Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  Beth, at eighteen, was one of the oldest in her year at school. She was well aware of what other people her age were doing, fighting in France and serving as doctors and nurses in Serbia, and this influenced her decisions about her future. In 1915 she left the IRA, gaining her Leaving Certificate (a group award across a range of subjects, examined nationally) and ‘proxime accessit’ (second prize) in Art. This second prize was the source of some disappointment as Beth had originally believed she was going to be placed first: an experience that she later used as inspiration when writing the scenes in Miss Pym Disposes where Mary Innes loses out on the prize of the job at Arlinghurst. The disappointment also helped to convince Beth that art school was not for her.8

  Beth still loved writing, and wrote in her spare time, but, unencouraged at school, and aware that she needed to earn a living, she wanted her private and favourite hobby kept separate from her working life. ‘When [I] was old enough to choose a profession,’ Beth said later, ‘[I] took care that it was one as far removed from writing as possible [... I] wanted a life of many facets.’9

  Her parents Colin and Josephine wished Beth to go to university, and she had also considered art college before the disappointment of the lost first prize in art, but instead she made the decision to apply to physical training colleges. Physical training was popular at the time, and the curriculum at a PT college would have included not only gymnastics and dance, but also academic book-based study such as medicine, biology, theories of teaching, and ‘physical therapy’, or basic treatment of injuries – all things which would have appealed to an intelligent, active girl like Beth who saw her fellow classmates working in military medicine. Miss Pym Disposes, the Josephine Tey mystery novel set in a physical training establishment, makes clear just how rigorous and highly regarded this type of training was.

  Specialist colleges for training girls in PE were still relatively rare, particularly those operating at the high academic level Beth expected. There was one PT college in Scotland, based in Dunfermline; previous students from the IRA had attended here, and Beth did apply, but was rejected because she wore glasses. However, Beth’s eyesight did not prevent her pursuing her chosen career, as she gained an acceptance to Anstey Physical Training College near Birmingham. Anstey had established itself as one of the premier girls PT colleges since its foundation nineteen years previously, and it maintained strong links with Scotland through its teaching staff and former pupils – supplying, for example, the Physical Training Instructress for the district of Ross-shire.10

  Anstey College had been begun by a woman called Rhoda Anstey in about 1895, gradually building up from what was originally billed as a ‘health centre’ called ‘The Hygienic Home for Ladies’ in Bristol, to offering academic, accredited courses, taught by a number of specialists, and based in a large house with gardens in Worcestershire, near Birmingham. In 1907, the school made one final move to similar premises nearby in Erdington (Sutton Coldfield), the location it was in when Beth MacKintosh attended. Rhoda Anstey, originally from Devon, was a formidable woman: an active feminist and suffragist, sometimes seen as unconventional, who, with the support of her family, was able to create a school where she could teach girls the physical training principles she had herself learnt at college. In 1915, when Beth MacKintosh started her course there, Rhoda Anstey was fifty years old, and the actual teaching of physical work was by then done by others, but Rhoda still remained as the principal and continued to be involved in her school even after her retirement, and right up until her death in 1936 at the age of seventy-one. One of Rhoda Anstey’s particular talents was the hiring of staff. Although the school bore her name and propagated many of her ideas, it was never a one-woman show, but always strived for good quality academic and practical achievement, with demonstrable results. Rhoda was well aware that she was fighting against received ideas about women and, despite some eccentric ideas of her own, always encouraged her teachers and pupils to aim for the highest standards. Anstey was a prestigious institution, which accepted only the very best students, carefully screening all applicants to make sure they were young ladies with suitable (i.e. middle-class) values. The school continued for many years, until it was finally incorporated into Birmingham City University.

  Anstey College continued the high educational standards that Beth MacKintosh had been used to at the IRA, and in later life she was to say that she never regretted her choice of further education. In the Josephine Tey novel Miss Pym Disposes, Lucy Pym, sitting with the gathered staff of the Physical Training College, reflects on the breadth and depth of education offered to PT students of the time:

  If this were any other kind of college that gathering would have been homogenous. If it were a college of science, the gathering would consist of scientists; if it were a college of divinity, of theologians. But [...] in this one room many worlds met.

