth favoured classic, well-cut tweeds matched with soft blouses in the epitome of 1930s chic, the masculine form of dressing popularised by Coco Chanel, which suggested a literary and artistic sensibility. A journalist friend once commented that, surrounded by actresses whose job it was to look beautiful, Beth, with her dark, west-coast-of-Scotland colouring and big eyes, more than held her own. In fact, Beth’s charm attracted the strong attention of one charismatic and aristocratic lesbian actress, an unasked-for and almost certainly unrequited romance that Beth at first found almost incomprehensible, and which, although she treated it with remarkable tolerance, did cause her real problems.
In the late 1940s, Beth was confident in her London friends. This was a trip that she had taken many, many times since she first left home aged nineteen, and, even though she had to stay in Inverness to look after Colin, she also regularly took short train journeys on day trips to escape into the hills. The first part of the journey south was achingly familiar, yet the incongruity of the Highland landscape she was leaving, and the London town life she was going to, struck Beth anew each time.
When the train finally pulled into Euston station in the early morning, Beth made her way to her Club. She had been a member of the Cowdray Club for professional women – mostly nurses and teachers – for many years, and its Cavendish Square location, in a grand building formerly owned by Prime Minister Asquith, was an ideal base both for heading out into town and a grand surrounding in which to hold any business or social meetings she might want to arrange. Before Beth went to meet anyone, she had one more stop to make to finish her ensemble: she would go to Debenhams on Oxford Street and collect her fur coat from the cold storage department. Now, she was Josephine Tey the writer, as at home in London as Beth was in Inverness.
Walking past one of the larger bookshops, Josephine Tey could see large displays of her new book – something that gave her just as much pride as seeing her name in lights in the West End had before the War. Knowing that she was in London, Tey’s publisher and friend Nico Davies would take her out to lunch; as one of their bestselling authors, Josephine Tey got the best treatment. Nico, of course, was steeped in the literary world. The former ward of J. M. Barrie, he worked for his brother’s publishing firm Peter Davies – Peter being the inspiration for Peter Pan, and another good friend of Tey’s. Other authors on the Peter Davies roster included Nico’s cousin Daphne du Maurier. Josephine Tey never knew Daphne well, but did know her sister, Angela du Maurier.
Josephine Tey would also meet her literary agent, David Higham. She had been with Higham since he was first employed at the Curtis Brown agency – and both Curtis Brown and David Higham remain among the largest and most important agencies in Britain even now, representing a formidable array of talent, including other crime writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers.
As well as her literary agent, Beth was also represented by a theatrical agent, who dealt with enquiries about her ‘Gordon Daviot’ plays, and, when she was in London, it was the friends she had made as ‘Gordon Daviot’ that Beth still contacted. When she had written her first play, it had been many months before the producer and actors realized that the script they were dealing with had been written by a woman, and many of her friends from this time habitually called her ‘Gordon’. The artist, socialite and writer Caroline (or Lena) Ramsden wrote later of the joy she always felt when a phone call from ‘Gordon’ came out of the blue – Lena instantly recognized the soft Highland accent, and knew that the phone call was coming from the Cowdray Club. Lena and Gordon had become closer after the Second World War as, despite her privileged background, and unlike many of their other friends, Lena had opted not only to remain in London as the bombs fell, but also to work long and difficult hours in a factory making aircraft parts. The two women had a mutual love of horse racing. Lena was an accomplished rider and the proud owner of a racehorse, whose father was Chairman of the Manchester Racecourse Company, and Gordon was a real enthusiast, whose descriptions of horses and horse racing occur and reoccur throughout her writing.
Lena had a wide circle of theatrical and artistic friends, many of whom Gordon also knew. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, star of two of Gordon’s 1930s plays, had returned to London after the Second World War, though her stormy partner Marda Vanne remained tied to her home of South Africa. Others, like Peggy Webster, flitted back and forth between London and America, depending where the work was. Peggy had gone from bit parts in Gordon’s plays to being lauded as one of the first female directors of Shakespeare on Broadway; courted by Hollywood. Dodie Smith, another 1930s playwright and friend of Gordon, was also in America, where she had spent the war years obsessively rewriting her masterpiece, the novel I Capture the Castle. Dodie was soon to return to her beloved country home in Essex, to start work on her best-known work The 101 Dalmatians, and Gordon would often visit Essex, where not only Dodie, but also Gwen and John Gielgud had houses, the latter two having bought their homes with the proceeds made when they starred in Gordon’s first play.
