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

  Winchester Street (now demolished), where Elinor was born and grew up, seen here in the 1950s.

  That the house-sharing plan had drawbacks must be obvious. They included for Charles Dyer the classic snag of a resident mother-in-law. One, moreover, of sturdily independent character, who would not only retain ownership of the house but had for many years been accustomed to acting as its head.

  From Nelly’s point of view things looked different. She, as her parents’ youngest child and only surviving daughter, had always been cosseted, and the house had been her home since she was six years old. It might well have seemed to her convenient that her mother was living upstairs, ready with advice and help. Most of all Nelly would have appreciated this when the time came for her first baby to be born, since there was probably no question in those days of the birth taking place in hospital. At all events, the child who later became well-known as Elinor M. Brent-Dyer was born at 52 Winchester Street, the house where she was to live until she was nineteen. The year was 1894, the date Friday 6 April; and the birth certificate gives the baby’s names as GLADYS ELEANOR MAY DYER.

  It is safe to guess that both Nelly and Hannah thought that the baby was beautiful. However there is no possibility of learning how Charles Dyer reacted to his daughter’s arrival. He did go and register her birth, and he was not at this period working away from home. But of course babies were nothing new so far as Charles was concerned: he, by his previous marriage, already had a son, Charles Arnold Lloyd Dyer — born in 1888, two years before the death of the first Mrs Dyer. And this little boy is surrounded by one of the strangest mysteries in Elinor’s background.

  Charles Arnold was barely five at the time of his father’s second marriage; and it would surely have been natural for him to have come and lived for at least part of the time with Charles and Nelly, once they had settled down at Winchester Street after their wedding. By this juncture his grandparents had all died, he had no other close relatives, and there was ample room at 52 Winchester Street. Instead, it appears that he was condemned to continue a pathetic kind of wandering passage between lodgings, being left for the most part in the care of various landladies. And at no point does he seem even to have visited the Winchester Street household.

  Altogether, this half-brother of Elinor’s represents a curious enigma. There is documentary evidence for his birth, as well as for the fact that he was still living in 1911, at the age of twenty-three. And it has now come to light that he later married and had a son — yet another Charles Dyer. But what became of him in the mean time is unknown. Oddest of all — among those who supplied information about Elinor’s early life, including some who appeared to have known her and the family reasonably well, not one person could recall ever hearing a word of Charles Arnold’s existence.

  Elinor herself may not have know of it in her youth, for much was concealed from children in those days. But later she did learn about this vanished half-brother, and it is tempting to speculate about a passage in one of her books, The School at the Chalet (1925), which describes the extraordinary behaviour of Grizel Cochrane’s widowed father. Grizel’s mother had died when she was five. ‘After her death, Mr Cochrane had sent the child to his mother’s, and led a bachelor life for the next five years.’ Then ‘he had married again, most unaccountably, without informing his second wife of the fact that he had a [child].’

  Could it be that this unlikely sounding episode was actually based on real life? And, if so, might not the second Mrs Dyer have reacted like the second ‘Mrs Cochrane’ who, we hear later, ‘had never forgiven her husband for not telling her of Grizel’s existence’? Of course this is only speculation. On the other hand, it has now been established that the rift which gradually widened between Charles Dyer and his second wife did partly originate in disagreements over the small Charles Arnold.

  Whether or not other things contributed to the trouble is unclear. But certainly the couple were very different in both temperament and outlook. Charles was apparently an extrovert, outspoken in manner and bohemian in tastes. He played the organ, was an accomplished amateur photographer, and tended — it seems — to be a little too fond of drink and pretty woman. Whereas Nelly, who by all accounts was herself a pretty woman, was far more conventional in attitudes and tastes. The two did share musical leanings, for Nelly, in her daughter’s words, anyway, was ‘a brilliant amateur pianist’; perhaps a characteristic exaggeration on Elinor’s part? Be that as it may, later reports about Nelly clearly indicate that she was throughout life a person who attached great importance to received middle-class opinions.

