The Chalet School Revisited

by Sheila Ray

  The third distinguishing characteristic of the Chalet School is its avowed aim to protect the health of its pupils. One of Madge Bettany’s main reasons for starting the Chalet School is Joey’s poor health, which makes it desirable that she moves to a drier climate, and one of Madge’s first pupils, Amy Stevens, is sent there for the same reason. Later, when the sanatorium is founded nearby and Madge marries its head, Dr Jem Russell, the school’s function to protect its pupils’ health becomes more explicit, with particular concentration on combating TB.

  So many of the girls had one or both parents at the sanatorium undergoing treatment, and the doctors were all of the opinion that prevention was infinitely better than cure. “Catch the children early, give them a good foundation and we may save them,” Dr Jem had said on one occasion.

  So plenty of milk, sleep, fresh air, and exercise were enforced at the school, and the girls throve on the treatment.76

  This continues when the school moves to England: “ever since the establishment of the two [school and sanatorium], great stress had been laid on the care of the girls’ health . . . The school was planned with an eye to this, and the Staff knew it”.77

  In reality, there were English schools in the Alps where the children of sanatoria patienta studied, and these had previously been fictionalised in Elsie Oxenham’s Swiss school stories. By the 1950s, when the school and a branch of the sanatorium had moved to Switzerland, antibiotics were well-developed and the continued stress on TB patients was becoming anachronistic. However, the sanatorium also functioned as a place where former pupils found husbands, thus ensuring that they remained close to the school, and this made it too important to the series to alter.

  Health was also a consideration for some real parents when deciding to send their daughters to boarding-school. Sheila Rowbotham has written that “at eleven off I went . . . to a Methodist boarding school in East Yorkshire, close to the sea. ‘Healthy air,’ my father said. ‘Good for the chest, bracing.’”78 It is equally important to remember that the supposed fragility of girls’ health had been of concern to educationists during the late l9th and the first quarter of the 20th century, with fears that giving girls an equivalent education to boys’ would affect their general health and particularly their fertility.79 Hunt points out that one of the main ways in which headmistresses combated these concerns and preserved a full academic curriculum for girls was by concentrating “heavily on health and medical care and this included rules about dress, holding medical inspections and encouraging gymnastics and games”.80

  It is possible, then, to interpret the stress that Brent-Dyer places on the school’s function to protect its pupils’ health as a means of extending the choices available to the girls rather than limiting them, and it is probable that she genuinely believed that girls’ health in particular needed protecting. It is also likely that the death of her brother Henzell had left her with lifelong insecurities about illness, which the emphasis on the fragility of health reflects. In retrospect, the constant references to smoking, the high levels of dairy products and caffeine which staff and pupils alike consumed and the insistence that girls kept their coats on when climbing may seem to mitigate against good health rather than promote it. But having regard to the period in which Brent-Dyer was writing, her sincerity is unquestionable.

  Elinor Brent-Dyer’s educational philosophy

  Brent-Dyer’s dual professional status — as a teacher and an author — is evident at a few points when she uses the series to air what were almost certainly her own beliefs about educational theory and practice. As a teacher it is probable that she would have been aware of educational developments, both in state and in private education, during the time she was writing the Chalet School series, and would be able to compare and contrast them with her own experience. And despite Brent-Dyer’s own shortcomings as a headmistress, McClelland points out that at least one lesson described in the books — Joey teaching history to new girl Polly Heriot (Jo Returns to the Chalet School, 1936) — has been validated by an experienced teacher as “a model in miniature of how it should be done”.81

  McClelland suggests that Brent-Dyer was dissatisfied with her own educational background, and that this is reflected in the series when old-fashioned teaching methods are criticised. For example, in Jo Returns to the Chalet School, new girl Polly Heriot’s work is decribed by the staff as being “at least fifty years behind the times!”. The staff go on to explain in detail exactly why this is the case: “she doesn’t even know how to do arithmetic. Her science is conspicuous by its absence; botany, mid-Victorian; geography, the limit . . .”82

  Perhaps it is not surprising, given that Brent-Dyer was educated and trained at the beginning of the century, that modern teaching methods also come in for criticism in the series. In the first Swiss book, The Chalet School in the Oberland (1952), staff are concerned about a girl who has come from a school where:

  Two new governors were appointed and they both have the idea that emulation is all wrong for children and there should be neither prizes nor marks nor form positions in school . . . The girls raged about it and a good many of them either did no work at all or else worked so badly that they might just as well have left it alone.

