Tag Archives: Dorita Fairlie Bruce

Dimsie Goes Back by Dorita Fairlie Bruce

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Dimsie Goes Back by Dorita Fairlie Bruce was published in 1927, my Oxford University Press copy seems to be a first edition.

In this one Dimsie has been asked to come back to the Jane Willard Foundation for one term to help out the headmistress Miss Yorke, who is looking a bit ‘seedy’ as far as the girls are concerned.  Dimsie will be working as school secretary.

Dimsie is now engaged to be married, the older girls who know her are glad that she’ll be coming back, she had been Head Girl in the past and with a lot of common sense she could be just what is needed as things haven’t been going very well in the school recently.

The behaviour of senior girls has deteriorated badly, with the prefects and even the Head Girl happy to ignore the rules. Even worse than that is the influence of Coral Danesbury who comes from a very wealthy family and thinks that she should get special treatment from the staff, even offering to get her mother to pay the headmistress extra if she can have a room to herself for a study. Already her shared study is stuffed full with silk cushions and ornaments – all against the rules. But a majority of the girls look up to her and want to emulate her style. Face powder and anti-freckle lotion have become popular despite being against the rules.

Dimsie helps some of the girls set up a revived Anti-Soppist League.

This was a good read, there’s quite a lot of humour with a new girl Lintie Gordon being allowed to bring her puppy with her. Lintie is only nine years old and it’s thought she won’t be so homesick with her dog Jeems being at the school. He’s an absolute scamp and is always in trouble, but never for long as he’s just too sweet to be angry with. Through Dorita Fairlie-Bruce we’re told what is going through his mind, which is always amusing, she was obviously a dog lover as they often feature in her stories.

 

Nancy at St Bride’s by Dorita Fairlie Bruce

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Nancy at St Bride’s by Dorita Fairlie Bruce was first published in 1933, but my copy is in an omnibus edition published in 1937 along with That Boarding-School Girl and The New Girl and Nancy.

Chapter I is headed On A Clyde Steamer. The boat which will take the schoolgirls to the Scottish island location of their school is waiting for them at Greenock Pier. Nancy Caird is a new girl, a junior who has never been to school before. It turns out that she’s a handful and a half with no boundaries or inhibitions. In fact she thinks that rules are there to be broken and she’s always on the look-out to cause mayhem, no matter what the consequences are. A typical Nancy as we have experienced. Each of us had a mother called Nancy.

Christine Maclean has been given the job of looking after Nancy and explaining the rules to her, the job of monitors and such, but Christine’s good friend Sybil who is a bit of an awkward personality herself,  makes matters worse when she appears to be siding with Nancy and doesn’t take matters seriously at all.

This one took a different turn from what I expected it to as it got close to the end, which was a nice surprise really, as there was a bit of a comeuppance for Nancy.  I was slightly disappointed that given the Scottish setting there wasn’t more of a sense of place somehow, but maybe that was me expecting too much. There were quite a few Scots words used within the dialogue though.

I have most of the author’s Dimsie books in original hardback, but I had to buy them online, I was also sent several of the books by a very kind woman who was looking for a good home for her collection.

I was amazed to find this Nancy trilogy in an Oxfam bookshop, at a very reasonable price too, so it’s still possible to find old books like this when you least expect to.

Sadly my copy doesn’t have its nice dust jacket – but you can’t have everything!

 

 

 

 

 

Dimsie Head Girl and Dimsie Grows Up by Dorita Fairlie Bruce

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Dimsie Head Girl by Dorita Fairlie Bruce was published in 1925. Dimsie isn’t in the running to be head girl of the school the Jane Willard Foundation, but Jean, the aspiring poet turns out to be so feckless and dippy as head girl that she eventually has to be sacked by the headmistress Miss Yorke, and Dimsire takes over.

It was the middle school girls who had caused all the problems, they’re always determined to bend any rules to their own advantage. They’ve been banned from keeping pets so decide to start an orphanage for animals, unfortunately this leads them to abduct (steal) a kitten from a street in the nearby town. Their antics are giving the school a bad name.