  Whatever caused the problems originally, let alone the rights and wrongs of the matter, trouble appears to have begun quite early in the marriage and to have been well established by the time Nelly Dyer’s second child was born. Nelly had become pregnant again only five months after Elinor’s birth, and the baby, a boy, arrived on 28 June 1895.

  This time it was not the father, but the mother who went to register the birth, something that was a little unusual in 1895: and the choice of the baby’s two names — he was called HENZELL WATSON — was significant, as both were closely and exclusively associated with his mother’s family: Watson was the second of Nelly’s own names, having been her mother Hannah’s maiden surname; Henzell was the favourite and the most frequently used name in the Rutherford family. (Clearly the Rutherfords were proud of their connection with the Henzells: a family of Huguenot origin, who had fled from France and come to carry on their craft of glass-manufacture in and around Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and Elinor herself was always pleased to claim her French ancestry.)

  Altogether it is hard to escape the impression that when Nelly chose those two particular names, Henzell and Watson, she was deliberately establishing her own family’s claim on the child to the exclusion of his father. Especially bearing in mind that it was against the normal custom of the day for a first son — as Henzell in effect was — to receive no name from the paternal side of his family.

  At any rate two things are certain: in the 1898 street directory for South Shields, based on facts supplied in 1897, the name of Charles Dyer no longer appears at 52 Winchester Street, although it had done so in the two previous years; and, after the closely spaced births of Elinor and her brother, there were to be no more children.

  Elinor, then, was probably no more than three years old when her father finally walked out. Or, to be fair, perhaps he was pushed. But either way, and typically of that small-town world in which Elinor grew up, the loss of social face involved was considered almost as grave as the loss of a husband and father.

  The residents in Winchester Street placed a high value on respectability. Perhaps some of them might only recently have drifted across the barrier from upper-working to lower middle class; but among their number were lawyers, officials of the gas company and the proprietors of an exclusive Young Ladies’ Academy. Besides, the street was situated in the ‘right part’ of South Shields — in other words, in the area bordering the sea-front and the select Westoe Village, and on the far side of the town from the docks and shipyards, where at this date mean little houses thronged higgledy-piggledy, in a maze of narrow streets beside the Tyne. Winchester Street was also at a safe distance from the Harton Workhouse, a survival from the bad old days, which was still casting a grim shadow over working people’s lives. On the other hand it was within a stone’s throw of the beach, and of Bents House, a handsome private estate on the sea-front (now a public park).

  Undoubtedly, then, Winchester Street was respectable. And to Nelly Dyer’s family, clinging as they were to the skirts of this middle-class respectability, Charles’s disappearance represented not only emotional upheaval but social disaster. In those days, almost a century ago now, the whole question of ‘What — will — people — say?’ was charged with an importance that is difficult to appreciate today; but plainly this side of things did matter a great deal to Elinor’s mother and grandmother, as demonstrated by the enormous pains they took over hushing thi
ngs up.

  How they managed to succeed in doing this is mysterious. Nelly and Hannah can hardly have gone so far as actually to announce Charles’s death; but Nelly could possibly have assumed widow’s garb, as was traditional in those days. And, one way and another, the impression was gradually spread around that Mrs Dyer was now a widow, having lost her husband. Of course, in a way, she had ‘lost him’ — a euphemistic expression that Elinor herself was to use, many years later, in a letter to her publishers where she explains: ‘I never knew my father, because we lost him when I was three years old.’

  Relatives and friends must have known the facts. Neighbours may have guessed. But apparently there were blind eyes turned and deaf ears, and only the most hushed comments were whispered behind the lace curtains. With the result that, after a few years had passed, the myth of Nelly Dyer’s widowhood was being generally accepted.

  But what version of the story did Nelly give to her children? Of course at only three and two respectively they could not have understood the true state of affairs, but they were quite old enough to have noticed their father’s continued absence and to have been acutely aware, as small children are, of the tensions in the atmosphere around them. And Elinor, at least, was of an age to have asked questions repeatedly.

