Elizabeth MacKintosh is a writer whose work is worthy of critical appreciation, not just a genre writer who produced excellent crime fiction. Of course, she was that too. The main reason Josephine Tey’s work has stayed in print is that her books are really good. Every new generation of readers rediscovers them, and, having read one, reads them all – and recommends them. Josephine Tey’s novel The Daughter of Time recently received a lot of attention, dealing as it does with the mystery of Richard III, the king whose remains were so dramatically discovered under a car park. The book was read on BBC Radio 4, and programmes celebrating it were re-broadcast. In one of these programmes, a reader said that The Daughter of Time was possibly the most important book ever written. There was a moment of realization as he heard the sweeping statement he had made. Then he took out the qualifier: The Daughter of Time, he said, was simply the most important book he had ever read. That is the sort of devotion that Josephine Tey, that Beth MacKintosh, inspires in her readers.
This is Beth MacKintosh’s story, the biography of the mystery writer who was once such a mystery herself: a mystery solved.
PART ONE
Elizabeth MacKintosh
1896–1923
Chapter One
‘With Mr & Mrs MacKintosh’s Compliments’
Elizabeth MacKintosh was born in Inverness on 25th July 1896.1 Her parents, Colin and Josephine, were not writers, and there was no family history of writing or involvement in the theatre. Colin and Josephine ran a fruit shop, and, on both sides of her family, Elizabeth’s grandmothers had been in domestic service. The thing that really made the difference to the MacKintoshes was the Education Act of 1872, which had provided free state education for all children until the age of fourteen. This was what gave Elizabeth’s father, Colin, a love of literature. School was where Colin learned to speak English, and it provided him with the education that enabled him, the child of illiterate Gaelic-speaking crofters, to survive and build a business in Inverness. The demand for more education gave Elizabeth’s mother Josephine her job before marriage, as a pupil-teacher. It was their love of learning that brought Colin and Josephine together, and they passed on their respect for education, particularly reading and literature, to their daughters, starting Elizabeth on her route to becoming a writer.
One of the few facts about Elizabeth’s mystery life which seems to be well known is her love for her mother Josephine, who was sadly to die young, and whose name Elizabeth preserved when she chose to write as ‘Josephine Tey’. Growing up, Elizabeth and her two sisters were close to their mother. And, contrary to the received view that Elizabeth was a loner, she was actually born into a large extended family. Josephine was the fourth of seven children, and Elizabeth had one aunt and five uncles on her mother’s side of the family, and was to have many cousins.
Josephine Horne had grown up in Inverness, though her family roots were from Aberdeenshire, Perthshire and England. These roots, and the stories from her mother’s side of the family, were very important to Elizabeth, particularly the link with England, which, as an adult, she identified with more and more. Josephine’s mother, Elizabeth’s grandmother Jane, was a strong matriarchal figure who lived into her 90s. She was present for all of Elizabeth’s childhood, as well as being around when Elizabeth returned to Inverness in her twenties, and it was Josephine and Jane’s stories that Elizabeth absorbed.
Elizabeth’s grandmother was born Jane Ellis in 1837 in the small village of Forgandenny in Perthshire. One of the easiest ways to trace Elizabeth’s relatives has been to look for Jane’s surname ‘Ellis’ – it was preserved as the middle name of not only Elizabeth’s sister but also several of her cousins. Jane meant a lot to the whole family. Elizabeth even used the surname Ellis for the fictional family in her second novel, The Expensive Halo.
By the time Elizabeth’s grandmother Jane Ellis was fourteen years old she was working as one of three female servants in a big house called the Barracks in Kinloch Rannoch, as a tablemaid. While she was working there, Jane met Peter Horne, a young carpenter from Aberdeenshire. Jane and Peter married in Kinloch Rannoch, before moving back up north to Inverness. Inverness was a rapidly expanding town with many new buildings being erected after the expansion of the railways had made travel to the Highlands easier for tourists and workers alike, and there were many opportunities for a well-qualified and time-served craftsman like Peter. The young Horne family rented a flat in Shore Street, but after a few years they did well enough to buy a house – a significant achievement for the time – in a better part of town, at 53 Crown Street, where Josephine and her brothers and sister were brought up.
