The Chalet School Revisited

by Sheila Ray

  But also unlike Elinor, Madge’s parents were dead — no mother or stepfather existed to deny her independence or to thwart her ambitions. And while Elinor still grieved over the loss of her adored brother Henzell, who had died of cerebro-spinal fever (a type of meningitis) in 1912 aged 174, Madge’s brother Dick remained alive — although living sufficiently far away to allow Madge to be totally independent of him. Madge was also fortunate enough to have the company and custody of her little sister Joey, and it is interesting to speculate on the part she played in Brent-Dyer’s original fantasy, given life in The School at the Chalet.

  In 1921 Brent-Dyer had become deeply attached to the child actress Hazel Bainbridge, whom she liked to pretend was a little sister and for whom she had written Gerry Goes to School.5 Hazel’s life cannot have been easy, and the demands of touring would have meant that her childhood experiences were far from the innocent, stable childhood which was later portrayed in so many of Brent-Dyer’s books. But although Brent-Dyer might have wished she was Hazel’s sister, in reality she had no such status or influence.

  In the early books, then, before Brent-Dyer came to identify herself with Joey, Joey’s character appears to fulfil her wishes for both her “little sister” Hazel and her dead brother Henzell. Madge had care of Joey from infancy, and Joey had a stable home and retained her childhood throughout her teenage years — in fact until about two hours before she became engaged (in The Chalet School in Exile, 1940). Although her health was very delicate, she was always saved by a combination of her sister Madge (assisted by her husband, Dr Jem Russell) and the health-giving air of the Tyrol. And while Brent-Dyer never married or had children of her own, Madge, of course, had not only “Dr Jem” but, eventually, a large family of six.

  There are grounds, too, for assuming that Brent-Dyer’s school at the Chalet represented her ideal as an educational institution, and that Madge’s life — at least initially — was the life she herself would have liked to have led. And yet Brent-Dyer’s teaching career ensured that her descriptions of school life were written from experience, and it is this combination of idealism and authenticity which helps to account for the fact that over the years a number of readers have written to the publishers to ask for a prospectus, hoping if not wholly believing that the school is real.6

  Madge’s school began in the mid-1920s as a small, privately owned establishment of nine pupils, an “English school” set in the Austrian Tyrol. By the time the last Chalet book was published, 45 years later, it had become a large boarding-school of over 400 pupils, with its own finishing branch and public examination centre which, together with an “English” branch in Wales, was owned by a public company still headed by its founder. In this the school mirrored the development of actual educational establishments for middle-class girls, for whom boarding-schools were a common experience in the late l9th and the first half of the 20th century, and this probably helped to maintain the series’ credibility.

  The first girls’ public school, St Leonard’s (in St Andrew’s in Scotland), had opened its doors in 1877, less than 50 years before the publication of the first Chalet School book. Others, such as St Felix, Southwold, followed in the first quarter of this century. Alongside these well-known and highly academic schools existed hundreds of much smaller, less academic establishments, many dating from the early l9th century. Boarding-schools flourished between the wars, and in the 1920s and 1930s many new schools were opened; for example, Benenden in Kent in 1923. But after the Second World War the implementation of the 1944 Education Act brought free education to middle-class girls and regulated school standards, leading to the gradual disappearance of many boarding-schools. Those schools that remained were larger, catered for a more exclusive group of girls, and had more uniform academic standards.7

  It is important to remember that Brent-Dyer herself was not a product of the type of school she was writing about. Instead she was educated at a small private day school, established in the 19th century and run by a pair of sisters who were almost certainly, like Madge, without teaching qualifications.8 Nor do the books reflect Brent-Dyer’s teaching experience: the quality of her own early education meant that her most prestigious post was at the Boys’ High School in South Shields during 1917, and she spent much of her teaching career at local authority schools. Later, she did teach at girls’ schools, but the most notable, Western House in Hampshire, was a day school rather than a boarding-school. And while she was competent as a teacher, the evidence suggests that she lacked the management and leadership skills needed to become as successful as her fictional headmistresses when running her own school, the Margaret Roper School in Hereford, during the ten years between 1938 and 1948.9

  In fact, as with the vast majority of school stories, the educational aspects of the Chalet School play a secondary role in the plots of individual book. Lessons are used primarily as settings for tricks or amusing incidents; for example, the cookery lesson described in Chapter 9 of The Chalet School and the Lintons (1934) provides a background for Cornelia Flower to flavour apple pies with garlic cloves by mistake. Instead, the boarding-school setting essentially provides a realistic raison d’être for the autonomous all-female community that is the true subject of the series.

