Behind the Chalet School: A biography of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer Read online

  Behind the

  Chalet School

  by

  Helen McClelland

  Bettany Press

  1996

  2nd edition published in Great Britain

  by Bettany Press 1996

  8 Kildare Road, London E16 4AD

  Reprinted 2002

  Ebook edition 2011

  First published in Great Britain by New Horizon 1981 & reprinted with revisions by Anchor Press 1986

  Text © Helen McClelland 1981, 1986, 1996

  The right of Helen McClelland to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved

  Contents

  CHAPTER

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE: THE LONG ROAD

  I A FAR CRY FROM THE TYROL

  II TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY CHILDHOOD

  III SCHOOL WAS A LIFE SENTENCE

  IV READING, WRITING, MUSIC

  V SCHOOLMISTRESSES AND SCHOOLGIRLS

  VI ‘JOEY WILL GET WELL’

  VII TANGLED WEBS

  VIII STEP-RELATIONS AND SISTERS-BY-MARRIAGE

  IX ‘A VERY ECCENTRIC AND DIFFERENT SORT OF PERSON’

  X WAITING TO BEGIN

  XI MY OWN DARLING LITTLE SISTER

  XII NEW FRIENDS AND OLD

  XIII ‘IT ALL GREW FROM ONE HOLIDAY IN THE TYROL’

  XIV ‘WRITE IN YOUR OWN WORDS . . . ’

  XV OUR LOCAL AUTHORESS

  XVI ‘IT’S ONLY ONE OF THE ROADS TO GOD’

  XVII ‘MY NEW HOME IN THE WEST COUNTRY’

  XVIII CHALET SCHOOL — MARK II

  XIX MOTHER — DAUGHTER — AND MARRIAGE

  XX LIVING IN CHALET LANDS

  XXI ‘A ROMANTIC WORLD IN ITSELF’

  XXII THE CHALET SCHOOL SEVENTY YEARS ON

  XXIII THE END OF THE STORY

  POSTSCRIPT

  Appendix I: Books by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

  Appendix II: The ‘problem’ stories

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Elinor M. Brent-Dyer as a child

  Westoe Village, South Shields, 1906

  Winchester Street, South Shields, late 1950s

  St Nicholas’s School, South Shields, c. 1908

  The composer Ernest Farrar, 1916

  The Bainbridge family

  The Maids of La Rochelle

  Elinor M. Brent-Dyer with some fellow teachers at Western House School in Fareham, c. 1925

  The Alpenhof, Pertisau, the possible site of the original Chalet School

  Pertisau and the Achensee

  St James’ Road, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s first home in Hereford

  Lichfield House, Hereford, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s home and the Margaret Roper School

  The Chalet School in Exile

  The Chalet School Goes to It

  The Margaret Roper School, Hereford, 1941

  Elinor M. Brent-Dyer with Phyllis Matthewman, early 1950s

  The commemorative plaque at Pertisau, 1994

  Elinor M. Brent-Dyer in a friend’s garden, early 1960s

  Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s ‘Golden Jubilee’ portrait, 1963

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ACCOUNTS of my problems in finding even the basic facts of Elinor Brent-Dyer’s life story have been given elsewhere (notably in The Chalet School Revisited, Bettany Press, 1994); and it remains as true today as it was twenty years ago that, without the wonderful help I was given during my researches, Behind the Chalet School could never have been written.

  This revised edition has added new names to the long list of people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. First, though, I should like to repeat my special thanks to all who gave me so much assistance with the original book. They include, as well as those in libraries, public records and newspaper offices whose names are not known to me:

  Hazel Bainbridge (Mrs J. F. Carroll), Tony Chambers, Helen Colam, Thomas Collocott, Susan Dodsworth, Judith and Peter Humphrey, Marjorie Jewell, Doris Johnson, Phyllis Kerr, the Kostenzer family, Marion Lloyd, Margaret Mann, Stanley Oliver, Donald and Elizabeth Roberts, Margaret Schofield-Palmer, Sybil Smith, Joyce Thorpe, Edward West and Judy Whale; and the late Mrs Blake, Hilary Bray, Ernest Bullock, Rose Farr Smith, Olive Farrar, Mrs Griffiths, Herbert Howells, Phyllis Matthewman, Isobel Miller, Hope and Noel Moncrieff, Eva Oliver, Vivien Pass and Mary Starling.

  In connection with this new edition — which could well have been retitled Further Behind the Chalet School — thanks are due first to Pamela Howe, whose BBC programmes not only unlocked a store of new information but also provided my introduction to Elinor’s half-nephew, Mr Charles Dyer, son of her vanished half-brother, Charles Arnold Lloyd Dyer. Mr Dyer has been most helpful in filling in some of the gaps in Elinor’s early life, and it is due to him that I have now been able to give a fuller account of this period and of Elinor’s father.

  I want also to thank my dear friend, Chloe Rutherford, for all her encouragement and especially for sharing her personal memories of Elinor, as well as for generously allowing the use in this book of copyright material.

