Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  The attractive cast photos provided in the festival programme, along with the adverts and a certain datedness in the copy, bring home the difference between 1949 and now. Actors are photographed smoking cigarettes, few of the men are without a tie or smart jacket, and the women’s hair and make-up has an attractively retro appearance. The Malvern Festival of 1949 was a very different beast from the self-promoting book festivals that authors have to attend today. Given what we know about Gordon Daviot’s personality, it seems eminently her sort of place. A snapshot of Gordon at Malvern also survives: taken in the street, it shows her and Lena sightseeing – two extremely well-dressed women enjoying a cultural holiday.16

  The Malvern Festivals continue today, with an ongoing commitment to cultural, high-quality entertainment. Drama now takes more of a back seat, with writers, film-makers and other artists now featured as well, but the Malvern Theatres still have a full year-round programme. The significance of Gordon Daviot’s attendance at the festival is worth noting: she was still being assessed as a major British dramatist post-war.

  Beth was very pleased with the reception of The Stars Bow Down, and said proudly in a letter to the mother of her Anstey room-mate, ‘it got a first night reception that made history at Malvern’, and describing her (largely positive) reviews.17 Whereas the Gordon Daviot of the first performances of Richard of Bordeaux was overwhelmed by her reception, now Beth was pleased and comfortable with it. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies returned to Britain permanently from South Africa in 1948.18 Beth wrote to her shortly after the Malvern Festival, again describing the good audience reaction to her play: ‘According to a cutting, the MALVERN Gazette announces that what it calls “the locals’ favourite” was THE STARS BOW DOWN. Which pleases me far more than it has any right to do!’19 She also describes some of the socializing that went on, and her meetings with festival founder Roy Limbert and sponsors the Beauchamps – all of whom would have been well known to Gwen. Gwen had appeared at the Malvern Festival herself, and knew founder Barry Jackson well through her work with Birmingham Rep at the start of her career. Beth’s letter to Gwen is much like their letters of the 1930s, full of references to people they knew and books that Beth was reading, but it is the only surviving post-war letter between the two women.

  After the Second World War, Gwen’s position in theatre was slightly different, as, just as Beth had feared, there was a general feeling that she was ‘one of those who had left’ while the war was on. The old problems between Gwen and Marda were still not resolved, and Marda did not come back to Britain at the same time as Gwen.20 Marda stayed in South Africa for a while longer, partly to continue the work she and Gwen had done on establishing theatre there, but partly also because she was not homesick for Britain in the way that Gwen was. It was also because Gwen wanted a break from their intense relationship. There was a suggestion that Marda was drinking too much. Beth’s group of friends had all been affected by the war, and they were all, not just Beth, forced to rethink their lives and work. Dodie Smith, like Beth, had also turned to novel writing, and at the time that Beth was at Malvern, she was overseeing the US and UK publications of her hugely successful and beloved novel I Capture the Castle. This book perfectly captured a 1930s Britain with an atmosphere that worked in print but would no longer work on stage.

  Beth, too, was focusing on her novels. 1949 was the year of publication of Josephine Tey’s next mystery novel, Brat Farrar. Lena Ramsden, one of the few of Beth’s London friends who had not only remained in Britain but who had made an effort to engage with the war effort, was particularly friendly with Beth in the post-war years, and Brat Farrar has as its subject something that was dear to both Lena and Beth: horses and horse racing. Beth wrote to Lena during the planning and preparation of Brat Farrar, and her letters and discussions shed some startling light on Beth’s method of writing.

