Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  The book received some good reviews, but, although it was acknowledged to be useful for students of the period, it did not get the response that Daviot hoped for. ‘The Manchester Guardian,’ Beth wrote, ‘hovered on the verge of libel and refused me permission to answer their reviewer’s really shocking accusations’.12 Daviot acknowledged that she was not a historian, but felt she was more than capable of reading sources critically, and that she had something new and important to say, which would rehabilitate Claverhouse’s reputation. She didn’t want to be judged as a historian, but felt that the common-sense she applied to her reading of history books gave her a fresh and important perspective – something she was later to manage to express to its fullest potential in The Daughter of Time.

  However, Daviot no longer had the anonymity of Richard of Bordeaux, but was now known as a female ex-PE teacher. The dust jacket made it clear that Daviot was a woman, and, in the text itself, Gordon Daviot makes a couple of wry observations on a previous biographer of Claverhouse, stressing that the author has drawn certain conclusions ‘because she is a woman’. Gordon Daviot was no longer writing anonymously but would be judged, not only in Inverness but in the wider press, on her sex as well as her previous achievements. Daviot noted in her letter to Dodie Smith that the reviews had generally agreed that Claverhouse was ‘not a woman’s book’.13 Reviewers also felt that her view of Claverhouse tended more towards ‘Bonnie Dundee’ than ‘Bloody Clavers’, and her portrayal of his soldiers does seem far more courteous and bloodless than the reality could ever have been. Daviot, reading the criticism of her book, summed it up in a letter to Dodie Smith, saying ‘I couldn’t find bad things to report about [Claverhouse], with the inevitable result that I have been accused of using pink spectacles.’

  Beth also wrote at length about the reception of the book to one interested and interesting ‘fan’, who had written to her with a page of intelligent criticisms – Miss M. E. M. Donaldson. Mary Ethel Muir Donaldson, or MEMD as she called herself, was another remarkable woman of the period, a writer and gifted photographer, whose views of the Highlands are still widely disseminated. Something of a kindred spirit to Beth in her search for historical truth, she had recently published Scotland’s Suppressed History: Talks on Scottish Church History for Young People, etc. ‘The first thing I did after reading your letter,’ Beth wrote to MEMD, ‘was to get your book from my bookseller, and I have read it with vast enjoyment [...] I hope to see Scotland’s Suppressed History in a prominent position on the Literature Stall at the Empire Exhibition. (What is the betting that it isn’t? Eighty to one against and no takers!)’14 Sadly, the friendship had no chance to progress, but Gordon’s letter to MEMD covers three enthusiastic, closely typed pages, and she shared one of her favourite reviews of Claverhouse, from an irate Reverend.

  Beth never again attempted to write straight, non-fictional history: from now on, all her historical writing was fictionalized. She had found the constant referencing needed in a more ‘academic’ work tiresome, and in the future she focused on the story, and her own interpretations of events. In this way, she managed to achieve something greater, and showed that education, information and truth were available to anyone who chose to spend time researching. The Daughter of Time, her most well-known historical piece, sets out not only the historical story of Richard III but also the way in which Alan Grant and Brent Carradine research this story. Grant and Carradine’s searches through the archive for contemporary materials are a good indication of how Beth herself approached research. For the amateur historian, the search itself is part of the joy; the discovery of the original sources is part of the exhilaration; the chase for the truth and the realization that this is something that can be done by anyone with a good education and access to the right libraries are particularly well conveyed in The Daughter of Time. In Inverness, Beth had access to the Inverness Central Library, and other subscription libraries, such as Boots, would also have been easily available. Her trips to London gave her access to the larger public libraries, and Claverhouse is fully referenced, with Beth’s sources clearly stated. Claverhouse is a response to how she saw the movements in Scottish politics and culture, and an important and prescient one, but she never allowed that to come to the front, always focusing only on the real history. This makes it a much better history book, but perhaps a less enjoyable read.