  Others, too numerous to mention individually, have contributed valuable new information during the years since Behind the Chalet School first appeared, including many members of the New Chalet Club and of Friends of the Chalet School and other Chalet fans around the world. I am deeply grateful to all of them; and I would like to thank particularly:

  Fen Crosbie and Polly Goerres — for their tireless enthusiasm in pursuing clues; Rosemary Auchmuty and Juliet Gosling of Bettany Press and their editor Joy Wotton, with whom it is always a pleasure to work; Beth and David Varcoe for their dedicated researches in Herefordshire; Luella Hamilton and Olga Hargreaves for detailed and enlightening comments; and David Russell Halliwell for solving one of the mysteries.

  Finally, I want to thank my husband and daughters, AK, CHK and AMK, who, despite being at times less than enthusiastic about the Chalet School, have always given me invaluable support.

  Helen McClelland, February 1996

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ALL extracts from the Chalet School series, the La Rochelle series, The Lost Staircase and the Chalet Club News Letters are quoted by kind permission of the publishers, W. & R. Chambers and Harper-Collins; and of Mrs C. P. Rutherford, Miss Brent-Dyer’s executor, who has also kindly allowed quotations to be used from letters, an unpublished poem, and from Elizabeth the Gallant (published by Thornton Butterworth).

  The short extract from Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s The School by the River is quoted by kind permission of the publishers, Burns & Oates Ltd, and of Mrs Rutherford.

  Quotations from Miss Angela Brazil’s autobiography, My Own Schooldays, and from school stories by Miss Brazil — The School in the South, A Fourth Form Friendship, The Fortunes of Philippa, Bosum Friends and The Third Class at Miss Kayes — are included by kind permission of the publishers, Blackie & Son Ltd.

  Four short quotations from You’re a Brick, Angela! by Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig are included by kind permission of the publishers, Victor Gollancz Ltd.

  An extract from the 1973 edition of the Benenden School Magazine is quoted by kind permission of the Editor.

  For the use of photographs and other illustrations, warmest thanks are due to:

  Charles Dyer: Photograph of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer as a child.

  South Tyne
side Central Library: Photographs of Westoe Village and Winchester Street.

  Mrs Eva Oliver: Photograph of St Nicholas’s School c. 1908.

  Executors of the late Mrs Olive Farrar: Photograph of Ernest Farrar.

  Mrs J. F. Carroll (Hazel Bainbridge): Photograph of Hazel, Julian and Edith Bainbridge.

  W & R Chambers Ltd: Photograph of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer (1963); various illustrations by Nina K. Brisley.

  Foto Angerer: Photograph of Pertisau and the Achensee

  Vivian’s Studio, Hereford: Photograph of the Margaret Roper School (1941); portrait of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer (1954).

  Mrs C. P. Rutherford: Snapshot of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer and Mrs Phyllis Matthewman.

  Mrs Christine Keyes: Photograph of the commemorative plaque at Pertisau.

  Behind The Chalet School

  is affectionately dedicated to

  the memory of

  Georgina Grace Moncrieff

  who introduced me to Elinor’s books

  and to so many others

  PROLOGUE

  THE LONG ROAD

  Higher and higher they climbed . . . till at last they reached the great Alp . . . and there before them, dark, beautiful, and clear as a mirror, spread the . . . [Achen] See, with its three tiny hamlets and two little villages round its shores, and towering round on all sides the mighty limestone crags and peaks of the mountains . . .

  From the landing stage to the Chalet was a good ten minutes’ walk, and then they saw the welcoming lights . . .

  They were at the Chalet School at last.

  (The School at the Chalet, 1925)

  IN fiction, it had taken Madge and Joey Bettany, whose arrival at the lovely village of Pertisau-am-Achensee is described above, only about a day-and-a-half’s journey by boat and train to reach the Tyrol. In real life it had taken Elinor Brent-Dyer more than thirty years.

  At the time of her visit, in 1924, she was just an unknown schoolteacher who happened to choose Austria for her long summer holiday. Yet, when she died some forty-five years later, she was considered important enough to be given obituary notices in many of the national papers, among them an appreciative half-column in The Times.

  It had all come about because of that holiday in Austria. For on her return Elinor had written a school story with a Tyrolean background: The School at the Chalet (published a year later, in October 1925); and this story, along with the mammoth series that followed — in all fifty-nine books — had proved fantastically popular. The books were reprinted over and over again, while fan mail arrived in increasing quantities from all around the English-speaking world. Perhaps Elinor’s name did not become as familiar to the general public as that of Angela Brazil, the best known of all school-story writers, but even Miss Brazil never had a fan club with rising 4,000 members, as Elinor Brent-Dyer had during the 1960s.

