Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  Beth’s assets were finally collected together and itemized. Including stocks and shares in companies like Woolworths; war bonds; cash and savings accounts; antique furniture; jewellery; and one half of her share in Colin’s business. It all added up to an astonishing £24,323 18s 8d – the equivalent today of half a million pounds. Clearly, given the total of her father’s assets, this had come almost entirely from her writing, and from clever money management and investments. The copyright of her books and plays was valued by her agent at £3,075.

  Elizabeth MacKintosh’s will, as well as being written in her own strong-minded style, shows personal bequests to her favourite sister, who helped her during her final illness; some sense of loyalty to Inverness, despite a wish to preserve her privacy there; and a strong love of her adopted home, England, where she had been unable to live due to family circumstances. It also shows how successful a writer she actually was, and how she had been able to enjoy the money she had earned. The most important clauses, however, are the provision for the publication of her uncollected ‘Gordon Daviot’ works, and her concern over her papers. People have often focused on her main legacy to the National Trust, but however she felt about it, her life in Inverness is what created Gordon Daviot and Josephine Tey as we know them, and Beth knew that and gave it due recognition. Her will shows that even if it was her love of England that had sustained her and which she wanted to thank through her generous legacy to the National Trust, her other legacies to her family, friends and the town were important to her. She specifically wanted all her plays to be published first, before any money went to the National Trust. She did not forget her family; she did not forget her friends; and, in the end, her love of writing came before her love of England.

  In a personal request to Moire, Beth also showed her love of the Highlands, when she asked for her ashes to be scattered at Daviot, the area just outside Inverness where the sisters had spent their childhood holidays, and which had given Beth her preferred pen-name.7 Moire, with a husband and child to care for, found it hard to take time to make the journey north to Inverness. When she finally made it in the spring, not only did she have to deal with Beth’s unorthodox will, but she also found that the house at Crown Cottage was partially flooded. The pipes had frozen over the winter and had burst when the warmer weather came. Beth had not left any spare key with neighbours, so no one had done anything to mitigate the damage, and the water was simply pouring down the street as Moire walked up to her old house. Crown Cottage was in a mess. Fortunately, Beth’s papers and writings were not water damaged, and Moire was able to follow her sister’s instructions. She found the manuscripts of the plays Beth had specified should be printed, and also the complete manuscript of one more Josephine Tey novel: Beth’s final Inspector Grant mystery, The Singing Sands. There were to be four posthumously published books.

  Josephine Tey’s books, and Gordon Daviot’s plays, had been immensely popular, and her death was seen as a loss not only by her friends and family, but also by her many readers. Almost all her books were reissued in the years after her death, with the ‘Gordon Daviot’ novels The Man in the Queue, Kif and The Expensive Halo all republished under the name ‘Josephine Tey’. New publications of her books received universally good reviews. BBC radio produced several adaptations of her work, with Miss Pym Disposes appearing on the Saturday Night Theatre programme only three months after Beth died. The Daughter of Time had its first US publication in 1952, while John Gielgud returned to the part that had made his name in a BBC adaptation of Richard of Bordeaux – recordings of which still exist.8 Gielgud also contributed a short introduction and biographical sketch to the first collected edition of her plays, the plays Beth had in her will specifically asked to be published.