  The Chalet School curriculum

  Nevertheless, academic achievement and the curriculum in general do play a significant role in the series, and are given greater prominence than in most other girls’ school stories. The school initially begins with a curriculum consisting of “English subjects”, French, German, sewing and music. However, this soon broadens out as the school grows and more staff are appointed, and for most of the series the standard curriculum includes Latin, science, mathematics, art, domestic science, religious studies, English, history and geography, as well as sewing, music and foreign languages; and senior girls are entered for public examinations. The curriculum of the school, in other words, is similar to that found in many real middle-class girls’ schools of the period.

  Penny Summerfield’s study of middle-class girls’ schools in the first half of this century, “Cultural Reproduction in the Education of Girls; a Study of Girls’ Secondary Schooling in Two Lancashire Towns, l900-50”, shows that there was a great deal of emphasis placed on academic achievement, although interestingly given that the Chalet School was inter-denominational, this was less pronounced in Catholic schools.10 However, while in reality the academic performance of girls has always been found to decline as they reach adolescence11, this does not appear to happen in the Chalet School. While this can be partially explained by the fact that the Chalet School is a girls’ school — even today, evidence shows that girls achieve better academic results when taught separately — the fact that descriptions of adolescence are generally absent from the series must also be relevant.

  Mary Evans, writing about her girls’ grammar school in the 1950s, recalls that:

  Academic achievement was never allowed to be everything (hence the universal dislike of the swot and the equally universal award of the school prize to the good “all rounder”).12

  This was duplicated in the Chalet School, where swot and sneak Eustacia Benson is at first universally disliked. Later in the series, the adult Joey presents a prize for “the girl who . . . has done most to help other people”.13 Prize-winners include Mary-Lou Trelawney, one of the role model characters in the series, who is told that the prize “is given to the girl who most fulfils the ideal the pupils of the Chalet School always have held before them”.14 That ideal is service to others rather than academic success. Evans also recalls that:

  To be assured of high academic honour within the school, the subjects to excel at were English Literature and History. Being good at science and mathematics had no great cachet or appeal.15

  This is not quite true of the Chalet School, where girls go on to study science subjects in higher education, but it is true that Joey’s own subjects are history and English literature, while her “ideas of maths are wild and woolly in t
he extreme”16. Mary-Lou’s chosen career is archaeology, a specialism with strong links with both subjects.

  Out-of-school activities include the Hobbies Club, the school magazine (The Chaletian), Brownies and Guides, and an annual sale. These will have been familiar to many readers, and to a lesser extent remain so today. Valerie Walkerdine, who has written extensively about girlhood, stresses their importance:

  Proto-fascist organisations are embarrassing to those who stand outside the familiarity of one of the mainstays of suburban life. Yet, it was the church, the school, the Brownies, the Guides and the fêtes and competitions which helped to provide the building blocks of my formation.17

  Sewing, first mentioned as a subject when the school begins, is still on the syllabus in A Problem for the Chalet School, published in 1956. Evans points out that sewing was a skill still much in demand in the 1950s:

  mass availability and mass consumption had not yet given the physical object the kind of fleeting importance that it was later to acquire . . . Perfectly respectable and comfortably-off women still mended their stockings in those very recent days.18

  That sewing is seen as useful and valid rather than as an accomplishment is also shown by Brent-Dyer’s serious treatment of Sybil Russell, Madge’s eldest daughter, who wishes to study embroidery at “the South Kensington School” (the Royal School of Needlework), and then earn her living sewing “church embroideries, like altar frontals and stoles and copes”.19

  Other domestic subjects were introduced in the Chalet School in 1934, when the then Headmistress tells the school: “While we wish you to become cultured women, we also desire that you shall be home-makers”.20 However it is doubtful that Brent-Dyer was sincere in her commitment to this, as these lessons in particular were used as settings for tricks or amusing incidents like the one described above. In this the Chalet School appeared to reflect the mixed message which real middle-class schoolgirls continued to receive over the first half of the century. Penny Summerfield has noted that:

  the schools themselves relegated them [domestic subjects] to a secondary positon. In so doing they conveyed a message to girls about the relatively unimportant place which preparation for domesticity occupied in the schools’ agenda.21

  Evans recalls a different message by the 1950s, but points out that:

  The responsibilities of the housewife and the mother were given full credit by the staff and “making a home” was an ideal which was accorded full status by a staff that was largely unmarried.22

  It is probable that both the fictional and non-fictional dichotomies arose because both fictional and non-fictional Headmistresses were forced to reflect the dominant educational emphasis on domestic subjects for girls, while not necessarily agreeing with it. Deirdre Beddoe points out that educationists have differentiated between the purpose of education for boys and girls for much of this century, in reference to official education reports.23 Two years before the publication of the first Chalet book the Hadow Committee, reporting on The Differentiation of the Curriculum for Boys and Girls Respectively in Secondary Schools (1923), stated that “We do not think it desirable to attempt to divorce a girl’s education from her home duties and responsibilities” (p.125). Hunt quotes the Journal of Education which, in August 1932, claimed that girls who did not become mothers were failures as women, and which commented that women teachers and office workers really needed “marriage, a home and a family”.24 By 1943, when the 17th book in the series was published, the Norwood Report of that year still saw girls being educated as future wives and mothers.