Jane Ellis told her seven children about her childhood working in the big house in Perthshire, but she also told them stories going much further back: her father Robert had been a hedger, or gardener, and had originally come from Suffolk. Robert had travelled for work, making his way north before meeting a Scotswoman and finally settling in Perthshire. Jane passed on to her daughter Josephine and her granddaughter Elizabeth a sense of difference, a connection with the south of England, so far away and exotic-sounding to an Invernessian. But as well as this ‘Englishness’, Jane also identified strongly with her husband Peter and his family, and they too imparted something of that sense of difference to first Josephine, and then Elizabeth MacKintosh.
Peter Horne was from an even more numerous family: one of at least sixteen children, he was born in Aberdeenshire. Peter, and several of his siblings, left their home village to look for work, spreading out to other parts of Scotland and down to England. Peter followed his father’s profession when he became a carpenter, but others of his siblings took different routes, with his younger brother Joseph being one of the notable successes of the family after he emigrated to Australia and became involved in land management and real estate, founding a business that is still thriving today. This became one of the family stories, passed down to Elizabeth and encouraging her to believe that moving on, aiming high and succeeding was possible.
Peter Horne’s other legacy to his family was his strong religious belief. His birthplace of Forgue in rural Aberdeenshire is in an area still known for its strong Protestant faith, and glimpses of this can be seen in Elizabeth MacKintosh’s writing. Elizabeth’s father’s family were Free Church of Scotland, and it is perhaps saying something to state that the Free Church side of the family was the less religious side. Although Elizabeth was later to stop attending church, her childhood included religious instruction, and she was to go on to write a series of religious plays. Other glimpses of Peter Horne’s religious beliefs appear in Elizabeth’s early novels, such as the references in The Expensive Halo to ‘a sect which were a kind of superior Plymouth Brethren. A very greatly superior kind, of course.’2 Peter’s children continued this religious upbringing to different degrees. Josephine took the Protestant emphasis on education and literacy into her first career as a pupil-teacher, but softened her attitude to fit in with her husband Colin’s, so their daughter Elizabeth was given a less strict upbringing than some of her cousins. Elizabeth’s later plays took religious figures and humanized them, in a reaction to the strict and sober religion of Peter Horne, but the Horne family’s strong sense of morality and the Protestant insistence on education and literacy was definitely something which influenced Elizabeth’s life choices as well as her writing.
Although Elizabeth always emphasized her closeness to her mother’s side of the family, and her identification with her English ancestors, her father’s side of the family had just as important an influence on her – arguably, in fact, even more influence, whether Elizabeth liked that or not.
Colin MacKintosh was the eldest son – though not the eldest child – in a family of five. Unlike his wife and daughters, he was not born in Inverness. The MacKintosh family came from Applecross, on the west coast of Scotland, where they had lived for generations in Shieldaig, a tiny, remote crofting community. Colin and his siblings grew up speaking Gaelic; they had no English until they went
to school, and their parents never learned English to full fluency. Elizabeth’s mother Josephine grew up a town girl: although Inverness was small, it was the largest town of any size for miles, it had all the amenities, and counted itself as the capital of the Highlands. Shieldaig, on the other hand, was a totally different proposition, and Colin’s upbringing would have been almost foreign to Elizabeth, and it was not something that she learned to value in the same way as she valued Josephine’s and Jane Ellis’s stories of England and big houses.
