Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  After Claverhouse had been published in late 1937, 1938 became another year in which Gordon Daviot had no new publications or theatre productions, though new editions of her work continued to be published. She was busy writing, but the full production of her play The Stars Bow Down had been postponed indefinitely, and she began to explore other options for it. It was to be published in book form in 1939. However, adaptations of her plays continued to appear, and, after the success of Young and Innocent and her other experiments with film, there were other media options to explore. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, paired this time with actor Andrew Osborn, reprised her role as ‘Anne’ for an adaptation of Richard of Bordeaux for the new medium of television.31 At this time, television plays were filmed live, with the actors on a regular stage, rather than pre-recorded on location. It was a new and exciting development which presaged the many TV adaptations that would later be made of Josephine Tey’s mystery novels – but in 1938 there wasn’t even a television signal in Inverness, let alone any television sets, so the new medium had little impact on what and how Beth wrote. The broadcast has not survived or been preserved in any way.

  Beth took another holiday around this time in 1938, travelling on the continent to Denmark and Germany with her sister Moire – but they ended up cutting their holiday short as there were now growing concerns about events in Europe.32 References start to crop up in Gordon’s letters to Germany and Hitler, though public opinion in Britain continued to be against any suggestion of war. Neil Gunn, now settled further north out of Inverness, was also travelling in Europe, making two visits to Germany in 1938 and 1939 – though, unlike Beth and Moire he was not on holiday, but had been invited to speak there by some young Germans, who were interested in his vision of Scotland and his nationalist politics. ‘It would be much to the purpose,’ Heinz Mollwo wrote to Inverness ex-provost Alexander MacEwen, ‘if we knew something about the views which Mr. Gunn is inclined to-day to hold on young Germany and its problems’.33 Heinz had been a guest at MacEwen’s house in August 1936, where he had met Gunn.34 Gunn, somewhat naively, accepted his invitations abroad, but in later life his friends did much to protect his reputation against any accusation that he had been pro-Nazi. The idea of ‘nationalism’ was beginning to take on a different meaning.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Second World War

  During the Second World War, John Gielgud and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies met Gordon Daviot in Edinburgh, while they were touring their production of Macbeth, their own contribution to entertainment of civilians and troops for the war effort.1 Gielgud’s description of Gordon Daviot at this time is of a deeply depressed woman, who spoke with extreme bitterness about war and its aftermath, and who made reference to her own lost love from the First World War. Gielgud was very much struck by how Gordon appeared to him at this time, and his description of her in 1941 is one of the enduring images of the enigma ‘Josephine Tey’. He wrote about it in his introduction to her collection of posthumously published plays, and it has been quoted by almost every commentator on her life since. The Second World War is often seen as the most ‘mysterious’ part of Tey’s life; a period of silence where, commentators mistakenly write, she produced no work and where her movements were unknown. The reality, of course, is a little different, but the Second World War radically interrupted Gordon Daviot’s writing, once more forcing her to rebuild her life as it destroyed everything she had so carefully built up since her mother’s death.

  As with so many of the myths around Beth’s life, the reality of what war meant to her, and the reason why so many of her friends struggled to understand this, was bound up in what it meant to be living in Inverness. As with the First World War, Inverness, as a major military hub, was affected to a very great degree, with large numbers of troops stationed and training there. Once again, Invernessians’ movements were restricted and citizens had to carry a pass – the whole of Scotland north and west of the Caledonian Canal was ‘closed’, which was a considerable inconvenience to Invernessians, since the canal cuts through part of town and people must have crossed it regularly in Beth’s time. ‘This Closing of Scotland north and west of the Caledonian Canal is a bit of a nuisance,’ said Colin with some understatement in a letter to his youngest daughter, ‘It means that no one can cross the Canal without a permit. You have to fill up reams of paper, get two photos, your registration card, how far you want to go and god knows how much more. But the powers that be seem to think it necessary so what can we do.’2 The Longman too, then an open area where Colin enjoyed walking, was closed and made into an airfield.3 Around this time, he sent postcards of Shieldaig to Moire, so it seems he did manage to travel to his birthplace during the war years, but wider travel had certainly become more difficult, affecting Beth’s journeys to London. However, Beth was actually on her way home by train to Inverness in September 1939, just after war was declared, and she did travel to London during the time of the Blitz.4 Of Beth’s two sisters, Moire was in London itself, while Jean was just outside and, as a veteran of the Zeppelin bombings, Beth was well aware of what dangers aerial bombardment might bring. Equally, in the north of Scotland, German planes were not unknown, and Colin’s regular letters to Moire at this time obliquely mention ‘visitors’ to the night skies. Colin’s business was affected, and his letters also discuss the difficulties of running a fruit shop in a time of rationing, the problems he had getting fresh fruit delivered and the tension it caused amongst his customers when there was not enough to go round.

