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

by Helen McClelland

  The play was produced at the Marina Theatre during the last week of January 1922, and seems to have gone down well. But it was to be the last play that Elinor would write for the Bainbridges’ company; for, sad to say, Julian and Edith’s venture, on which they had embarked with such verve, was to collapse barely a year after its beginning.

  The reasons were many and complicated; but in the end everything came round to the question of money. Artistically the company had achieved an undoubted success, as witnessed by the local paper where the critic often rose from the normal humdrum of rapportage to heights of lyrical praise. The public too, those who attended the productions, had been enthusiastic. But unfortunately the audiences had often been small. Here the cold was much to blame: it took more than notices in the paper about the New Boiler to convince people that the hopeful statement ‘This theatre is now warm and comfortable’ was literally true.

  One way and another, Edith Bainbridge’s capital had dwindled to the point where it was no longer possible for the enterprise to continue. It was a bitter ending to the dream. For all of them, but most of all perhaps for Julian; since the fact that it was not his own but his wife’s money which had been swallowed up can only have made matters worse.

  The Bainbridges did make a gallant effort to keep their Stock Company going. And they did not immediately forsake South Shields. Right up to the middle of July 1922 they continued to play in the town, appearing now at the Theatre Royal, and living in rented accommodation. But after that there was nothing for it but a return to the old life of touring.

  Elinor’s feelings when the Bainbridges finally left South Shields can be imagined. Quite apart from her tremendous affection for Hazel, she had found in Julian and Edith two most congenial friends — perhaps the most congenial she had ever had. And it seems possible that her decision to continue teaching in the south of England was connected with her friends’ departure.

  However, at this point it becomes impossible for a time to find exact information about Elinor’s movements. It has now been established that during the period between the autumn term of 1921 and the summer of 1923, she was teaching at the well-known St Helen’s School in Northwood, Middlesex. Few details are available, but the school magazine, St Helen’s Own, contains several mentions of Elinor’s having organised various dramatic performances, including a masque which she both wrote and produced in the summer of 1922; and Elinor herself contributed to the magazine on at least a couple of occasions. Apart from these snippets in the magazine, only two other things have come to light about her time at St Helen’s and both are speculative. The first is a suggestion that Elinor could have gleaned the idea of the ‘No Spot Supper’ (featured in Excitements for the Chalet School, 1957) from St Helen’s, where it was apparently a tradition. The second, which is more important, will find its proper place in a later chapter.

  After leaving St Helen’s, probably in July 1923, it seems likely that Elinor spent at least part of that summer holiday in the Channel Island of Guernsey. Her Maids of La Rochelle (see page 99), which is set mainly in Guernsey, was published in October 1924 but must have been completed many months earlier; and the detailed descriptions in this book indicate that the author had actually visited the Channel Islands before writing the story. Unfortunately, though, no details have survived about her visit, so nothing definite can be stated.

  However it is known that by the autumn term of 1923 she had joined the staff of Western House — a girls’ school at Fareham in Hampshire. (The school still exists but is known today as Wykeham House.) Here Elinor taught mainly English, with some history and geography; and also, from time to time, coached hockey — an experience that may well have helped with her school-story writing.

  Elinor (second from left) and some of her colleagues at Western House School, Fareham c1925.

  And an interesting question arises at this point, concerning Elinor’s decision to go and teach at this particular school. Western House was a far smaller and less prestigious school than St Helen’s, and, from a career point of view, the move seems an odd one. But could Elinor’s choice have been influenced by the fact that Fareham is so close to Portsmouth? And Portsmouth was the place where Elinor’s father and a number of his forebears had come from, and where in all probability many of his relatives were still living. They were her relatives too. So did she perhaps feel a sudden urge — or even not so sudden — to go and make some contact with them? It would seem highly likely that she did.