  [...] All these worlds had gone to make the finished article that was a Leaving Student; it was at least not the training that was narrow.11

  This is an excellent refutation to anyone who queries how a woman who was trained as a PE teacher could go on to write plays and novels.

  Anstey was fee-paying, and cost Beth and her parents approximately 35 guineas a term, or just over £100 a year. Colin and Josephine MacKintosh were committed to seeing that their daughters got the best education possible, but it must have been particularly hard to see their eldest daughter leave home and go to college so far away in war time.12 The journey down to Birmingham was arduous and difficult to contemplate, given the wartime restrictions on travel: at times the train to the Highlands was almost taken over by military transportation of troops.

  Beth did not make the long journey from home alone, as a fellow IRA pupil attended Anstey with her.13 In the new house in Crown, Beth’s next-door neighbour was Marjorie Davidson, an IRA pupil from the year below her. Marjorie left after Fifth Year to attend Anstey College, and the two girls went through their two-year training at Anstey together, and kept in touch for many years afterwards. Colin and Josephine could not have travelled down to see their daughter, but at least Marjorie meant she had company. Although Beth came home for the summer, she would probably not have been able to travel home for shorter holiday periods. Leaving home really meant leaving home.

  Their time at Anstey – and the period of war they lived through – made Beth and Marjorie very close. Beth remembered their wartime journeys vividly, writing beautifully evocative descriptions of them over several pages to Marjorie years later. ‘Do you remember,’ Beth said, ‘the atmosphere of our shared miseries – the blackened stations and overcrowded trains and the swarming services [...] the long nights sitting up four a side with fat snoring men collapsing onto our shoulders every three minutes, and what Crewe looked like at four in the morning.’14 Marjorie Davidson and Beth MacKintosh shared a room together at Anstey, where college custom was for girls to be referred to by their surnames. The room-mates became known as ‘Mac’ and ‘Dave’.

  There was another major threat from the war. We think of the First World War as being fought mainly on the battlefields in Europe, but there were also air raids on Britain. Only a few months after Beth started college at Anstey, there was a Zeppelin bombing raid in the Birmingham area – two German airships, which had been aiming for Liverpool, drifted around Birmingham on the evening of the 31st January and through the night to February 1st 1916.15 The black-out that was in force confused their pilots, but they eventually dropped their bombs towards the north-west of Birmingham (Elizabeth’s college was situated in the north-east of the city). Thirty-five local people died. Both of the German Zeppelins escaped England, though one only made it back to its base in Nordholz in Germany, as the other crashed into the North Sea after being shot at by Dutch sentries. The black-out was even more strictly enforced after this. British air defences improved, but there was another Zeppelin bombing over the Birmingham area in the autumn of the following year. Blackouts and travel problems affected Beth daily at Anstey as she tr
avelled across Birmingham to take classes. During term time, the MacKintoshes could communicate regularly by letter, and they also sent Beth copies of the Inverness Courier, the traditional gift for the Invernessian in exile. Beth was an excellent correspondent, who wrote chatty, readable letters all through her life, with descriptions that bring alive her day-to-day activities, but it must have been horrifying for Colin and Josephine to read about Zeppelins in the papers and then have to wait for a letter from Beth to find out whether she or anyone she knew had been affected.

  In the long summer holidays of 1916 and 1917 Beth contributed to the war effort through her work as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment member). VADs were trained by the Red Cross to provide first aid and nursing help where needed, such as in nursing homes, thus freeing up other medical staff to join the military – Anstey students, including Beth, did VAD work in convalescent homes near the college, and in their home towns. There were three convalescent homes in Inverness during the First World War: Inverness Military Hospital, Hedgefield Auxiliary Hospital, and Leys Castle Auxiliary Hospital.16 All three were within walking distance of Beth’s home in Crown – at least, for an active walker – but given her choice of name for her fictional training college in Miss Pym Disposes, it seems likely that Beth spent some time at Leys, which opened in summer 1917.