  We were 18 days without tomatoes and when they came we only got half the ordinary allotment. My allotment is 56 12lb baskets and most of the 28 baskets were over ripe. On an average there are 75 to 100 women daily at my place asking for tomatoes, and I take it that this happens at all other shops in town.5

  When he could, Colin sent fruit down to Moire, but even he and Beth were going short as the war progressed.6 Jean had less need of food parcels, but her husband Humphrey decided to re-enlist in the navy and rejoin active service.7 As Commodore, he was in command of Atlantic convoys, a dangerous position under attack from U-Boats.

  Professionally, one of the first notable things that happened for Gordon Daviot the playwright when the Second World War broke out was that all the theatres in London were closed.8 They were quickly re-opened, as theatre and culture was publicly declared as being both important to morale and one of the things to fight for, but playwrights’ work was difficult to continue in its same form with so many actors away fighting in the army, while those who remained, like John Gielgud, often focused on the classics, or on pieces that their managers knew would definitely attract an audience. Gordon was not in a good position, as the performance of her last two plays at the box office would not convince a manager to take a new one on at a risky time. With the exception of revivals or the inclusion of scenes from her plays included in revues, the theatre was effectively closed to Beth for the duration of the war.

  Beth’s London friends reacted differently too. Some of them were, frankly, rich enough to try to buy their way out of war. Acquaintances such as writer Marguerite Steen and her painter husband sold their London home and moved out to the country.9 The honourable exception was Lena Ramsden, who, for the duration of the war, resolved to put her art and theatre-going to one side, and signed up to do war-work in a factory making aeroplane parts. Decidedly wealthy and artistic, Lena was at first something of an outsider in the factory, but eventually won over her colleagues with her attitude to hard work, her charm, and her love of placing a bet on the horses. Several of Beth’s friends made their way to America, for various reasons. Peggy Webster, who had dual nationality, was already based there, while Dodie Smith had moved out because of the pacifist convictions of her now-husband Alec Beesley. Alec, several years younger than Dodie, was worried that he would be forced to join the army, and had convinced Dodie to take advantage of offers to work in Hollywood.10 Alec spent the war working with other conscientious objectors to promote pacifist views, while Dodie, fr
eelancing in a well-paid job as a scriptwriter and beginning to write novels, wrote endlessly to her friends in London, horrified to be missing out on what was developing in Britain. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies was also persuaded by her partner to leave Britain, though Marda Vanne’s motives were slightly different.

  On 7th January 1940, Gordon wrote a long and revealing letter to Marda, discussing the war.11 Marda, as a South African not feeling much British patriotism, had asked for advice on whether or not she should continue to persuade Gwen to leave England and come with her to South Africa. Gordon was very much against the idea of Gwen leaving, partly because she felt it would be a professional misjudgement: ‘Already letters are beginning to appear in the film trade journals asking: “What is So-and-so doing in Hollywood? Hasn’t he got a country any more?”’ Gordon also tried to illustrate what she felt by discussing both her own personal feelings, and those of her family, including both her sisters – a rather rare occurrence in a letter to her theatre friends, where she tended not to focus on her family and private life and only to speak about her work. Gordon explained to Marda:

  When the last war ended, my life drifted away from Service matters, both naval and military. Inasmuch as I had lived till I was eighteen in a town that was a Regimental Headquarters and within bugle call of a barracks, I would always have an interest in the army; but in England I met few Service people, and my daily interests led me further and further from them [...] And no one mentioned the war. No one, it seemed, had been marked in any way by those four years, or remembered them except to mention a butter shortage. To me, who could never quite forget, that seemed odd; but as the years went on I came to believe, without ever thinking definitely about it, that it was I who was odd, and that for the great bulk of the British people the war might never have happened.

  Gordon particularly noted that for her sister Moire, who was eight years younger than her, the war did not seem to have much meaning – but she had recently been surprised to hear Moire say of someone at her work, ‘He’s not very popular. He didn’t serve’, – meaning that he hadn’t joined up during the war.

  Marda was not convinced, and she and Gwen went to South Africa.12 Gwen was persuaded that it was the right thing to do, because the two women were invited to try and start a national theatre. They began a high profile and successful administrative, organizational and acting mission to improve South African theatre, with the aim of bringing two races together – meaning, of course, the two white races, English and Afrikaans. Marda, with her high-profile connections in South Africa, cleared the way for the two women to get invitations to the highest rank of society, where they worked hard to raise funds and raise the profile of the arts. For Gwen, it was part of her vocation to promote the arts, though as time went on she found her relationship with Marda more and more difficult, and was persuaded back to the UK in 1941 by John Gielgud, who offered her the part of Lady Macbeth. It was on the tour for Macbeth that Gwen and John met Gordon in Edinburgh.

  By 1941, the war had already had a very personal impact on the MacKintosh family. Jean’s husband Humphrey was killed in action in September 1940 when the flagship he was commanding was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat.13 Fifty-eight men were killed. Humphrey’s body was washed ashore in Ireland, and he was buried in that country. Jean was not as good a correspondent as Moire and Beth, and there were periods when she did not keep in touch with her father Colin and her sisters as much. Beth in particular sometimes found her difficult to get on with. By the time Jean had managed to write to Moire and her family in Inverness, Beth had already read in the papers about Humphrey going missing, as the loss of his ship had been reported. Beth kept the knowledge from Colin at first, who heard it from Moire. He wrote at once to Jean, and worried to Moire about how she would be left financially. Humphrey, of course, was survived by his children and grandchildren from his first marriage as well as his second wife. In the event, things were arranged to everybody’s satisfaction, Jean remaining in Buckinghamshire, on good terms with her stepchildren.

