The Chalet School Revisited

by Sheila Ray

  “Girl Guides, was it?” asked Joey with interest. “I always wanted to be one, but my sister would never let me, because in England I caught cold over everything.”3

  Thus the seeds of interest are sown. In Jo of the Chalet School (1926), Grizel returns to school “full of the Girl Guide movement”.4 A company has been formed in the High School where she and Jo were once pupils, and her father has given her several books on the subject. She hands these around the seniors and middles, and their enthusiasm results in a deputation to the Headmistress to ask her to form a company in the Chalet School.

  Miss Bettany asks the girls why they want to be Guides. Grizel replies: “It bucks you up and makes you smart!” Gisela likes “the idea of learning to do many useful things”. Juliet says that “it will make for oneness”.5 Miss Bettany thinks so too. She tells them of her plan to attend an instruction course for Guiders in the Easter vacation in England. Helen McClelland suggests that Brent-Dyer herself may have attended such a course at that time, held at the Girl Guide training centre at Foxlease in Lyndhurst in the New Forest, not far from her Fareham home. Foxlease had been opened only four years before, in 1922.6 Helen found no evidence that Brent-Dyer was ever involved in actual Guiding: the books, she points out, “tell nothing about Guides that Elinor could not have learnt second-hand”.7

  Evidence may in fact be found in the pages of the Chalet Club News Letter, run by Brent-Dyer’s publishers, W. & R. Chambers, in the last decade of her life. In no. 4 (Oct. 1960) the author quoted a letter she had received from Miss Helen Crampton which said: “I don’t know whether you will remember me, but I used to be a member of the 1st Herefordshire Lone Ranger Company when you were Captain.” Brent-Dyer did remember Helen “and what a keen Ranger she was”. The Lone Branch was set up in 1919, with the first company being formed in 1921, for girls who lived in isolated areas and could not get to regular meetings. Lone Guides received a monthly training letter through the post, which took the place of a company meeting.8 Whether Brent-Dyer was ever involved with an ordinary Guide company is unclear. In News Letter 17 (Dec. 1967) she wrote, “I loved my own Guiding days”. Recently Gill Bilski expressed the view that Brent-Dyer’s descriptions of Guides have the ring of experience about them.

  As a Guider, it struck me on reading Chalet Girls in Camp that Elinor must have been to a Guide camp . . . It is possible to get most of the information from books, but she captures the feel of a Guide camp; the endless search for wood (and the girls who always seem to find green wood); the near panic when it rains in the night and how it’s always the few who have to get up to loosen the guys . . . 9

  At any rate, Guides feature significantly in most of the Tyrolean books and in other non-Chalet books of the period, such as Judy the Guide (1928). In The Princess of the Chalet School (1927), a chapter is devoted to Elisaveta’s enrolment, and we learn that her father, the Crown Prince of Belsornia, plans to establish a branch in his own country: “it seems to me that it is just what is needed for our young girls”. Not even the men of his own regiment, we are told, could show greater smartness than the Chalet Guides. The activities of the Guides and Brownies are described in great detail: ambulance work, signalling and Morse. The Brownies show the prince “a remarkable version of the life of Florence Nightingale in the Crimea”.10 Tests dominate the girls’ thoughts, and their benefits are revealed when Jo is able to track and rescue the princess when she is captured by her father’s mad cousin. “How thankful she felt that she had given up a whole Saturday afternoon once to teach the woodcraft signs to Elisaveta!”11

  Guides are an important feature of The Rivals of the Chalet School (1929), in which one whole chapter is devoted to “The Chalet Guides”. One fine Saturday, abandoning the Christmas tree they are decorating for the local children, the Chalet Guides have a march-out round the lake to Seehof. This takes them past the windows of the rival school on the Tiernsee, St Scholastika’s, situated at Buchau. The Chalet girls’ singing attracts the attention of the “Saints”. Their Head Girl, Elaine Gilling, longs to be a Guide, but the headmistress, Miss Browne, objects to the movement, saying it is “unnecessary” for her pupils.12 Elaine nurses a grievance against the Chalet School which, fed by this additional envy, leads indirectly to an outbreak of disobedience and the near tragedy in which Jo Bettany almost dies after rescuing one of the errant “Saints”, Maureen O’Donovan, from the frozen lake.