  And it is worth stressing that it was not during the heyday of the school story that this Chalet Club existed: had there been such a club in the twenties or thirties it would not have been so astonishing. That the Chalet Club was a going concern as recently as 1969 underlines what must be the most remarkable feature of the Chalet books: the way in which their popularity still endures, right up to the present day. For despite the school story being generally out of favour now, more than 100,000 Chalet School paperbacks are regularly sold each year; and hardback copies are eagerly sought in the secondhand market, where the prices of first editions and certain scarce titles can often reach three figures.

  Yet more unexpected: today in the 1990s the original Chalet Club has two flourishing successors, numbering between them well over a thousand fans; and, although seventy years have passed since the Chalet School’s first appearance, the publishers continue to this day to get letters from Chalet enthusiasts in many parts of the world. A number of these letters will be cited in Chapter XXI, which deals with the whole matter of the Chalet legend. But one may be mentioned here: it arrived in July 1979 — the writer being obviously unaware that Elinor had died ten years earlier:

  Please forgive my writing to you, but I have always wanted you to know how much I loved your books and what they meant to me . . . I was a complete Chalet girl, and could have recited your books by heart when I was young. I just lived for the next one to be published.

  They [the books] were my reality — not my own surroundings.

  That last sentence could fittingly be applied to Elinor herself. She, too, had always tended to prefer her own fantasy lands to the real world. And from the moment that the Chalet School was born, soon after her arrival at the Achensee, this tendency was to grow ever stronger.

  It had taken her more than thirty years to reach the Tyrol, and to find her life’s work. But then she had had to come a long way.

  Elinor M. Brent-Dyer as a child. Photograph possibly taken by her father, Charles Dyer, and found in his possession. Given to Helen McClelland by Charles Dyer, son of Elinor’s half-brother Charles Arnold Dyer.

  CHAPTER I

  A FAR CRY FROM THE TYROL

  They had five bedrooms, counting the two attics, but no bathroom. The family still took their tubs in the scullery in a long zinc bath, that hung from a couple of hooks during the day, and had to be filled with a bucket.

  WHEN Elinor wrote that description of Rosamund Lilley’s home — in A Problem for the Chalet School (1956) — she could have been drawing on her own early memories. For at 52 Winchester Street, the house in South Shields where she had grown up, there was no bathroom. There was no inside lavatory, either, and no running hot water. Cold baths were probably the order of the day in Elinor’s childhood home. And this may explain why her Chalet School girls are so often pictured cavorting merrily into cold baths, to emerge ‘glowing from the icy sting of the mountain water’. But this is running ahead too fast. To give Elinor’s story a proper beginning it is necessary to go back many years, to 26 April 1893, the day of her parents’ wedding.

  Charles Dyer and Eleanor Watson Rutherford were married in South Shields at the parish church of St Hilda: a dark squarely built edifice, with an oddly small, rather undernourished-looking, tower, which must be the town’s best-known building.

  The bride came from a family with deep roots in the north of England. One of her grandfathers had been a local miller, the other a parish schoolmaster, and her forebears on both sides had belonged to this corner of the north-east for generations back. She herself had lived all her twenty-four years in South Shields — for the past eighteen of them at the house in Winchester Street that would remain her home after the marriage, and she had grown up surrounded by family. For although her father, Isaac Henzell Major Rutherford (of whom more in due course), had died seven years previously, her mother was still living; and she had numerous relatives in and around South Shields, including two married brothers in the town itself.

  On the other hand her bridegroom, a thirty-six-year-old widower whose full name was Charles Morris Brent Dyer, was a newcomer, having arrived only recently in the north-east. He, like his father and grandfather, was a native of Portsmouth — a place that is frequently mentioned in the early Chalet books — and his widowed mother had continued to live there until her death in 1891. His father, William Dyer, had been a ship’s carpenter in the Royal Navy, but he was drowned at sea when Charles was still a schoolboy; and it was due entirely to the generosity of his godfather that Charles was able to complete his education and, in due course, to enter the Navy. Here he had achieved the rank of commissioned officer — something of which Elinor was always to speak with pride; but a bout of ill-health had obliged him to take early retirement. He had then trained and qualified as a surveyor at Lloyds; and it was to work in this latter capacity that he had come to South Shields with its busy docks and shipyards.

  At the time Behind the Chalet School was first published, Charles Dyer remained a shadowy figure; but even then it was clear that he was not fated to enjoy good fortune in marriage. His first wife, a Portsmouth girl named Helen Arnold, had died only five yea
rs after their wedding. And his second marriage was not to last, in any real sense, for even that short time.

  Charles and his new wife (she was always known as Nelly, and from now onwards this name will be used here) set up their home at 52 Winchester Street, which they were to share with Nelly’s mother, Hannah Rutherford. And this arrangement certainly offered practical advantages: the red-brick Victorian terraced house would have been too large, with its three storeys and attic floor, for Hannah to occupy alone; yet she could not have sold it, because legally it belonged to her only on trust for her lifetime. After that the terms of her late husband’s will were automatically going to bring the house into her daughter Nelly’s possession. Hence it would have been pointless for the newly married couple to buy another house, even if they were financially in a position to do so.