I found this quite entertaining, at almost 100 years old they’re a dip back in time to another age, but schoolgirls are much the same – whenever.

Dimsie Grows Up by Dorita Fairlie Bruce was published in 1924, confusingly as Dimsie has left the school. The book begins with her saying good-bye to her family home. Her father had died unexpectedly and that had scuppered Dimsie’s plans to go to university to study to become a doctor. That’s now unaffordable and she and her mother have given up their home in England and based themselves permanently at their Scottish home in the west of Scotland. It’s been in the family for generations and Dimsie’s grandmother had been well known locally as a herbalist. She had cured many illnesses in the local population in the past, but she’s now dead. Dimsie hopes to follow in her grandmother’s foosteps and sets about rejuvenating her herb gardens, with a view to setting up her own business and selling herbs to pharmacies.

Meanwhile, there’s a new mystery neighbour living nearby, bizarrely he wears a brown velvet mask, so cuts a bit of a sinister figure.  But after World War 1 there are lots of maimed men around. One other in the neighbourhood is a young doctor who is lame, he had befriended Dimsie on the train up to Scotland. When Dimsie’s plans seem to be hitting the buffers he encourages her to carry on, and helps her by being able to give her some business contacts. But an incident which allowed Dimsie to help a young sick girl goes a long way towards kicking her business off and she’s getting a good reputation locally as a herbalist. Of course this was all long before the NHS was set up when poorer people couldn’t afford to see a doctor.

As you can imagine this one was very different from the previous Dimsie books which are all set in the boarding school, I really enjoyed the different setting, and I couldn’t help laughing when a train strike causes a big problem with the train coming to a complete stop in Lancashire as the strike started.

I find it quite surprising that a book which is 100 years old focused on a young female school leaver and her determination to have a career, despite serious problems  being thrown in her way,  she also has a supportive mother!

Thank you again to Clodagh in London who so kindly sent me her Dimsie books as she was looking for a good home for them.

 

Dimsie Among the Prefects by Dorita Fairlie Bruce – 20 Books of Summer 2023

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Dimsie Among the Prefects by the Scottish author Dorita Fairlie Bruce is the fourth book in her Dimsie series and it was published in 1924.

It begins with Hilary Garth in disgrace,  something she’s not a stranger to, in fact her grandparents are at their wits’ end with her and they’ve decided that it’s time to give up on her being educated at home by a governess, she needs the more strict regime of a boarding school. Part of the problem is that Hilary’s parents had died in India when she was very young and her grandparents had always spoiled and indulged her for that reason. Their own daughter Rosamund isn’t best pleased however as Hilary will be at the same school she is, and she’s not keen to have her out of control niece at what she regards as her school.

Hilary is of course thrilled to be going to school and she seems to spend all her time thinking up ways of causing mayhem, ‘inventing’ adventures. She quickly becomes the dominant character in her dorm as the other girls are so easily led.

Dimsie can see some parallels with her own behaviour as a junior, but she’s a prefect now and thinks that she will be able to deal with Hilary and sort her out. At the same time Dimsie is having to help Rosamund with her problems within the school, but it’s an oversight by the local council which leads to the most serious incident, as you would expect, all’s well that ends well.

I was very lucky to be sent lovely old copies of most of this series by a very kind lady in London who was looking for a good home for her Dimsie books. Thanks again, Clodagh.

 

The School in the Woods by Dorita Fairlie Bruce

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The School in the Woods by Dorita Fairlie Bruce was first published in 1940, but my copy is a reprint from Girls Gone By Publishers.

Tabitha (Toby) Barrett’s mother is dead and her father, who is a famous artist, gets a commission which is going to take him to Ireland for six months. Toby had been a day girl at St Githa’s but that school is closing, and the boarders are being transferred to a school called Thatches. Obviously Toby will have to be a boarder too.

The girls settle in to the new school and make new friends, and enjoy the new setting of a woodland area, but Toby gets into trouble when she stumbles across a shed in the woodland which is being used as a laboratory. It’s off limits to the girls and Dick Trevor who is doing chemical experiments in it isn’t happy about her being there. His father is a well-known scientist and they live nearby, and with the country being on the cusp of World War 2 Dick is worried about his work being stolen by spies.

