Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  After Humphrey’s death in the Second World War, Beth’s sister Jean had remained in England.26 This refusal to move back and share the care for Colin, even after she was widowed, may partly explain why Beth is said to have not got on with her middle sister, though both Jean and Moire did visit Inverness several times in the late 1940s. Moire, now married to Londoner Donald Stokes, also stayed down south – but in 1946, Moire had news. She was pregnant. The whole family were delighted. ‘Dear Ett,’ Colin wrote to her (he always used her baby name), ‘this is great news. I look forward to this event. It gives me the greatest pleasure that life can give me now.’27 He went on tell her to be careful. Jean wrote to Moire too, a long letter that detailed a church service she had attended for Humphrey, where a pennant was unfurled in his memory. Jean’s letter shows that it was not just Beth who had a ready pen and a sharp tongue – the sarcastic sense of humour that Beth sometimes surprised people with, and which delights Josephine Tey’s readers, is evident when Jean writes:

  I’m glad to hear your egg is incubating satisfactorily. Have you been sick yet! Or are you past the stage when one begins that horror! I spent the last 3 nights with Olivia – her two are adorable, but it took me a long time to get over having known the younger one for the less pleasant stage of her existence! Now she’s ‘2 & a bit’, I feel better about her! But ‘4 in August’ is exquisite.28

  Jean arranged to come and see Moire, bringing some fruit, as rationing was still in place. Colin, too, was busy posting Moire some eggs, and making up new parcels of fruit to send down.

  Moire’s child was born in December 1946, a son. She called him Colin, after her father.29 Colin senior was delighted with his new grandson, and immediately amended his will to make him a bequest of £300 (more than the £200 he wished to leave to Moire).30 The later ‘Josephine Tey’ novels are full of warm references to young children, such as Laura’s baby in The Singing Sands or the opening scenes of Brat Farrar, showing the keen interest Beth took in her new nephew, as far as she could from the distance of Inverness.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Amateur Dramatics, Valerius and The Franchise Affair

  A year after Beth’s nephew, Colin Stokes, was born, the Citizens Theatre Company finally took The Little Dry Thorn to London. Before that, 1947 saw some very different performances of Gordon Daviot’s plays.

  The theatre scene had changed dramatically after the war. Angela du Maurier, an inveterate theatregoer, described in her autobiography the shock and disappointment she felt when attending a post-war first night: instead of the white ties and tiaras of a 1920s or 30s first night, the audience was casually dressed.1 The sense of theatre in the audience itself was gone. The community of first nighters had changed forever. The audience for ‘popular’ plays, like Richard of Bordeaux, had departed to the cinema. Changing entertainment taxes had also taken their toll, and the lavish productions with sumptuous scenery that Dodie Smith had excelled at were no longer as viable or appealing to theatre managers, as they would not guarantee a return on their investment. Dodie Smith herself was still in America, but she felt totally out of touch with the theatre scene in London, and saw clearly, and with a deep regret, that she was never going to come back in the same way.2 Critics didn’t like her sort of theatre anymore; they appreciated a new type of play, with a grimmer, less middle-class aesthetic. Straight plays were going out of fashion too, since the cinema could tell realistic stories with real backdrops. Theatre writers started to explore something different, like painters faced with photography and turning to impressionism to express themselves. Gordon Daviot’s set of actor and producer friends were no longer in the ascendant and the professional contacts she had made, and which she had never maintained as strongly as, for example, Dodie Smith had, were no longer as useful to her. Whereas before the Second World War, the impresario Binkie Beaumont, who was still renting Dodie’s house in Essex while Dodie and Alec were in the US, had seemed like a colourful, larger-than-life figure of power, ready to create magic on stage and with huge influence over both actors’ and audiences’ lives – now he seemed like an old man.3 The all-night meetings about castings no longer seemed like power sessions that could make or break careers, but instead like sordid, alcohol-fuelled attempts to recapture dreams.