  Leys Castle is a large house which is now located near new housing developments and a supermarket, about three miles from Inverness city centre. In Beth’s time it was rural and isolated. It operates now as an exclusive hotel (the Dalai Lama stayed there when he visited Inverness), but was originally a private family residence and was commandeered for war work. As a hospital it had fifty beds. Beth had some medical knowledge from her college coursework, and she also went on to work in hospitals and private clinics after graduation. Her VAD work was encouraged by Anstey as contributing not only to the war effort but also to her education. Beth’s experiences in hospitals are briefly mentioned in some of her writing, such as the descriptions of the girls’ career plans in Miss Pym Disposes or the short plays The Staff-Room or even Sweet Coz. However, although doctors and nurses are sharply drawn in these works, as in all her excellent character descriptions, there are no detailed descriptions of hospital life. Beth’s time as a VAD was not extensive, and her time doing medical work after college was interspersed with, and finally superseded by, teaching. Nursing was not a vocation for her, though Beth’s respect for the medical profession is clear throughout her work.

  Beth’s time as a VAD was motivated less by a desire to be a nurse than by a wish to contribute to, and be involved in, the war effort. The glamour of young men in uniform is easy to imagine. Beth and her female friends, like most of their contemporaries, were very enthusiastic about the soldiers they met, particularly the men of the US Navy who were stationed in Inverness towards the end of the war. It would have taken a while for the horrors of the trenches, and the lasting psychological damage of the war, to become apparent, and, at the beginning of the war all the sacrifices still seemed worthwhile, even glorious.

  At first, for Beth, the Great War was all about growing up, and her first romance. Sometime after the outbreak of war, before going into her second year at Anstey, Beth met and became romantically attached to a young officer in a Highland regiment.

  There has been a lot of speculation about Beth’s romantic life: she kept her personal feelings very close. She never mentioned the name of her First World War soldier to her friends, and never described their romance. However, Beth’s sisters did know about it, and Etta, in particular, believed that it was an important turning point in her sister’s life.17

  Many of Beth’s friends did speculate that she had lost someone important to her, being aware, for example, that she made visits to First World War gravesites in France to see where her young man had died. Beth’s later acquaintances, such as John Gielgud, felt that she was bitter about a love lost in the First World War, without knowing any details.18 I believe that this bitterness was not about one man, but about two very different men, whom Beth met at different stages in her life, as well as having its root in a wider understanding of the vast changes that the Great War brought about in society, but her first romance with the Highland officer was a brutal introduction to the frailty of relationships.

  It seems from what Beth said – and, more often, from what she didn’t say – that her first romantic experience in about 1915–16, in the middle of the First World War, was more of a crush than a serious engagement, but it was one that, because of the dramatic and abrupt nature of romance in war time, had important consequences for her both personally and professionally. From circumstantial evidence, it’s possible to guess who Beth’s young man was, and knowledge about the lives of typical Highland officers of the time reveals a little more about the background to Beth’s life, the society she lived in and her own personal values.

  At the age of eighteen, Beth couldn’t know that she was going to become a career woman. All the women around her – her beloved mother, her aunts and grandmothers – were primarily wives and mothers, and that was probably the future that Beth imagined for herself as well. Her family later recalled that she was interested in a young man at the IRA, a musician who went on to play for the London Philharmonic, but she had not had any serious romantic crushes before that.19 She was aware that her family didn’t ‘fit’ completely at the IRA, and she had inherited her father’s ambition – she was going to move on and up. Not for her the son of an Invernessian shopkeeper; she was going to find someone further up the social scale. This may have been a completely unconscious decision, but one that was understandable given her upbringing. Her romantic attachment in the First World War was to an officer – and he was not from Inverness. Beth had seen from her father and grandmother’s experience that the way for an ambitious person to get on in life was to move around for work, and by the end of her school career she was looking out beyond Inverness to the wider world.

