Dance was an important part of the curriculum at Anstey. There were two forms taught: artistic dancing, and folk dancing. The high standard of dance teaching is commented on in Miss Pym Disposes, and the main teacher, Mrs Ida Bridgeman (who later became principal when Rhoda Anstey retired), was a modern dance specialist. She was acknowledged to be different to many of the physical training teachers, as she was interested in a more aesthetic ideal. She was tall, dark and handsome, a physically striking woman, with a commanding presence, demanding strict attention from the girls in her classes. The modern, interpretive dance she taught was based on a precise system of movement, and even girls who did not have the essential artistic temperament necessary to fully express themselves through dance were expected to be able to follow the movements precisely. ‘Miss Pym’ comments on the difference between the students who went through the movements and the character of Desterro, who is a real dancer, showing that Mrs Bridgeman managed to impress upon Beth some of the real artistry of dance. English folk dancing was at that time undergoing something of a revival, though English and Scottish country dancing are slightly different, and the forms that Beth was used to might have hindered her. The main difference is that in Scottish country dancing the dancers point their toes, whereas this is not done in English folk dancing.
For dancing, a special outfit was worn, of a long green silk skirt or dress for Juniors, and a similar black dress for Seniors. Dress reform was one of Rhoda Anstey’s hobby horses, and she was clear that it was not possible for women to practise physical training properly if they were hobbled by restrictive fashions. She believed that these restrictive fashions, such as tight lacing and high heels, could actually damage women’s bodies, and this was emphasized in physiotherapy classes at Anstey. Beth had a life-long interest in clothes, favouring a country look with smart tweeds, and the occasional nod to fashion such as the sheer pussy-bow blouses of the nineteen-thirties, but her clothes were always practical. She loved walking in the Highlands, and dressed accordingly. During Beth’s time at Anstey, students wore a navy blue, loosely fitting tunic, which was cut just above the knee. Compared with the long skirts and white blouses of daily wear in the photographs of IRA students in their final year, this gave Beth and her fellow students much greater freedom of movement, and this tunic was worn for all classroom-based lessons as well as practical work. The Anstey uniform went completely against prevailing fashion for tight-laced tops and long skirts, and several students found that, when they had their first job, their new employers were shocked by their PE kit. Out of school, when walking into Birmingham for example, Anstey students were expected to create a good impression of the college by being smartly dressed at all times. On these occasions they wore a navy full-length skirt, a three-quarter-length coat, a straw boater with College band, a white blouse, and a College tie.
Presentation was also a big part of ‘Commanding’ classes. These were basically lessons on how to be a teacher and give instructions, especially the loud shouted ‘commands’ necessary for drill and gym. As a quiet, reserved person, Beth struggled with these classes at first. Dress and presentation were part of the ‘Commanding’ classes, but the accents students used were also criticized, and, as a Highlander, Beth’s accent was something her later students and friends in England particularly remembered. As the Inverness accent is not as distinctive as, for example, the Glasgow accent, it’s generally regarded as clear and pure, but it is usually soft-voiced. In a later letter Beth wrote, ‘I have vivid recollections of these dark days when we first faltered forth our feeble utterances under Mrs Bridgeman’s pitiless eye, and wondered vaguely why suicide was considered a sin!’4
In their free time, depending on the seasons, Anstey students also went sledging, skating or walking in the extensive and beautiful college grounds. It was a small, close-knit community, with the thirteen students of Beth’s year being a typical class size. There was plenty of opportunity for classmates to form a strong bond, while outside interests and the emphasis on vocational training meant the community wasn’t stiflingly isolated. It is easy to see how Beth, a good but overlooked student at the IRA, would have thrived in this more adult, yet still academic, environment. The detailed descriptions in Miss Pym Disposes are testament to Beth’s absorption in Anstey, and she remained proud and positive about her experiences there throughout her life. Amongst the scant biographical details she allowed her publishers to put on her books, Anstey was specifically mentioned. Beth spoke highly of Anstey to her family and friends as well, and was a direct example to one of her little sister’s friends: Mary-Anne Symington, a classmate of Beth’s sister Etta, followed Beth from the IRA to Anstey College, graduating in 1925.5
