Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  Neither Gunn’s personality nor his politics were of the type to appeal to Beth, but she was fortunate enough to meet one young man whose literary aspirations and attitudes more closely mirrored her own.10 Hugh Patrick Fraser McIntosh was to have a lasting influence on Beth’s writing. Not only did they start out sending work to magazines together, but his life and stories were to be reflected in her novels right up until her death, and their relationship had a lasting effect on her. Hugh is the man whose story has become tangled with the story of Beth’s First World War soldier; he is the man who really captured her heart, the real relationship-that-could-have-been.

  Hugh Patrick Fraser McIntosh moved to Inverness in October 1924, a year and a half after Beth had moved back.11 The first shock of Josephine’s death was over, and she was trying to build her new life. Despite their similar surnames, Hugh and Beth were not related, and Hugh had actually been brought up in London – though always with an awareness of his Scottish identity. A couple of years older than Beth, he was a mix of Highlander and Englishman, perfectly placed to understand how much Beth missed the south of England, whilst still understanding her Highland background. They were drawn together through their shared interest in writing.

  Hugh’s father, also Hugh, had been born in Culloden, just outside Inverness.12 From a humble background, Hugh Senior had been swept up in the religious fervour that accompanied the Disruption of 1843 and the establishment of the Free Church of Scotland, and had trained as a minister in Aberdeen, gaining his MA. He was posted to various places before eventually ending up as the minister of the Presbyterian Church in Brockley, London, where his son Hugh was born and brought up. Described as a ‘well-known and charismatic preacher’, the Rev McIntosh, already used to success after his establishment of a large church in Glasgow, oversaw the expansion of his new church in London, raising membership from under 200 to around 700 people.13 He did much work amongst the poor in the Deptford area of his parish, raising money for his parishioners by giving well-received lectures on ‘The Highlands and Islands of Bonnie Scotland’, often accompanied by musicians.14 He was also popular in the more affluent area of Brockley directly beside his church, where he and his family lived, and his congregation gifted his wife a diamond ring in celebration of his long service. The only picture I have been able to track down of Hugh Senior is rather surprising. Instead of an austere, bearded Highland minister, it shows a man with a kind, open face and neatly clipped sideburns.15 He is not the dark type of Highlander that Beth so often described in her writing, but has sandy, fairer hair. There are no surviving pictures of Hugh Patrick Fraser, his only son and third child of his second wife, but in Josephine Tey’s fiction a sandy-haired Scotsman is one of the ‘types’ she sometimes describes – never the hero, like dark-haired Grant, but always a complex, sometimes irritating though appealing character.

  After the Free Church joined with the United Presbyterian Church to form the United Free Church, Hugh McIntosh moved back to Scotland with his son and two of his youngest daughters. Described, when he was in London, as a ‘typical Scotchman’16 who could entrance his listeners with descriptions of his native home, Hugh Senior was pleased to move his family back, even if the changes within the church structure had been difficult for him. They were initially posted to the west coast of Scotland, not too far from Colin MacKintosh’s home of Applecross.

  A literary man, Hugh Senior published several religious books, and gifted his love of writing and education, as well as his love of Scotland, to his son, who was in the second year of an arts degree at Edinburgh University when the First World War broke out.17 In addition to their interest in literature and their shared knowledge of both England and some of the more remote parts of Scotland, Hugh Patrick Fraser also had the attraction for Beth of having been a military man. Hugh had been an early volunteer, first with the RAMC (Royal Army Medical Corps), signing up to the Black Watch in 1914. By 1915 he had been promoted to the rank of officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, where he served with the 9th, and later the 8th battalion – a promotion and changes in regiment which reflected not only his education and ability, but also the heavy losses that were suffered in the trenches. Hugh was involved in some of the worst battles of the war, and was wounded and gassed several times. In November 1917, over a year after Gordon Barber was killed at the Somme and Alfred Trevanion Powell killed at Arras, Hugh Patrick Fraser was awarded the Military Cross for the part he took in action at Polcapelle.