  Beth had specified three plays in her will which had not been published, and which she wanted to see in print so badly that she was prepared to pay for publication herself: Valerius, Dickon and The Little Dry Thorn. The first and last of these had of course been performed: Valerius in London in 1948, and The Little Dry Thorn by the Citizens Theatre Company in Glasgow in 1946. Dickon had never received a performance, but the importance of the subject matter – Richard III – was clear, since Beth had already made it the focus of her Josephine Tey novel The Daughter of Time. In the event, her executors made sure that every unpublished play they found amongst her papers was printed. Three volumes of Plays by Gordon Daviot were published by Peter Davies, the first in 1953 and the second and third in 1954. Where they let Beth down, however, was that the plays were presented almost wholly without context. The brief foreword from Gielgud was commissioned for the first volume, but it is usually cited for its personal memories of Beth and it doesn’t give a summary of Beth’s writing career or life. Beth’s desire to see her plays published and her willingness to fund this herself, did not give her publisher much incentive to publicize her final published works. Beth had never done any self-promotion, and her publishers were used to her Josephine Tey novels (and previous Gordon Daviot works) selling with little effort on their part. Her publishers didn’t stand to lose any money on the publication of the plays, so they merely fulfilled their obligation by putting them out there, to stand alone. It may even be that, because of her fondness for privacy and pen-names, Beth’s publisher, and even her family, could not have written a comprehensive overview of her career, but it certainly did the plays a disservice to be presented without context. By the time of the publication of the third volume, there was even a newspaper article questioning why so many unperformed plays needed to be published, with the journalist apparently unaware that many of the plays included had been performed.9

  Many of the plays in the three volumes also went on to be produced again in one form or another, Cornelia, for example, appearing on BBC radio in 1955; Dickon finding a stage home the same year; and Sweet Coz adapted for television also in 1955.10 Amateur groups embraced the plays, and Valerius was reprinted as a stand-alone play by 1955, while Leith Sands continued to perform well. This last play had won a place in the Scottish Community Drama Association finals just at the time of Beth’s death.

  Beth would probably have been happy with this, as she always let each of her own works stand on its own merit without any publicity, and she had had enormous success this way. She put a lot of herself into her Josephine Tey novels, particularly The Singing Sands, and these are of a quality that has stood the test of time far better than the Gordon Daviot plays. In other ways, though, the publication of her final Plays was a rather shoddy finish to a successful publishing career, a career that had made Beth’s publishers and agents a fair amount of money. Lacking any sort of context or assessment of Beth’s life and work – including any well-publicized association with the Josephine Tey name – the publication of her final Gordon Daviot plays contributed somewhat to the myths around her life – the image of her as unhappy, the unfair assessment of her father’s character – and she also did not receive fair recognition for the work she had done.

  The lack of context for the plays even extends to their covers. The first volume was published the year after Beth’s death, and has a plain cover, as was usual for play text. The end dust wrappers have a brief blurb, stating that Elizabeth MacKintosh, Gordon Daviot and Josephine Tey are one and the same person, and giving a short summary of the three plays included, the three that Beth had specifically requested, The Little Dry Thorn, Valerius and Dickon. The dates of the two performed plays are listed, as are the names of the principal players. The link with The Daughter of Time is also flagged up. However, this information only features on the dust wrapper, so many library editions, for example, have lost this information after the dust jacket has been removed. No full list of Gordon Daviot’s work is included in the volume of plays, though there are adverts for other Tey and Daviot works in print.

  The foreword by John Gielgud, focusing on his personal memories of Gordon Daviot, has been used as a source by every subsequent biographer of Daviot, and it is where many of the received i
deas about her come from.11 It provides, as you would expect, a clear idea of how he worked with Daviot on the production of Richard of Bordeaux, and then goes on to give his personal assessment of her writing, along with a brief attempt to put it in context of other plays and playwrights. It is, however, a very personal piece, and should be read as such, rather than as a factual assessment of Beth’s life and work. The foreword ends with a touching tribute: ‘The theatre is the poorer for an unique talent, and I for a dearly valued friend’. Gielgud’s summary, that ‘Gordon Daviot was a strange character, proud without being arrogant, and obstinate, though not conceited’ is a fair assessment of this complex woman.

  The three plays in the first volume have all been examined in this biography in relation to the times in which they were written – or, in the case of Dickon, in conjunction with The Daughter of Time. Dickon finally received its first performance in 1955, while Valerius was resurrected for radio twice in the 1960s. The plays in the next two volumes of collected plays are harder to date, and present a very varied selection of Daviot’s interests and writing styles. Like the plays in the first volume, which were from the 1940s, they are probably not Beth’s final written works, but were almost certainly written in tandem with her more successful published writings. These plays are not the conclusion to her writing career, they are collected writings.