Beth graduated from Anstey in 1917. Back in Inverness, her sister Jean finished school in 1917, after her fifth year.6 Jean was eighteen, and that summer Beth was twenty-one. Their younger sister Etta was thirteen. Their home in Inverness had been very much affected by the war. In addition to the loss of so many young men, the large number of soldiers stationed in the Highlands and the training taking up the landscape made the town Beth returned to after graduation very different to the one she had left. There were practice trenches dug in the surrounding countryside, and the whole area was militarized, with citizens’ movement curtailed. If people had still hoped that things would return to ‘normal’ after the war ended in November 1918, they were soon to discover their mistake. In the Highlands, as elsewhere, the whole way of life was changed by the war: from being a relatively stable, hierarchical society, the idea of change and the progress of technology was pervasive, even if the reality of change and progress took longer to arrive. Beth was to become very aware of how Britain was not the ‘home for heroes’ that the returning troops and their families wanted it to be, and her first full-length novel, Kif, was to deal particularly with the effects of economic depression and the difficulties that people, especially returning soldiers, faced after the end of the First World War.
Beth did not return to Inverness to live, though she spent the summer there before she started work, spending some time probably as a VAD at Leys Castle hospital.7 In Miss Pym Disposes there is a vivid description of the students’ plans for the future, with each of them ‘assigned’ to a placement by their eccentric headmistress. A number of Anstey students down the years worked not just as PE teachers, but as teacher trainers, and, as universities began to admit more women, even went on to work in academia, studying the theory and development of physical training. Anstey students were highly regarded by employers. Beth was not the only writer to come from the college (though the other writers tended to specialise in non-fiction, such as technical writing on physical education), while the strong emphasis on vocation at Anstey seems also to have appealed to girls with other callings in life: the college produced more than one missionary. Beth herself worked a number of short-term placements in a variety of settings after graduating from college, both as a physiotherapist and as a teacher. In the six years following her graduation, she worked in at least seven different settings. It took her some time to find a place where she was happy to live and work. The end of the war meant that women were now competing with men for jobs, affecting physiotherapy and medical positions though not, of course, female PE teaching positions. The number of short-term placements that Beth went through was influenced by this, but the general impression is of restlessness and constant movement when Beth was in her twenties. ‘[Y]our wandering life’, her mother Josephine called it, in a letter she wrote to Beth for her twenty-fifth birthday, saying she would keep her present (a ring) safe in Inverness until next time she came home.8 The lack of many concrete details about Beth’s life at this time adds to the impression that she was, if not yet an enigmatic woman, at least restless and unsettled.
Immediately after graduation, Beth stayed in the Midlands, near Anstey. She took the trouble to write to her former college to let them know how she was getting on. Many Anstey students kept in touch in this way, with letters often publishe
d in the school’s magazine.9 As a member of the Old Girls’ Association, Beth kept up to date with her college, and received copies of the magazine. Interestingly, Beth’s letter to her old college was singled out when a history of Anstey was written. Although the compiler of the college history had no idea that Beth had become an author, her talent for expressing herself in writing was already clear. Beth said in the letter that she had found work, essentially three part-time jobs at centres in Nottingham, Newark and Hucknall. This meant her working week involved a fair amount of travelling, but she had a lot of variety and plenty of chance to learn more and build on what she had learnt at Anstey. The first two places were girls’ schools, while the Hucknall Centre was a Pupil Teacher Training Centre, for both boys and girls. Unlike other students at Anstey, Beth had experience of co-educational teaching from her years at the IRA, and throughout her career worked with both sexes. She enjoyed working at the Hucknall Centre most, where she taught pupils aged from thirteen to around seventeen. She was teaching subjects as varied as Theory and Practice of Teaching Drill, Folk Dancing, and ‘Commanding’ – and after her own struggles with ‘Commanding’ she noted that she was very gentle with the students of the latter.
