And the same comment could justifiably be made about the way in which Joey explains in Chapter VII of Jo Returns to the Chalet School how to make a history-chart: here the instructions are so precise that, in the old cliché, ‘a child could follow them’.
Two children who did follow them in real life were Helen Griffiths and her sister, Sybil. Only their history-chart, made under Elinor’s directions, was a rather special affair: ‘The river of time, it was called; done on a large piece of drawing-paper, with the river winding backwards and forwards, and bridges drawn in to mark the dates’ (and ‘they had to be remembered too!’).
The latter remark suggests that Elinor could in some respects be quite firm with her two pupils. And Mrs Colam also writes, in the same letter where she describes the history-chart: ‘My sister has been reminding me what a demon Miss Brent-Dyer was over good manners. I had forgotten the speed with which we always leapt to our feet or opened doors!’
But Helen Colam’s memories of her governess are above all coloured by ‘much affection’. And admiration, too: ‘Miss Brent-Dyer was such a wonderful teacher. She must have had a very great skill in keeping a child’s interest. I never, ever, remember being bored.’
On the other hand, it must also be mentioned that Elinor was far less successful with Helen’s elder sister. Sybil Griffiths did not actively dislike Elinor, but she often felt left out of things, for Helen, in her own words, ‘was always teacher’s pet’.
To say the least, Elinor was perhaps not sufficiently aware of the different temperaments and needs of her two charges. And the schoolroom regime at Albion House was far better suited to one child than to the other. For instance, every day Elinor insisted that her pupils must read the leading article in the Daily Telegraph and then take part in fifteen minutes’ discussion of current affairs. This Helen always enjoyed; Sybil, according at least to her mother, ‘was put off reading for life’.
But then Elinor always had a capacity for arousing at one and the same time quite different reactions in different people. The attitudes of the Griffiths’ family provide a good example. As put by Mrs Colam: ‘My father and I liked and got on with her so very well; my sister not so well; and my mother not at all!’
Not that Helen herself was totally blind to the eccentric side of her governess, particularly as regards her appearance: ‘I shall always remember her wearing one of her stepfather’s old hats, and a suit she had knitted herself, without a pattern, and which even I as a child thought was a rather odd shape’.
Apparently Elinor ‘always was knitting, and her lap was always full of wool; knitting needles too — pencils — rubbers — cigarettes and matches — all sorts of weird things’. Undoubtedly there would have been cigarettes, for Elinor was quite a heavy smoker. And Helen Griffiths, at nine years old, was fascinated by one thing: ‘When Miss Brent-Dyer first came to us she had her own teeth, and quite a gap between the front ones, and she used to funnel the smoke out through it. I was quite upset when she had her teeth out, and replaced by rather pearly ones.’
Elinor herself appears to have made surprisingly little of losing her teeth. Perhaps, at forty plus, she accepted it as inevitable. Perhaps she actually preferred those pearly ones. At any rate she continued, minus her gappy teeth, to smoke right to the end of her life. Not only that: she was to portray many of the Chalet School staff and other adults, not excluding the exemplary Jo Maynard, as regular smokers. Indeed the number of cigarettes mentioned in the pages of the Chalet series might perhaps excite disapproval in some quarters today, in view of changed attitudes to the whole question.
Elinor, according to a Hereford friend, even smoked when she was writing; or rather typing, to be more exact, for all her books went straight on to the typewriter. It seems that she always worked with enormous energy and at high speed. And the speed could well explain two things. One, the many careless mistakes and inconsistencies that crept into her Chalet series, right from the beginning. Examples must occur even to her most devoted admirer. The other — and this to her credit — the fact that during the 1930s her output was seventeen books, although for several years she was doing what many would consider a full-time job.
For that matter, during these early years in Hereford Elinor was busy not only with teaching and writing; she had also launched into a new activity, that of giving historical lectures at Mothers’ Union or WI gatherings, or the like. The subjects included Queen Victoria, King Charles the First and, inevitably, St Thomas More.
Even nominally spare time was always crammed full. There was reading, of course. And she had become an active parishioner of St Francis Xavier’s Catholic Church in Broad Street. She was singing regularly in the Festival Choir; getting to know Hereford and the surrounding district; visiting her considerable number of new friends.
Altogether it would seem to have been a full and happy time in her life. But simply in the natural course of events it could not have continued unchanged. The Griffiths children were growing up; and even had the war not come, bringing with it a gradual end to many such institutions as private governesses, it is unlikely that Elinor’s services would have been required at Albion House after the early 1940s. As things turned out, her days as governess were to end much sooner than that. For in the autumn of 1937, almost two years before the war, Septimus Ainsley, whose health had been deteriorating for some time, became seriously ill. And on 16 November 1937 he died.
CHAPTER XVIII
CHALET SCHOOL — MARK II
IT is unlikely that Elinor was deeply affected on a personal level by Mr Ainsley’s death. True, her feelings do appear to have mellowed since the early days when she had gone around chanting ‘I hate my stepfather’; for, according to Mrs Griffiths, who knew her well at this period, she ‘always spoke quite nicely of Steppy, even if she poked fun at him a bit sometimes’. But the general impression seems to be that Elinor’s attitude was one of tolerance, not affection.