  Plays 2, the second volume, has three longer plays, and three one-act plays.12 Unlike Plays 1, there is no foreword, and the library copies I have seen were missing their dust jackets, so the reader was provided with minimal information about the author or the context of the plays. The three long plays are The Pomp of Mr Pomfret, Cornelia and Patria. The biggest omission seems to be any sort of context for Cornelia. There is not even a statement saying that this play had in fact been performed, let alone any sort of history of the ‘F. Craigie Howe’ pseudonym that Beth had used when she gave it to the Citizens Theatre Company. The mystery of its authorship was only really remarked on seventeen years after Cornelia was first produced, when the play was revived at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre by the Theatre’s in-house company in 1963. The programme notes for this production give a succinct explanation of the play’s history. This short run, however, did not touch public consciousness to any great degree, and the story of ‘F. Craigie Howe’ was forgotten again. It barely even shows up on the internet, which is pretty impressive given how the internet likes a mystery.

  The Pomp of Mr Pomfret and Patria don’t seem to have ever been performed in Daviot’s lifetime, though Mr Pomfret apparently finally got an airing on the radio in 1954.13 It is likely The Pomp of Mr Pomfret dates from the same period as Cornelia because, like that play, it has a modern English setting and is a comedy – unlike Daviot’s better-known historical or romantic plays. Mr Pomfret is a politician, and the play begins with him turning some people out of their seats in a restaurant; a protracted revenge is then taken on him by brother and sister Rosa and Valenti, supported by Canadian businessman John Judd, involving poltergeists and liberating Miss Hermione Pomfret from caring for her brother. Many of Gordon Daviot’s recognized interests are here: a London and English country setting; a woman forced to do housekeeping against her will; a journalist (working for Daviot’s standard fictional newspaper, The Clarion); and throwaway comments about the ‘Scotch’ character.

  The other full-length play, Patria, is more interesting in terms of Gordon Daviot’s interests and character, but probably less successful as a play in its own right. It is an extended political allegory dealing with two countries, ‘Creeland’ and ‘Tainia’. As with other Daviot plays, Patria suffers from having unseen drama offstage and several long speeches – with one speech, in particular, ranting non-stop over two pages in untypically uncontrolled fashion. There are odd little scenes with children, reminiscent of the scenes of ‘ordinary people’ in Richard of Bordeaux, which have charm and humour, but the general tone is polemical. And yet, despite this, it is a play that might still work in production, as its concerns are wholly modern, and the topics she expresses such strong opinions on are still current today. Patria is essentially a statement of how Gordon Daviot saw the nationalist movement and Scottish independence; a companion piece to her final Josephine Tey novel, the more measured The Singing Sands.

  Given the nation-changing concerns of Patria, it is rather a change of pace to read the one-act plays in Plays 2. The Balwhinnie Bomb is the one-act comedy set on the west coast of Scotland that was performed by the local Inverness drama group in the late 1940s, and popular with amateur groups in the north of Scotland. The Pen of My Aunt had been broadcast on the radio in 1950, was later anthologized, and then had the impressive after-life of adaption into Finnish as a 1963 TV movie Tätini kynä. Finally in Plays 2, there is the strange little one-acter, The Princess who liked Cherry Pie. This surely must be a children’s play, perhaps written for radio, or even with a memory of Beth’s teaching days – or from her ongoing friendships with other teachers, such as ‘Miss Mac’ in Inverness, the well-known Daviot primary schoolmistress.14 It is a simple moral fairytale with a lot of silliness.15