  How far she succeeded in doing so is another matter. There were more than twenty Dyers listed in the Portsmouth street directories of that period: some were almost certainly related to Elinor, for her father’s family had roots in Portsmouth extending back at least to the mid-19th century, quite possibly much further. There was plenty of scope for research. And all in all it would be hard to believe that Elinor, during the three or four years she spent in Hampshire, was not impelled by curiosity, if nothing else, to try and find some of her unknown kindred. There is also a possibility that some of her father’s relatives could have made contact with her.

  Speculation apart, there is one piece of real evidence that Elinor’s thoughts had turned at this stage towards her father: it was in the course of 1922 that she decided to adopt the surname Brent-Dyer; and Brent came of course from her father, Charles Morris Brent Dyer. Charles had in fact been named after a Captain Brent (possibly Charles Morris Brent), who had commanded the ship in which William Dyer (Elinor’s paternal grandfather) was serving at the time of her father’s birth. Captain Brent had consented to be the baby’s godfather. And clearly he took his responsibilities very seriously, for, when William Dyer was drowned at sea at quite an early age, it was Captain Brent who financed Charles’s education and training for the Royal Navy. If Elinor perhaps learnt this from her paternal relatives (it is hard to imagine that she heard it from her mother) it could have influenced her decision to include Brent in her surname. In any case, the implications of this particular decision are clear. The new version of name linked her immediately with her father; and may have represented also a kind of anti-stepfather gesture. On the other hand, her reasons for changing the spelling of Eleanor to Elinor are obscure. One friend was told at the time that the name was now to be spelt like Elinor in Sense and Sensibility. Another suggested that the idea may have come from Elinor’s publishers, although no one at W. & R. Chambers could confirm this. The point is not really important: for, whatever Elinor’s motives were, with the publication in October 1922 of Gerry Goes to School the name Elinor Mary Brent-Dyer had come to stay.

  New surroundings

  The first definite information about Elinor’s time in Hampshire dates from the autumn of 1923. By this time she had long ago completed her second book, A Head Girl’s Difficulties, which was just about to appear; she had spent the holiday in Guernsey that would provide material for her third story (The Maids of La Rochelle) and had already begun work on it; she had settled into her teaching at Western House School; she had made a number of friends, but had fallen foul of her landlady.

  The latter, on independent testimony, was not a pleasant person. Elinor disliked her extremely. In fact there is a distinct possibility that horrid Matron Webb, who sets everyone by the ears in The Princess of the Chalet School, did not spring entirely from Elinor’s imagination. Moreover the landlady — in a well-used Chalet School phrase returned Elinor’s dislike with interest. To make matters worse the house was small, which meant that the two incompatibles were continually thrown on top of one another. Which suited neither of them.

  Soon Elinor was grabbing any pretext to get outside the house. And she discovered that an excellent opportunity to do this was being offered by the Fareham Philharmonic Choir. That autumn they were just beginning to work on Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Bach was of course her favourite composer, and the rehearsals would fill up an evening each week in an altogether pleasant fashion. So Elinor decided to go along and join the choir.

  Thus, in a roundabout sort
of way, the disagreeable landlady had done her lodger a good turn. For not only did Elinor enjoy her membership of the choir, it also led her to a valued friendship.

  At that time a young pianist, Marjorie Jewell, used always to play for the Philharmonic Choir’s rehearsals. She was about seventeen then, the elder of two musical sisters, and she was working seriously at the piano with a view to taking up music professionally. This in itself would have caught Elinor’s interest; and presumably she asked someone in the choir for an introduction to Marjorie. At any rate it was not long before Marjorie was inviting Elinor to visit her home, and to meet her mother and her younger sister Vivien. Also, and very important, the Jewell family’s cats, which were as much loved and nearly as numerous as those in Elinor’s own home.

  After that Elinor was to spend much of her free time with the Jewells. Marjorie and Vivien’s mother took a great liking to her; although also sizing her up realistically: ‘Elinor’ — she remarked after an occasion when there had been some misunderstanding between her daughters and their friend — ‘may be a clever writer but she doesn’t really know much about girls’. And throughout the years that Elinor lived in Fareham, Mrs Jewell was kind enough to offer a regular refuge from that landlady’s clutches.

