Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  Meanwhile, the press campaign for Cornelia was managed expertly. For about two weeks from 15th April to 26th April 1946, the play, and its mysterious author, were the hot topic in all Glasgow’s newspapers. Clippings saved by the Citizens Theatre Company include articles with titles like ‘New Play By “Mystery” Scots Author’ in the Daily Record. Even the producer and the cast had no idea who ‘F. Craigie Howe’ was, and the papers were desperate to find out. The cast of Cornelia were reported to have received telegrams wishing them every success from the mysterious ‘F. Craigie Howe’ postmarked in London, and there was much speculation over whether it was a Scot in exile. As well as these ‘news’ items, in the entertainment columns of the papers were gossip articles with profiles of the play’s stars and details of the costumes they were to wear. One article would, I think, have particularly appealed to that lover of clothes, Beth MacKintosh: a special exposé of how a prominent Glasgow department store had lent the Citz’ costume department £3,000 worth of fur coats.

  The publicity did not stop at previews. Once The Little Dry Thorn and Cornelia were running the press enthusiastically reviewed the shows, and then followed their progress, and the progress of everyone connected with the Citz. A party of Church of Scotland ministers made a special trip from Edinburgh, where they had been attending the General Assembly, to see The Little Dry Thorn. And it seems that no fact or rumour about James Bridie’s negotiations with Hollywood to work on a script was too small to be avidly reported. The Citizens Theatre Company’s spring 1946 season, their first in their new theatre, was a roaring success, and it was mainly down to Beth MacKintosh. They were resting their reputation for good Scots plays on not one, but two of her productions. This showed massive confidence in her ability – and it shows one reason why James Bridie, no mean publicist, felt it was imperative to keep F. Craigie Howe’s identity a true secret. Paper after paper praised the Citz for promoting Scots writing, saying that two plays of this quality, The Little Dry Thorn and Cornelia, proved that the Citz was doing the right thing supporting Scottish-born authors as clearly there was plenty of talent out there. If James Bridie had let slip that both plays were by the same author, he would have undermined the manifesto he and the Citz were trying to create. Beth’s awareness of this, and her continuing friendship with Bridie, might be one reason why she never returned again to the F. Craigie Howe pseudonym. She also found another outlet for that lightness of tone in her Josephine Tey novels, while the positive reception of The Little Dry Thorn may also have convinced her that ‘Gordon Daviot’ had much yet to give. The Citizens’ approach to her as Daviot confirmed for her that her name was not forgotten, and her point had been made when she got Cornelia accepted – her writing was always good enough to stand on its own merits.

  The fact that neither reviewers, nor any of the Citz’ actors, worked out who F. Craigie Howe was, is a real testament to Beth MacKintosh’s writing ability. Several of the actors and actresses who played in Cornelia from 15th–26th April, went on to play parts in The Little Dry Thorn from 29th April–10th May. The actress Rona Anderson played Cornelia in the first play – her first major role – and then went on to play Hagar in The Little Dry Thorn – a major part. And yet, although some reviewers guessed that F. Craigie Howe was a woman, the characters in Cornelia and in The Little Dry Thorn were so well drawn that no one, not even Rona Anderson who would have carefully studied every word of Cornelia’s and Hagar’s speeches, recognized that the same author had created all these different parts. This strength and ability to draw characters and work on completely different subjects was both a strength and a weakness for Beth MacKintosh. Many later critics have picked up on the section in her novel The Daughter of Time, where Inspector Grant laments the ‘sameness’ of most authors’ ‘new’ novels, and how similar they always are to their previous work. No one could ever accuse Beth MacKintosh of churning out the same recycled themes: Cornelia is as wildly different to The Little Dry Thorn as Brat Farrar is widely different in theme to Miss Pym Disposes. Equally, however, it meant that playgoers and readers never quite knew what to expect. There was no ‘new Gordon Daviot’ play, and, as with The Laughing Woman, sometimes her audience stayed away out of disappointment when they did not recognize anything they knew in her new work.

  The Citizens Theatre Company’s staff carefully noted the reactions of the audience at all performances of Cornelia and The Little Dry Thorn.16 Performance reports were written up, and the notes used for the following night’s performance, as well as being kept in the Citz archive files. Between calculations of timings (the play was about two hours long, with an interval, despite Gordon Daviot’s dislike of breaks in the performance), prop plans and lighting cues, there are notes that Cornelia received ‘3 calls – excellent reception!’ Later performances got up to four curtain calls. The Little Dry Thorn ran the following week. From surviving photos and posters, the lead actor and actress Edmund Bailey (Abraham) and Enid Hewitt (Sara) were dressed in Egyptian-looking costume against backdrops that aimed towards the Motleys’ high standards. The play was received in the more serious manner it was written, with fewer laughs and curtain calls, but the careful notation of audience numbers and box office receipts shows that from 4th–11th May 1946 it took over £650 and played to over 3,300 people over eight performances (including matinees). Gordon Daviot considered that it was ‘[O]ne of my MAJOR TRIUMPHS’.17

  Amongst the good reviews of both plays, and the speculation over the identity of ‘F. Craigie Howe’, one article had noted that the cast of Cornelia were sent ‘good luck’ telegrams from London. Beth MacKintosh had not attended the original performances of Cornelia (though she did attend The Little Dry Thorn) in April, because she was away on holiday. Now that the travel restrictions in place during the Second World War had lifted, Beth had accepted an invitation from her friend Lena Ramsden to attend Newmarket races in England.