  Polcapelle (or Poelcappelle), near Ypres, was part of the Battle of Passchendaele, where Allied forces attacked the German trenches in Belgium. It was one of the slow, muddy, horrific trench battles typical of the First World War, with little gain in land and large loss of life. The British front line was in a terrible position, slightly lower down than the German front line, and thus extremely difficult to defend from direct fire. The wet weather also played a major part in the battle, with rain churning up the ground. It has been said that there were few wounded from Passchendaele, only those who made it through and those who did not. Anyone who fell from wounds slipped into the atrocious conditions underfoot, where they were literally drowned in mud. Hugh must have been both brave and lucky.

  His experience in the trenches did not stop Hugh from re-joining the army when the First World War was over. When he was demobilized from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, he chose not to return to university, but went to his parents’ home village of Culloden near Inverness, where he decided to re-enlist in the Cameron Highlanders. With the army no longer looking to recruit so many men, Hugh was not reinstated at the same rank he had held in wartime, but re-joined the army as a private. He rapidly worked his way up through the ranks again to Sergeant, but his progression would always have been limited, and, having chosen not to finish his degree, he would effectively never have been able to regain the rank he had held during the war. Popular amongst his colleagues, Hugh was remembered in the Camerons as an entertaining and outstanding musician, who played the piano at Hogmanay and recited the ‘Immortal Memory’ at a Burns Supper.18 He had a particularly unusual army career. Sent to Ireland in 1921 with the 2nd Cameron Highlanders, he was stationed in Queenstown, fighting against Sinn Fein in the Irish War of Independence, an unpopular posting. Notes from the Camerons’ regimental magazine say that this situation was considered by many to be worse than war service, due to the violence and complicated loyalties and politics involved. Hugh’s later writing about the army focuses mainly on moments of beauty and nature amongst the fighting, but the only real notes of bitterness are in his poems about Ireland.

  He then managed to be transferred on secondment to the Palestine Gendarmerie, an elite police force set up by Churchill to help control the new British mandate of Palestine. Much of the recruiting for the Palestine Gendarmerie was done in Ireland. Hugh briefly returned to England and the Camerons, before joining the West African Frontier Force in 1923, working in Nigeria. By October 1924 he was back in Inverness, invalided out of active service, adjusting, like Beth, to life in the Highlands and writing both about that adjustment, and poetry based on his military experiences.

  Hugh shared his literary taste with Beth, enjoying some of the First World War poets like Rupert Brooke, and the English literary scene, and when Hugh and Beth sent out their first pieces of writing it was to a magazine based in London.

  The Weekly Westminster Gazette ran features and stories, featuring, over the years, authors of the quality and reputation of Rupert Brooke, Raymond Chandler, D. H. Lawrence, Arthur Ransome and Katherine Mansfield. Beth and Hugh had their first work published in this paper, and it was something Beth was particularly proud of, mentioning it many years later in her entry for Who’s Who. Like many new writers, Beth and Hugh began their writing careers by focusing on shorter pieces, particularly poetry. Beth was published first, with a short ‘Triolet’ poem appearing on 29th August 1925.19 It was a clever piece, written in a form that was popular in the magazine. She had chosen to submit work under a pe
n-name, Gordon Daviot, as work by a male author often found a more ready audience. Her pleasure at seeing her work in print was slightly marred by the spelling error in her new name (poem by ‘Gordon Davitt’), but she was encouraged by the quality of the other pieces her poem kept company with: other authors published that week included Graham Greene.

  Hugh’s submission to the Weekly Westminster Gazette was also accepted, and his short story ‘Innocence’ was published a couple of weeks later, on 12th September 1925. ‘Gordon’ may have been masquerading as a man, but ‘Innocence’ has a subtle male earthiness that her writing never had – it’s an accomplished piece that evocatively immerses the reader in both its landscape and characters. Gordon Daviot was to become well known for her longer writing, and Hugh was to achieve most in poetry, but for these first publications their roles were reversed. Hugh’s longer piece meant that his biography was also featured, and the editor of the Weekly Westminster Gazette noted that Hugh McIntosh was already known to the magazine as a reader who regularly entered the crosswords and competitions: ‘one of the more gifted competitors of the Problems Page’. Hugh and Gordon had thoroughly researched the magazines they sent their first pieces to, they were magazines they read and enjoyed, and they were aiming to be like the writers they read and admired.

