Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  At the outbreak of war, John Gielgud had publicly stated that he would do everything he could to entertain troops and boost morale.17 There is a famous quote, attributed to Winston Churchill in the Second World War, in which he is reported as saying that culture was one of the things worth fighting for.18 Accordingly, the role of ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association, was given prominence, with actors touring round the serving troops providing entertainment. Binkie Beaumont, the theatre manager, organized a tour of army camps for Gielgud in the mid-1940s.19 The entertainment generally consisted of several short pieces, rather than one long play, as that held the audience’s attention better, and meant that pieces could be kept light and short. Noel Coward’s plays were included in Gielgud’s 1940s run, as were extracts from Gordon Daviot’s play Queen of Scots. Extracts from the hugely popular Richard of Bordeaux also went down well on Gielgud’s later ENSA tour to Gibraltar. These short extracts and shorter forms were where Gordon Daviot began to find an outlet for her writing.

  Magazine readership – and, in fact, reading in general – went up in the Second World War, as long blackout evenings meant people had to stay indoors and find their own entertainment.20 Short stories were in demand, and in February 1941 Lilliput magazine published a new Gordon Daviot story, Bees. Lilliput was a small-format magazine aimed, if the pictures of tastefully almost-naked women are anything to go by, at men, but with a good reputation for its fiction. Other authors featured around the time include James Thurber, Antonia White and Dorothy Whipple (whose novels have recently been republished to great acclaim by Persephone Books), while in its lifetime the magazine also published Doris Lessing and Evelyn Waugh. The brief biography given by Gordon Daviot for the magazine describes her as ‘best known as the author of Richard of Bordeaux, The Laughing Woman, and other plays, but before taking to the theatre was a writer of short stories, as readers of the English Review and Westminster Gazette may remember’. Daviot added, ‘I retired from the theatre; punch-drunk, in 1936. Still have a liaison with my first love.’21 The story Bees is about a naval man who returns to service – owing something, undoubtedly, to Jean’s late husband. It’s the only short story I have been able to identify in published form from this period, but there were almost certainly more, particularly as amongst Beth’s papers were manuscript versions of other short stories – ‘The Thing That Knows The Time’ seems to be a contender for being written at this time in her life.

  Gordon Daviot was also busy writing short plays. John Gielgud’s brother Val, whom she knew, was in charge of the BBC drama department, and, with the wartime reorganization of the BBC’s service into a national programme with little regional variation and a strong duty to encourage patriotism, he was actively looking for quality writing. Gordon Daviot’s plays had already proved popular on the radio, with The Laughing Woman adapted and broadcast near the start of the war, John Gielgud finally getting to play the title role of ‘Rene’ which he had so coveted.22 Gielgud reprised his lead role in Richard of Bordeaux for another radio adaptation in 1941. Gordon Daviot published a collection of short plays entitled Leith Sands and other plays in 1946, but no explanatory note was put into the published book and it is not generally realized that most of these plays had been performed on BBC radio during the war. However, recent archiving projects have revealed the broadcast dates for several of her one-act plays during the war: Leith Sands, in 1941; The Three Mrs Madderleys in 1944; and Mrs Fry has a Visitor, also in 1944. Sara, The Mother of Masé and Rahab were collected together as ‘Three Women’, in three instalments just after the war ended, in June 1945. Gordon Daviot’s full-length play Queen of Scots was adapted for radio in 1942; Remember Caesar, also in the Leith Sands collection, was broadcast in 1946; while two plays not in the Leith Sands collection – The Pen of My Aunt and The Balwhinnie Bomb – also appear to have been broadcast in 1946.23

