Tag Archives: school story

The Princess of the Chalet School by E.M. Brent-Dyer

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The Princess of the Chalet School by E.M. Brent-Dyer was first published in 1927 and it’s the third book in the Chalet School series which I’ve started to revisit since reading some of them as a youngster. I can’t really say it’s a trip down memory lane as I don’t remember too much about them, or maybe I just read the later books.

Princess Elisaveta has never been to school before, having been educated by governesses. She doesn’t know it but the heir to the throne in her country would like to get his hands on her to try to force the king to abdicate in his favour.

Meanwhile. Miss Bettany has employed a new matron without interviewing her, and it isn’t long before she realises that that was a big mistake.  The matron is a ghastly woman with a shrieking voice and she thinks the worst of everyone, but particularly dislikes Jo as she’s the headmistress’s sister, she even dislikes the baby of the school, The Robin! In no time flat the matron’s behaviour has upset the whole school.

A lack of communication leads to danger for Elisaveta and Jo. Miss Bettany is busy with her wedding preparations as well as the running of the school. but all is well – of course.

Nowadays we might think how unlikely it would be that a princess would be at the Chalet School but you don’t have to suspend disbelief too much as there were lots of what we would call minor royal European families around even in the 1920s. Such fun!

 

The Feud in the Fifth Remove by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

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The Feud in the Fifth Remove by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer was first published in 1932  but it has been reprinted by Girls Gone By Books more recently. At just 112 pages it’s a quick read, but still very enjoyable.

It begins at the start of a Christmas term at the Abbey School which has a fair few girls with unusual names, even for the 1930s – Philathea and Salathiel are new to me. But it’s Brenda, the new girl who causes trouble.

Brenda is an only child and has been utterly spoiled by her parents, but particularly her mother.  The results are that Brenda is a complete snob and it isn’t long before she’s sussed out and graded all the girls according to how much money she thinks their fathers will earn. Despite having  an eclectic mixture of backgrounds the pupils get on well together in general, but Brenda believes that those girls in the higher echelons, by her standards, shouldn’t have to consort with the girls who come from a ‘trade’ background, and she’s daft enough to try to get the other girls to join in with her and freeze out what Brenda regards as the poorer pupils.

It transpires that Brenda isn’t only a snob but she’s a liar and cheat too, and when she starts being rude to her mother even her mother has to accept that she has brought up a thoroughly unpleasant daughter. Brenda won’t even accept that the school’s prefects have a right to tell her what to do and she decides to run a campaign to get rid of them.

This book is like a handbook of how to conduct your life if you want to be an upstanding member of society. Just don’t do as Brenda does. I found it entertaining though and as ever I enjoyed being in the company of the characters.

 

War Among Ladies by Eleanor Scott

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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.

Strangers at the Farm School by Josephine Elder

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Strangers at the Farm School cover

Strangers at the Farm School by Josephine Elder was first published in 1940 but the setting is September 1938, the new academic year for The Farm School. There are a lot of changes, the school has become very popular and has almost doubled the amount of pupils that they had. The original pupils aren’t too happy about that, and the new people aren’t terribly impressed with the place at all. Most of them are locals but there are also two Jewish refugees from Germany, a brother and sister.

Johanna and Hans have had to leave their parents in Germany, and in recent years they had had a horrible time because of Hitler’s attitude to Jews, people they had formerly thought of as friends had turned against them, and their father is now in a concentration camp. Their mother had managed to get them on a Kindertransport train to England. But Hans in particular isn’t happy about being at the Farm School and he struggles with the lack of rules after the rigidity of what he has been used to in Germany.

Annis is voted head of the school, and Arthur is not happy about it, he thinks the head should be a boy – him.

“I rather think he’ll want watching,” Kitty said. “He’s the sort of person who thinks it’s all wrong for a girl to be in authority over boys. Kicked up a fuss at first because he had to have lessons from mistresses as well as masters, and in his family the girls have to make the boys’ beds for them, and the boys don’t do anything at all in return. There would be some sense in it if they cleaned the girls’ shoes for them, but they don’t, they loll about in a lordly sort of way.”

I think this is my favourite of the three books in this series. Josephine Elder was so forward thinking for the time the book was written in. Thirty years later my mother still thought that education was wasted on daughters because they “ended up pushing a pram anyway”. My brothers were treated like little household gods while I did all the housework! Can you tell I am still bitter about it?!

Anyway, I suppose the subtext of this book is that people shouldn’t be judged too quickly as often they have talents that are unexpected, particularly the teachers.

I was slightly disappointed that at the beginning of the book young Kenneth’s death (in the previous book) is written as being almost a blessing, because he was mentally handicapped. That attitude was rife in Germany at the time with such people being killed in hospitals as they weren’t deemed to be useful in a country which was fashioning itself as the ‘master race’. But I don’t think most people in Britain would have thought like that.

Cherry Tree Perch by Josephine Elder

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Cherry Tree Perch by Josephine Elder is the second book in the author’s ‘Farm school’ series, it was first published in 1939.