  Gordon Daviot always said that she had begun her writing career by having poetry published. In addition to the Triolet in the Weekly Westminster Gazette, the following year, in 1926, she had poetry published in the Saturday Review – though these poems were mainly short comic efforts, submitted as competition entries. Like Hugh, Gordon was a regular entrant to competitions, using them as a form of writing exercise. For example, she won prizes in the Saturday Review for inventing six new proverbs and a Latin motto, and composing a new nursery rhyme.20 There is at least one example of what must be her poetry in her Josephine Tey books (in To Love and Be Wise, where Inspector Grant quotes a poem that was printed ‘to fill up the spaces’), though I have not found any other published work.21 However, in the small Josephine Tey archive in the National Library of Scotland is an intriguing collection of handwritten poems, some with 1920s dates, which shed light on Daviot’s development as a writer – and also on how much music meant to her.

  The small collection in the NLS comprises around ten poems, or fragments, each handwritten on music manuscript paper, with musical notation handwritten alongside it. Some of the poems are Gordon Daviot’s own, while others are poems she liked, such as ‘The Skylark’ by James Hogg and several by Rudyard Kipling.22 Her own poems, as with all her writing, draw on her own experiences. She always grounded her work in reality, and, although they share a more traditional structure with the poets she admired, she never attempted to copy other poets’ subject matter – something which always gave her writing its own power, and shows the beginning of that individuality which makes her Josephine Tey novels such a joy to read. However, the particularly interesting thing is that the music the poems are set to also appears to be of Beth’s own composition.

  Beth had studied music at school, as had her sisters, and her later writing shows an interest in and appreciation of music, with many memorable scenes, such as the folk singers in her short stories, or the Gaelic singing in The Singing Sands.23 Beth is always very decided in her views on music – she really doesn’t think much of the Gaelic singing. The only other documents by Elizabeth MacKintosh kept by the NLS are final drafts of some of her final published works – The Singing Sands, Valerius and Dickon – so this sheet music from her very early days as a writer must have been important enough for Beth to have kept all her life, and for her sister and the other executors of her will to have saved instead of throwing away.

  The music itself is pleasant, if basic. It’s obviously the work of an amateur, although a talented and enthusiastic amateur. If the music was meant to be played on the piano, then there is only notation for one hand – that is, there are no chords or left-hand part – though it would be easy enough to work with the key and create these. There are some errors in timing and notation (Beth’s writing of musical notation is as messy and illegible as her handwriting), but the tunes are playable, and work well with the lyrics. The general impression is of someone amusing themselves – though in a serious and committed way – but the words are more important than the tunes.

  Amongst the Kipling poems – ‘Boots – Infantry Column of March’, ‘Mounted Infantry’, ‘The Last Chantey’ – are Gordon Daviot’s own pieces. Several deal with homesickness, or the consolation of nature: ‘Treasure’ tries to find beauty in a grey day; ‘Home-going’ is also a little grey but happy about going home; ‘South Away’ gives a good indication of where home is; ‘Youth’ looks at nature; ‘Spring’ speaks for itself. ‘A Song of Racing’ stands out as the first written declaration of Gordon Daviot’s love for horse racing – ‘Epsom downs, Newmarket spaces [...] Goodwood graces, Kempton fun and York sobriety, Oh the lovely dear variety!’ – something that she explored more fully in two of her first three novels: Kif and The Expensive Halo. ‘Old Vin Rouge’ stands out as being the only poem that attempts to copy the military images in Kipling, but also probably puts in something of what Beth herself had seen in France. The images are a precursor to Gordon Daviot’s French-set short stories, or the scenes in Kif when Kif himself is sent to the Western Front, with the same sort of stereotypical French bohemian bonhomie: ‘Old vin rouge in a cracked old cup, Old vin rouge oh drink it all up, for you won’t have the chance tomorrow morning!’