Shieldaig in Applecross is exceptionally remote, while the Applecross peninsula is famously accessible by the treacherous and torturously slow trip over the mountain road known as Bealach na Ba (the Pass of the Cattle), which is clearly signposted as being unsuitable for inexperienced drivers, impassable for large vehicles, and totally useless in bad weather. Readers of Josephine Tey’s first mystery novel The Man in the Queue might start to get an idea of where Alan Grant’s tortuous journey into the Highlands came from. Shieldaig itself is a tiny collection of houses alongside the shore, but Colin and his family actually came from settlements even smaller than that, on the top of a hill behind Shieldaig: Camus na Leum and Camus na Tira. These settlements were literally one or two houses, surrounded by small areas of cultivated land where the family could grow vegetables or raise a few animals. Many of the MacKintosh men were also fishermen, while Colin’s mother Elizabeth (known as Betsey) supplemented their income by doing domestic service work at the local big house, Courthill. The MacKintosh family had been there for many generations: the earliest records for the area which I have found are lists of able-bodied men made in 1715, after the first Jacobite rebellions, with the MacKintoshes of Shieldaig clearly noted.
However, it was not an easy life. It goes some way to giving an impression of the area when it’s explained that Shieldaig was not included in the Highland Clearances: it was one of the areas of poorer grazing land that people were cleared to, rather than from. Both Camus na Leum and Camus na Tira are completely abandoned now, with only a few stones showing where the walls of the houses once were. Walking up the track from Shieldaig into the mountains, with steep cliffs going down on one side to the water, it is easy to see that just a few winters of bad weather could be enough to encourage a family to clear out, and the MacKintosh family endured further hardship when two of Colin’s fishermen uncles were lost at sea.3 Colin’s father John MacKintosh decided to make the long walk down to Lochcarron and take the train to Inverness to look for work. Attracted to the town for the same reasons as Colin’s future wife’s family, John found a job amongst the building work going on in Inverness, mostly as a general labourer, though sometimes specializing as a mason’s labourer.
Many years later, Colin wrote to one of his daughters about this time in his life, describing how in 1877, when he was fourteen, he remembered walking from his home in Shieldaig to the train station in Lochcarron to pick up a parcel that his father had sent home from Inverness. This was a round trip of about forty miles, and Colin described how he, small for his age, set off alone at daybreak, which would have been around 4 or 5 am in summer. He walked all day, armed only with the address of a relative in Lochcarron who could give him some food. On the way he met the local doctor, who was astonished at how far he had come, and on the way home he met the coachman for the big house, who refused to give him a lift. Colin made it home just before dark – which, in summer, would have been around 11 pm – perhaps a full nineteen hours after setting out. ‘Think of it. It makes me sad,’ Colin wrote.4 His daughters kept the letter as a curiosity, but could barely understand their father’s upbringing, it was so different from their own. Unlike Josephine and Jane Ellis’s English roots, her father’s poverty in Applecross was not something Elizabeth MacKintosh talked of with pride to her friends.
Colin’s father’s job as a labourer was less specialized than Peter Horne’s trade as a carpenter, and less well paid, but it was enough to eventually move the rest of his family out from Shieldaig to Inverness. By 1881 the whole MacKintosh family – mother, father, daughter and four sons – were living in the Maggot in Inverness. Although the name ‘the Maggot’ was actually a corruption of ‘Margaret’ (the area being dedicated to the saint), the more evocative name perhaps gives a better idea of the type of area it had become. Thatched cottages sat on a rather damp piece of land, parts of which had been reclaimed from the river, or had been a sort of island. It was not an attractive part of town, though it is sometimes fondly remembered for its community spirit – rare photos of the area show the communal green festooned with families’ washing. The MacKintoshes lived in a flat in Friar’s Court, alongside a couple of other large families. Colin MacKintosh was actually quite close to his future wife Josephine in Shore Street, but Josephine’s family was always just a slight step up and one street along on the social scale from the MacKintoshes.
The Maggot was also close to the Gaelic church. There was no Gaelic enclave in Inverness; Gaelic speakers were widely spread throughout the town, but newcomers tended to gravitate towards areas where something was familiar, or where they knew someone. Colin MacKintosh had relatives in Inverness already. As well as his father, his uncle Roderick, or Rory, Maclennan (his mother’s brother) was living in the town, and had got married there in 1877. Rory Maclennan was to be a big help to Colin and his family, because Colin’s father John was still not earning enough to keep everyone.