Toby knows she’s not a spy, but she suspects that there’s something nefarious going on within the school, she’s just not sure what.

I enjoyed this one which is interesting from a social history point of view with the girls thinking about their futures although in general it’s a ‘training’ in something that they’re thinking about.

As often happens there’s a radical shift in the behaviour and attitude of the most annoying girl – if only that were true in real life!

Dimsie Intervenes by Dorita Fairlie Bruce

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Dimsie Intervenes by Dorita Fairlie Bruce was first published in 1937 and it’s the eighth book in the Dimsie series, so I’ve missed a few of them. I’ll have to get online to find the others. This is the third last book in her Dimsie series and it was only written after readers had asked her for more books featuring Dimsie and the school, the Jane Willard Foundation.

Old girl Erica is living in the village and has set up a branch of the Girls’ Guildry there, but they’re in dire need of a piano. They’re trying to raise £8 to buy one and that’s an awful lot of money. When Erica mentions it to some of the pupils they decide to help out somehow.

Some of the younger girls are getting very keen on make-up, face creams and slimming cream!! But things like that are frowned upon by the school. A small business is set up by the older girls when they realise that they can send off for small samples from the manufacturers who advertise in magazines, and they can sell them on to the younger girls, at a profit naturally. It’s all very secretive of course.

I think this is the fourth Dimsie book I’ve read and I didn’t enjoy it as much as the others, although it was still a good enough read to continue. Inevitably I feel uncomfortable when there’s interaction between the schoolgirls and the local village girls as there’s an air of them being condescended to. Which is exactly how it would have been, in fact it still is like that – in some places not that far from here!

Dimsie Moves Up Again by Dorita Fairlie Bruce

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Dimsie Moves Up Again cover

Dimsie Moves Up Again by the Scottish children’s author Dorita Fairlie Bruce was first published in 1922 and is the third book in the Dimsie series with the setting of a boarding school for girls. My copy of the book dates from 1941 when it was a Christmas gift to Joan from her Auntie Belle, according to the inscription.

The story begins on a stormy September day, it’s the first day of the new school year so it’s quite chaotic with lots of girls’ boxes and trunks piling up waiting to be emptied. Dimsie and her chums are now almost seniors, but not quite. They are however senior enough to be outraged by the behaviour of the girls in the lower forms, they had never behaved like that when they were juniors!

The new head girl is an unexpected choice as far as most of the girls are concerned, and to some of the teachers too, and it takes a while for her to get into the swing of it all, so behaviour does get a bit out of hand in a dangerous way.

The new girl Fenella, who has never been at school before having been educated by governesses, has such a superior attitude – for no good reason – and she inadvertently triggers a hair-raising adventure.

As ever though it’s Dimsie who is the central character. I feel that Enid Blyton based Darrell in her Malory Towers books on Dimsie, those books were published over 20 years later than the Dimsie books and aren’t nearly as well written although I loved them as a youngster. I’ll definitely be continuing with the Dimsie series.

The New House Captain by Dorita Fairlie Bruce

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The New House Captain by Dorita Fairlie Bruce was first published in 1928 but my copy is a reprint from the 1950s – going by the illustrations, there’s no date in the front.

This is the first book in this Dorita Fairlie Bruce series which features Springdale School. The school is located in the west of Scotland, Ayrshire I believe but sadly there wasn’t much in the way of Scottish atmosphere in the book, apart from one character who was a Glaswegian and supposedly had a rough accent, but there was no dialect written in any sort of Glaswegian.

However the story itself was quite entertaining with the headmistress’s unexpected choice of Peggy Willoughby to be the captain of The Rowans house. Peggy’s best friend Diana had been sure that she would be the captain and she’s more than a bit miffed to miss out on what she regarded as her right – to her best friend. To Peggy’s dismay Diana more or less drops her as a friend, using the fact that she has to study for a scholarship to sideline Peggy instead of supporting her and siding with the ghastly Sydney whenever she could. Sydney is a girl who has no team spirit and is only interested in herself.