  Gordon Daviot was always interested in poetry and it is something she wrote, mainly for her own pleasure, throughout her life. She wrote short, funny verses for her friends in her letters, and, as mentioned above, the Josephine Tey mystery novel To Love and Be Wise contains an unattributed poem which is surely her own.24 As the brief extracts from her poetry – and her taste in poets – show, she was interested in more traditional verse forms, and a discussion between two characters in To Love and Be Wise makes that clear.25 This was the time of T.S. Eliot, but Beth and Hugh were still far more interested in the poetry of the First World War than anything else. Although Hugh, with the romantic ideas of Scotland given to him by his father, had more of an interest in Scottish identity than Beth, his experiences in the military in Ireland, and later in the Palestine Gendarmerie where many of his colleagues were former ‘Black and Tans’, coloured his view of Celtic nationalism. The ‘British’ poetry of people like Kipling spoke more strongly to Hugh’s and Beth’s own experiences and their own lives than the literary work done in Inverness by Scottish nationalists and Gaelic revivalists. When Beth moved her work forward, she did so by taking her own path: not by ignoring what was going on around her, but by taking what she liked and was interested in, and what she felt was relevant to her. Her interests coincided with Hugh’s, and both of them were starting to find an interested audience in the literary magazines as well.

  So, if Hugh Patrick Fraser McIntosh was such a perfect fit for Beth, and their writing was progressing so well, why did their romance not develop? The answer lies in the reason that Hugh was in Inverness: he had been invalided out of the army, and he was dying.

  Hugh had tuberculosis.26 This contagious disease is often associated with poverty and poor living conditions. It could have been caught at any point in Hugh Patrick Fraser’s army service, as he was living and working in often appalling conditions from the time he had first joined the army ten years before and been sent to the Western Front. He had a long and painful death. The image of the poet with consumption, or tuberculosis, is a romantic cliché, and, at first, the illness would not have been apparent. Hugh would have been pale and interesting, a little thinner than normal, perhaps with a slight cough. As the illness progressed, any idea that it was romantic evaporated, as a hacking, uncontrollable coughing would have racked his frame and brought up blood; the paleness of his skin would have been offset with red cheeks; and bright eyes would have looked less glittering and more manic. He would have been in conside
rable pain.

  A search through the records revealed that Hugh Patrick Fraser MacKintosh (the different spelling is used), a (retired) Sergeant in the Cameron Highlanders, died of pulmonary tuberculosis (affecting his lungs) in the TB hospital in Culduthel, Inverness on August 14th 1927, at the age of only 33. He was single, and his death was registered by his sister, Mamie (Marianne) McIntosh, who, although she was in Inverness for Hugh’s last days, gave as her usual address St George’s Square, Regent’s Park, London. A corresponding notice in local paper the Inverness Courier gives notice of Hugh’s death, mentioning his Military Cross, and also his father, the Reverend Hugh McIntosh, MA, of London, suggesting that this was a name known to local readers of the paper. A further notice a week later on Friday 19th August 1927, inserted by his relatives, thanks friends, the RSM (Regimental Sergeant Major) and Sergeants of the Cameron Highlanders for their sympathy and flowers, as well as thanking the staff of Culduthel hospital.

  Hugh and Beth had worked hard on their writing in the time that had been left to Hugh. They had begun writing longer pieces, with Beth focusing on short stories while Hugh concentrated on poetry. Working from notes that he had made, and from remembered impressions of his time in the army, by 1927 Hugh had the nucleus of a poetry collection. Writing is a solitary activity, particularly in the beginning, when there is a lot of work for very little reward, and it must have been sustaining for both Hugh and Beth to have someone to bounce ideas off, and to know that someone else was working towards similar goals, and also believed it to be worthwhile and achievable. It’s particularly interesting to see that Gordon Daviot, who was later thought to be always working in isolation, in fact associated with other writers from the start of her writing career.