  It turned out, too, that they all had interests in common. Not only in the musical field: the Jewells shared Elinor’s love of reading, and Mrs Jewell was also an avid book collector. ‘The two of them would sally forth on a tour of the secondhand bookshops in Portsmouth, and return quite bowed down with books.’ Later Elinor would pay a special tribute to Mrs Jewell in her dedication to Stepsisters for Lorna (1948); and in fiction Joey Bettany was to patronise those very same bookshops:

  Miss Maynard turned to Joey and asked her . . . about the books she had come to buy [in Portsmouth].

  ‘Got three of them,’ replied the girl. ‘The Francis Thompson was five bob [25p], but worth it — I’ve wanted him for ages! The Green’s history was five too. The other thing was sixpence [21/2p].’ (The Head Girl of the Chalet School, 1928)

  At the time when Elinor first got to know the Jewells, Vivien (later Mrs Pass) was about fifteen. She was obviously an observant girl, with a retentive memory, for she was able to supply detailed descriptions of Elinor, both as regards character and appearance.

  She was tall [or seemed so to Vivien: probably not more than five feet six inches], and far from thin. She had brown bobbed hair — straight; rather large features, nose and chin being both very prominent. Blue eyes [other people however have suggested grey, or hazel], and very strongly marked eyebrows. Not at all pretty, but she did have a very mobile and expressive countenance. Her appearance was always dreadfully untidy, and she didn’t seem to care much about clothes, but enjoyed wearing bold colours.

  Something that stands out from the memories of those days is that Elinor gave the impression of being considerably younger than she was. The Jewells, for example, had always thought of her as being then around or less than twenty-five; whereas in that autumn of 1923 she was only six months short of thirty. Most probably it was Elinor’s remarkable vitality that made her seem youthful. It also made her at times a rather tiring companion.

  She was extremely excitable, and full of enthusiasms. A compulsive talker, too, with a distinctly loud voice; and she always laughed a great deal — rather a loud laugh. [Perhaps the landlady did have her side of the case.] Like many imaginative people, she could be up in the heights and down in the depths within the same hour. Her imagination really was amazing. And, exhausting and tiresome as she could sometimes be, she had a tremendous sense of the dramatic, and enjoyed so much of life.

  Altogether the impression given is hardly that of a sober schoolmistress. Making it hard to picture Elinor fitting in well at Western House, which was a conventional enough establishment. She and the headmistress there do appear to have got across each other, and this may well have had less to do with Elinor’s work (in her own way she was a most effective teacher) than with her personality. There is no doubt that Elinor lacked discretion; and she often referred to her principal as ‘the fat white slug’, a phrase that must have given mortal offence if — or more likely, when — it reached that lady’s ears.

  However, although Elinor’s relations with the head of Western House appear to have been strained, she did become very friendly with one of the other mistresses, a Miss Edith Le Poidevin, who taught French and had joined the staff not long after Elinor did. Miss Le Poidevin is described as ‘a delightful person . . . very bonny and friendly’. She came from the island of Guernsey, something of which she was extremely proud. And this would certainly have interested Elinor, who retained a life-long affection for Guernsey. Undoubtedly her Channel Islands holiday must, with hindsight, be judged less important in her writing career than was her subsequent visit to the Tyrol, but its effects were nevertheless both perceptible and enduring. Moreover it was to furnish her with background material for five of her La Rochelle series (family stories, of which many are set in Guernsey and with remarkably accurate topographical details); as well as for parts of two wartime Chalet School books (The Chalet School in Exile and The Chalet School Goes to It).

  Elinor and her colleague at Western House had quite a close friendship. So at one time it seemed odd that Miss Le Poidevin had quickly vanished from Elinor’s life. More recently, it has emerged that there was a simple explanation. Edith Le Poidevin had not stayed long at Western House; she had married at quite an early age and had gone with her husband to live in India where she had remained until the mid-1980s. This makes it easy to see why, in this particular case, the two lost touch. On the other hand, something that becomes increasingly plain is that Elinor often tended to blow very hot in the early days of a friendship but to cool off very suddenly later on. More than likely she was unaware of this. Her most important Chalet School characters still have the same ‘best friends’ at forty-odd as they did in their middle-school days; and this is obviously something of which Elinor approves whole-heartedly. Nor, clearly, does she consider it any bar to Joey’s acquiring — and keeping — hosts of new friends. The fact remains that a number of the friends Elinor herself made along the way dropped out of sight and out of mind altogether.