However, in practical terms, Septimus Ainsley’s death was to bring many changes for Elinor as well as for her mother. First of all, there was plainly some alteration in their financial circumstances. This cannot easily be assessed, but one rather odd thing emerges: Mr Ainsley’s estate, leaving out of account the house in St James’s Road, was valued at less than £900. And that, even in 1937 and making every allowance for inflation, was not a great deal of money. Moreover it is far less than could have been expected, not only in view of Septimus’s original handsome inheritance, but from the standard of living maintained by the Ainsleys, who struck more than one visitor as ‘comfortably off’.
Perhaps the family had been living on their capital. But since Mr Ainsley appears to have had a good business head it is more likely that he had already made over part of his money to his wife and/or his stepdaughter. And, in possible confirmation of this, Elinor did mention to Mrs Griffiths at this time ‘something about a trust’. However it is impossible to do more than speculate about this.
Of course there was Stoneleigh, the house in St James’s Road. A solid, respectable property, it was undoubtedly worth, in house agents’ parlance, ‘a substantial price’; and Nelly Ainsley still had her own money — the far-sighted Isaac Rutherford had assured that. But Elinor was now placed in a difficult position, for although her combined earnings as governess and author had no doubt provided a reasonable income, it is unlikely that her writings on their own could have done so. On the other hand, had she continued her job at Peterchurch, this would have meant leaving her widowed mother alone all day on five days of the week.
In the end an obvious solution was found to this particular problem and it was arranged that the Griffiths girls, who were now thirteen and sixteen, would travel daily into Hereford in order to have their lessons. And once that had been decided it was only another step in the same direction for Elinor to consider setting up a school of her own. This was something that Madge Bettany, and numerous others in fiction, had done with resounding success. In real life people had done it and got by. Why should
n’t she?
Whether the idea originated in her own mind, or with her mother, or perhaps with someone quite outside, the scheme appears to have fired Elinor’s imagination, And full of enthusiasm, as always in the initial stages of any enterprise, she launched into a search for accommodation. The house at St James’s Road did not offer anything suitable for a school — or so it seems. But a friend had a large hut, of the ‘summer-house’ variety, standing empty in her garden, and arrangements were quickly made for the school to begin its life there.
In practical terms this was just about feasible. The shed contained two ‘rooms’, and it was easy enough to acquire a few desks and chairs. But with winter still in full swing it looked as though conditions would be, to say the least, primitive. Elinor characteristically remained undaunted. After all, the shed had a stove: that took care of the present. Then, as soon as the warmer weather began, the children would be able to have their lessons in the garden. So she turned her attention to the enjoyable, if not strictly essential, task of designing a school uniform — in fact, two uniforms, one winter, one summer. And in happy disregard of the fact that the school as yet numbered only Sybil and Helen Griffiths on its roll, she placed a notice in the Hereford Times of 5 February 1938 announcing: ‘The Margaret Roper School . . . for Girls . . . To be opened after Easter. Terms on application to the Principal, Miss Brent-Dyer (Inter. Arts. N.U.T.C.)’.
The naming of her school would have given Elinor no difficulty. Perhaps her beloved Thomas More would really have been her first choice. But in 1938 the name ‘St Thomas More’s’ would immediately have marked out the school as Roman Catholic, and Elinor wanted it, like her Chalet School, to be open to all denominations. In any case, More’s eldest daughter, Margaret (who married Will Roper) provided an ideal model for schoolgirls to emulate. To quote Elinor herself (in Bride Leads the Chalet School, 1953), ‘as early as the days of Henry VIII one family of girls [that of Sir Thomas More] had been encouraged to become learned ladies’.
And Thomas More did indeed hold the opinion, most unusual then for anyone outside royal or noble families, that girls should receive the same academic education as boys. His daughter Margaret had profited from her opportunities and had grown up an accomplished young woman, well able to hold her own in scholarly conversation. (Those who saw Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons may recall the scene where King Henry, on a visit to the Mores’ Chelsea home, is astonished and perhaps not altogether delighted to find the youthful Margaret as fluent in Latin as he is himself.) The name ‘Margaret Roper School’ also had the great advantage that, while it might strike a special chord among Roman Catholics, nothing about it was likely to put off others.
With the school’s name and uniform now settled, there was still the matter of finding proper buildings, not to mention attracting a few more pupils. And, astonishingly, as regards the former requirement, Elinor was to have an almost Chalet School type of good luck. For it turned out that a school in Hereford, known as the ‘Grey School’, was just on the point of closing down; their premises at Lichfield House, Bodenham Road, were soon to be for sale; and in a short time Elinor had made arrangements to buy the house (doubtless with some financial assistance from her mother and perhaps also from the trust she had mentioned to Mrs Griffiths).
Apparently there was no question of her taking over the Grey School as a going concern, since the remaining pupils and staff moved in a block to ‘The Elms’, one of Hereford’s long-established private schools. So Elinor obtained possession only of Lichfield House itself and the large garden in which it stood (perhaps also of some school furniture and effects). But this did not prevent her from inserting an optimistic notice in the Hereford Times to the effect that the Margaret Roper School would be opening on 5 May 1938.