  Daviot found the writing of Claverhouse hard going at times: ‘the “woik” is fair bluidy!’ she wrote to Lena Ramsden in 1937, planning a holiday in the sun when it was all over.15 Once Claverhouse was done, it seemed like things moved on in Inverness. Neil Gunn left the town, selling his house on Dochfour Drive and moving further north after various personal problems, including his wife’s miscarriage and probable discovery of his affair with Margaret MacEwen.16 Beth, too, was more concerned with family, as her sister Jean announced that she was getting married.

  Beth’s youngest sister Moire was still fixed in London, working for the Gas Board and generally enjoying life. Jean had moved around a little more in her secretarial work, occasionally coming back to Inverness between jobs.17 She had been with a firm in London in the late 1920s, until 1931, and sometime after had moved north of London to Buckinghamshire. It was here she met her future husband, either through their shared love of horse riding, or possibly because she worked for him as his personal secretary. Jean was in her late 30s and her father Colin might have been forgiven for thinking that none of his three daughters was ever going to marry. Jean’s marriage was something of a surprise, particularly as her future husband was twenty-two years older than she was with two children from a previous marriage. His elder son was actually older than Jean.18

  Jean, no less than Beth, had been affected by the First World War, surviving in a post-war world where there were far fewer men of her age to marry, and where she had tasted the freedom that a career could give her. Her secretarial work had given her plenty of opportunity to travel, and, like Beth, she had enough money to enjoy her hobbies. She and Beth shared an interest in horses, though Beth was always more interested in watching racing, while Jean liked riding. ‘Jean and her gee-gees’, Moire used to say dismissively, but this love of horses was a shared hobby with her new fiancée, Vice-Admiral Humphrey Hugh Smith, DSO.19 Humphrey was a navy man who had been aboard ship through the old-fashioned style of training, on old-fashioned sailing ships, starting when he was thirteen or fourteen.20 He had served with distinction in the First World War but had been retired (against his will) in 1926, and had settled down with his wife and children to write his memoirs (which was why he needed a secretary). His two volumes of memoir are vastly entertaining, full of bluff, amusing anecdotes about his travels and the people he worked with, completely sincere in his devotion to the navy and his general belief in people’s essential goodness.

  Photographs of Humphrey show a very smartly dressed man with a wry smile and eyes surrounded by laughter lines. He had married his first wife, the aristocratic and well-connected Blanche Scott-Murray, around the same time that Colin MacKintosh had married Josephine, and they had had a happy marriage, despite Humphrey’s long absences at sea, but Blanche had died in January 1937. Humphrey was not the sort of man who could manage on his own, and he and Jean were pleased to find companionship together. They were married in late spring/early summer 1937, less than six months after Blanche’s death. Humphrey was a Catholic – not the easiest link for the daughter of a Free Church family to make – but however Colin, Beth and Moire felt about the marriage in the first place, there was no doubt that Humphrey was accepted into their family, visiting Inverness and Colin, and making Jean happy. Beth was happy to refer to her sister ‘marrying into the navy’ in letters to her friends.21 Several photographs of Humphrey remain amongst the MacKintosh family possessions, and Josephine Tey was surely thinking of him when she wrote in The Singing Sands about the journey to Inverness and the dreadful sleeping-car attendant who was rarely challenged except by ‘an Admiral of the Fleet or something like that [w
ho] would venture an opinion that it was damned awful tea’.22