  When Miss Browne laments over the behaviour of her pupils, her colleague Miss Anderson suggests that “our girls wanted more than we have given them”. Miss Browne cannot understand this. “They have a good library, games, a debating society. What more can they want?” The answer is Guides. “I am not a Guide myself,” Miss Anderson says, “but I know what tremendous good they have done wherever they have been started”.13 St Scholastika’s duly starts its own Guide company, tactfully assisted by the experienced Chaletians; and by the time of The Chalet School and Jo (1931) the two schools are going on weekend camps together.14

  The Chalet School and Jo introduces Biddy O’Ryan, an orphaned runaway found wandering around the Tiernsee by a group of Chalet School middles. Rather than allow her to be sent to the Cecilia Home for Orphans, the Guide companies of the two schools undertake to pay for her education and support.15 This must have been a major responsibility, even allowing for the fact that she is evidently housed free of charge by the Chalet School in term time and by Madge Russell and, later, Jo Maynard in the holidays. At first Biddy is sent to the local school at the head of the lake, and a future as a lady’s maid is planned for her. But she soon proves, as Brent-Dyer quaintly puts it, to need better schooling than the village can provide and is transferred to the Chalet where she makes good. This takes her to Oxford and a job in Australia before, repaying her debt to the school, she returns as its history mistress in Carola Storms the Chalet School (1951). One of the most popular characters in the series, Biddy O’Ryan is permitted by the author to join that select band of Chalet girls who, like Joey, marry doctors at the Sanatorium and settle on the Görnetz Platz, thus retaining their connection with the school to the end of the series.

  Much emphasis is laid in these early books on Guide values. Forced to take the long way home over the mountain in The Rivals of the Chalet School, when the path breaks away on a winter’s walk, the girls of St Scholastika’s sulk and complain; the Chaletians, on the other hand, “as became people who had been in the country for some time, and who were Guides, said nothing, but set their teeth and went at it”.16 The Chalet Guides do not complain in adversity17; they are neat and tidy18; they “laugh and sing on all occasions”.19 In The Exploits of the Chalet Girls (1933), Thekla, who initially refuses to join the Guides “since it was an English institution” and she despises all things English, changes her mind when the prompt action of the Chalet Guides saves her from injury when her petticoat catches fire.20 “Guides always help, don’t they?” observes little Daisy Venables, justifying her action in stopping Jo and Frieda in an Innsbruck street.21

  By the time of The New Chalet School (1938), the last fully Tyrolean book, the Chalet School boasts three large Guide companies, a Ranger and a Cadet company, and all the Juniors are Brownies. That year the annual garden party at the end of the summer term was to be a “Guide affair”.

  The Rangers would see to Kaffee und Kuchen, and the Cadets were to have a couple of stalls in aid of the free beds at the Sonnalpe which the school had maintained ever since the opening of the Sanatorium. The Brownies were to give a display, and it had been decided that they should present the story of Grace Darling . . . The Guides were more ambitious. They were to represent hospital work in war-time . . . 22

  Thus presciently prepared, the Chalet School Guides pass into war-time and exile. The girls’ training comes in handy during their escape from Nazi-occupied Austria: “How thankful they were that, as Guides, they had all had plenty of tracking practice!”23

  Re-opening in Guernsey, the school includes first-aid classes in its curriculu
m as part of their war effort; “and as all were Guides, they had taken to the lessons like ducks to water”; indeed, “most of this work was revision for the Seniors, who had done it in their Guide tests”.24 Jo, now an established author, makes use of her own experiences in the two Guide stories which are among her earliest published novels for girls: Patrol-Leader Nancy and Nancy Meets a Nazi.25 Later, The Robins Make Good joins the list.26

  Guides in the British books

  That Guides were an important feature of Chalet School life in Britain is not so surprising. Many girls’ schools had their own Guide companies at this period; indeed, Helen McClelland tells us that there were Guides at the school Elinor Brent-Dyer herself ran between 1938 and 1948.27 A clear picture of the range of Guide activities is given in The Highland Twins at the Chalet School (1942). When the school secretary is hurt in an accident, the Cadets and Rangers taking their clerk’s badge share out her work between them.28 A poignant note is struck when Elisaveta, now a refugee from her Nazi-occupied homeland, declares her intention of earning her living after the war by taking in washing: “I’ve got my laundress badge, Joey, as you may remember.”29