Lichfield House, the premises of the Margaret Roper School between 1938 and 1948 and Elinor’s home until 1964.
The house she now owned was a Victorian villa of imposing size. Built originally to accommodate large Victorian families with tribes of servants, it was by this time about eighty years old and most likely a bit shabby following its years of occupation by a school. Or, to describe it in the words of the local newspaper: Lichfield House was ‘a spacious private residence . . . in Bodenham Road’; the latter being, then and today, a pleasant residential road about three-quarters of a mile from the centre of Hereford.
There could be no doubt that the house offered scope for running a school of considerable size. Now it only remained for Elinor to find the pupils. And it was here that things ceased to run as easily as they had in the Chalet stories. Certainly Madge Bettany had started off with only two pupils: her sister Joey and Grizel Cochrane. But almost immediateiy Madge had gained another in Simone Lecoutier, her partner’s young cousin. Moreover in no time at all there had been also six Tyrolean girls.
Elinor had got her ‘foundation stones’ in Sybil and Helen Griffiths; and she, too, had the promise of a third pupil, who was to have joined the others at the beginning of the summer term. But at the last moment this girl developed appendicitis (a far lengthier and more serious matter in 1938 than it is today) and she did not turn up at the school until many months later.
For a while it looked as though the Margaret Roper School was condemned to exist as an eternal duet. The only thing was to soldier on and hope that by September more girls would have enrolled. But in the mean time Elinor, sanguine as she was, must sometimes have had an uncomfortable feeling that she had been unwise to purchase such an enormous house. (Since those days Lichfield House has become, first an hotel — with about twelve bedrooms, in addition to lounges, dining-room and offices — and more recently an old people’s home.) So it was almost certainly at this stage that she and her mother decided to assist matters financially — and justify the existence of all those rooms — by taking in a few discreet lodgers. This was the beginning of what has been called ‘Elinor’s old ladies’, for most of those who came at various times to live in Lichfield House were elderly women. Some were to remain for years and to become an integral part of the household. And Elinor, according to a friend, was always very good to her old ladies: ‘she seemed to have a kind of bond with older people, just as she often did with much younger ones’.
One, at least, among the lodgers became a close friend. Her name was Elizabeth Pearce, but she was known by everyone as Aunt Elizabeth, although no relation. She is remembered by Chloe Rutherford, who was a schoolgirl at the time, as ‘a really beautiful old lady; a rare soul’. Elinor was particularly devoted to ‘Dearest Aunt Elizabeth’ (the dedication of The Highland Twins at the Chalet School, 1942) who was to continue living at Lichfield House until her death. That, however, did not take place until many years later, and by that time the Margaret Roper School had come and gone.
In the end it had seen ten years of life. So, looking back, it is odd to think how nearly the school had come to a dramatic ending in 1938 — even before it was properly started. There is no difficulty in seeing how it happened; nor in understanding that Elinor was under considerable pressure throughout the spring and summer of 1938. There were all the complicated arrangements, practical, legal, domestic and scholastic, that had to be made for the school’s opening. There were letters to be written and people to be interviewed. There was work connected with her books: two appeared in 1938 — The New Chalet School in April; They Both Liked Dogs later in the summer — and that involved much proof-reading, a task that Elinor seems to have disliked as much as Joey does in the stories. Above all, there was the constant battle to find time for writing, and the inevitable sense of frustration when every moment was filled in meeting other demands.
It was the conflict between teaching and writing that almost wrecked the Margaret Roper School. The struggle was unequal, for Elinor seems to have been oddly uninvolved with her teaching at this time; with the result that her two pupils at the temporary school began to find everything increasingly disorganised. On most mornings Elinor would be late, whereas Sybil and Helen, who alwa
ys travelled by the 8.15 bus from Peterchurch, would naturally enough arrive each day at about the same time. This meant they often had to spend quite long periods waiting outside the hut. One day they both — Sybil in particular — became ‘so fed up with hanging around’ that they left and went back home to Peterchurch. ‘I remember that on the way my sister dragged me through a churchyard — that somehow made it all seem worse!’
The whole episode can hardly have been popular with Mrs Griffiths. And afterwards Elinor did presumably pull herself together up to a point, for the arrangement with the Griffiths was to continue into the next term. However, 5 May — the day that Elinor had planned for the Margaret Roper School’s official opening — went past unobserved.
No one remembers exactly when disaster struck, but it came towards the end of the summer term. Sybil Griffiths was then about sixteen and she was supposed to be preparing intensively to take an examination the following year — most probably the School Certificate, forerunner of today’s GCSE. And then one day (history does not relate exactly how) Mrs Griffiths discovered that Sybil was frequently being taught, not by the qualified and experienced Miss Brent-Dyer, but by her quite unqualified mother. That was too much. Understandably Mrs Griffiths was outraged. And despite the fact that both summer and winter uniforms had been bought for Sybil and Helen, their days at the ‘school’ were brought to an abrupt end.
Behind the Chalet School: A biography of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer Page 20