  Today, we can never learn what answers she received, for at no time in her life does she appear to have spoken, even to close friends, about this unhappy passage in her childhood, or its aftermath. Nor in this case do her books offer enlightenment, since none of them deals with the plight of a family deserted by their father. On the contrary, her fictonal fathers, with a few notable exceptions (those in the Chalet series include Captain Carrick, the callous and unscrupulous father of Juliet, and Margot Venables’s ne’er-do-weel husband, Stephen) are usually portrayed as figures of almost preternatural reliability. Something that may in itself be significant, for when Elinor endowed these story-book fathers with so many admirable qualities she could have been compensating for her own childhood loss.

  It seems hardly conceivable that Elinor and her little brother were among those who were encouraged to believe in Charles’s death. Yet this was an era when the precept ‘Not in front of the children’ was almost religiously followed, so there remains a faint, dreadful possibility that, for at least a time, she and Henzell were deceived. Undoubtedly their childhood contemporaries were; as was borne out in a striking way — and quite unconsciously — by one friend who had known Elinor and the Dyer family well during those early years, the late Mrs Phyllis Matthewman. In a letter, dated 24 May 1974, Mrs Matthewman began a description of her first meeting with the eleven-year-old Elinor: ‘[She] was about a year older than I am, and she lived in South Shields with her widowed mother and her brother.’ Nor was this a case of someone exercising discretion. Mrs Matthewman was visibly astonished to learn, all those years later, that in 1905 — the time she was describing — Elinor’s mother was very far from being a widow; was not, in fact, to be widowed for a further six years.

  And not only was Charles Dyer still alive. He was actually living on the other side of South Shields: it was the other side in every sense, for although barely a mile from Winchester Street for the seagulls, which are rarely silent in South Shields, it was a world away in social terms. This bizarre situation was first revealed by the street directories: here, after a gap of eight years, the name Charles Dyer suddenly reappears in the 1905 directory, and it is then regularly included until the 1911 edition.

  Charles, at some point in the interval, had joined the Merchant Navy and he was now a master mariner. Quite possibly he spent long periods at sea, and was relatively seldom at his address in the Laygate. Nevertheless, the fact that he was actually resident in South Shields, however seldom, inevitably raises speculation as to whether Elinor and Henzell could possibly have remained ignorant of their father’s continuing existence. In 1905 they were eleven and ten years old respectively; and the South Shields of those days was a very small community. However hard Nelly worked at keeping things dark, there must have been an ever-present danger that someone would give the secret away.

  Whether the children were ever allowed to see their father is another matter. If they were, the meetings must unquestionably have taken place in the darkest of secrecy. And one small piece of evidence does exist to indicate that Elinor may indeed have seen her father some years after she was three. It is provided by a photograph that was among Charles Dyer’s possessions (and passed to the author of this biography by Charles Dyer, his grandson and Elinor’s half-nephew). This picture, (page 4) the earliest known of Elinor, shows a rather wary, inward-looking little girl, with long straight fair hair, and a somewhat mournful expression. Not that the photograph in itself proves anything. But it is significant that the child portrayed is unquestionably more than three years old. No date appears anywhere; but a reasonably informed guess would put Elinor’s age as near enough six or seven at the time. So, how did this photo come to be in Charles’s possession, if he really had not seen Elinor since 1897? Nothing suggests that Nelly Dyer would ever have sent it to him. Yet, on the other hand, if — and this must remain a large ‘IF’ — Charles was occasionally allowed a visit from his children, he could have taken this photo himself, bearing in mind his acknowledged skill as a photographer.

  Whatever the facts of the situation, either way it was extraordinary. On the one hand, the children would have been innocent victims of the myth that Charles was dead. On the other, they were perforce accomplices in concealing not only his existence but, perhaps, also the fact that from time to time they paid him visits in secret. And there can be no question that the atmosphere of secrecy and evasion surrounding Elinor’s childhood did radically affect the development of her character.

