Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  Beth did not go to the registrar’s office to record her father’s death. This duty was carried out by her father’s close friend, Alexander Finlayson. In his will, Colin had named three men as his executors or Trustees: Alexander Finlayson, Alexander Martin and David Brass. Finlayson lived at 15 Lovat Road and was a cashier who had worked at the MacKintosh’s solicitors, Stewart, Rule and Co, the firm which employed ex-provost and friend of Neil Gunn, Alexander MacEwen. Alexander Martin was a chartered accountant, living in Lombard Street, and Brass a commercial traveller living in Broadstone Park. From the addresses, all the men were living close to the MacKintosh’s house in Crown, so it’s possible that all three were Colin’s close friends, though, from their job titles, it is also possible that Martin was a business acquaintance Colin may have thought would be useful in administering the financial side of his will.32 Many people choose relatives to act as executors, but perhaps Colin felt men of his own generation would be better able to deal with his business, or perhaps he wished to spare his daughters any further stress and upset.

  Colin’s will was not overly complex, but his financial affairs took time to settle, and he made personal requests which cast some light on his family affairs.33 The will had first been drawn up four years earlier, in 1946, but Colin had made some changes to it, the most recent in 1949. Colin’s assets amounted to £3,826 11s 4d before taxes. As well as his business and house, he had savings in more than one bank, and stocks and shares. Colin had bought a substantial amount of British Government war stocks, which would have been sold to help the war effort, and he also had money in various other assets, such as Associated Newspapers shares and the Eagle Star Insurance Company, chosen probably for their returns rather than any particular association. His business was valued at £156, and his household furniture and personal effects at £131. His rents for the shop and flats were not completely balanced, and his tenant Mrs Diack’s account in particular needed attention, as Colin had allowed the widow to fall behind on her rent when she had trouble paying. Colin’s total assets were a reasonable amount, given inflation. An average wage in Scotland in 1950 would be around £350, and the Highland economy was always poorer than the rest of the country. In today’s money, Colin left just over £87,000.34

  In the written statement of the will, Colin was careful first to make provision for all his sickbed charges, funeral expenses, debts, and expenses incurred by his Trustees to be paid. He added that, for the trouble of administering his will, each of the three Trustees was to get a sum of £25. Having settled his debts, Colin then wished to give his daughters ‘Mrs Jane Ellis MacKintosh or Humphrey Smith and Mary Henrietta MacKintosh or Stokes the sum of Two hundred pounds each’. Elizabeth, ‘who has kept house with me since her mother’s death’, was to get a larger sum of £1,500. Any left-over money from his capital, once the debts and bequests had been paid, was to be divided equally between his daughters. Jean and Moire, as they were married, were, in Colin’s eyes, more financially secure. He wanted to make special provision for Beth as she was single, and because she had helped him for so many years. The money was not his main legacy to Beth, however. She was also to have the house in Crown, and a half share in his shop.

  Colin was very proud of his business. In the absence of a son to whom he could have left the business outright, he wanted to leave half the shop to Beth and half to his loyal shop assistant, Annie Macpherson. Annie was also to get a sum of £200. He further added that ‘it is my earnest wish that [...] the said Annie Macpherson, should, after my death, continue to manage and direct my said business for the joint behoof of my said daughter Beth MacKintosh and herself’. Colin’s fruiterer business was at this point established at numbers 47, 49 and 53 Castle Street, and Beth and Annie were to get ‘all stock-in-trade, furnishings, implements, utensils, fittings and all others of my business as Fruiterer’. Colin also made provision in his will for any shop debts and problems with ‘legacy and Government duties’ (presumably death duties) to be dealt with by his executors/trustees before the business was handed over to Beth and Annie, so they could have a clean start.

  Colin had added a special amendment to the original will on 17th December 1946, saying that his new grandson, Colin Stokes (son of his youngest daughter Mary Henrietta) was to get £300. He had also altered a previous legacy, where he had wished £150 to go to his shop assistant Barbara Cameron, because she had left his employment.

  In his will, Colin’s closeness to his eldest daughter Beth, and his gratitude for her help, is clear. Of his family, he mentions only his immediate descendants, no nephews or nieces or cousins, and he also mentions his good friend Alexander Finlayson and his loyal shop assistants, which probably gives a fair picture of his social circle at the time of his death. His family had become scattered and less close over the years, while his wife, brothers and sisters had predeceased him. Colin had spent much of his adult life providing for his family financially, looking after his sister and his parents when he was a young man, and then his children as he grew older, but over the years they had all become independent, surely thanks in part to Colin’s support. Colin’s national pride is clear in his large holdings of British Government war stocks, while his new pride in his grandson is shown by the amendment he made after little Colin’s birth. Finally, Colin’s pride in the business he built up from scratch is clear in his wish that it should be carried on.