  Lena Ramsden was the sort of woman who could have been a model for ‘Cornelia’: resolutely unconventional, with the money to back up and excuse any sort of eccentric behaviour, she was a sometime sculptor and great lover of the theatre who lived in a studio in Primrose Hill. She was friends with Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and had known Gordon Daviot since the 1930s. During the Second World War, wishing to contribute to the war effort, and despite her age and total lack of experience, she had found work as a lathe turner, interspersing this difficult factory work with hospitality from sympathetic friends, visits to various pubs, and the odd broadcast on the BBC. She was part of a creative set of women that included many of Gwen’s Tagley Cottage friends, and also the writer Marguerite Steen.

  Through Lena, Beth must surely have been aware of Marguerite: the opinionated Steen, mistress of the well-known portrait painter William Nicholson, must have made a vivid contrast to the sort of literary society available in Scotland.18 Although Cornelia was pure fantasy, Beth MacKintosh did have some experience of the social round she described ‘Cornelia’ rejecting. Lena, though, had more in common with Beth than Marguerite the writer had, in their shared passion for horse racing. With Gwen and Marda still in South Africa, and with the shared experience of living in Britain during wartime, Gordon became much closer to the garrulous, enthusiastic and friendly Lena, and their friendship deepened in the 1940s.

  Lena, after spending the war working very hard, was looking forward to a holiday, and was delighted to see her Scottish friend after so long. The two women travelled from London to Newmarket races by car (Lena drove).19 Although Lena doesn’t record whether or not the two women discussed the theatre, she does provide a vivid picture of the journey they made each day from the races to the house where they stayed:

  At one sharp bend there was a garden in which grew an apple tree, which was unfailingly obliging with a full show of blossom. I shall always remember with pleasure Gordon’s delight in that tree. In spite of the vagaries of spring weather, on the day we arrived it was always covered with tight, pink buds, which by the end of the week were so fully opened that
they were almost white. Each day, as we approached the turning on our way back from racing, Gordon craned forward to see what progress had been made, and I stopped the car so that we could jointly admire the tree before driving on. I looked on the tree as a talisman; a guarantee of Gordon’s continued enjoyment of that particular holiday.

  Gordon returned with Lena to Newmarket several times. In January 1948 she wrote to Lena: ‘your letter comes, suggesting Newmarket again. And I remembered the peace of that house, and the nice green Newmarket world, full of space, and the apple tree – No things to un-remember about it.’

  Whatever feelings of depression Gordon had at the start of the Second World War were now completely gone: she was full of renewed optimism and hope for the future. Her writing career was blossoming forth, and would soon be in full bloom.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Miss Pym Disposes

  1946 was a year of great change for Beth, a reawakening after the difficult years of the Second World War. Now that two of her plays had gone down well, offers for her theatrical work began to come in again, though, as the nature of theatre changed post-war, so the offers of work changed. Leith Sands, her collection of short plays, was published and, most importantly, Josephine Tey began to take over from Gordon Daviot, as Miss Pym Disposes was published, the first of six mystery novels. Beth opened up to the press and re-established her ties with not only her London friends but also contacts from her college years – and became an aunt for the first and only time. Her creative circle widened, as shown by her friendship with James Bridie, and it seems that it was around this time that she also became friends with the successful Scottish author and journalist Elisabeth Kyle (real name Agnes Dunlop).1 Yet, paradoxically, as Beth’s life expanded after the restrictions of wartime, and her circle of family and friends got larger again, it was at this very time that the perception of her as a ‘loner’ in Inverness grew.

  Other theatre companies had noted the success of Gordon Daviot’s The Little Dry Thorn, and the Citz began to receive communications from the Wilson Barrett repertory theatre company.2 Wilson Barrett staged a production of Richard of Bordeaux in both Glasgow and Edinburgh in summer 1946, a well-timed repeat which capitalized on and took advantage of the renewed interest in Daviot’s plays, and they wanted to secure the rights to The Little Dry Thorn as well.3 The Citz referred them to Gordon Daviot, but, as with all her business negotiations, she passed them on to her agent and did not want to deal with them directly. It was clear, though, that Gordon did not want The Little Dry Thorn to become a play for what she saw as second-rate repertory. She still wanted a professional London run: ‘[my agent] knows’, she wrote to her friend Mathew Forsyth at the Citizens, ‘that I don’t want the play to become “small change” before we get a West End showing, and perhaps can tactfully discourage him for the moment. The THORN will not date and is fore-ordained to be God’s gift to repertory for years to come, so there is no need to cash in on it.’4