  New interests

  Her friendship with the seventeen-year-old Marjorie Jewell was one of those that had got off the ground at a great rate. ‘She was extremely kind to me at first,’ Marjorie recalls; ‘I liked her a great deal; and I really think that in her own way she was fond of me and of us all’. Then one holiday, probably during the summer of 1926, Elinor invited Marjorie to go with her to one of the holiday courses held by the English Folk Dance Society. Marjorie was delighted, perhaps a little flattered too, and looked forward greatly to the holiday. The two arrived at the Summer School together; but, from that moment, ‘Elinor was so completely swept away with all the new people, and so absorbed by the whole Folk Dance set-up’ that she completely dropped the younger girl.

  And that she was simply unaware of Marjorie’s reactions is suggested by the fact that, the following year, Elinor actually invited Marjorie to accompany her on another folk dancing course. What is more, she was most offended when Marjorie refused. A definite break in the friendship ensued. And although later this was patched up, and in 1934 Elinor dedicated a book, Carnation of the Upper Fourth, to the Jewell sisters, things were never to be quite the same again.

  Ironically it had been through the Jewells that Elinor first encountered the English folk dance movement, which for a while became one of her great crazes. And it was also to Marjorie and Vivien that she owed her introduction to the writer Elsie Oxenham, whom she had long admired from the distance. She possessed all Miss Oxenham’s books, and had presented copies of several to Hazel Bainbridge.

  Elsie Jeanette Oxenham had an enormous enthusiasm for everything connected with English folk dancing. Moreover, and far more unusually, she was a real expert on the subject. And, as anyone who has ever come across her books will know, folk dancin
g often plays an important part in her stories. Many of these books appeared during the early twenties, when Vivien Jewell had been among the vast number of schoolgirls who devoured them. And Vivien did not see why the ‘Abbey Girls’ should have all the fun. She herself joined a folk dancing group; and was enterprising enough, when this group entered for a national folk dancing contest, to write and ask Miss Elsie Oxenham for her advice.

  This can hardly have been the only request of its kind to reach Miss Oxenham at that period. But perhaps there was something out of the ordinary about Vivien’s letter; Vivien herself thought it might have been connected with her great fondness for cats, which had somehow spilled over into the letter. But, whatever the reason, Elsie Oxenham not only replied most kindly, but offered to come over to Fareham and coach the group herself. ‘That,’ as Vivien Pass recalled, ‘was a real thrill. And what’s more, thanks to her our group got into the finals at the Albert Hall.’ Real storybook stuff, in fact.

  This incident shows Miss Oxenham in a pleasant light; and the impression that she was a genuinely kind person is strengthened by her friendly treatment of Elinor, who was introduced to her during one visit to Fareham.

  It must be remembered in order to get the right perspective that Elinor was then all but unknown in the world of schoolgirl fiction. Miss Oxenham, with about twenty published books to her credit, was near the top of the league. Yet she was neither too preoccupied nor too grand to take an interest in Elinor, and to encourage her in her writing. And that Elinor appreciated this can be seen from the dedication of Seven Scamps (1927): ‘To Elsie Jeanette Oxenham, whose friendship and books have given me such pleasure, and to whom I owe so much.’ A friendly contact between the two writers was to continue until Elsie Oxenham’s death in 1960. It never became a specially close friendship and the number of their meetings must necessarily have been limited, but the two corresponded at intervals and often sent each other copies of their books. Those from Elinor always contained some special handwritten message on the fly-leaf. And it may have given Miss Oxenham a little gentle amusement — if she recalled their first meeting at Fareham — to read the one written in Judy the Guide (1928) which concludes ‘From one writer to another’.