  As one of Inverness’s oldest shopkeepers, Colin’s death was noted in obituaries in the local papers. The day after his death, 26th September, the Inverness Courier ran his death notice in their classified section, and a short obituary in their main news section.35 The Courier reminded its readers that Colin was ‘one of the oldest businessmen in Inverness. He was in his 88th year, and he had been in business as a fruiterer in the town for over sixty years’. The obituary is not signed, but is clearly written by the paper’s staff, rather than by a family member. It says of Colin that ‘He was possessed of a keen sense of humour, and he was the most generous of men, doing many kindly and helpful actions quietly and unobtrusively’ and that he ‘took a lively interest in the affairs of the town and in its welfare’. It also mentions his birth ‘on the west coast of Ross-shire’, and his hobby of angling – ‘he was acknowledged to be a first-class fisherman’. Colin’s daughters are also mentioned, both ‘the well-known authoress’ Gordon Daviot (no mention of ‘Josephine Tey’) and his other two daughters, now married and living in England.

  There is one slightly sour note in the obituary. After noting Colin’s interest in Inverness affairs, the writer feels compelled to point out that Colin ‘did not associate himself actively with any public boards’. This was almost the same criticism that was to be later thrown at Beth on her death: the idea that the MacKintosh family didn’t give quite enough to Inverness, didn’t contribute to the public life of the city, and held themselves aloof. Colin was concerned with his immediate family, but did not feel under any obligation to the city where he had struggled and worked for his own success. The MacKintoshes did not move in the same social circles as the family who owned the Inverness Courier, so the Courier did not feel that the MacKintoshes were completely involved in the fabric of Inverness society.

  The contrast between Colin’s life and that, for example, of ex-provost Alexander MacEwen, shows how little the writer of the Courier’s obituary understood of the different upbringing that Colin had experienced. To read about MacEwen’s life is like reading about a different world. He was a colonial child, born to well-off parents, educated privately then trained as a lawyer, automatically given a place in an Inverness firm, encouraged to stand for local government, and later knighted for services to local government and public health in Scotland. MacEwen’s gentle upbringing meant his energy was saved for battles when he was an adult. Colin had already fought his way through life when he was fourteen and had to start bringing in a wage for the family. MacEwen saw public life as a duty that successful businessmen should engage in; Colin saw his successful business as t
he end result. MacEwen moved in the same circles as the Barron family who ran the Inverness Courier (though they did fall out over politics), and Colin did not.36 More consolingly, one of the sympathy letters Beth and her sisters received came from the manse in Colin’s home village of Shieldaig, where Colin was remembered as ‘a kind friend to us on many an occasion and in particular I shall not forget his goodness when my mother was ill and died in Inverness’.37

  Another local paper, the Highland News, also ran an obituary for the ‘Late Mr C. MacKintosh’, and it did not feel any need to criticize Colin.38 The Highland News is the more tabloid of the two papers, publishing weekly in a smaller format, and it has more west coast and Gaelic connections. They ran an obituary on Saturday 30th September, beginning ‘Inverness has lost its oldest and one of its most respected members of the business community’. It describes Colin’s progress in the business world in more detail, writing that ‘He came to Inverness as a youth and gradually built up an influential business, his clientele including prominent families in the three Counties’. Colin’s interest in Inverness and the wider Highlands is mentioned, with no qualifications, and a personal insight into his hobbies says that he was interested in fishing and reading: ‘he loved to converse about the great literature and political figures who dominated the Victorian stage’. It ends, ‘His geniality and hospitality were striking characteristics’. This is the Colin who had common interests with Beth; who gave his wife and daughters presents of beautiful and expensive jewellery; whom Beth honoured and respected, even if she found looking after him a chore; who had worked hard and made something of himself.

  Sadly, the Courier’s portrait of a man who wasn’t interested in public affairs is sometimes the one that seems to have prevailed. Recent articles on the history of Castle Street have omitted any mention of Colin’s business’s sixty-year presence on the street, and his shop seems, unlike many others of a similar vintage, to have faded from public memory. Perhaps the fact that he sold to big houses and on contracts, rather than always directly to the public, has influenced this, but there is also a selective memory at work. Many researchers of Tey’s life have used the same written archive – the Inverness Courier’s – and repeated the same facts without an understanding of the background. I have found no photographs of Colin’s shop – it would have been difficult to take a good one of the shop from the narrow darkness of Castle street – and it has seemed at times as if he was never there. He could be proud of what he had achieved for his daughters and grandson, but his pride in his business was Colin’s (and perhaps his wife Josephine’s) alone.

  Beth did not want to carry on the fruit shop in the way that Colin wished. His final illness and death had been very stressful – it was around this time that she said to Lena Ramsden at the Malvern Festival that her idea of a good idea was to lie in bed and do nothing – and it took her a while to recover. She was also suffering from illness herself. It took time to sort out Colin’s affairs after his death, and things did not work out exactly the way Colin – or Beth – had wanted.