In this one Annis is back at the Farm school in April for the new term. The Farm School is run by her friend Kitty’s family and the place is a bit of a misnomer as the school is very far from being all about animals. Some children are there to concentrate on the sciences, music or art, and the easy-going atmosphere seems to make them blossom. Annis learns to ride and gets her own horse and takes part in a gymkhana at the Agricultural Show.

Annis is thrilled to be with her best friend Kitty again but things have changed as Miss de Vipon, a rather eccentric person is now living in one of the cottages and Kitty is spending a lot of time with her. Annis is frankly jealous of that relationship, but there’s more to worry about when haystacks begin to be deliberately set alight. Who would put the farm in such danger?

There’s just one more book in this series and I’ll get around to reading that one – sometime.

The idea for the Farm School might have been inspired by the Summerhill School which was founded in the early 1920s, it has a similar ethos anyway.

Exile for Annis by Josephine Elder

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With the Hogmanay celebrations being cancelled in Scotland and meeting up with people being discouraged, I needed a trip into a different world via a book, and Exile for Annis by Josephine Elder hit the spot. It was first published in 1938 and it’s the first book in the author’s Farm School series.

Annis is 14 years old and has been quite ill, her mother thinks it isn’t a good idea for her to go back to her school which is an ordinary High School that concentrates on a lot of sports. Annis loves her school, in fact she’s quite disdainful of any others, she thinks the way her school is run is perfect, but when it’s described it’s evident to the reader that the school and its pupils have fostered a rather elitist attitude as they all believe that any other schools are inferior. So when her parents decide that Annis will be sent to a school in the country Annis is horrified, she thinks it sounds awful, but she can’t wriggle out of it as her parents are going to be away from home for some time.

Annis soon learns that her prejudices were misplaced as she blossoms in the more relaxed atmosphere of the farm school and finds new friends. It’s a surprise to her that although the pupils don’t seem to be studying anything like as hard as they would if they had been at the High School they still all pass their important exams, and they also learn how to care for animals and do farm work. Despite some difficulties the experience has been a positive one as Annis has met people she would not have encountered at her old school and it has all contributed to enriching experiences for her, and for most of the people she encounters.

It was an enjoyable read. I had never come across the name Annis before but it’s explained in the book that it is a Scottish name for a girl, but I’ve certainly never heard of it before.

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.

The School on the Moor by Angela Brazil

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The School on the Moor cover

The School on the Moor by Angela Brazil was first published in 1939. Brenda is 13 and she and her brother Denis are living with their Aunt Madge and Uncle Harry while their father is working in India, their mother is already dead. When Uncle Harry gets a job in Argentina the children have to be sent to boarding schools as Aunt Madge will be going with him, it’s not something that they’re looking forward to, they’d rather stay with Grannie but that won’t be possible. So Brenda is sent to a school in Cornwall while Denis is sent to Portsmouth.

I can’t say that I found this book that entertaining, maybe the prospect of war was weighing on the author’s mind at the time. The schoolgirls seemed to spend a lot of time getting up entertainments for people and each other, and none of them was particularly enthralling, I found the whole thing to be very predictable. Thankfully it’s a very quick read.

Oh well, there have to be some duds in life so that we can appreciate the stars!

The Mystery of the Moated Grange by Angela Brazil

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The Mystery of the Moated Grange cover

The Mystery of the Moated Grange by Angela Brazil was published in 1942 and World War 2 does feature in it as the tale opens with the Bevan family enjoying a last hour together before Captain Bevan goes off to rejoin his regiment. Captain Bevan had had a week long leave but he had to spend so much time in London with solicitors that the time had gone so quickly. The upshot of that is that he has inherited an estate from an elderly uncle – if the uncle’s estranged son doesn’t turn up to claim it. It’s thought that the son must be dead.

Maenan Grange is a moated property in rural Herefordshire and it has just been rented out to a boarding school which has been evacuated to the safety of the countryside. The two Bevan girls are enrolled at the school while Mrs Bevan becomes a sort of custodian of the house. It’s an awkward situation for Mrs Bevan and the teachers who really don’t want the owner of the property looking over their shoulders. The older son of the family is sent to a nearby boarding school for boys.

The Bevan children are very impressed with their new home, but they know there’s some sort of mystery surrounding it as they overheard their father saying something was a gamble. The Bevan sisters, Marian and Hilda find it difficult to make friends with the schoolgirls, Marian is particularly aware of her status as the daughter of the owner of the grange, and is a bit stand-offish with the other girls for that reason.

The possibility of the grange being haunted and a hint of lost treasure make this one seem like a cross between an Angela Brazil and an Enid Blyton, but it’s an entertaining light read for pandemic times.

If you fancy having a read at an old-fashioned school story have a look here at the Angela Brazil books available free from Project Gutenberg. This book isn’t available free as it’s one of her later books. She had a very long career which began in 1899 and ended in 1946, she died in 1947.