  The contrast between Beth’s home life and working life was stronger than ever: 1937 was the year that A Shilling for Candles was adapted by Hitchcock as Young and Innocent, with the film coming out in November, but, although Beth was not involved with the filming at all, her family were certainly too busy with their own affairs to be very involved in her writing life. Colin, Jean and Moire were proud of Beth, but did not understand her work. Colin was more concerned with his hobby of angling: the Inverness Courier of Tuesday 13th July 1937 reported that ‘Fishing the Ness Castle Pools yesterday, Mr Colin MacKintosh, a well-known local angler, had a beautiful salmon, which scaled 24½ lbs’. As the year went on, Colin was also very concerned with his property on Castle Street: the street was not in a good state of repair. A contemporary description of the flats in the street, from the mid-1930s, described how number 67, where Colin and his family used to live, was crawling with cockroaches.23 Number 51, where Colin was now the landlord, was described by the same person as ‘a bit more up-market’, with indoor toilets, a well-maintained drying green outside, and a well-kept stone staircase entrance. Colin was friendly with his tenants, and the grandchild of one of his tenants remembered that ‘[o]ne of the things he always did when he got new potatoes in, he would take a pail of them up to my grandmother to get her to try them out for him – she was the official taster’. But regardless of how well Colin kept his property, Castle Street as a whole was giving the council cause for concern. In 1932, there had been a landslide under the castle, which had led to the demolition of all the shops and flats on that side, including the original building where Colin’s family had opened their fruit shop. The street looked entirely different – much closer to how it does today, as the buildings on the castle side were never rebuilt – and the appearance of the old town, with its narrow streets and alleyways, was starting to go. The council were keen to close up more of the alleyways, and demolish more of the buildings which were felt to be dangerous. Castle Street, with its problem tenements, did not fit in with their image of a bustling town – but, as is the way with councils, the whole project was thought to have been handled in the worst way possible, as the council would have preferred to demolish the problem rather than spend time fixing it, and the ensuing battles began to take up more and more of Colin’s time and energy.

  In May 1938 the council closed two rights-of-way leading from Castle Street to Castle Wynd, and Colin was moved enough by this action to write to the local paper complaining – in a beautifully expressed letter that shows at least some of Beth’s writing talent was inherited from her father.24 Colin also had the distinction of being one of the few correspondents on the matter to openly sign his name, as others chose to hide behind pen-names. In later analyses, both Colin and Beth were criticized for their lack of engagement in the social and public life of Inverness, but this incident shows clearly that Colin was involved – though not necessarily on the side of the class of people who were running the council and who made these later analyses.25 Beth, too, was engaged with what was happening in Inverness, taking time out from her serious writing to produce a crossword for her old school newspaper, with a prize offered for its completion.26 It was a fitting contribution for someone who was to become well known as a mystery writer, as crosswords and their clues are so often associated with crime writing. Crosswords were still a relatively new fashion at the time, invented only around 1913.

  Colin’s complaint about the right-of-way in Castle Street was supported in the leader column of the next week’s paper, and further letters complained that shops were losing custom because customers could not get to them. The council reacted by refusing to discuss the matter at their next meeting, and, after a couple of months, the butcher who owned the shop further down the street from Colin, cheered on by the other residents of the street, took his butcher’s saw to the council-erected barricades and forcibly re-opened the right of way.27 The council gave a long-winded response about how wrong this was and how they could close the rights-of-way if they wanted to. They then backed down and agreed to try and fix the roads. The local paper went back to complaining about the council’s other big problem of the moment – their planned reforms to the Public Library. Reading the Inverness Courier of the 1930s is essentially the same as reading it today.

  While Colin’s attention was fixed in Inverness, Beth looked elsewhere for discussion of her writing career and literary interests, continuing to meet up with her sisters regularly and maintaining a correspondence with playwright Dodie Smith.28 Beth’s acquaintance with Dodie deepened around this time. Where Gordon Daviot had had one brilliant success with Richard of Bordeaux and then not quite followed it up, after her breakthrough play Autumn Crocus Dodie Smith had hit after hit.29 Both writers were concerned with observant humour, though Dodie always set her plays firmly in the middle-class house or family. In 1937 Bonnet Over the Windmill was running, the successor to Call It A Day, Touch Wood and Service, and Dodie was writing what was to be one of her most enduring plays, Dear Octopus.