  Guides become a symbol of right thinking in the Armishire books. Betty Wynne-Davies, who resigned from her company after falling out with her friend Elizabeth Arnett, goes on to betray war secrets to the Nazis, and is expelled. Her friend Florence Williams, while less culpable, is “too lazy” to be a Guide.30 Lavender Leigh’s babyish helplessness is depicted as the result of an over-indulged upbringing by an aunt who “doesn’t approve of the Guides”. But when her schoolmates ostracise her for anti-social behaviour, they are taken to task by one of the prefects: “If any of you had been the good Guides you ought to be,” Biddy O’Ryan declares, “you’d have given her a helping hand . . . ”31

  The opposition of Miss Bubb, locum headmistress when Miss Annersley and Miss Wilson are hospitalised after a bus crash, is represented as an integral part of a package of anti-Chalet values. It is taken for granted that her dislike of Guides, as of all activities outside schoolwork, is wrong.32 But Tom Gay, raised as a boy, is simply misguided when she declines an invitation to join (“No blinking fear! They had ’em in the parish all right, but I never had any use for ’em”).33 As soon as she is assimilated into girls’ school values, she becomes a keen Guide; and by the time of The Wrong Chalet School (1952) she is an even keener Patrol Leader.34

  Weekend camps become an attractive possibility again when the school moves to an island, and a whole chapter of The Wrong Chalet School is devoted to one such camp. Here we meet many old friends. Miss Wilson is now District Commissioner for Carnbach Guides (“very trig in her uniform”); Miss Burn, former Head Girl of the Chalet School, is Captain of the First Chalet Company, with Miss O’Ryan as one of her Lieutenants. Unlike the Chalet girls of Tyrol days, the Guides now pitch their own tents; but like their predecessors, they enjoy the swim that follows — until they run into a shoal of jellyfish!35 In the last British book, Changes for the Chalet School (1953), these weekend camps are still being talked about.36 And then — silence.

  The mystery of the missing Guides

  Why did Elinor Brent-Dyer drop Guides, which had been a central feature of her Chalet School books for almost thirty years? “Elinor seems characteristically to have lost interest in the subject,” writes Helen McClelland37; and if her assessment of the author’s character is correct, this may be the simple answer. In 1954 Brent-Dyer was sixty years old; she had given up her school six years before, and was now writing full-time. In 1953 she published no fewer than five full-length books, and in 1954, six. Interested or not, she might not have had the time and energy to keep up with Guides in any personal capacity.

  Elinor Brent-Dyer’s own explanation for the absence of the Guides in the Swiss books was that the girls themselves would have had no time for them. In the Chalet Club News Letter 15 (Sept. 1966) she writes: “The Chalet School Guide Company has not carried on in Switzerland because there is little or no time for it. The English branch has, however, a flourishing Company.” There is a sense of post hoc justification about this, as in quite a lot of Brent-Dyer’s answers to readers’ queries, and it really doesn’t stand up to close examination. What is it that fills the Swiss Chaletians’ time that the English girls do not also do? Rambles, perhaps? But when they were all in England, they went for long walks, and they also played a great many matches against other schools, which they don’t do in Switzerland. In Challenge for the Chalet School (1966), the Saturday schedule is given as “Games on Saturday morning and a ramble in the afternoon, weather permitting. Dancing and games in the evening”.38 Even with the addition of mending, there is surely room for a Guide meeting here.

  Another explanation is that Guides were too closely associated in Brent-Dyer’s mind with a particular kind of English boarding-school culture, which she was anxious to get away from. There were two aspects to this apparent attempt to distance the school from its earlier Guide-centredness: geographical and temporal. Paradoxically, although the Girl Guide movement was internationalist in intent and had spread to countries all over the world by the outbreak of the Second World War, it was nevertheless often portrayed in children’s literature as a strongly patriotic, imperialist organisation, focused on England and English virtues.39 This tendency was of course exacerbated in war-time, when patriotism was paramount. For Brent-Dyer, the sisterhood of Guides was always cross-national, and she was exceptional in distinguishing between the Nazis, who were England’s enemies, and Germans generally, who were not.