  Beth wrote to Lena frequently in the late 1940s, often about horse racing.21 She described, on one of her still-regular visits to the cinema, seeing a particularly good horse race in the newsreel before the main feature started, the St Leger, won in 1949 by Michael Beary on his horse Ridge Wood. To Lena, whose father was chairman of the Manchester Racecourse Company, the jockeys like Michael were people she was on first-name terms with, whom she met at parties and socialized with. Josephine Tey, in Inverness, was still at arm’s-length to this society, as she had been to London theatreland before the war, but, unlike the people around her watching the newsreel in the cinema, she could write about Michael as someone she was aware of, and had perhaps met. Tey had knowledge of horse racing as a connoisseur, but also the personal connection that her friends knew the jockeys. This is another illustration of her slightly strange position in society, in that, if she had been living in London, she would have been associating with very different people. In Inverness, Beth was still the daughter of a shopkeeper who – rather strangely, it was thought by her neighbours – went to the cinema on her own. In England (and to Lena) Gordon Daviot was an established playwright who would be invited to parties along with leading sports stars, actresses and Lena’s other well-to-do artistic friends.

  Lena said herself that ‘Gordon was a grand person to have as a friend [...] her visits to London were infrequent, but we communicated regularly, and our letters were like conversations, broken off and resumed from time to time’.22 Gordon had been particularly keen to draw on Lena’s knowledge of horses and jockeys in the previous year, when she had been planning and writing Brat Farrar. Lena reveals in her autobiography the rather startling fact that, although Brat Farrar and Simon Ashby’s lives were completely fictional, Brat had a physical counterpart: the way he looked was based on a real person. Apparently Brat looked, sounded and moved like a racing personality of the day, Frank Moore O’Ferral. O’Ferral was a wealthy Irishman who co-founded the Anglo-Irish Bloodstock Agency, exporting Irish horses and promoting Irish racing and horse breeding to wealthy clients, particularly Americans.23 He was an extroverted, noticeable character in the horse-racing world of the time, though one that Beth would only have come across through her association with Lena and others behind-the-scenes, not someone Beth could ever have met as simply a horse lover from Inverness.

  Beth went to the length of getting Lena to find out everything she could about O’Ferral, asking her to obtain a photograph of him and also make a sketch. Lena was not acquainted with him, but she sent what information she could up to Inverness. Gordon wrote back saying,

  I hope you will go on dishing the dirt. If you don’t happen to be familiar yourself with this kind of interest, it is difficult to explain it to you. It isn’t a question of wanting to meet him – which I should actively dislike. It is a quite detached curiosity about him and his. What he thinks, reads (I suppose he can?), says, eats; whether he likes his bacon frizzly or flaccid; how many children he has, their sex and ages; how many back teeth he has had filled and how often he has broken his collar bone. It always happens with someone I see casually, like that; and once my curiosity is satisfied my interest finishes. But until the picture is complete the curiosity is devouring. I think it is one tenth sex, four tenths writer’s instinct, and five tenths urge to detection.24

  The basis for a Josephine Tey character is seen here: the people in her books are always described precisely, with their facial characteristics often a key to their characters, such as Richard III in The Daughter of Time, or ‘The Dago’ in The Man in the Queue. Little details, physical or personality traits reveal characters’ motivations. Beth was a very observational writer, who was supremely interested in psychology and character motivation and this glimpse into her planning for Brat Farrar is a key insight into the way she approached novel writing and the creation of her plots. It backs up the idea that other fictional characters were based, in looks at least, on people she had known, such as Murdoch Beaton/Murray Heaton in Kif.

  Eventually, as Beth wrote to Lena, the fictional character she created in her mind would take over from the real person: ‘It was lovely of you
to send the drawing of Himself [O’Ferral], but you have made him far too good-looking [...]’, Beth continued,

  When I was in town this last time I thought that, apart from a well-fitting new suit, there was nothing in the world that I wanted. And then I thought that yes, there was. I wanted a camera that looked like a handbag, or a compact, or something. So that one could photograph a person standing two feet away and be looking in another direction altogether while one was doing it. This has nothing to do with Himself; it is a permanent need with me. I am always seeing faces that I want to ‘keep’.