  This view of girls’ education continued after the war and for the rest of the time that Brent-Dyer was writing. Summerfield refers to John Newsom’s book The Education of Girls (1948), in which he concluded that: “the vital educational objectives for women are to enable them to become accomplished homemakers, informed citizens and to use their leisure intelligently”.25 The Crowther Report of 1959 claimed that the incentive for girls to equip themselves for marriage and home-making was genetic, while the Newsom Report of 1963 stated that the main social function of girls was to make a suitable home for their husbands and children and to be mothers.

  Aspirations and careers

  However, the lack of commitment with which many middle-class girls’ schools pursued domestic science subjects did not mean that they were offered an equivalent education to boys. Deirdre Beddoe has pointed out that:

  It is worth noting that the education offered in girls’ “public day schools” (i.e. private secondary schools) was far more academic and less sex differentiated than that offered in State schools. Domestic subjects were looked down upon but, on the other hand, science and mathematics were not given the provision which they had in boys’ schools in the same sector. Consequently, when many middle-class girls went to university, they had already opted for arts subects.26

  This was not strictly true of the Chalet School. As early as 1927, Brent-Dyer writes that Juliet Carrick, Madge’s ward, is leaving the school to study mathematics at London University.27 By the 15th book, The Chalet School Goes to It (1941), fifth formers’ ambitions include being a surgeon, and later in the series one of Joey’s triplet daughters, Margot, wishes to go to medical school (The Chalet School Triplets, 1963). Daisy Venables, Jem’s niece, also becomes a doctor (Tom Tackles the Chalet School, 1955), although she marries soon after qualifying and then abandons her career. Throughout the series many of the girls aim for higher education and professional careers, including teaching, nursing, gardening, librarianship, farming, law, museum curatorship and interior design. Summerfield has noted that in actual middle-class girls’ schools:

  Not surprisingly from the earliest point girls developed a strong impression that academic success and entry to higher education, especially university, but also teacher training college, were what these schools required of their pupils, and that any other objectives they might have were of little interest to the heads and their staffs.28

  She adds that this is despite the fact that the actual numbers going to university each year were small. In another study she states that only 0.5 per cent of 18-year-old girls entered higher education during the 1920s.29 In fact Oxford Universty did not open its degrees to women until 1920 and Cambridge until 1948, although women studied there and took the exams from 1879 and 1869 respectively.

  Annie Nightingale, one of BBC Radio One’s first women disc jockeys, writes of her girls’ public day school in the early 1960s:

  I was not considered particularly academic and I think they rather disapproved of me. When I left and said that I wanted to be a journalist, it was not considered the right thing to do. If you weren’t going to university you were supposed to go to secretarial college.30

  Evans agrees, and notes that this emphasis on academic achievement did not reflect what was considered to be important in the outside world.

  We lived in a semi-fictional world in which education, and educational success, mattered more than anything else. If we chose to believe in this fiction then we could be assured of adult success, and we could also be assured of the approval and support of the school.31

  Evans believes that the main reason that academic success was emphasised for middle-class girls was to reinforce class structures in English society.

  Our security depended on our parents’ (particularly our fathers’) ability to earn a living and to earn a living that would support the detached house and car. To do the same we would have to pass exams and learn skills that might command considerable financial rewards.32

  She adds that:

  In one sense, of course, we were being encouraged in a lie. As middle-class girls it was highly unlikely that we would spend our adult lives in employment . . . Such an attitude on the part of teaching staff is nowadays sometimes interpreted as a fervent feminism, a determination to ensure that girls can gain access to higher education. That determination was undoubtedly there, but so too was the determination . . . that middle-class girls should remain in a mi
ddle-class world. The surest way to do this was . . . to go to university or training college or medical school or some other enclave of middle-class expectations and aspirations.33

  However, four years before the Chalet School series began, the census of 1921 showed that nearly one in three women had to be self-supporting34, while about 18 per cent of women aged 20 to 45 never married during the interwar period.35 Tinkler quotes research carried out by Edith Mercer in 1940, which found that all the girls interviewed from a girls’ secondary school wanted a profession, while the majority also wanted to marry.36 And in 1951 more than one in five married women and half of all unmarried women were in employment.37

  While many of the women employed at the time the books were published may have been working class, there is nothing to suggest that Brent-Dyer’s readers reflected the social class and educational background of the Chalet School pupils, and the need to work would probably have seemed quite natural to many of them. Brent-Dyer herself needed to work throughout her life, suggesting that her portrayal of a career as a serious option for most middle-class girls was quite sincere.