  Chapter Twenty

  You Will Know the Truth

  After Colin’s death, Beth wrote to Marjorie, her friend from school and Anstey, that ‘I have not yet decided on plans for the future. The present is too full of horrible practicalities like lawyers, and values, and inventories, and what not. And it is so long since I had a life of my own that it is difficult to accustom myself to the idea that I am free.’1

  Beth did not want to keep on running the shop with Annie Macpherson, and did not need the income. Plans to sell the shop and flats, however, took time to carry out, particularly because there were sitting tenants whose rents still had to be collected, not to mention the fact that the building was not in a good saleable condition because several of the flats were condemned. It wasn’t until later in 1951 that the shop and attached flats passed into the possession of Estate Agents John Macmahon of Huntly Street in Inverness.2 Beth was still writing to Moire about the finer financial details in October 1951.3

  What Beth did want to do was keep writing, and what she wanted to keep writing were mystery novels. However much she might talk about ‘knitting’, her Josephine Tey novels were very important to her.

  Colin had missed the publication of To Love and Be Wise by a matter of days. In October 1950, the month after his death, Beth made a trip to London. She no longer had to wait on Colin’s convenience to take holidays, and she also wanted to see her sisters after their father’s death, as well as sort out some of her writing business, meeting Nico Davies for lunch. Both Nico and Peter had become good friends. Later, from her club in Cavendish Square, Beth wrote to Nico discussing a letter she had received from a fan after the publication of To Love and Be Wise.4 The fan seems to have questioned a couple of points in the novel, and Beth defended her book robustly. Her letter to her publisher also sheds more light on her writing methods, as she mentioned that when she wasn’t sure about police matters she would ask the local Chief Constable. This suggests not only that Beth did some of the technical research so beloved of contemporary crime writers, but also that her social circle in Inverness was wider than is popularly believed. The Chief Constable in Inverness in 1950 was William Paterson, a local man who had worked his way up the ranks. This letter to Nico is not publicly available; it was advertised, along with detailed photos and a partial transcription, for private sale on the internet, and has a particularly interesting footnote. Written in Beth’s usual execrable handwriting, she tells her publisher, ‘It’s a very strange thing but I got more kick out of seeing Tey in the middle of the ‘Times’ window than I ever did out of seeing my name in front of the New [Theatre]’.

  Walking around London, Beth had seen a prominent display of her new novel, To Love and Be Wise, in a bookshop window featuring novels from the Times Book Club. She was also keen to finish her next novel, which involved checking some research at the British Museum. Throughout the time Colin was ill, she had been thinking and writing about another man who was trapped, ill, in a hospital bed, creating what was to become her best-known novel, The Daughter of Time. Like To Love and Be Wise, this once again featured Inspector Grant as the main character, but it was a very different story to anything Josephine Tey had written before – in fact, it was a very different sort of mystery to anything anyone had done before. The Daughter of Time and her subsequent novel, The Privateer, may have been attempts to fuse her ‘Gordon Daviot’ and ‘Josephine Tey’ writing, by mixing serious historical facts with entertaining novelization and story. The Daughter of Time succeeded spectacularly in this aim, and it remains many people’s favourite Tey novel. The Daughter of Time is also an ‘Elizabeth MacKintosh’ novel – not because she reveals anything more of herself, or sets the story in her Inverness world – but because it is exactly the book to read to find out about Beth herself, the things she thought about, and how and why they mattered to her.

  The title is a quotation from Francis Bacon, ‘Truth is the Daughter of Time’, and the plot concerns the hospitalized and bedridden Alan Grant, who becomes interested in the historical mystery of Richard III, and whether he was responsible for the deaths of his nephews, the Princes in the Tower.5 The action doesn’t leave the one hospital room, and mainly involves Grant reading books about Richard and his time, discussing him with his friends, and drawing his own conclusions, and yet the book is unputdownable. Josephine Tey manages to make us care about Richard III and challenge received opinion about him. As with her biography of Claverhouse, she has picked a historical figure she thinks has been maligned, and tells us why. The difference is, unlike that biography, the literary device of using Alan Grant, a character who her readers already cared about, and showing why truth is so important to him as a serving police officer, demonstrates why the interpretation of history matters.

  Grant is in hospital because he has broken his leg badly while chasing after criminal Benny Skoll. Bored and restless, Grant rants about how much he hates the books his friends have brought into
the hospital for him to read during his convalescence. They are all the same and nothing new, he argues, dismissing the new novel by ‘Silas Weekly’ as ‘earthy and spade-conscious [...] mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hay-loft, everyone else lying low in the barn’.6 Josephine Tey is a confident writer who can use five different versions of the word ‘lie’ in one pithy sentence, but, however much Grant likes books normally, Tey here gently satirizes contemporary fiction, including her own, and recognizes that there is a point when even the most avid reader no longer wants to read. Josephine Tey understood that the lies of fiction are not always satisfying, but she ultimately reaffirms Grant’s faith in books by presenting him with a different subject to read about. Marta Hallard, with her actress’s intuition about character, provides Grant with the perfect way to pass the time. She brings a brief and welcome blast of her aura of theatre and glamour into the hospital ward, leaving Grant a selection of historical pictures to study, each with a mystery attached. Grant the policeman believes he can spot a criminal on sight, and is struck by a portrait of Richard III: he cannot believe that this man, with his sensitive face and hands, is the hunchbacked child killer he remembers from school history lessons and Shakespeare’s play. His interest is sparked, and he embarks on a course of reading and research, ultimately convincing his ‘associate’, a young American academic called Brent Carradine, to write a book of their findings.