  Plays 1 and Plays 2 both have a selection of plays that had already been performed. Plays 3 seems to be a collection of entirely unperformed pieces, though several of them were picked up after publication.16 Lady Charing is Cross is one of Daviot’s historical pieces, set in the middle of Edward the Seventh’s reign (1901-1910). Set in high society, with the descriptions of clothes that Daviot excelled at in her historical pieces, it deals with politicians and politics, not quite in the same vein as Patria, but clearly from the same sort of small-c conservative standpoint. Neil is a Scottish socialist politician, who gradually drifts further and further to the right wing as he associates with Lady Charing. Daviot points out that politicians are very clever in the way they use words to rouse people, but also that there is often little meaning behind the words, an idea that also recurs in Barnharrow, another of the plays in this last collection. Daviot particularly pokes fun at people who say they are working class but clearly aren’t, and, as in Cornelia, has few pertinent things to say about socialist ideas. The humour is a little like Cornelia, and, given that the politics are not as polemical as in Patria, it may well date from the mid-to late-40s.

  Sweet Coz is on a different subject from almost any other Daviot play. Set in modern times, it features as its main character a woman doctor, Dinah Partridge. Dinah is a professional career woman, of the type Beth must have been familiar with from her days as a VAD and from Anstey. Other medical professionals feature as characters, surely drawn from Beth’s own experiences. Despite Dinah’s professionalism, however, the plot hinges on her getting drunk and being rather silly. It is in fact a farce in which she wakes up with a strange man (not in the same bed, but in the same house). This is a much more ‘modern’ topic than Beth’s other writing, and it is rather surprising to find her writing about people being drunk and silly – though certainly Beth had her share of partying when she hung out with her theatrical friends and Lena Ramsden in London. The other main character is Hector, Dinah’s brother, who is a poet, and Beth is scathing about his writing life and the man in general. Given the poet in Patria, and ‘Wee Archie’ in The Singing Sands, Beth doesn’t seem to have had a very high opinion of male poets – something at odds with her use of Hugh Patrick Fraser’s poems in her work, and her own start to her writing career. There was a particular ‘type’ that she didn’t hold in high regard, however, and Hector is typical of this, a rather pompous man, who relies on a fading ‘boyish charm’.

  Reckoning also shows another side to Daviot’s interests. A modern play, it seems to be set in a 1930s London similar to the backdrop of Kif, and covers Camden Town’s underworld and its gangsters. Its plot is filmic, and suggests something of the sort of movies Daviot enjoyed – but it is tonally a rather strange play. The first half of Scene 1 starts with a gentle portrayal of someone working in a shop, with no hint of the gangster plotline to follow. Perhaps the switch in tone
was deliberate, but it is a dramatic shift for someone used to reading the rest of Daviot’s work – even bearing in mind that she wrote crime novels. The romance between ‘Nell’ and her criminal also isn’t terribly believable. It’s an interesting look at retail work though, something that Colin’s daughter didn’t use much in her fiction.17

  Barnharrow is a Covenanting play, Claverhouse-period. It works well as an exploration of religious fanaticism, though, as in Daviot’s biography of Claverhouse, her soldiers are rather too polite, well mannered and well spoken to be wholly believable. Her portrayal of the daughter, ‘Ishbel’, is effective. She heads to the conventicles not out of religious conviction, but to see the boys – one of Daviot’s young women in the Betty Kane mode, rather than like Erica Burgoyne.

  Finally, The Staff-Room is a realistic look at an all-female teaching staff, and must surely give a hint of what Beth’s teaching days were like. The end is something of an anti-climax, but it is an extremely believable portrayal of a staff room.

  The Staff-Room was adapted for television, and broadcast as a live double-bill with Barnharrow on Tuesday 1st May 1956. Sweet Coz also made it onto television the year before, broadcast on Tuesday 4th January 1955, and it was later produced on stage as well.

  The number of productions of Daviot’s plays shows their enduring appeal. Even without a proper context, the quality of the plays was clear to readers and producers, and Daviot’s name was enough to generate interest. The three volumes of plays achieved what Daviot would have hoped for them: all her work was collected and published, and audiences liked it. Adaptations of her work on radio and on stage (particularly with amateur groups) continued for decades after her death, but it was her Josephine Tey works that proved the most enduring. In addition to her collected plays, the last and final work published was The Singing Sands.