Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  The main interest of the racing scene is perhaps the rhapsodic description, both of the event itself – horse racing was a particular interest of Beth’s, and something she enjoyed on her visits south – but also of the England that horse racing represented for her. Following on from her Scottish-set short stories, and the Highland scenes in Kif and The Man in the Queue, The Expensive Halo more obviously reflects the Anglophilia that Beth was to foster, which was to become a major part of her reputation. The first enjoyment of moving back to Scotland was wearing off, and Beth was beginning to realize that, in choosing to stay and look after her father Colin, she was missing out on the independent lives her sisters Moire and Jean were enjoying down south. The Expensive Halo, with its declaration that family is not always right and that England is wonderful, is a defiant book. It has something of the short story ‘His Own Country’ in its tone, but there is genuine feeling – and more subtle nuance and understanding of the age she was living in – in Gordon Daviot’s uncharacteristically long description of England as personified in Kempton Park, which follows on from pages of dialogue:

  [B]efore them, in the October sunlight, spread a little bit of the England one remembers with affection in distant places; a bit of the England which not wars, nor the ridicule of the intellectual, nor the fanaticism of the reformer can destroy [...].

  Everything that was England was down there between the stands and the far trees; and every type of man that made her was down there in the crowd: saint and scallywag; and all the courage, optimism, and philosophy which are common to both […].

  Kempton Park. But it might have been any English racecourse on a Saturday afternoon.8

  This is not a completely rosy picture of England; it is a clear-sighted vision of a society riddled with class bias. Beth did love England, but she was not blind to all its faults, and much of the inspiration for The Expensive Halo actually came from closer to home. The plot hinges on an orchestra and a talented fiddle player, and this was partly inspired by the musical culture in Inverness. Beth didn’t see the culture in Inverness as inferior in any way, and she took what she had access to and applied the same standards and imagination to it as she did to any show she might see in London. In the summer, Inverness played host to a German orchestra led by a ‘Herr Meny’.9 Mr Philippe R. Meny’s band, dressed in green military uniform, played the summer season at the Ness Islands, a tiny group of islands in the middle of the River Ness, linked to the banks by a series of footbridges. The islands are just slightly downriver from the town – five or ten minutes leisurely walk – and are still one of the nicest parts of Inverness. There was an open-air bandstand on the islands in the 1930s, and the summer musical season had been run there for over twenty years. Tea was served, and in fine weather it was an ideal concert venue. Nowadays there is still a small seating area, and the islands still play host to musical events and other entertainments. The tradition of Invernessians taking a stroll down through town and along Ladies’ Walk to listen to music there on summer afternoons is a long one. Mr Meny’s band returned every summer for several years, and attracted large crowds – delighting not only Invernessians, but also tourists.

  Tourism is still a major industry in Inverness, and the town takes on a different atmosphere in summer, that heady feeling of meeting strangers and seeing people you know turn out differently to what you expect that is captured so well in The Expensive Halo. In the late 1920s, the Inverness Courier reported that there were 235 enquiries at the tourist office, from visitors from such diverse countries as Japan, Australia, Argentina, America and England.10 Beth and her sisters joined this throng walking through town and down to hear Herr Meny. Meny and his band were reportedly excellent, and were very popular, particularly with the ladies of the town, who found their ‘continental’ manners particularly charming. The concerts on the islands were the thing to see and the place to be seen. Beth went there with one of her sisters, and was inspired, apparently by the band’s excellent cellist, to create the band and the violinist Gareth Ellis in The Expensive Halo. Another glimpse of Beth’s private life, which supports the theory that the romances in The Expensive Halo had some basis in reality, was given by her family, who remembered that her love of music was connected to romance, as she had admired a young man from her school, who had gone on to play violin in the London Philharmonic Orchestra.11

  Beth made use of her trips to London to soak up the culture – music and theatre being high on the list. The Expensive Halo as a script, rather than a novel, was to go on to further life, but at the moment Gordon Daviot was focused on writing something new. On one of her trips south she took two outings that remained particularly strong in her memory, and which she carefully recorded in her journal.12 The first was to see the Cameron Highlanders at Aldershot. The memory of the Cameron Highlanders during the First World War, and her personal connections with the regiment, was very dear to her, and Beth was always moved by the sight and sound of the military. ‘I’ll be dead when a column-of-four doesn’t give me a kick any more’, she wrote to a friend, describing the London trip many years later.13 The second visit Beth made in London was to the Old Vic Theatre.