  This was emphasised in the scene in The Highland Twins in the Chalet School (1943) where Emmie and Joanna Linders, former Chalet School pupils and Guides, don Guide uniform to tell the story of their escape from their native Germany during the war to the assembled Guides in the school.40 A comparison with Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s presentation of the Girls’ Guildry, a parallel girls’ organisation, in Dimsie Intervenes (1938) — where Dimsie has her famous confrontation with Miss Carver over the parish hall piano — clearly illustrates how unusual was Brent-Dyer’s approach in the Chalet School books.41

  Nonetheless, in Brent-Dyer’s novels — even those set in the Austrian Tyrol — the values promoted by the Guides remain utterly English. “Guide honour” is a refrain which accompanies many a schoolgirl assurance. When Madge Bettany praises the Guide movement in Jo of the Chalet School (1926), she says that “it gives you a big outlook, and strengthens one’s ideas of playing the game and being straight”.42 And therein lies the other distance: that of time. It is clear from the Swiss Chalet School books that Brent-Dyer wanted to present her fictional school as completely up to date. Not only its educational methods but its uniform, its attitude to make-up for the girls, Jo Maynard’s egalitarian relationship with her daughters, are all presented as thoroughly “modern”. Brent-Dyer may have felt that the image of the Guide movement (still promoting the old ideals of honour, straightness and playing the game in the 1950s and 1960s, as women who were Guides at the time assure me) was a little old-fashioned for her new model Swiss Chalet School.43

  Doubly paradoxical, however, is the fact that although Brent-Dyer professed to be internationalist and up to date in the Swiss Chalet School books, in reality her focus remained stubbornly English and traditional. She seems to have had no desire to turn her Chalet girls into Swiss Guides; she wanted them to retain their English identity, even though Guides had existed in Switzerland since 1913; indeed, “Our Chalet”, the Guides’ World Centre from 1932, was located in Adelboden in the Bernese Oberland!44 A Swiss contingent attended the Scout and Guide International Folk Dance Festival in London’s Hyde Park in 1947, and ten years later Switzerland provided the site for one of four gigantic World Camps to celebrate the centenary of Baden-Powell’s birth.45

  No such dilemma had presented itself when she introduced Guides into the Chalet School in the Tyrol, since (as she claims in The Rivals of the Chalet School) Guides were unknown there at that time.46 In fact, Gill Bilski
tells me, the first Austrian Guide company was formed in 1914. But owing to the First World War and its aftermath, Guides ceased in 1918; were resumed in 1924; dwindled, and were officially restarted in 1935 — to cease again soon after because of the Second World War. Gill suggests that they may only have existed in the cities, so Brent-Dyer’s claim may well be correct; the Achensee (“Tiernsee”) being fairly off the beaten track.

  In Switzerland the Chalet School takes pupils from many countries but it remains an English school. Though the number of “foreign” girls increases book by book (and to do her justice, she does point out that the English girls are the foreigners in Switzerland, though significantly some English girls have trouble grasping this fact)47, not one becomes Head Girl; it seems that British girls alone have the requisite qualities for the work.

  As for the much-vaunted “modernity” of the school (or of Jo Maynard for that matter) in their approach to the upbringing of young women in the 1950s, this seems to be more honoured in assertion than example. Discipline, for instance, is much stricter in these later books: compare those regimented files from dormitory to dining-room with the freedom of Jo and her friends to run downstairs as soon as they were ready!

  Yet of course Miss Bettany’s sentiments would have been absolutely modern and radical when she expressed them, in the mid-1920s. The principles underlying Guides fitted so comfortably into the healthy, organised, educational regime of the early Chalet School that we tend to forget how new was women’s access to such ideas. Education for girls based on an intellectual training, games, devolved leadership and a code of moral values dates only from the late 19th century; organised leisure in the form of girls’ associations like the Girl Guides from the early years of the 20th.