  This extract from Beth’s letter to Lena is interesting not only because of its connection to Brat Farrar, but also because of what it reveals about Beth herself: this is the woman that people knew in Inverness; one who did not want to engage, but who held herself apart – one who did not even shop for clothes locally, but always went to London (‘to town’). Beth seems to see this part of her personality in a positive way, as being something that is essential to her as a writer, rather than something that held her back socially. It is interesting too to note that Beth, who once considered art school, and who wrote about artists in The Laughing Woman, is still very interested in portraiture, yet dismissive of her own talents. The word pictures that Beth could create in her novels were far more satisfactory to her than her drawing talents.

  Brat Farrar is one of Josephine Tey’s most popular novels. Before its US publication in 1950 it was first serialized, in a slightly shortened form and under the title Crooked Penny, in the US magazine Ladies Home Journal, and over the following years it went on to be adapted for TV several times, made into a movie (with some creative licence) and adapted for radio.25 Moire remembered that Beth would sometimes ask her for ideas for plots, and Josephine Tey’s characters are so strong that she is often described as a writer who prioritizes character over plot, or even a writer whose plots are weak.26 But when considering Brat Farrar, especially coming after The Franchise Affair or Miss Pym Disposes, it’s clear that once Josephine Tey did find a good idea, she was capable of evolving some impressive storytelling. Brat Farrar’s plot is clever, turning on a case of mistaken identity and twins, which is eventually revealed as a murder mystery. The title character, orphan Brat Farrar, is approached in the street by Alec Loding, a stranger who mistakes him for Simon Ashby. Building on this unlikely coincidence of appearance, Loding convinces Brat to insinuate himself into the Ashby family, posing as the long-lost Patrick, Simon’s elder twin and heir to the family home and business.27

  Twins are a fairly standard literary device, but they did run in Beth’s family. Her grandmother, Jane Horne, had a brother and sister who were twins, James and Anne Ellis. Jane Horne had probably mentioned the twins and the large family they came from. The Ashbys, in Brat Farrar, are a very convincing large family, with two sets of twins, Simon and Patrick, and Ruth and Jane. The opening scenes of the book, with the family around the dinner table talking and squabbling, may come as a surprise to someone re-reading the novel, because they do not relate to the plot as it is remembered or described, but they do show how at home Josephine Tey was writing large families. She had her childhood memories of her three sisters to draw on, as well as her new baby nephew – and even her other sister Jean’s stepchildren and step-grandchildren. Jean, like Beth, was a horse lover, and the Ashby home is reminiscent of the English home of Jean and her husband Humphrey, the house at Wilfred’s, Radnage where Jean now stayed alone. Jean’s real name was ‘Jane’, and, in another of Josephine Tey’s in-jokes with names, the horsey daughter is Jane. Moire’s middle name, Henrietta, had been used in earlier work. Other names include Ledingham, a name common in Inverness, while the unseen twin, who dies young through no fault of his own and with whom our hero (Brat) feels an affinity, is given the symbolic name Patrick – Hugh McIntosh’s middle name recurring again.

  Tey continues to build her fictional world, with Kevin Macdermott QC reappearing, and the paper The Clarion showing up, as it did in her play Clarion Call. Local paper the Westover Times seems very similar to the Inverness Courier. The intersection between truth and fiction crops up in strange places, as do Beth’s own views. ‘What I can’t get into [people’s] blind blinkered minds’, she had said to Marjorie, her Anstey room-mate, ‘is that luxury isn’t owning Rolls Royces, or having the royal suite on the Olympic, but not having to do something you don’t much want to do’.28 This sentiment appears in Brat Farrar, but it is the villain, Alec Loding, who echoes it: ‘Riches, my boy, don’t consist in having things, but in not having to do something you don’t want to do. And don’t you forget it. Riches is being able to thumb your nose.’29 Alec, the old actor, is an ambiguous villain.