As Josephine Tey and Gordon Da
viot enjoyed themselves immensely in London, Beth made a reappearance as well, visiting her sister and her new nephew, who lived near London. However, the different worlds – family, and theatrical and literary – did not overlap, and when the two weeks of parties and visits and meetings and theatre and culture were over, Beth returned by sleeper train back to Inverness, to Colin, and to days of writing.
Always alive to nature, Beth often remembered how, after one memorable trip down south, she arrived at her sleeper compartment to find it filled with flowers; yellow roses, frangipani and orchids, all picked from the garden at the country cottage of her actress friends Gwen and Marda. ‘I feel like a film star,’ Beth had written to them in her thank-you note. To the people around Beth in Inverness, film stars were people they saw on screen at the cinema. To the people Beth knew in London, film stars were their friends – were themselves – while to Beth herself, film stars were the people paid to say her words: in the course of her career, she had written for various acclaimed screen actors, including not only John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier, but also James Mason and James Stewart. Beth lived in an extraordinary space between completely different worlds. It was no wonder that so many of her friends, from both Inverness and from London, and so many of her later readers, found her something of a mystery.
Elizabeth MacKintosh was one of the most successful writers to ever come out of the Highlands. In her lifetime she was lauded as the greatest Scottish playwright. And yet her story is almost completely unknown, surrounded by myths and misconceptions. Even people in her home town of Inverness don’t always recognize her name or realize how much she achieved. Her full body of work, her writing as Gordon Daviot and Josephine Tey – as well as under a third, almost completely secret pen-name – has not been acknowledged, and she has not received the critical attention, respect and credit that she deserves. Elizabeth MacKintosh achieved everything from her home in the north of Scotland, where, as the eldest, unmarried MacKintosh daughter, she kept house for her widowed father. She never moved to London, and was rarely interviewed by the press, despite such notable successes as having plays on simultaneously in the West End and on Broadway. She focused on her writing – and her writing was so good that Hollywood literally came north to find her.
The story of Elizabeth MacKintosh is not only the story of a fascinating and complex woman, but provides an entirely new way of looking at the Scottish Literary Renaissance – and at Scotland itself. Her writing directly engaged with the rise in Scottish nationalism that came out of Inverness in the 1930s and the formation of the Scottish National Party. Her literary relationship with her contemporary and fellow Inverness resident, Scottish nationalist Neil Gunn, is of particular interest. Elizabeth’s writing can provide a new understanding of the situation in Scotland – and Britain – today.
So why is such a popular and influential writer as Elizabeth MacKintosh still a mystery? Partly it’s because she had such a diverse body of work – fans of her Alan Grant mystery novels don’t always know about her plays – and that’s before taking into account her other literary fiction, short stories and serious biography. But partly it is because Elizabeth MacKintosh chose to hide behind pen-names, and almost never publicized her work. She was a genuinely modest person, whose reticence has sometimes been misunderstood. An inspiring, yet sometimes difficult woman, she successfully balanced very different lifestyles – at the same time a Highland housewife and an attendee of the brightest London theatre parties – though neither of these different societies that she moved in fully understood her. Elizabeth achieved what she did through pure talent. She didn’t have influential parents or an easy route into the literary and theatrical worlds, and many of the people around her struggled to understand her because she did not fit the mould. Privately-educated thespians like Laurence Olivier could not fully appreciate that Elizabeth’s family had come from a background of crofting and domestic service in some of the most isolated parts of the north of Scotland. Elizabeth was the granddaughter, on one side, of illiterate Gaelic-speaking crofters. However, as a writer whose strength lay in her observational skills, Elizabeth was able to take these differences and put them to good use in her writing. She had great – and justified – confidence in her own abilities and experiences, and did not try to assimilate into the new literary and theatrical worlds that were opened up to her, instead sticking to her own path, not compromising on what she wanted from life and from her writing. As a result, she produced an extraordinary body of work, shot through with experiences and imaginative situations drawn from real life and supplemented by her wide reading and interest in history and research. The only common feature of all her writing is its sometimes stunning originality.