  One of the other staff members comments:

  what a pity it is when cranks get the upper hand anywhere — especially where youngsters are concerned. I do feel that elder girls ought to manage without any incentive, though, human nature being what it is, I know the majority of them do work much better if they’re going to gain something tangible in the end. Where younger girls come in, I agree with prizes every time!83

  Another device that Brent-Dyer uses to illustrate her opinions about modern teaching methods is the invention of another Chalet School, run on very different lines. It makes its first appearance in The Wrong Chalet School (1952), when a pupil tells a new girl:

  last year they had a new Head and she has the maddest ideas. She believes in you learning what you like and when you like. It sounds very nice, but I think it must be an awfully untidy way of doing things. I’d a lot rather do as we do and have time-tables.84

  In a later book, Bride Leads the Chalet School (1953), the two schools merge and the results of these teaching methods are demonstrated for the readers:

  it was found that, with very few exceptions, the girls from the Tanswick school were a good year behind their contemporaries on the Island. Free discipline does not make for hard work unless the pupils are born students and the general tone of the Tanswick school had not made for that.85

  Given her attacks on both old-fashioned and modern teaching methods, it is likely that Brent-Dyer agreed with headmistress Miss Annersley when Miss Wilson claims that “There’s quite a lot to be said for some of the old-fashioned methods of teaching, you know.” Miss Annersley replies: “I believe in mingling the old and the new — making the best of both, in fact.”86

  Whether or not this was the secret of the Chalet School’s success educationally, there is no doubt that readers found the school both believable and attractive. Writing about the series’ popularity, Helen MoClelland points out that:

  Just as important for the readers was their belief in the Chalet School itself, as an abiding institution whose customs gradually evolve but whose traditions remain constant throughout the series. Maybe it was only a few fans who actually wrote and asked the publishers to send prospectuses of the school. But most readers could recite from memory the Chalet School’s history, rules and constitution, could explain the time-table and take on the “sheepdog” duties of guiding a new girl around the school.87

  With the Chalet School, then, Elinor Brent-Dyer succeeded in creating a school which was as much an ideal for her readers and fictional pupils as it was for herself. Jenny Price is typical of many readers when she says that: “My introduction to the Chalet series was Barbara, borrowed from the school library and I was hooked (so much so that I told all and sundry that I wanted to go to this school in Switzerland).”
88 Likewise new girl Barbara Chester, on arrivng at the Gornetz Platz to start school, “gave a cry of rapture. ‘Oh, isn’t it marvellous! Oh, I’m so glad I’ve come! This will be school with bells on!’’’89

  NOTES

  1. Helen McClelland, Behind the Chalet School (New Horizon, 1981), p.43.

  2. Ibid., pp.155-6.

  3. Ibid., pp.1-2.

  4. Ibid., pp.41-2.

  5. Ibid., pp.63-72.

  6. Ibid., pp.166

  7. See Gillian Avery, The Best Type of Girl (André Deutsch, 1991).

  8. McClelland, ibid., p.33.

  9. Ibid., pp.145-149.

  10. Felicity Hunt, ed., Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women 1850-1950 (Blackwell, 1987), pp.152-69.