  Beth spent much of her time living in her mind; her reality might be in Inverness but Brat Farrar has an element of wish fulfilment, a way of writing out her longing for her former home before her mother’s death and the Second World War. Brat is the most unlikely hero, yet the reader cannot help but like him, despite what he does, and Bee Ashby comes to think of him as family. Brat, the outsider, loves and appreciates England, and, despite everything that stands in his way, through his detection and his ultimate desire to do the right thing, he gets to be part of the Ashby family. ‘The close, fine turf slipped by under them [...] England, England, England, said the shoes as they struck. A soft drum on the English turf. I don’t care [...] I don’t care. I’m a criminal, and a heel, but I’ve got what I wanted, and it’s worth it. By God, it’s worth it. If I died tomorrow, it’s worth it.’30

  These are Brat Farrar’s words as he rides in England, a passage so full of emotion it can even make someone who is not English feel for the country. Brat wants to be part of an old English family who pay pensions to their old servants, who live in a pre-war landscape, surrounded by animals. The image is tarnished by Simon, but it is still something Brat aspires to.

  It seems unlikely Beth would have remembered and romanticized England as she does in Brat Farrar if she hadn’t been living in the Highlands for over twenty years. During her holidays, and throughout the time she was preparing Brat Farrar, Beth was mentally focused on England and her life there – Malvern, and her sisters, nephew and friends – but in reality she was dealing with questions of money, her father Colin’s illness, and worries about her own health. Post-war, Beth was managing to pick up the threads of her old life successfully, reconnecting with friends like Lena Ramsden, still receiving commissions for her playwriting, and moving her creative output in a new direction towards novel writing, but Inverness life kept disrupting the pattern she wanted to establish.

  The photos of Gordon Daviot the successful playwright in Malvern are offset by some family snapshots from the same year. In these, Colin and Beth stand side by side outside. Colin, dressed in a heavy coat and hat, is an old man. He stares challengingly at the camera, looking every inch the strict father he undoubtedly was. Beth, as in so many photographs, doesn’t meet the eye; she looks away from the camera and down at the ground. She is just as smartly dressed as she was at Malvern, in a tweed jacket and skirt, with her dark hair neatly up, and the beautiful bone structure of her face highlighted by shadows, but it would be clear to anyone looking at this photograph that she is the daughter of Colin. There is almost a graceful, adult version of childish awkwardness in the photo. As Colin’s daughter, she must do what she has to for him, putting him before herself.

  Brat Farrar alternates its point of view between Brat himself, and Bee Ashby. Brat gets England by any means, but Bee, faced with a family tragedy and dependents who needed her, has given up her single life in London with regret, but not a moment’s hesitation. And, no matter what Eleanor has planned for the future, it is Bee, in the end, who gets to live with Brat, that substitute for Patrick.

  Chapter Nineteen

  To Love and Be Wise

  Beth’s father Colin was now in his late eighties and, although still going down to his shop each day, was becoming more and more frail.1 Beth herself was not keeping well. Lena Ramsde
n talked about her at the Malvern Festival, saying that her idea of a good day was to lie down doing nothing, and this probably reflects both her need for a rest from looking after Colin, and her own niggling health worries.2 Lena also recalled in her autobiography that both she and others, like Gwen, were worried about Beth’s health in about 1950 – perhaps even a year earlier, in 1949.3 Certainly Beth had been experiencing some health problems for a few years, which had gradually got serious enough to become obvious to her friends. Another friend, the Scottish writer Elisabeth Kyle, was concerned that she only had help in the house one day a week, and that even on that day Beth herself had to work hard at the housekeeping.4

  Given the choice, Beth often did just ditch the housework and go out: she much preferred taking the train to Aviemore and doing a day’s hillwalking around Rothiemurchus to spending her limited energy tidying. However, she wrote to Lena saying, ‘If you have seen Gwen you probably know that I have been reprieved, and am not likely to turn invalid. A nice simple treatment by tablet should bring me back to normal in about a year.’5 They had been planning a trip to Newmarket races again, and Beth did indeed manage Newmarket, for all three days of the races, but Lena said later, ‘There could be no doubt that she had enjoyed herself, but, all the same, to her friends the cloud was still there – small, but persistent.’6 Beth always presented a cheerful front, ignoring any illness as much as possible and continuing her quiet life in Inverness, interspersed with trips south.