  Leith Sands was broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland in 1942.24 The BBC had merged its stations into one ‘Home Service’ at the start of the war, but there were still some regional opt-outs and, as a play based on Scottish history, Leith Sands must have been thought to appeal particularly to the Scottish audience – it is one of Gordon Daviot’s short plays which is often remembered and mentioned by an older audience. Leith Sands is an area in Edinburgh, but the play’s hero is actually a Highlander, a well-known name for those in Inverness – Duncan Forbes. Gordon Daviot never engaged with the history of Culloden, the most famous historical incident near Inverness, but in Leith Sands she came close. The Forbes family were known for their appeals for clemency after 1746, and, despite their support for the government troops, the Forbeses paid for the monument to the Jacobites which still stands on the battlefield. Duncan Forbes was a character guaranteed to appeal to Gordon Daviot: a British-supporting, logical man, who tried to do the right thing even if it meant going against what people thought. Leith Sands is a one-act play focusing on an incident during his training as a lawyer in Edinburgh, where men are mistakenly hanged for murder. The play is set in a bar, where Duncan Forbes is not afraid to stand up against the anti-English sentiment of the other drinkers, who believe the hangings were right and necessary. He is finally proved right when the supposed murder victim walks in and asks for a drink. A prostitute, Belle Hepburn, is guilty of supplying the misinformation that led to the hanging, but Forbes also blames the bystanders for being swept up in the moment and not carrying out justice properly. It is a very ‘Gordon Daviot’ theme: she likes to set straight historical misconceptions. It also seems a play with some bold themes to broadcast during wartime: the idea that everyone should be responsible for justice and not get carried away with punishment could equally be applied to British attitudes towards Germany – though I think Daviot’s main aim in writing the play, as with most of her work, was to elucidate a historical point.

  Gordon Daviot’s work was often broadcast on the BBC, particularly after her death, when many adaptations were made of her Josephine Tey novels. In the 1940s, when they produced Leith Sands, she was pleased enough to get the plays performed anywhere, given the wartime conditions, as she later wrote to her friend Lena Ramsden: ‘At the time, it was found money. I just “used them up” on the BBC before collecting them.’25 Beth was not financially dependent on her writing since Colin was still housing her and running his shop (and she still had considerable proceeds from Richard of Bordeaux). However, she later became dissatisfied with the wages that the BBC had paid her, explaining to Lena Ramsden in the same letter: ‘Where the Corporation is concerned, I remember that before the Authors’ Society screwed them up to a minimum they got my one-acters – brand new and unacted – for the price an amateur hack gets from a provincial daily for writing an article on a fortnight in Brittany for the Saturday page. But that rankles now, not then.’

  The BBC certainly do not seem to have done a terribly good job in promoting her plays, given that many serious critics of Gordon Daviot’s work still assert that she wrote nothing during the Second World War. Josephine Tey – and Gordon Daviot’s – work is still being broadcast on the radio in the present day, so the BBC perhaps should have tried harder to develop a better relationship with Beth. Certainly she later turned down offers from the BBC because she was unhappy with the way they had treated her, and was unhappy with the quality of the adaptations they made. In a lengthy letter to her friend Lena, Beth explains her thinking on the manner, which sheds some light on her professional relationships. She was not happy with the BBC’s pay, but had not attempted any negotiation. She preferred the financial side of her work to be taken care of by an agent, and did not wish to enter into discussions. Her lack of financial dependence on her writing influenced her attitude, and she treated her work in a personal, rather than detachedly businesslike manner. She had drifted into the agreements with the BBC because they suited her at the time, but when she became aware that the BBC were not paying her a fair rate, she instantly took action by refusing to give them any more stories – and then continued to refuse
them stories in the future. She was later able to write that ‘of course where the BBC are concerned Tey is out, since they won’t pay my prices. (I get more pleasure out of bucking the Corporation than I ever could have had out of their measly few pounds.)’ Beth was also unimpressed with some of the Scottish opt-outs of the BBC programming.26 She felt these did not take the Highlands into account, and had too many Central Belt accents. In the North of Scotland, she said, these sounded almost more foreign to her than an English accent.