  Besides, there was another complication in the tangled skein of events — one it is virtually certain Nelly Dyer would never have mentioned to her children. Charles had at some point set up house with another woman; and when he eventually departed for the last time from South Shields, it was to her house in Forest Gate, East London, that he went to live. And Emily Sarah Drowley not only presented Charles with yet another son — and Elinor and Henzell with a second unknown half-brother — she also gave him something that Nelly had not, apparently, ever provided: a home for the elusive Charles Arnold Lloyd Dyer, who also lived at the house in Forest Gate. It was here that Charles made his will, in the summer of 1910; and here that he died of‘ cancer on 30 July 1911 — barely a fortnight after his 55th birthday.

  The death was notified by his eldest son, who is also named in the will, a brief but revealing document which begins, after the usual preliminaries: ‘I leave the sum of £150 to my son, Charles Arnold Lloyd Dyer’. (That was worth something more like several thousand in 1990s terms.) And everything else of which Charles died possessed, he left to Emily Sarah Drowley. Not content with that, he then added: ‘And I make no provision for my wife, Eleanor Watson Dyer, from whom I am living separate and apart by deed of separation. Nor for her two children.’

  There appears a frightening bitterness about the addition of ‘that ‘I make no provision’; and in the contrast between ‘her’ two ‘children’ and ‘my son’. The latter also makes clear that Charles and Nelly did become estranged, at least in part, over Charles Arnold. And, more recently, this has been confirmed by Elinor’s half-nephew.

  For Nelly Dyer the will must have been both painful and humiliating. And it would be hard to believe that she allowed Elinor and Henzell, even at seventeen and sixteen years of age, to read it. Indeed, if Nelly continued the pattern of concealment she had begun fourteen years earlier, it is likely she destroyed any copy of the will that came her way.

  But she cannot so easily have destroyed her memories.

  CHAPTER II

  TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY CHILDHOOD

  IN one important respect Elinor’s mother had been luckier than many other deserted wives; for although her husband was the family’s official breadwinner she did not have to face acute fina
ncial anxieties after his departure. And for this fortunate state of affairs she had to thank her father, the late Isaac Henzell Major Rutherford.

  Isaac, like a number of Elinor’s forebears, had spent his working life in the Merchant Service. Here he had quickly risen to become a master mariner, and by hard work and thrift had managed to amass a considerable fortune. In addition he had bought 52 Winchester Street — a good-sized freehold house in a residential district — which, together with almost all his money, had been left in his will, first to his ‘dear wife Hannah’ on trust for her lifetime and after that outright to his daughter, Nelly. Moreover, Isaac and his lawyer had carefully tied things up to ensure that Nelly would enjoy her inheritance ‘free from the debts, control, or engagements of any husband with whom she . . . [might] intermarry’.

  Without that clause in her grandfather’s will, Elinor’s childhood might have passed in far less comfortable surroundings. As things were, Isaac Rutherford’s capital, sensibly invested, produced an income that was amply sufficient at that time for a small family living in their own house. Besides, it is virtually certain that some payment by Charles Dyer towards the maintenance of his wife and children was arranged in the deed of separation.

  One way and another life was probably comfortable enough at 52 Winchester Street. Living was cheap, too, in those pre-1914 days, with milk costing a mere penny (not quite a 1/2p) a pint, butter about 21/2p a pound, eggs 2p or 3p a dozen and the best meat perhaps 7p a pound. And although a direct comparison of prices can be misleading, since the value of money has plummeted during this century, there is no question that Elinor’s mother was spending far less, not just in money but in real terms, than a housewife must now in the 1990s. Nelly could, for instance, have bought a hundredweight sack of best coal for a shilling (5p) or less — which means that, even making allowance for the changed value of the pound sterling, coal was then in effect many, many times cheaper than it is today. Not surprisingly then, coal fires were a feature of most living-rooms at that period; and Elinor was always to retain from her childhood days a preference for the cheerfully burning open fire (a preference to be shown also, in the later Chalet books, by Jo Maynard who insists on having an English-style fireplace installed in her Swiss home).