  Beth managed a trip to visit her youngest sister in London in April 1941, during the Blitz.14 On arriving in town, just off the sleeper train from Inverness, she found the city depressing and badly damaged, but was impressed to see cheerful women walking to work with bright lipstick and smart clothes, not looking at all as if they had been up all night. She went to Moire’s flat where, she wrote ironically afterwards, she realized that the reason these women could live through Blitz nights being bombed but still get up and look lively and smart was that they all had a ‘sleeping sickness’, which Moire had picked up as well:

  I know now how Moire has lived through the winter in London and come out looking not a day older. It is for the simple reason that there is no sound known to God or man that can keep her awake. At the height of last Saturday’s blitz, about two in the morning, in her top floor flat, with pandemonium all around that drew the teeth from your head, – guns, shells, bombs, falling shrapnel, and ambulance gongs – she woke up suddenly, said with great distinctness: ‘I really have a horribly guilty feeling that I should be staying awake when I have a guest.’

  Moire then flopped over on her other side and resumed her snoring, leaving her ‘guest’ to face the three hours still to come with what philosophy she could! Beth remained awake, alone, quaking all night as the bombs continued to fall.

  Moire was personally affected by the Blitz, as her flat was bombed out.15 She herself was unhurt, but, as with so many other women, the war sharpened feelings that she had for one of her colleagues, and she soon after wrote to her father with the announcement that she was getting married. ‘So you have made up your mind to get married’, Colin wrote back to her. ‘Well, well. I hope you will be happy.’16 He had never met her fiancé, Donald Stokes, and wanted to know all about him. He thought he had a good Highland name but, jokingly, said that he was rather sad that Moire was marrying an Englishman. Colin had seen Jean very little since her marriage, and, if Moire married an Englishman, that would mean that she would be permanently based away from him – and from Beth. With men now being conscripted into the armed services, and with Jean’s widowhood still raw, Colin and Beth could see that there were other unknown dangers ahead for Moire, while for Beth it brought back memories of both Hugh McIntosh and her World War I soldier.

  Beth’s situation was in contrast to her sisters. Now aged forty-five, she was the last unmarried MacKintosh daughter, a spinster caring for her aging father, and, with the difficulties of travel, the closure of the theatres, and the choices of her London friends, now cut off from parts of the professional career and the friendships that meant so much to her.

  However, Gordon’s depression, which Gielgud wrote about so movingly, was not solely linked to her own personal situation, but also to the wider implications of the war. As a sensitive, observational writer, Beth watched the people and society around her. War meant many different things to different people, but the First and Second World Wars in particular caused a rupture with the world that had gone before them, and perhaps Beth saw this more clearly and more immediately than many people of her generation. Beth was not only unhappy at the loss of a lover or a friend in the First World War, she was unhappy at the loss of a whole way of life. She herself had rebuilt her life more than once, reinventing herself as a teacher and later as a writer, and now she could see that she would have to do it all again, and that the whole society she lived in would have to do it again. Kif had reflected her understanding of what war can do to a society; Richard of Bordeaux had shown that she understood what grief could to a person and a nation.

  Beth was born in 1896, when she had an uncle who drove a horse and cart; by 1952, when she died, she was living in a world of cars and nuclear bombs. As a writer whose career was based on observation, and a single woman whose life wasn’t invested in her family, but was often turned outwards through her experiences, Beth saw these changes more clearly than many of the people around her. After the war, she wrote mainly detective fictio
n, and her books as Josephine Tey, her masterworks, although decidedly modern, are full of longing for a world that does not exist any more: the England before the war, or between the wars. The passages in Brat Farrar where Brat, coming home from America, describes England, are an elegy for something that was disappearing. Beth was an Anglophile, but, by the end of her life, she knew that she could never return to England even if family commitments and money allowed her to, because the England she wanted was one that no longer existed, that two World Wars had destroyed. Beth saw early on what the Second World War meant for her and for her country. Everything was going to change again. It took her a while to figure out how to deal with this, and her written output decreased sharply when the war began.

  Another, more practical obstacle in the way of publication, as well as the lack of theatres in which to put on her plays, was paper rationing, which meant the number of books printed was limited. After turning already from writing for the stage to writing novels and biography, Beth needed to find a new format if she was going to continue publishing her work. However difficult it might be for her to reinvent herself and rebuild her life again, Beth was not going to give up. Even at the end of that depressing meeting in Edinburgh which Gielgud described so vividly, he noted that only a few days in his and Gwen’s company seemed to revive Gordon. She might miss her friends and her pre-war life down south, but she was a writer, and all she needed to write was right there in Inverness. In 1941, she made a return to the format of the short story, and the first of her radio plays was broadcast.