  Gordon Daviot had written about the Bright Young Things of the 1920s in The Expensive Halo; now in the 1940s she was over fifty years old, and her theatre friends were no longer the new guard. In 1948, she had to write a consoling letter to Peggy Webster, still in America, on the death of her mother May Whitty. In it, Gordon remembered ‘a furious letter’ May had written to her about the New York production of The Laughing Woman, ‘where the very pen strokes were protest and repudiation so that even if you looked at it upside down you would get the gist of it’.4 It was a letter that Peggy treasured, as Gordon had captured some of the essence of her mother’s character, but it was a letter about old times: actors and plays that were firmly now in the past.

  Unlike Dodie Smith, Gordon Daviot did not try to go back to this world, and did not waste her time hankering after it. She still wanted London performances of her plays, but in a changing theatrical world, she did not turn down other ways to get her writing out in public. Gordon Daviot’s plays, starting with Richard of Bordeaux, had always been very popular with amateur theatre groups. With their large casts, they were perfect for groups who wanted to include as many actors as possible, and their popularity with the public meant they would be guaranteed to sell tickets. Amateur dramatics was still very popular across the country, and there were active groups in Inverness. Beth had never previously been involved with these, but in 1947 she was persuaded to allow an Inverness amateur dramatic society to perform three of her one-act plays, Rahab and Leith Sands, from the Leith Sands collection, and a comedy, The Balwhinnie Bomb.5 It was an outward sign of a new development in her career. She had been writing these short plays since the Second World War, originally for radio, but she was now finding that they were very popular with editors of collections. Acting groups and schools often wanted collections of short plays which they could study and put on, and Gordon Daviot’s work appeared in many of these, often ending up, as a result, in very strange places. The short play The Pen of My Aunt, for example, was first broadcast on BBC radio just after the Second World War. It was anthologized, and repeated on radio in 1950. By 1963, as a result of its dissemination in various collections, the play was picked up by Finnish television, and made into a TV movie, translated as Tätini kynä.6 This sort of willingness to try new formats and allow her work to be published in different places – both when she was alive and, afterwards, because of the way her work was managed – is partly what has made Beth’s work survive and do well.

  Gordon Daviot’s association with community theatre in Inverness was not conducted solely through her agent. Beth was persuaded to take part by a member of the society, Barbara Bruce-Watt, who simply walked up to her in the street and asked her if she had any plays the local acting group could put on. This was considered rather bold of Barbara, as Beth was seen as unapproachable, but she was actually delighted to be asked. As far as Beth was concerned, she felt that Inverness had never honoured her, nor asked her to be involved in the community. As soon as she was asked – in her capacity as a writer – she responded immediately, much as she had before the war, when asked to contribute to the IRA school magazine.

  The amateur dramatic society in Inverness was the Florians. Set up originally to entertain the troops stationed in the town during the Second World War, the group is still going today. The first play of Gordon Daviot’s that they performed was Rahab, in 1947, the Biblical short published in Leith Sands. Leith Sands itself followed in 1948, and The Balwhinnie Bomb in the 1949 season. Other amateur dramatic groups were also using Gordon Daviot’s plays, and, at a Scottish Community Drama Association event on the 15th February 1947 at the Empire Theatre in Inverness, Beth was in the audience to see productions of both Rahab and Leith Sands. The SCDA events
took the form of a competition, where the best group was awarded a prize. Beth stayed to watch all the plays, but, characteristically, didn’t watch the judging. The end goal for Beth was always to see her work performed as well as it could be, not to please the critics. She was back again the following year to watch the Inverness group perform Leith Sands.

  Gordon Daviot’s short plays remained extremely popular with amateur groups, and newspaper searches bring up many references to groups performing her work to great success. Rahab comes up in newspaper articles about a performance in Aberdeen in 1947; Leith Sands is mentioned in the Dundee Courier in 1948, and won a competition for a Stirling amateur group in 1948.7 The excellent play The Balwhinnie Bomb was one of Gordon Daviot’s most enduring short pieces, which holds up particularly well today, with a superb beginning (though it slows down a little by the end). Telling the story of a suspect package delivered to a rural post office, it is peopled with Daviot’s usual cast of well-drawn characters, and it is rather modern in its take on the Highlands. Roddy Ross the postman, Annabella Morrison the postmistress, Finlay Macphail and Peter the Polis could quite easily slot straight from their 1940s debut into a modern BBC Scotland drama. The play is full of lines that draw a laugh of recognition from anyone in the Highlands:

  ‘It’s a scandal, that’s what it is. How is anyone to catch a train only an hour late? One of these days it will be on time, and then there will be nobody there to pick up at all.’