  Dodie Smith was a small woman with a big personality. Photos of her at this time show her with short, dark hair, fashionably curled at the ends; eyebrows plucked into the thin line of a 1930s Hollywood fashionista, and a small mouth with rather big teeth. She had been a full-time writer for some years, having extricated herself from her shop job at Heal’s (and her affair there with her boss), and by 1938 she was well established on the theatrical scene and enjoying that life to the full. Dodie had known Gwen since they were both young women in the Three Arts Club – Gwen a rising star, and Dodie a struggling actress. Now Dodie was doing well enough for her and her partner Alec not only to have bought a Rolls-Royce, but also to have customized it to their own requirements. When they went out to the US some years later they paid to ship the car out with them. Dodie’s life very much shows the different route Beth could have chosen to take, if, after Richard of Bordeaux, she had chosen to move to London and immerse herself in the commercial, hit-making side of playwriting. Dodie lived with (though, typically unconventionally was not married to) her partner Alec Beesley, a younger man who had worked with her at Heal’s but was now her manager. Her social life revolved entirely around the theatre and she was far more immersed in the gossipy world of acting than Beth, and more openly interested in and involved in the relationships between actors. While Gordon Daviot focused on historical and religious subjects for her plays, Dodie Smith drew on her own relationship experiences, particularly her affairs before her marriage. She was later to befriend Christopher Isherwood and to be intrigued by his gay lifestyle, and often tried, through her writing, to question social mores of the day. That is one reason many of her plays have not stood the test of time as, by engaging so wholeheartedly with the ideas of the 1930s, they now seem very dated.

  Although they had both come from relatively modest middle-class backgrounds (Dodie was originally from the north of England) Beth and Dodie’s writing styles and approach to their careers were very different. However, the four extant letters written from Daviot to Smith show a correspondence between two women writers working as equals, with respect for each other’s views and an emphasis on their shared interest in the theatre and women’s work in the theatre. Gordon wrote cheerfully to Dodie about her trips to Paris and England, the plays she had seen and the people she had visited, but was compelled to refuse Dodie’s invitation to spend Christmas in Essex because of her commitment to Colin in Inverness. Dodie seemed unaware of Colin, but she was often seemingly unaware of anything or anyone that wasn’t in her beloved London theatre world. This mismatch between their lives is apparent in a later letter, where Gordon felt she had to write quickly to explain comments she had made earlier – it harks back to the slightly apologetic tone in some of her letters to Gwen and Marda: although Gordon wanted to live by the maxim ‘never explain, never apologize’, some more explaining was necessary if she was to maintain her London friendships, as it was too easy for
them to misunderstand her. Gordon knew that if she lost these friendships it would be a greater loss for her than it was for Dodie, or Marda, or Gwen.

  Each of the letters from Beth to Dodie is signed ‘Gordon’, rather than ‘Beth’. Daviot had met Smith through her professional life as a playwright, and kept that persona when corresponding with her. This is not to say, however, that the letters are impersonal, and contain no details of her private life: they include an amusing sketch Beth writes about visiting her dentist, and a funny description of her troubles getting the home help to make Christmas pudding. One intriguing reference, in the last letter, talks about Daviot’s ‘other half’, who is not encouraging when Daviot comes up with new ideas for plays. Beth MacKintosh sometimes comes up with new ideas, but the ‘other half’ of her personality, Gordon Daviot, rejects them. This same idea, of an inner contradictory voice, is present in the Josephine Tey novels for both Alan Grant and Brat Farrar, while Miss Pym talks about ‘her other half [...] which stood watching her with critical eyes [...]. It had sent her into fights with her knees knocking, it had made her speak when she wanted to hold her tongue, it had kept her from lying down when she was too tired to stand up’.30 That was Beth and Daviot, or Beth and Tey. However, in these letters it is the discussion and analyses of plays that is exercising Gordon Daviot and Dodie Smith’s interest.

  The main discussion of content is in the first letter: Gordon advises Dodie to write about something other than ‘Young Love’. Dodie was sometimes obsessed with analyzing her relationships, particularly the affairs she had before marriage, but the play she was working on which was to become so successful (Dear Octopus) is far more focused on family relationships. Gordon’s advice perhaps struck a chord with her at this time. It also reflects what Daviot herself thought important enough to write about: her books are certainly not about ‘young love’. The discussion of writing in the letters is not focused solely on the content of plays but also on the things that surround the writer and playwright: more than one letter comments on critical reviews, either of Dear Octopus or of Daviot’s biography of Claverhouse. This is the analysis of two successful professionals who have nothing to prove to each other, who see each other as equals with whom they can discuss the drawbacks of writing success, rather than the correspondence of writers who are yet to become established and are still fixated on the process of writing. Daviot also saw Smith as an important colleague in another respect: she makes frequent comment in the letters about ‘women playwrights’ or ‘women’s writing’.