  During the war, however, the BBC work was useful to Beth, particularly as, alongside her return to short stories, the short play format was encouraging her to experiment with different ideas. Her writing began to develop in new ways. Leith Sands was a fairly typical ‘Gordon Daviot’ historical play, but The Three Mrs Madderleys was completely different. After the bout of depression at the start of the Second World War, The Three Mrs Madderleys marked a change towards a lighter tone, reminiscent of The Expensive Halo. In this case, the story is very slight and has no moral – unless it is never to run around after a man, or believe what he says. Mary, Margaret and Marion meet over pink gin, and gradually find out that they all know the same, rather disappointing man: one woman is his current partner, one is his ex-wife and one is his mother. In the late 1990s, The Three Mrs Madderleys was one of the plays chosen to be performed by the local drama group in Inverness for a ‘Gordon Daviot evening’ – its humour still appealed, though it seemed dated.

  Of the other plays broadcast on the BBC in wartime, Mrs Fry has a Visitor is another historical piece, with a twist in the tale rather like an early Daviot short story – it was to have an afterlife as a BBC children’s television play, reflecting its gentle nature.27 Remember Caesar is as light as The Three Mrs Madderleys, with gentle humour and an understanding of city life as opposed to country life:

  LADY WESTON And the kitchenmaid thinks that she will stay in London after all.

  Weston Stay in London?

  Lady Weston Yes, she was leaving because she found London so quiet after the country.

  Weston Ridiculous!

  Lady Weston In the country, she said, if there wasn’t a wedding there was a wake. It was never dull. A pleasant girl. I am glad London is being livelier for her.28

  The Pen of My Aunt is the only play to have an explicitly wartime setting, set in France where a young man evades capture. It has echoes of Kif, but with a strong female lead this time, an older woman who helps the young man escape. Finally, The Balwhinnie Bomb is probably Gordon Daviot’s very best short play, a genuinely funny slice of Highland life that has stood up to numerous revivals by amateur dramatic companies, and which easily translates to a modern audience.

  It is obvious from the sheer number of publications and performances that Gordon Daviot was to produce in 1946 that she spent the Second World War writing. At the age of forty-eight, she no longer felt the need to volunteer, as she had done as a VAD in the First World War, and the time she wasn’t writing was spent housekeeping and caring for Colin, who was now in his eighties. He was still going to his fruit shop every day, but, although he had assistants to help out with the day-to-day serving behind the counter, wartime rationing made this job stressful, and he wasn’t as able as he had been. ‘I haven’t been too well lately’, Colin wrote to his youngest daughter in 1943, ‘so I went to see Dr Campbell, who thinks I am wonderful for my age. I usually get to Castle St [the shop] about 10:30’.29 Just as Beth couldn’t travel south in wartime, so Moire found it difficult to travel north, though she and Jean did their best, arranging, so that they wouldn’t disturb Beth and Colin too much, to stay in one of the two hotels in town that were not in Government service. Colin complained to Moire that Jean was not good at keeping in touch in between visits, and complained, too, that continual bad weather was taking its toll. In several letters Colin said he was struck down with colds and niggling bad health – ‘Beth is not too well,’ either, Colin added, ‘but makes no reference to it in any letter.’ (Beth wrote separately to Moire.) Beth carried on stoically working through any ill-health she was enduring.

  When the collection Leith Sands was published after the war, it contained seven plays in total. By the time of publication, six of the seven had been broadcast on the radio. Just after the war had ended, Sara, The Mother of Masé and Rahab had been collected together as a series, entitled Three Women. These three plays, broadcast on three subsequent Sundays, continue the re-telling of Biblical stories in modern-day language that Gordon Daviot had started to explore in The Stars Bow Down: Rahab is about the walls of Jericho, but is chiefly concerned with longevity, and wishing one’s name to be remembered after one’s death. The Mother of Masé is about Moses (Masé being Daviot’s version of Moses), and Sara is a one-act play that was later developed into the full-length production The Little Dry Thorn, and is about Sara and Abraham. Each story is told with considerable feeling for the Biblical characters. Beth was trying to make them into real people, whose stories and choices were relevant to understanding character, not just religious emblems. The final, apparently unperformed, play included in the collection is Clarion Call, about a family reunion engineered by a newspaper. Gordon Daviot had written knowledgeably and with understanding about newspapermen since her first novel, though her experiences after Richard of Bordeaux had not improved her opinion of journalists. Interestingly, she keeps the same fictional name for her newspaper, The Clarion, consistently throughout her work, much in the way that she carried place names from her very early short stories through into her Inspector Grant mysteries.