Obviously there’s a lot more to it than this. I had read a book in this series previously and there were lots of descriptions of the Scottish countryside and a plenty of Scots dialect dialogue in it. The New House Captain is the first book in the series so I assume that the author decided in the later books that she should make the Scottish setting more obvious, which I think was a good decision. However my copy of the book was published by Spring Books, not the usual Blackie of the original books so there’s a possibility that this edition has been gutted of its Scottish atmosphere.

Dimsie Moves Up by Dorita Fairlie Bruce

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Dimsie Moves Up by Dorita Fairlie Bruce is the second book in the Dimsie series which I started reading recently. It was first published in 1921 but my copy dates from 1950. These books were obviously very popular as this book was reprinted eight times within those years.

In this book Dimsie is unexoectedly moved up a form along with several of her friends, with new girls arriving those who had done well academically the previous year need to move up to make room for them. Some of the older girls in the new form make Dimsie and her friends promise not to give flowers to any of the teachers. It’s something that none of the younger girls had even thought of doing. It’s explained to them that some girls go through a phase of being soppy over their female teachers or older girls. Nowadays we’d call it having a crush. Dimsie and her friends set up an ‘Anti Soppist Society’ as they don’t want anything to do with that sort of nonsense.

Dimsie Moves Up has quite a lot about games in it, but even if like me you were never keen on PE at school this doesn’t detract from the storyline

Nita Tomlinson isn’t a prefect but she has been made games-captain. Giving someone like Nita any power is just madness, she does her best to make trouble all round, stealing away best friends and generally throwing her weight around. I suppose she’s the sort of character that you love to hate, whereas Dimsie is a lovely girl, nothing startling in the looks or brains department, just a girl with plenty of common sense and kindness. She reminds me a bit of Darrell in Blyton’s Malory Towers series but I must say that I think Dorita Fairlie Bruce was a much better writer than Blyton was, although I loved her books as a youngster.

It has been mentioned before that the name Dimsie is an unfortunate choice, her actual name is Daphne and I’d plump for Dimsie any day rather than that. However I googled dim as in dimwitted and it seems that it was first used in that way in 1934. However another source cites it as being used in US colleges first in 1922, which is still after this book was published.

Dimsie Goes to School by Dorita Fairlie Bruce

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Dimsie Goes to School by the Scottish author Dorita Fairlie Bruce was first published in 1920 with the story taking place in 1919. It was originally titled The Senior Prefect. My copy was published in 1932.

It begins with the ten year old Daphne Isabel Maitland better known as Dimsie travelling by train from her west of Scotland home to her new boarding school at Westover, a coastal town in the south of England. She’s accompanied by her older cousin Daphne who is a prefect at the school.

There’s a bit of a mystery as to what has happened to Dimsie’s mother as she has disappeared and only communicates with her soldier husband through solicitors, but Dimsie is unaware of this. There’s a new headmistress at the school and many of the girls are upset by the change, especially when she cuts their hockey practice time by half, reasoning that they don’t do at all well in their exams. However she starts lessons in domestic science which hadn’t been taught there before. This is a good idea given that it’s just after World War 1 when the lack of servants became such a problem for middle-class households.

Although the war has ended it’s still very much part of the book as air-raids and coastal trenches are mentioned as well as shell-shock, and Dimsie’s father is a colonel in the army.

There’s talk of spies, counterfeit money, a strike and even a problem with burglars in the neighbourhood and rumours fly around, aided and abetted by Nita, a nasty piece of work who takes aim at Daphne with a view to getting her sacked as a prefect. The characters of the two Maitland girls shine through it all though with Dimsie in particular becoming popular with just about everyone, the addition of some well written Scots dialect was enjoyed by me anyway.

I found it interesting that it was written in 1919 and that first marking of armistice day is described as ‘the rejoicings’. That struck me as being really strange as today more than one hundred years later it’s always a very sober affair. I think a lot of people in 1919 who had lost family members in the war would not have felt much like celebrating and in a girls’ school there would have been girls who had lost fathers and brothers in the war.

Whatever, this was a really entertaining read and I think it was better than any by Angela Brazil that I’ve read and she was the most popular writer of school stories, but maybe that was just because she wrote so many of them.