  Beth worked as a VAD in both Birmingham and in Inverness, giving her many opportunities to meet soldiers.20 In her last year at school, Beth had made plenty of connections with the 4th Cameron Highlanders, through schoolmates who had joined up, and her family members in the army. Entertaining the troops was practically considered a patriotic duty – and was enormous fun for the girls of Inverness. They used to make ‘autograph books’, asking the soldiers to sign their names and say where they were from, and many of the signees gave their addresses and asked for letters.21 Soldiers from all over the country were sent to the Highlands for training, and there were numerous social events, such as dances, church events, and fundraisers for the war effort, at any of which Beth could have met and pursued a friendship with her young officer – and the same sort of events were equally as important in her college town.

  The other known fact about Beth’s officer is that he died at the Battle of the Somme, in July 1916.22 There was not a lot of time for Beth to get to know him, and not very much time for the romance to develop into something serious enough to be recognized by many people. It was more in the nature of a crush, or a private, tentative beginning to a romance. This is the main reason that information about Beth’s officer is hard to come by: the relationship was a brief, intense, wartime experience.

  Troops moved around the UK quickly as they were trained up. Once Beth had met her officer, though, she would have been able to follow his progress quite easily, particularly if he was in a ‘local’ Highland regiment. The Highland papers gave as much coverage as censorship would allow to the exploits of local regiments, particularly the 4th battalion Cameron Highlanders, which was one of the earlier battalions raised from Inverness, and which had attracted many of the first volunteers, including many former IRA pupils. Officers were regularly mentioned by name, and deaths and injuries were listed as fully as possible, while private letters from soldiers published in the correspondence pages gave more information to relatives and friends waiting anxiously for news.

  Using the information th
at Beth’s young man was an officer in a Highland regiment, and putting this together with the knowledge that he was killed at the Somme, I made extensive searches through the lists of Commonwealth War Graves, and searched the history of local regiments, in an attempt to identify Beth’s officer.

  Several small pieces of anecdotal evidence, coupled with clues in Beth’s writing, such as the mention of Becourt military cemetery in a dedication, helped to narrow the search. Beth said, later in life, that her officer died on the same day and near the same place as the poet Robert Graves was seriously wounded.23 This would make it the 20th July 1916 at High Wood, during the Battle of the Somme – although Beth might have exaggerated this connection to a writer she admired: poetic licence, as it were.

  It is dangerous to put too much emphasis on what Beth wrote in her fiction – it wouldn’t have been typical for her to have simply fictionalized a real person, she was a more complex writer than that – but there are little touches in her novels, particularly in her choice of names, that often link to real people, whilst the beginning of Kif, her first novel, is full of information that directly links back to the real 4th Cameron Highlanders.

  Alfred Trevanion Powell was an officer of the 4th Cameron Highlanders.24 An Englishman, born in Camden Town, London, he was only three years older than Beth, but, educated at a private school called Edward Alleyn’s, he was, as befitted a man of his class, already commissioned as an officer, in charge of a group of men and ready to lead them to the Front. He was a volunteer, and had left his job as a banking clerk with Thomas Cook and Son to join a cavalry regiment, the Royal Bucks Hussars, in April 1915. Along with his brother Charles Sydney, Alfred had been transferred to the 3rd/4th Cameron Highlanders as a reserve officer, and sent up to Inverness for training. Alfred had the opportunity to meet Beth, and had many of the qualities that would have attracted her: his English background, his class, his education. He was typical of the sort of officer Beth would have met. There is nothing to definitively prove that he was Beth’s soldier, but the thing that stands out to me is Alfred’s unusual middle name: Trevanion. In Beth’s first novel, Kif, which deals with the First World War, there is a small cameo of a soldier called Travenna. Travenna, a Cameron Highlander, meets the hero on a train going south, shows him London, sparks the hero’s interest in horse racing – and then is never heard of again. Beth, travelling regularly by train down to Anstey, retained a life-long love of England, particularly London, and an equally long-lived love of horse racing. Did Beth’s officer spark these two loves? Trevanion to Travenna is not too great a leap, and Beth always had an interest in names: it would be consistent with other links with real people’s names. Was Alfred Beth’s lost World War I soldier?