Beth also wrote to her old college room-mate, ‘Dave’, who had found work in the far north of Scotland; a cheerful letter that masks what seems to be homesickness. Her general impression of Nottingham was ‘red-brick – soot – fog’. ‘On the whole it’s a lovely life – till I get bored!’ Beth joked, describing the disparate group of people she shared lodgings with (a list that is rather familiar to readers of her novel The Expensive Halo).10
Back in Inverness, Beth’s middle sister Jean was also thinking about her career. Like Beth, Jean had her sight set on further education, and she too wanted to travel and wanted the best. Leaving school after fifth year – one year early – she had opted for secretarial college, but chose to move to London for her studies.11 She enrolled as a pupil at Kensington College, run by a James Munford and specializing in shorthand and business work. It was a one-year course, against Beth’s two-year period of study, so she was catching up with her elder sister, able to travel south with her and thinking too about moving on to the world of work. Beth and Jean met up in England, particularly for holidays, and continued to do so over the next few years as Jean moved around.
The MacKintoshes financial situation had changed considerably. They could afford to send their two eldest daughters to fee-paying colleges, and were happy to see them both starting good careers. Towards the end of the war Colin made a significant purchase, when he bought the shops that he had been renting for the last few years.12 In addition to his fruiterer’s shop at number 53 Castle Street, Colin was now the landlord for the flats at number 51. There were nine properties of different sizes; some may just have been rooms, while others accommodated families, and Colin charged different rents accordingly. His tenants ranged from the spinster Miss Christina Macdonald, to John Diack, a warehouseman, and his family. Some of Colin’s tenants, like the Diacks and Alexander Thomson, clerk, were to remain in the flats for many years, with their rents fairly stable during that time. Unlike his work as a ‘Fruiterer’, which Colin mentioned proudly on every official form, he never described himself as a ‘Landlord’. In his will, it wasn’t even clear that he owned the flats, they were just included with his other assets, while, in contrast, he left detailed instructions for what was to happen with his shop. The landlord side of his business did not engage his interest as much, and was not so successful. Colin had also bought 47 Castle Street, which had room for a shop downstairs and rented flats above, and, although these (comprising seven individual flats or rooms) had been occupied when they were owned by the previous landlord, by 1918 they were all vacant, listed in the valuation rolls of Inverness as ‘to be reconstructed’, while the flats’ value is recorded starkly as ‘nil’. The space under the flats was not suitable for a shop, though Colin used it as a store, along with neighbouring number 49. Castle Street, with its tall tenement flats going up each side of the hill, was an area that was going downhill. Over the next couple of decades, the buildings deteriorated structurally, and the flats were to get a bad name for overcrowding and slum-like conditions. Although Colin and Josephine never struggled for money, their purchase of the Castle Street buildings was not necessarily the bargain they thought it was. Even the fruiterer’s business did not do so well after the First World War, as the Depression took hold, and Colin’s upmarket clientele in the big houses of the Highlands ordered less as their circumstances changed. There was no question for Colin that his daughters would have to keep working.
After probably only one academic year in Nottingham, Beth moved on. She is variously noted as working for a physiotherapist in London, as a physical therapist at a private clinic in Leeds, and as a PE teacher in a school near Liverpool. By focusing on physiotherapy as well as PE teaching, Beth was following a national trend which saw Anstey and other physical-college-trained gymnasts in much demand for work in rehabilitation. Anstey had emphasized the medical and scientific background to gymnastics, with students trained in anatomy, and this knowledge was particularly useful for helping injured and disabled war veterans. Beth also had the added practical training of her VAD work. Her later playwriting draws on her knowledge of medicine and hospitals, but nursing was never a vocation for her, and her main focus is always the relationships between staff, or their social lives.