This biography aims to present the story of Beth’s life – of her many different lives – and also to show just how good, and how important a writer she was, setting her full body of work – her plays, her mystery novels and her other writings – in both the context of her life, and in the context of the literary canon.
Beginning with original documents like birth, death and marriage certificates, and visiting libraries and archives across the country – from a tiny one-room family history centre on the remote Applecross Peninsula, to the archives of her schooldays at Inverness Royal Academy to the British Library in London – I have traced Beth’s story from her family origins onwards. Born in 1896, the daughter of a fruiterer and the eldest of three sisters, she was eighteen years old when the First World War broke out, and was deeply affected by her experiences, something that was later to come out in her writing, but which originally influenced her choice of further education.
After being accepted to the prestigious Anstey College near Birmingham – an incredible journey for a young girl to make away from the Scottish Highlands during wartime – Elizabeth worked as a PE teacher in several different places after the war was over. She had a difficult start to her teaching career, including at least one serious accident in the gymnasium, but eventually established herself happily in England, teaching in an all-girls private school. Living through the war and the ensuing Depression meant that Elizabeth had her fair share of challenges and disappointments, but she managed to create a good life for herself in the south of the country. However, a dark period in her twenties saw the early – and, to Elizabeth, shocking – death of her beloved mother, Elizabeth’s return to the Highlands, and then a period that was marred by the death and loss of family members and friends. Out of this dark time grew Elizabeth’s new career as a writer, which was marked by steady and growing success. She was to achieve publication, critical acclaim and considerable financial reward.
I have rediscovered Gordon Daviot’s short stories, written at the same time as much of her most well-known work. I have visited the London theatre that showed Gordon Daviot’s major plays, stood where John Gielgud stood, seen the photographs of the performances, heard from Dame Judi Dench about her memories of Gordon Daviot’s contemporaries, and collected rare magazines and souvenirs from Gordon Daviot’s productions. I have also discovered the third pen-name she kept secret until her death. Beth’s romantic life has been the subject of some speculation, and I have untangled the separate stories of the officer in the First World War who meant so much to her, and her later, lasting friendship with another soldier, a tragic forgotten poet. This latter search took me from Tomnahurich cemetery in Inverness to a church in south-east London.
Having worked so hard to build up her writing and create the life she wanted within the family constraints she felt obliged to honour, Elizabeth’s life changed all over again with the advent of the Second World War. Once again, Elizabeth came back stronger than ever: she developed her writing in new ways, and worked with the artistic challenges she was facing to create new and better work. After the war was over, she entered a remarkable period of creativity, writing most of the Josephine Tey novels that remain so beloved today and responding thoughtfully to the changing world around her – all while caring for her now elderly father, and
dealing with the beginnings of her own final illness.
I have read the original manuscripts of Josephine Tey’s novels, and deciphered her almost indecipherable handwriting, and, finally, I have met with Beth’s surviving relatives, who have given me their full support and opened up to me their own family papers: personal letters, photographs, memories – and even unpublished manuscripts.
For me, Josephine Tey, Gordon Daviot and Elizabeth MacKintosh are an inspiration, not just because their writing has brought me hours of enjoyment, but because the story of Elizabeth’s life showed me a new version of what was possible for a Highland woman. Her family came from a background of crofting and domestic service, and, through hard work and a belief in education, supported their daughters and encouraged them to aim high. Elizabeth went from Inverness Royal Academy to London’s West End, to Broadway, to Hollywood – and back again, to my home, to the small town of Inverness. Her biography paints a vivid picture of the society that she lived in, particularly in the north of Scotland, but also further afield. In a time of political change, which foreshadows the time we live in now, an examination of Elizabeth’s writing shows a different Scotland, a different history, and a new way of looking at the world, which can help us to understand where we are now.
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