  The Old Vic was an extraordinary theatre. Located outwith the fashionable West End theatre district, it had a temperance history, with a mission to try and engage its local audience with entertainment that would distract them away from drink and expose them instead to high culture. Its manager was Lilian Bayliss, who had inherited control of the theatre from her aunt, Emma Cons, the original instigator of its temperance principles. Lilian upheld these formidably. In 1914, Lilian had decided that the best way to engage her audience was by providing the best quality theatre, and she had embarked on an ambitious project to have every single Shakespeare play performed. She did this in her own inimitable way, always insistent on keeping production costs as low as possible, always with an eye on the box office and profits. This had the effect of making the acting the focus of every performance, and, despite Bayliss’s notoriously low wages, actors became desperate to star at her theatre, not only for the opportunity to play the great Shakespearian roles, but also to prove themselves in front of what had become an extremely educated, demanding and loyal audience. The complete Shakespeare cycle took almost ten years, and established the theatre’s reputation. The Old Vic audience had become fiercely loyal, returning week after week no matter what was on, safe in the knowledge that they were guaranteed a good night out. They were also fiercely possessive, loudly and vocally criticizing actors’ performances, and following with great enthusiasm the career of anyone they approved of. Inevitably, the audience now consisted not only of the locals the theatre had originally set out to attract, but also anyone who considered themselves interested in theatre – or interested in whatever was popular. This audience was to become very important to Gordon Daviot, but, in 1930, she was just one among the crowd, filing in to see the up-and-coming young actor John Gielgud star in Hamlet.

  Gielgud was born in 1904 and died in 2000, outliving most of his contemporaries, and it can be difficult to imagine him as he appeared to Beth when she first saw him act, rather than as he is remembered now.14 Born into a family with strong links to the theatre, a relative of the revered stage actress Ellen Terry, Gielgud was interested in and exposed to theatrical life from an early age. He had decided to go to drama school instead of university, and his family connections had helped him to gain a place, and to then start getting walk-on and later speaking parts in the London theatres and on regional tours. He slowly built up a track record in the theatre, and by the 1930s was beginning to focus on Shakespeare and more classical work, though his passion for the theatre was wide-ranging and all-consuming, and he was interested in directing, production, set design, and all the technicalities of acting. His season of Shakespeare plays at the Old Vic, where Beth saw him play, was generally well received, with critics saying that he was one to watch, and theatrical magazines beginning to print photos and profiles of the slim young actor. Gielgud’s
performance made a big impression on Beth.

  In her will, Beth asked for some of her possessions to be donated to Inverness Library and Museum. Included in this was ‘the original script of Richard of Bordeaux’ – but in fact, what was given to the museum was not only the script, but all her notes, giving a fairly comprehensive overview of the entire creative process that went into the writing of her most famous play.15 During her lifetime, after the play was produced, Beth had stored these documents in a safe deposit at the North of Scotland bank, at the Eastgate in Inverness, and she obviously felt they were important documents, worthy of being securely stored and later seen by the public.

  After Gielgud’s portrayal of Hamlet had sparked her interest, Beth looked out for other information about the young actor and the season of plays he was involved in at the Old Vic. One of his next performances was in Richard II. Beth had already studied this period of history at school, so knew a little bit about it, and the popularity of Gielgud’s Old Vic season meant that there were other people interested as well. In Inverness Museum’s collection, newspaper clippings from the Daily Express, dated 11th March 1931, give an idea of where the original research for what was to become Richard of Bordeaux began. Reacting to Gielgud’s portrayal of the Shakespearian king, the articles focus on the real life of Richard and his queens, Anne and Isabella. The focus on Richard’s domestic life gave a new dimension to his character and sparked further interest for Beth. Back in Inverness and unable to see Gielgud’s London performances as Richard II, she tried to imagine how he might portray this king. Interested in the discrepancies between Shakespeare’s account and the historical reality, Beth began to reimagine Richard, and started to write her own play.

  In some ways it is significant that Beth saw Gielgud as Hamlet, not Shakespeare’s Richard II. In Richard of Bordeaux, Richard is very definitely the romantic hero, whereas in Richard II, Richard is sometimes an ambiguous figure. In the recent 2012 BBC production of The Hollow Crown series of Shakespeare history plays, for example, Ben Whishaw played Richard as a slightly camp, delicate figure – standing in contrast to the future Henry IV. The history of the play is bound up in Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ understanding of the outcome for the Tudors in the Wars of the Roses. It is a very English play, with the speeches about English men, English soil, and ‘this sceptred isle’ – but this was lost on Scot Elizabeth MacKintosh, who sees only the man, Richard, and his relationship with his queen. She was more interested in historical fact than English national propaganda. Richard of Bordeaux was a reaction to what was happening in the cultural world around her, but, like all her work, it came out of her own reactions to it: she took her own tangent and her own original thoughts. That is what makes her work simultaneously universally appealing and unique. It is the root of what sets her apart from both the London-based literary scene, and the Scottish literary scene, and the root of what created the image of her as an enigma. She wanted to be part of the London theatrical world, but, up in Inverness, she was isolated from it. To take part, she would have to do it in her own way.