By the 1881 census, Colin’s trade was listed as ‘grocer’s apprentice’. He was eighteen years old, and his older sister Mary was also already out working as a domestic servant, though his younger three brothers, being under fourteen years old, were still at school. Colin’s job was an important part of the family income, and was to become even more important. Census records give a snapshot of the MacKintosh’s family life every ten years, but their fortunes seem to have fluctuated rather more than the steady life of Josephine Horne and her family. The move from Applecross to Inverness was not easy, and the whole family had to work hard.
There were other challenges to face as well. At the very end of 1882, Colin’s older sister Mary gave birth to an illegitimate son, whom she named Donald. Donald’s father’s name is not listed on his birth certificate, but he was born at an address in Rose Street in Inverness. Mary had been working as a domestic servant, and Rose Street was not the sort of address where one might expect servants to be employed, so it’s reasonable to assume that a pregnant Mary had lost her job, and was staying with the father of her child. However, a search through the records to find the owner of the Rose Street address does not make it clear who that father might have been. Mary gave her son Donald her own surname, and moved back into the family home. Whatever her Free Church family might have thought of Mary’s actions, they welcomed her and her son, and supported them.5
Colin’s mother Betsey turned to her brother Rory for help. Perhaps drawing on her experience as a crofter growing her own food, and using her son Colin’s expertise gained as a grocer’s apprentice, Betsey decided to set up a shop, selling fruit and flowers.6 The shop opened around 1887, staffed by Betsey, Rory and Colin. It’s not entirely clear just how and where the shop started, but two years down the line, in 1889, it was based at 50 Castle Street, on the right-hand side of a narrow street leading up a hill, directly underneath Inverness Castle walls. At that time, Castle Street had buildings on either side, and was much darker than it is now, when one side of the street is open. Little alleys, now all blocked off or demolished, ran between the shops and houses, and the flats above the shops had small private courtyards and drying greens to the back of what we would now consider the main street. The shops were all small stores, selling things like food or furniture. Many west coast Highlanders lived and worked on the street, and Betsey would have been able to speak to them in Gaelic, but, since her English was not good, Colin’s role in the shop (and in the MacKintosh family) was becoming something more than an apprentice.
Soon the fruit shop was doing well enough to move to larger
premises. A big advert in the centre of the front page in the local paper the Scottish Highlander and North of Scotland Advertiser on 4th June 1891 gave
NOTICE OF REMOVAL for E. MACKINTOSH, FRUITERER AND FLORIST, In returning thanks to his Customers and the Public in general for their liberal support during the past four years, takes this opportunity of intimating that he has now REMOVED from 50 CASTLE STREET, to those more commodious Premises, No. 55 CASTLE STREET, (DIRECTLY OPPOSITE) where he hopes by strict attention to Business, and keeping only the best quality of Goods, to merit a continuance of their kind support.
The mixing of pronouns in the advert – E. MacKintosh, the owner, was a ‘she’ of course – reflects Colin’s growing role in the day-to-day running of the shop. By the 1891 census, Colin’s occupation is given as ‘fruiterer’, the title he would proudly bear for the rest of his life. He is no longer an apprentice, and, in fact, was training his two youngest brothers, Murdoch (Murdo) and Donald (Dan). Colin and his family had also moved to one of the flats on Castle Street, to be closer to their shop. The whole family, including Mary and her illegitimate son, were at number 67; seven adults and one child in a three-roomed flat.
The tenement houses of Castle Street were known for their overcrowding after the Second World War, but even by the end of the nineteenth century the houses here were holding very large families. However, despite what seems to modern eyes to be cramped conditions, the flat on Castle Street was actually larger than the MacKintosh’s old home in Friar’s Court: that had only two rooms. Number 67 Castle Street was owned by the Sutherland family from Broadstone Lodge on Kingsmills Road in the Crown area of Inverness, who also owned the new, larger shop premises at number 55, simplifying Colin’s rental arrangements. They were now Colin’s rental arrangements, as he, not his father John, was listed as the named tenant. The income from the fruit shop had obviously become more important than John’s wage as a labourer, and since John was now in his early sixties, it is easy to see that hard physical labour might have become more difficult for him.
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