  11. Sue Sharpe, “Just Like a Girl”. How Girls Learn to be Women (Penguin, 1976), pp.134-5.

  12. Mary Evans, A Good School: Life at a Girls’ Grammar School in the 1950s (Women’s Press, 1991), p.22.

  13. Gay from China at the Chalet School (1944), p.234.

  14. The Coming of Age of the Chalet School (1958), p.222.

  15. Evans, ibid., p.13.

  16. Jo Returns to the Chalet School (1936), p.85.

  17. Liz Heron, ed., Truth, Dare or Promise. Girls Growing Up in the Fifties (Virago, 1985), p.65.

  18. Evans, ibid., p.86.

  19. Carola Storms the Chalet School (1951), pp.111-2.

  20. The Chalet School and the Lintons (1934), p.64.

  21. Hunt, ibid., p.157.

  22. Evans, ibid., p.29.

  23. Deirdre Beddoe, Discovering Women’s History. A Practical Manual (Pandora, 1983), pp.59-62.

  24. Hunt, ibid., p.3.

  25. Ibid., p.131.

  26. Beddoe, ibid., p.59.

  27. The Princess of the Chalet School, (1927) p.119.

  28. Hunt, ibid., p.158.

  29. Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences of Two World Wars (Pandora, 1987), p.138.

  30. Jackie Bennett and Rosemary Forgan, eds., There’s Something About a Convent Girl (Virago, 1991), p.132.

  31. Evans, ibid., pp.39-40.

  32. Ibid., p.37.

  33. Ibid., p.38.

  34. Hunt, ibid., p.18.

  35. Deirdre Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: Women between the wars 1918-1939 (Pandora, 1989), p.148.

  36. Hunt, ibid., p.67.

  37. Rosemary Deem, ed., Schooling for Women’s Work (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p.114.

  38. Jo Returns to the Chalet School, p.204.

  39. Tom Tackles the Chalet School (1955), p.56.

  40. Ibid., p.46.

  41. Bennett and Forgan, ibid., p.138.

  42. The School at the Chalet (1925), p.279.

  43. Jo of the Chalet School (1926), p.30.

  44. The Chalet School and Jo (1931), p.152

  45. Evans, ibid., p.60.

  46. Heron, ibid., p.41.

  47. Ibid., p.208.

  48. Carola Storms the Chalet School, p.169.

  49. Shocks for the Chalet School (1952), p.13.

  50. Tom Tackles the Chalet School, p.141.

  51. Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise. Women in Post-war Britain 1945-1968 (Tavistock, 1980), p.47.

  52. Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty, p.8.

  53. Wilson, ibid., pp.22, 59.

  54. The Exploits of the Chalet Girls (1933), p.23.

  55. The School at the Chalet, pp.65-6.

  56. For example, A Chalet Girl From Kenya (1955).

  57. The Exploits of the Chalet Girls, p.23.

  58. The Chalet School and Barbara (1954), p.114.

  59. Evans, ibid., p.17.

  60. McClelland, ibid., p.177.

  61. The Chalet School and Barbara, p.66.

  62. Evans, ibid., p.15.

  63. Ibid., p.33.

  64. The Chalet School in Exile (1940), p.55.

  65. Ibid., p.57.

  66. Ibid., p.202.

  67. Ibid., p. 332.

  68. The Chalet School Goes to It (1941), p.215.

  69. The Highland Twins at the Chalet School (1942), p.95.

  70. The Chalet School in Exile, p.228.

  71. Evans, ibid., p.28.

  72. Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School (1930), p.191.