  One of the reasons that Richard of Bordeaux was such a success, and struck such a chord with its audience, was that they read into the historical play parallels with their modern-day problems, and responded to the themes of war and appeasement. Although it might seem that Beth was more isolated from the centres of power by living in the Highlands, this ignores the fact that the north of Scotland was the base for much of the British army, and Beth’s awareness of the politics of the day must have been heightened by the fact that she was coincidentally in Invergordon on the day of the Invergordon Mutiny, one of the major post-war incidents in Britain.16

  In September 1931, the British government was attempting to deal with the Depression by reducing public spending. One of the ways they tried to do this was by reducing military pay. The cut in pay, in real terms, worked out at something between 10 per cent and one-quarter of sailors’ pay packets, much more than the reductions in other public servants’ wages. Those earning the least were the most affected. Just north of Inverness, at Invergordon, there were about a dozen fully staffed warships. Beth often escaped Colin and her housekeeping duties to take day trips on the train from Inverness, and in mid-September 1931, at the time she was writing the first drafts of Richard of Bordeaux, she decided to visit Invergordon. The sailors there had been hearing rumours about the pay cuts, which suggested they would be even worse than they were, and they were disbelieving when their senior officers tried to explain, particularly when these officers had to admit that it was true that some people really would be losing 25 per cent of their next salary. The men believed that the news had been held back until they were far away from home and so would not have the support of friends and family to protest. A crowd of people met in the canteen to decide what to do, but so many tried to attend that it spilled out onto the navy football field. The sailors decided to refuse to carry out their duties, and mutinied. They remained in port, cheering, singing and shouting from one ship to another, and wouldn’t go to sea.

  Although the protests were well mannered and well founded, the British government was seriously worried. The Depression and post-war conditions were making life extremely difficult for a large number of people, and morale was very low. They were genuinely afraid of a Russian-style revolution, and now thousands of military personnel on armed warships were refusing to obey orders. The King was in Scotland at the time, and was placed under armed guard at Balmoral, while the government updated him on the situation by messages that were sent by private aeroplane as they were so afraid that the telephone exchanges were being manned by Bolshevists. One MP suggested the problem was so severe that it should be resolved by force, and that the rest of the army should be sent to open fire on the men in the boats in Invergordon.

  In the event, the action ended peacefully after only a couple of days, though it was to have lasting consequences for many of the navy personnel involved. The government backed down and, although pay was reduced, it was cut by only 10 per cent. Beth was probably more aware of the situation from the papers than from her time in Invergordon on the day of the mutiny itself, but the effects of the mutiny were serious for the British economy, with widespread panic on the Stock Exchange, which ultimately meant that Britain had to withdraw from the Gold Standard. A General Election was held in 1931, with the Tories elected back to power, taking over from the Labour party and their National Government coalition which, it had been thought, had handled the Invergordon crisis badly.

  Beth was not always happy in Inverness, and, after the modern-day setting of The Expensive Halo, with its potential to upset her family, she turned to the far-away history of Richard of Bordeaux. Her escapist, romantic description of politics which were removed from her audience’s lives by several centuries, but which the modern language meant they could still identify with, was part of what made the play the success it was. All around them, the theatrical audience could see a political mess, which had led to one world war where all of them had lost loved ones, and they could see their government pursuing policies they did not agree with. Richard of Bordeaux, written by a woman who knew the value of escapism and reinvention, offered the audience something it desperately wanted – and changed everything for Elizabeth MacKintosh.

  Chapter Nine

  Richard of Bordeaux

  Many years later, Beth wrote to a friend that in her diary she had written of a trip to London in the 1930s, ‘The two things that gave me the greatest kick were Gielgud’s Hamlet and the Camerons at Aldershot; but the Camerons had it’.1 She added two exclamation marks for emphasis, but whatever nostalgic appeal the army regiment had for her, it was that trip to Hamlet that would change everything.

  Richard of Bordeaux, written with Gielgud in mind after watching his Hamlet, was Elizabeth MacKintosh’s breakthrough play. Published and performed under her chosen pseudonym of Gordon Daviot, it was a huge success, and the piece of writing for which she was best known in her lifetime. Her
Josephine Tey mysteries have stood the test of time better than her Gordon Daviot plays, but Richard of Bordeaux was the game changer, the piece that brought her fame on London’s West End, opened up doors and opportunities for her, brought her into contact with people who were to become her friends for life and shaped her future writing career. It also destroyed her anonymity, changing the way she wrote, affecting her personal relationships, and shaping how we see her reputation today.

  The files in the Inverness Museum archive give a complete picture of how Richard of Bordeaux was written. After her interest had been sparked by Gielgud’s London Shakespeare performances, and the newspaper publicity surrounding them, Beth scrawled out a basic outline of the different acts of her play as she first imagined it, in chronological order, carefully working out how old Richard would be in each Act. She then wrote a more formal essay, typewritten and then annotated by hand, sketching out the historical background to Richard’s life, stating why she felt he was interesting – and misunderstood. ‘No sovereign was ever so entirely the author of his own destruction,’ she wrote.2 Richard of Bordeaux was a romantic chronicle play, showing scenes from the king’s life as he first fought for true control of his country, and then saw his beloved queen die and his power taken from him. Notes from other books show that Beth read widely on the historical background before starting to write her play, writing short biographies for many of the characters, such as De Vert. The museum collection also includes a hand-drawn map of the London of the period, as Beth visualized the scene.