War Among Ladies by Eleanor Scott

War Among Ladies by Eleanor Scott was first published in 1928 but it has just been reprinted by British Library. It’s a school story as experienced by teachers. It isn’t a comfortable read, whether you have just experienced schools as a pupil, or also as a teacher. It is very authentic though.

Besley High School is situated in an English Midland town called Stamborough. Although Miss Barr is the headmistress it’s the County Education Offices that hold the power in the shape of school inspectors. The school has been going downhill in recent years and there’s a real problem with behaviour and discipline which of course has an effect on exam results. If you fail one exam then you fail the whole year and this puts terrible pressure on everyone.

Miss Cullen is only four years off retirement, but she has lost control of her classes and can’t keep up with the new ways of doing things. All the other teachers dislike her. Miss Cullen had been at Oxford’s Sommerville College and in her younger days had been described as being brilliant, but now she has no friends and has had to live her whole life in shabby boarding houses, in common with the other teachers. Some of the others have not been to a teacher training college and so get less pay than Miss Cullen, but worse than that, they fear that the school will be closed down and they’ll all lose their jobs, including the money that they had had to pay into ‘The Fund’ which is what they call their pension, apparently nobody has ever got any money out of the fund though, even when they retire!

Viola Kennedy is one of three new young teachers at the beginning of the summer term. She’s really good at controlling the pupils and they enjoy her classes, but Viola is already finding teaching to be an exhausting job, there’s so much more than just teaching that must be done. But it’s the politics of the staff room and the nastiness of some of her colleagues that really get her down.

This is a great read although not exactly uplifting, in fact it’s a wee bit depressing. I’m not sure that anyone actually teaching nowadays would be all that keen to read about how things were almost 100 years ago because in reality nothing much has changed, regarding colleagues and politics.

The big differences are that in 1928 all female teachers were unmarried, if they wanted to get married they had to resign. They weren’t able to buy a home of their own unless they were lucky enough to be able to buy one outright, women couldn’t get mortgages. Actually even in the 1970s in the UK women couldn’t get a mortgage from a bank, unless they had a male guarantor. That happened to me and I was fizzing mad as I was the breadwinner at that time!

As ever this British Library edition has lots of interesting information on the times it was written, the author, and of course an Afterword by Simon Thomas.

I was lucky enough to be sent a copy of the book for review by the publisher. Thank you, British Library.

The Star-Spangled Manner by Beverley Nichols

The Star-Spangled Manner cover

The Star-Spangled Manner by Beverley Nichols was first published in 1928 and it’s a collection of twenty-three essays about various aspects of life in America in those days. More than anything I was struck by how topical many of the subjects are, even after ninety years.

Beverley Nichols obviously liked visiting America, he lectured there and supervised the production of plays. He had lots of friends and very high-profile contacts there, but he was always an observer and often a critic. He even managed to have a meeting with the then President, Coolidge who apparently had a reputation for being rather silent and lacking in personality, but Nichols managed to get some interesting thoughts and anecdotes out of him.

Prohibition was in place at this time, so there are his observations on that – it’s a mess of course. He also meets a Trump-ish businessman with his eyes on the White House, but it’s towards the end of the book that his thoughts turn back to Britain and the need to regenerate British industry. He calls for Europe to unite and to get rid of all the economic tariffs between the various European countries.

From the previous books that I’ve read by Beverley Nichols I had no idea that he had a serious and deeply thoughtful side to his personality. He’s not perfect of course – who is? But I really like being in his company – via his books. How Brexit would have enraged him!