The exact chronology is unclear, but one move is of particular interest. In January 1920, two and a half years after graduating, Beth, despite her later reputation as an Anglophile, chose to return to Scotland, to work as a PE teacher at Oban High School.13 It was an important choice, though a part of her career that she later wished to forget: ‘I never worked in Scotland, by the way’, she wrote in the 1930s to someone wishing to write a profile of her career. ‘I went straight from school to England, and spent all my working years there.’14 This wasn’t true. She did work in Scotland – her identification with England, and her love of that country had not yet taken hold. This was to come later. In another letter written many years later, Beth said that in her twenties she felt almost unbearably homesick:
[O]f all the major emotions [homesickness is] by far the most all-pervading. Grief rolls you over in waves, like surf [...] love has climax and anti-climax, but homesickness blackens everything, day and night, in one constant fog [...]. There is no rising to a new day, no new point of view. You go to bed with the thing, and it is there when your eyes open again. I haven’t known it since I was in my first few “twenties”, but I shall remember till I die what it was like.15
Even this small extract from one of Beth’s letters shows her developing writing skill: grief doesn’t ‘roll over you’ it ‘rolls you over’ – providing a vivid image of just how strong the feeling was. Whatever Beth’s day job, she continued to write in her spare time, and her experience of homesickness was used to great effect later in her play Valerius. It was something that had affected her deeply and inspired this brief return to Scotland.
Beth started work at Oban on 12th January 1920. Oban High School was a co-educational secondary, taking pupils from a wide surrounding area, some coming in each day by train, and some weekly boarders, including Gaelic-speakers from the islands (boys boarding with families in town and girls living in a residential hostel). School life for a teacher in the small town was all-consuming, with extra-curricular activities for the boarders encouraged, particularly in Beth’s area of sport. Boys played shinty and football; there was hockey, athletics and cricket for all; and swimming and rowing were promoted in the warmer terms. A new rector, Mr Angus Macleod, had started just three months before Beth was appointed, and he was in the process of making several changes to the curriculum and employing new teachers.
Qualified in Mathematics, Angus Macleod’s real interest lay in Gaelic. A noted Gaelic scholar, he promoted the study of Gaelic language and culture at Oban, and the school was to become significant to bot
h Gaelic and Scottish literature, and to Scottish nationalism: later teachers employed at Oban included Sorley Maclean’s brother John, Iain Crichton Smith and SNP politician Iain MacCormick (son of leading nationalist John MacCormick). Beth was in the first influx of new teachers, but there were also many long-established staff members and customs. In her later play, The Staff-Room, Gordon Daviot gave a vivid picture of a young, enthusiastic female gym teacher who ‘teaches because she likes the children’, and her relations with the older, jaded schoolmistresses. The play is not entirely a success, partly because the real observation lies in the descriptions given of the teachers, written only to be read, rather than in the play’s dialogue: ‘MISS HINCH [the English mistress ... ] is tall, thin and weary, and her ash-fair hair is always on the verge of falling from its insecure knot at her neck. She likes that knot, however. It suggests art and literary coteries, and most of MISS HINCH’S life is suggestion.’ 16
The experiment of returning to Scotland to cure her homesickness was not a success. The small-town atmosphere of Oban did not appeal, and neither did the Gaelic revival. There was also an accident in the gym, less than a month after she arrived. It was not Beth’s first sporting accident – she had also broken her nose riding in London some time in those first ‘wandering’ years after she graduated from Anstey – but it was a serious one. On the 30th January 1920, the school log book dryly records, ‘Miss McIntosh [sic.] met with an accident in the Hall – the heavy bar striking her head. The Rector took class IV’. It was the spark that provided the murder method in Miss Pym Disposes many years later, but in 1920 it was the result of trying to control a difficult class, in a school setting that Beth was not finding congenial. As a petite, rather quiet young woman, she might not have had the easiest time controlling large mixed classes – particularly given her attitude to ‘Commanding’ class at Anstey. Two months later, on the 31st March, ‘Miss Elizabeth MacKintosh demitted office of Physical Instructress today’. She had not even lasted a term.
Josephine Tey Page 10