  ‘Man, it’s an awful thing ambition. Believe it or not, there’s people will climb mountains just to sit on the top and look at places they knew were there all the time.’8

  The humour in the play makes it seem, out of all Daviot’s one-act plays, the most ripe for revival.

  Another major theatrical event in 1947 did not include Gordon Daviot at all.9 The Edinburgh International Festival, now one of the biggest arts events in Europe, started that year, but none of Gordon Daviot’s plays was performed there and she was not invited to take part. The 1947 Festival was deliberately planned to provide cultural respite and boost cultural tourism after the Second World War. It was supported by the British Council and Edinburgh civic leaders and with the aim of bringing the world’s very best performers to the city. Shakespearean plays and dancers from Sadler’s Wells were among the first to be included in the programme. Gordon Daviot did not have a presence at the Festival until 1951, when Richard of Bordeaux was performed there as part of the Scottish Community Drama Association’s programme.10

  Gordon Daviot had not lost sight of full-length plays, however, and now returned to Valerius, the story of a Roman legion in Scotland defending Hadrian’s Wall against the Picts. There is an 1821 novel of the same name by J. G. Lockhart, Walter Scott’s son-in-law, which at least one critic saw as direct inspiration, though the plots are not the same, and the style is very different. Gordon Daviot had actually written Valerius ‘just after the blitz and put [it] in a drawer’.11 She had been in London in September 1939 when war was declared, and during the first days of evacuation and uncertainty the streets had been empty and the atmosphere tense. Beth described it as being like the end of civilization, and imaginatively likened it to the past London of Roman times, before the barbarian hordes descended.12

  Although Valerius is a well-imagined idea of how the Romans felt defending an indefensible last stand, the added context of the parallel with the Second World War was not brought out in the production, and neither is it obvious to the reader. Anyone brought up in the tradition of broad classical education, of the type that Beth received at the IRA, would see no reason why the Romans should not receive attention, even in the Highlands, where there is less obvious Roman influence on the landscape – but the reader is left searching for Daviot’s inspiration. The play is well written, well paced and interesting, but has elements of an intellectual exercise without that extra context. Valerius is a frustrating play as it is almost a return to Daviot’s best form as a playwright, and she was certainly very happy with the production, but it did not go on to a longer run. Of all Daviot’s full-length plays, if there was some way to bring out that parallel with the Second World War, Valerius could well be the best one to revive. The claustrophobic atmosphere increases the tension, and the descriptions of the wall are extremely evocative, even reminiscent to the modern reader of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy Wall which stands against the forces of darkness in his Song of Ice and Fire series – something fantastical that looms over everything – while the tragic end of the play is very affecting. We get a sense that civilization is being threatened, and that Valerius and his fellow soldiers on the wall are the last stand against chaos, but this isn’t over-emphasized. As in her Biblical plays, Gordon Daviot’s aim is to bring history to life by showing normality, but that normality eases the dramatic tension – and, incidentally, shows how much Richard of Bordeaux benefitted from Gielgud’s direction and the sharper parallels that were drawn between that historical play and its context of 1930s appeasement.

  Daviot returned to Valerius because she had been contacted by The Repertory Players, whose leading actor was Andrew Osborn. They put on a one-off London show at the Saville Theatre on 3rd October 1948. Osborn played the title character ‘Valerius’, and, although his name at first meant little to Gordon, she soon realized that he had a long Daviot pedigree, including playing ‘Richard’ in the 1938 TV version of Richard of Bordeaux, opposite Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies. Osborn knew and liked Daviot’s work, and was pleased to be involved, and she in turn was happy with the performance ‘with the Valerius out of all others that I would have chosen [...] my star was [...] perfect for the part!’13