  The seven plays in the Leith Sands collection are as variable in subject matter as the rest of Gordon Daviot’s output, and reflect her wide-ranging interests. From 1941’s Leith Sands to 1944’s The Three Mrs Madderleys, Gordon Daviot’s mood seemed to have lightened considerably. Perhaps she came to feel, in common with other writers like Georgette Heyer, that, during wartime, a writer’s duty is to entertain. Certainly the depressed Gordon Daviot that John Gielgud described meeting in 1941 had somehow found some sort of peace by the end of the war. She had turned the closure of the theatres and the rationing of paper to good account, turning the artificial interruption of wartime to her advantage by using the shorter formats that were available to her to experiment with new ideas and styles, and was to continue to develop this in her post-war writing. She had obviously also continued to read widely and to explore new subjects that might interest her. Valerius, about the Romans, dates from the 1940s, while a short play about Richard III, Dickon could possibly be dated as early as the mid-1940s. It dealt with the mysteries surrounding Richard III, the subject that she was to return to so successfully in The Daughter of Time.30 A few other longer plays, which were posthumously published but don’t appear to have been performed in her lifetime, may also date from the 1940s – The Pomp of Mr Pomfret for example, or Lady Charing is Cross, which are close to The Three Mrs Madderleys in style; or Reckoning, which seems closest to Kif, but with strong cinematic influences. Barnharrow too returns to the themes of her pre-war Claverhouse.

  Beth’s depression in the early years of the war was replaced by 1946 with her renewed focus on her writing. Her talents had grown and developed over the wartime period until, afterwards, she was able to produce some of her best work. As the war ended in 1945, Beth MacKintosh was about to enter one of the most creative phases of her writing career. She had got through the war, and had managed, once again, to hold onto her identity and her work as a writer, and to continue to have a life that she enjoyed despite the restrictions around her. She was entering the third stage of her career, where Beth MacKintosh and Gordon Daviot were soon to be taken over by Josephine Tey.

  PART THREE

  Josephine Tey

  1946–1952

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Citizens Theatre

  Although it was after the Second World War that Beth wrote most of her Josephine Tey novels, 1945 started with a return to the theatre as Gordon Daviot – and another reinventio
n with a new project under a different third pseudonym. It was a new phase of creativity and optimism.

  Post-war theatre was entering a new phase, as cinema had won away the popular audience. In London, the big project was Olivier’s National Theatre. In Scotland, the Citizens Theatre Company had been formed in 1943 by James Bridie. ‘James Bridie’ was the pseudonym of Glaswegian Oswald Henry Mavor, a doctor who had switched careers in the 1930s to focus on his hobby, and become a full-time writer. His plays had been successful on the London stage for some time, with Tobias and the Angel running concurrently to Gordon Daviot’s Richard of Bordeaux in 1933. Bridie, through his involvement with the Citizens and, later, the RSAMD (Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama1) has earned the title of the ‘father of modern Scottish theatre’. Unlike Gordon Daviot, he was involved in all aspects of the theatre world, from writing plays to setting up theatre companies, to discussions with actors, to screenwriting jobs (like Daviot, he worked with Hitchcock). The library at Glasgow University Union is named after him, as is the Bridie dinner that takes place in the University each year (it was at the University of Glasgow that he first studied to be a doctor, and he kept up his links with the place for many years). In short, Bridie was a public figure. And yet, this man, whom so many saw and still see as ‘Scotland’s best-known playwright’, considered that ‘Scotland’s greatest living playwright’ was Gordon Daviot.2 He founded the Citizens Theatre Company to promote Scottish playwriting and acting, as opposed to bringing up shows from London, and when he was looking for a new play to showcase his company’s talents, one of the first playwrights he turned to was Daviot.