  73. McClelland, ibid., p.117.

  74. Tom Tackles the Chalet School, p.73.

  75. The Chalet School in Exile, p.162.

  76. The Chalet School and Jo, p.66.

  77. Gay from China at the Chalet School, p.62.

  78. Heron, ibid., p.197.

  79. See Hunt, ibid., pp.9-11.

  80. Ibid., p.9.

  81. McClelland, ibid., p.132.

  82. Jo Returns to the Chalet School, pp.82-3.

  83. The Chalet School in the Oberland (1952), pp.78-9.

  84. The Wrong Chalet School (1952), p.19.

  85. Bride Leads the Chalet School (1953), p.94.

  86. Three Go to the Chalet School (1949), p.156.

  87. Friends of the Chalet School Newsletter 6, Aug. 1990.

  88. Friends of the Chalet School Newsletter 17, October 1992.

  89. The Chalet School and Barbara, p.28.

  V. THE CHALET SCHOOL GUIDES — GIRLS’ ORGANISATIONS AND GIRLS’ SCHOOL STORIES

  ROSEMARY AUCHMUTY

  JOEY Goes to the Oberland (1954) is, in every sense, a transitional book. Published as no. 29, it appeared roughly halfway through the Chalet School series. It marks the end of the school’s British record; from now on, readers will only be concerned with the Swiss branch. In its pages, certain popular characters are settled — Daisy gets married, Robin enters a convent — while others, absent for a period after the war, make a welcome reappearance. “You know, Jo, I have a feeling that from now on we’re going to pick up a lot of threads we’ve had to drop,” Primula confides.1 On the journey to the Oberland, Jo makes contact with Evadne, Simone and Frieda; and in the books that follow, many of the girls who had been at school with Joey before the war return to play a new role in the series.

  Jo is following the Chalet School back to the Continent — not to its first home in the Austrian Tyrol, which remained under Russian occupation until 1955, but to the Bernese Oberland. Though a traditional site for English boarding-schools and sanatoriums, Switzerland represents a fresh start for the Chalet School. Having decided to locate the finishing branch there (The Chalet School in the Oberland, 1952), Brent-Dyer quickly realised the attraction of transferring the main school as well; the passing of 25 years and a major war since the visit to Achensee which inspired the series had destroyed the Tyrol of Brent-Dyer’s memories, and the setting needed an update.

  Jo’s role was to provide the thread of continuity. Ostensibly she is moving to Switzerland because her husband has been appointed head of the new Sanatorium on the Görnetz Platz. From an artistic point of view, however, she has to go with the school because she has become indivisible from it; in Brent-Dyer’s presentation, she is as much a part of the school as the staff and pupils, symbolising (we are told) its very spirit.

  But in leaving Britain, there are losses, too — for Jo, for the school, and for the series itself. This is not simply because the British books are among the best of Elinor Brent-Dyer’s writing (particularly those set in “Armishire”); by 1954, she was simply not writing so well, and the Swiss books — with the occasional exception — are among the least inventive and most repetitive of the series. It is also because, while former connections are revived and new ones forged in the Swiss books, others are broken. This new life will lack many of the features of the old.

  One thing that is left behind is the Girl Guides. In The Chalet School and Barbara (1954), the girls express the hope that Guides will be resumed in the new school. Though their Captain, Miss Edwards, has remained behind in England, there are other experienced Guiders on the staff, and Miss Wilson, their former Captain and District Commissioner, is nearby at the finishing branch. Miss Annersley, the Headmistress, is also keen to continue with G
uides. But the removal to Switzerland has meant a great many changes, and the Head decides that “until they were in full running order, outside things like Guides must wait, although she fully intended that they should begin presently”.2

  In fact, as readers know, they never do. Chalet fans and critics naturally wonder why. In Tyrol, in Armiford and on the island, Chalet Girls were the most enthusiastic of Guides. Practically everyone in the school belonged. Readers of all the books from The Princess of the Chalet School (1927) to Changes for the Chalet School (1953) must be familiar with the Saturday morning meetings, the hikes and weekend camps, the skills acquired and badges earned. In the first half of the Chalet School series, Elinor Brent-Dyer proved herself one of the most fervent of the large band of literary advocates of the movement. In the second half, she ignored them. This chapter will examine the significance of girls’ organisations in girls’ school stories; and in so doing, will attempt to find an answer to the conundrum of the strange disappearance of the Guides in the Chalet School books published after 1953.

  Guides in the early Chalet School books

  Elinor Brent-Dyer’s interest in Guides probably dates from around the time that the first Chalet School book was published, in 1925. None of her books published before this date features Guides; they first rate a mention in The School at the Chalet, where Gisela has been reading an English girls’ school story about a Guide, “but I did not quite understand it. It is not the kind of guide we know here.”