  Daviot was very involved with the rehearsals for Valerius, more so than with many of her plays. She went to rehearsals from 10 am to 6 pm every day of the short preparatory process, and then attended the final performance. One reason the play had not been performed when it was written was that, obviously, during wartime there had been a lack of male actors, and it was a wholly male cast. Daviot had felt uneasy about submitting a play with an all-male cast in the early 40s as she hadn’t wanted conscientious objectors to take good parts, but now the war was over, she found it strange to think that men who had, only a few years before, been fighting in the front line, were now play-acting on stage. Some of the people Daviot knew had not come back from the war, and in the late 40s Daviot’s consciousness of war – which she was always very sensitive to – was still strong. She also felt there was a gender split in the audience, with men and women responding differently to her tale of soldiers. She felt that female audiences did not like it as much, and that this would prevent Valerius from ever being a West End success. The Saville was in the West End, and had seating for just under 1,500 people, comparable in size to Richard of Bordeaux’s home in the New Theatre, but, unlike Richard, Valerius’ one-off performance did not lead to it being picked up for a longer run.

  Daviot’s approach to her theatre writing, her even-handedness in showing off the good and bad points in all the characters, is far more suited to a novel. What became drawn-out and overlong on stage was more acceptable in a book, where the reader is happy to take a little more time. The detective novel framework, in particular, allowed Daviot to talk about the many different things that interested her, yet still leave the reader always wanting to read on, because in a detective novel there was always the underlying goal, which Daviot never forgot when she was writing. The reader might be interested in the characters and the digressions, but they also want to solve the crime and know what happens. The Franchise Affair, published the same year that Valerius was performed, was the next Josephine Tey novel, and it has been one of her most popular.

  The Franchise Affair is not a crime novel where there is a murder and a detective to solve it, but a novel where there is a mystery and the reader wants to know the truth. Solicitor Robert Blair’s quiet, pedestrian life is disrupted when Marion Sharpe calls asking for his help. Marion and her mother have been accused of abducting a young girl, Betty Kane.
Betty’s story is plausible and detailed, and the thought that it is entirely without foundation seems fantastic – but Robert Blair is convinced of Marion’s innocence. Like Miss Pym Disposes, The Franchise Affair plays with conventions, but, unlike Miss Pym, Josephine Tey was becoming comfortable enough with her status as a ‘mystery writer’ to refer to her own work by reintroducing Alan Grant, though he only makes a very brief appearance when another character remarks that he is not happy with the case. The mystery solving is left to Robert Blair.

  Coming immediately after Miss Pym Disposes, which was so firmly rooted in Beth’s life experiences at Anstey, and after Beth’s period of reflection on her own experiences during the Second World War, it is interesting to see what The Franchise Affair can tell us about Beth’s own life. Its central story concerns a mother and daughter who, like Colin and Beth, are in a community but not of that community. Marion Sharpe and her mother have just enough money and status to set them apart from the rest of their village, to the extent that the village is able to believe they are capable of horrible crimes against young Betty Kane. Marion and her mother are proved completely innocent, and the questioning of their way of life is shown to be petty and based on stupidity. In the final chapter of the book, which is a sort of coda, Robert Blair follows the Sharpes out to their new home in Canada. He has proposed marriage to Marion, who has rejected him because she has to care for her aged parent – he then rejects this rejection.

  It’s hard not to read a little of Beth MacKintosh’s life here. Despite her willingness to be involved with community theatre in Inverness she was still generally seen as unapproachable, and any man who married Beth would have had to take Colin on as well. To make her book’s hero capable of this is a rather wry in-joke for her. However, Beth’s own possible romance with Hugh Patrick Fraser had a lot more in its way than just Colin: there was also the inescapable fact of Hugh’s illness – and there is an amusing portrait of a young man with literary aspirations in Robert Blair’s nephew Nevil. One of the reasons that Beth’s relationship with Hugh seems so real is that any reference to poet or ‘young love’ or Scotsmen who do not fit the Alan Grant-Murdoch Beaton-Colin MacKintosh dark-haired ‘type’ are always realistic and well-drawn: Beth’s relationship with Hugh was more than a crush, it was a real relationship where she saw the good and bad – but it was also a long-ago relationship.