  Instead, the Citizens Theatre Company took The Little Dry Thorn on a short tour to Edinburgh, but letters rumbled on between the Citizens Theatre Company and Wilson Barret. Mrs Dagnall, Gordon Daviot’s agent, finally settled the matter, writing to confirm that Wilson Barrett did not have permission for any performances, as she was in negotiation for a West End contract. The Citizens Theatre Company wrote back immediately, wanting to know more about this contract, and, producing their trump card, saying that they themselves had had an invitation to perform the play in London, as part of an ‘exchange’ visit with the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith – which eventually took place in 1947. They also extended their tour of The Little Dry Thorn around Scotland, including a visit to Inverness, where it played at the Empire Theatre on the 12th August 1946 and Beth MacKintosh met up with her friends and colleagues from the cast.5 The play was reviewed and mentioned by the Highland News, Inverness Courier and the Northern Chronicle, though, in contrast to the Glasgow papers, there were no interviews and no special mention of Beth MacKintosh. Beth might have been happy now to do interviews, but she was still not the sort of person to do publicity. She would attend a literary party in London that she had been invited to, but the thought of phoning up someone at the local paper to promote her new play would never have occurred to her. Not only did she not need the publicity, she probably felt, since the family-owned Inverness Courier still had staff members who went to school with her, that the journalists should be doing their job and seeking her out. Professionally she didn’t need the publicity, and personally she was not going to beg for recognition. The Beth who had written ‘His Own Country’ still felt ambiguous about Inverness, and was now the Beth who disagreed with the nationalist politics of the prevailing literary scene in Scotland. Her Josephine Tey novels always had reference to Scotland and Scottish characteristics, some more cutting than others, and this was the light in which she approached much of her dealings with the local press. She had been well reported in the Glasgow press, but the Highland press seemed to have forgotten the identity of Gordon Daviot.

  The national London-based press, however, had not. As well as the previews and reviews for The Little Dry Thorn and Cornelia, the administrators at the Citizens Theatre carefully kept and pasted into their scrapbooks a cutting from The Observer of Sunday 28th April 1946. Alongside good reviews of the Citizens productions, the show business reporter Mamie Crichton wrote an article entitled ‘Author reveals a thrilling secret’. In this, Mamie Crichton described meeting and talking with Gordon Daviot at a party. ‘Because we, two Scots, both know a little Sussex village so unexploited that few except its inhabitants ever seem to have heard of it, we got chatting, the secret slipped out and Miss Daviot allows me to publish it’ – i.e. Gordon Daviot and Josephine Tey were the same person. This secret ‘was to have been disclosed in the autumn anyway, when my next whodunit comes out’, Beth is quoted as saying. Beth went on to reveal a little more about her writing: ‘As against historical plays, thriller-writing is “like a piece of knitting: it’s my way of relaxing”’. In the same piece Beth stated that she had not yet decided on the title of her next novel. It was to become Miss Pym Disposes. Compared to the research needed for The Little Dry Thorn, or for Richard of Bordeaux, writing Miss Pym Disposes must certainly have required a very different approach.

  This interview with The Observer must have taken place during Beth’s spring holiday, at the same time as she had visited Newmarket with Lena. Her renewed enthusiasm for life and confidence in her work is clear. She was now happy to attend literary parties and chat to journalists in a way that she had not really done in the days of Richard of Bordeaux. Ironically, however, next to Mamie Crichton’s article in The Observer were their two reviews of the Citizens’ productions: one for Gordon Daviot’s The Little Dry Thorn, and one for F. Craigie Howe’s Cornelia. The reviewer had no idea that Daviot and Howe were the same person. Beth was still keeping some secrets.

  This piece in The Observer is also the first time in print that Beth referred to her mystery novels as ‘knitting’. It was a phrase she was to return to, and her friends remembered and repeated it, until it became something that critics and analysts of her novels continually referred to.6 The idea that Beth saw her writing as Gordon Daviot as serious work and her writing as Josephine Tey as unimportant ‘yearly knitting’ became established. However, her work under the two names was always intertwined, and she never prioritized one over the other. All of her work was important to her. When Beth first tried to describe the different feelings she had about writing mystery novels and plays, she didn’t realize the interpretation later critics would put on her work. Composing a novel is a different process to composing a piece of theatre based on historical research. Miss Pym Disposes came from a very different place to The Little Dry Thorn: from her own life, from experiences she had had over twenty years, now seen from a mature standpoint, and with the added confidence of a writer who has mastered her craft and is able to construct a story. Beth MacKintosh was now fifty years old, and Miss P
ym Disposes might have seemed to her like easy writing after the research necessary for a historical play, but there is fifty years of research in the novel; fifty years of living and observing, and twenty or more years of practice at the craft of writing.

  Miss Pym Disposes is a rather strange mystery book, as the reader doesn’t even know what the mystery is until chapter sixteen (of twenty-two), and even then it’s not immediately clear if it is a murder mystery or not. Nevertheless, it is compulsively readable from the start. The common memory of the insistence of school bells and the nerves of those preparing for examinations give the book its initial sense of urgency, and then the reader, like Miss Pym, starts to want to know what will happen to the students. Miss Pym Disposes is particularly absorbing because of its strongly drawn characters, and the strange world it describes.