St.Clare's v Malory Towers

[reelingintheyears]

Why was that thread just pulled?

gosh, first I don't really know why the books would be considered right wing and worrying that as a fairly right wing individual (please note this is not the same as fascist, racist or homophobic) I should be disliking books because they are left wing. I don't think I ever have

Schadenfreude - yes, I reread the Put-Em-Rights recently. Bunch of kids urged by the 'Wandering Preacher' to improve lives of people around them, take it literally, try to help/interfere with locals, learn that actually they have their own faults which need fixing first. Which wouldn't be a bad plot except that what one of the kids 'needs' to learn is that he is working-class and shouldn't be hanging around with and bothering his 'betters' from the vicarage and their friends.

Worse than the otherwise-excellent Six Bad Boys where Blyton fairly sympathetically looks at the youth justice system of the day and the various boys (2 nice middle-class ones fallen in with a bad lot, 4 'bad' working-class ones with previous) get told off/fostered/sent to approved school to get a fresh start/family moved to a lovely new housing estate as it's understood overcrowding was a factor. All very touching, but the last one, 'wild Patrick' is sent to Borstal because he was Irish so what do you expect?!

Ok - Nick is in favour of capital punishment: she agrees with Mrs Bertie that the 'just boys' in TRMF should be whipped.
Edwin, an obvious twat, reads the Guardian.
Keith's ideas that 'a great corporate effort from the whole school' is to be preferred to gifted children shining in things they're already good at are clearly marked as risible - as are 'character building' ideas about who should be in teams.
Rowan is scathing when Lawrie suggests the socialist idea in TFL that they all put money in a kitty for the fete and draw out winnings fairly, rather than paying their own way and taking their own winnings. This is clearly meant to be Lawrie being tight, and ideologically wrong.
Maudie in TTA tries to help wayward young boys - she's a twat for it.
Mr Merrick is clearly a Tory MP.
Patrick rightfully hates the progressive approach of Vatican ii, not just on faith grounds but because it's all a bit liberal and modern.
Ginty dislikes bloodsports, but only when she's being a twat - when she comes to her senses, she starts liking them again.

I'll think of more.......

My point being that they're all ideas I don't much care for - and that this is a series of books with a fairly right wing ideology underpinning them. And yet I still sort of want to live at Trennels and go to Kingscote!

I don't do/like blood sports

I think it is inevitable that some twats will read the Guardian.

It doesn't actually say what kind of MP Mr Merrick is, does it?

Being in favour of captial punishment is not a particularly right wing viewpoint, I certainly am not.

I take your point about allowing some people to shine rather than condemning all to mediocrity

I also often think of those two books notcitrus, they are really shocking in their attitude and show how much things have changed. I do think Six Bad Boys is actually rather annoyingly sexist, it is purely because his mother goes out to work that the one boy goes to the bad.

Humphrey - it's actually not just because she goes out to work, but the staying late socialising with 'friends', and staying out with them - heavily implied she's sleeping over at men's houses. It's more subtle than I realised as a kid.

Re the Forrest politics - I think they're more small-c-rural-conservative than what we now think of as right-wing. Given that capital punishment was still happening and whipping naughty children was both legal and normal, and hunting was a 'standard' rural activity with animal rights not really being an issue yet, I wouldn't expect the incredibly-normal Marlows to say anything against them.
Looking up the 1950 and 1951 election results, as you do, it looks incredibly unlikely for the Trennels constituency to be anything other than classic Tory.

I think right wing on here is often woefully misrepresented as being racist/sexist/authoritarian and it can be really annoying for us economic libertarians to be lumped in with some Daily mail reading reactionary. Hence the chippyness, I do apologise.

Yes I agree - rural conservative and representative of their type more than anything, which is not unusual in books of the earlier Marlow era that I've read. And actually yes, as a leftish adult I probably feel similar to Malcontent.

Mr Merrick clearly a Tory.

But I don't think Edwin was 100% twat. In the Cricket Term he reveals definite non-twatty depths.

I grew to like Edwin - I think in Cricket Term Nicola realised that she has changed from thinking 'What does Karen see in Edwin' to 'What does Edwin see in Karen'

Mind you, I do wonder if the Karen/Edwin marriage would have lasted

Oh I'm not saying all Tories are landed gentry or anything (though I do think you'd be hard pushed to argue that Anthony Merrick was anything but a Tory MP!).

Ann is the most consistently liberal/left-leaning of all of them - very tolerant and socially liberal etc, doesn't think there should be wars..... and we all know where she comes on the family liking list!

There are many things that are very much of their time, probably just as much as in EB, and I agree it doesn't have to marr the reading experience. But I've always been uncomfortable with the bit where Miranda complains that another girl is always saying 'sort of underneath', 'whose father is a rich Jew, then?', and the narrative goes on to state that Nicola doesn;t know what to say since 'Miranda's father was undoubtedly fantastically wealthy, and so very ugly that once you got to know him it became an endearing character trait' or something.

I never saw things like Lawrie's wanting to share the fees/prizes for the festival evenly, nor Miss Keith's desire for corporate form/school efforts, as reflecting anything about the wider world - I always thought that they were simply character assassinations (Lawrie being notoriously tight with money, and knowing that the prizes for the other events were bigger than hers; Miss Keith being generally shown as not a particularly good headmistress). I have difficulty seeing those as evidence of right-wing-ness more generally. However, otherwise, I do tend to see the Marlows as being fairly typical country conservative types simply because of background and the times, rather than conservative as an active choice. Nicola has some conservative traits and attitudes, but then in other ways can be quite liberal (e.g., thinking it 'grotty' that a book portraying a homosexual character should be on the limited list because of it - although I know that there is controversy about exactly what her statement means). Some of Patrick's ideas show a strange mix too.

Patrick's oddest idea is that sex outside marriage is only ok if it's someone you really love - or if it's 'paid for', I think!

indeed! that was one of the ones I was thinking of...

And any fifteen year old who comments after his first snog 'that was rather pleasurable, might we do it again sometime?' needs a slap, Tory or no!

Definitely

Ha! Yes Patrick in the flesh might have been a bit hard to take I think.

Agree with MorningPurples re the character stuff - all part of what makes it such fantastic reading.

Also AF herself was partly Russian Jewish, which came as a total shock to me but does give a different slant to the Miranda thing (and must remember how shockingly racist some perfectly well received books were, right through the 60s).

I loved the Malory Towers, St Clares and Trebizon series but never got to grips with the Chalet school. The stories were a revelation to me as a child going to an inner city school. A couple of years ago I went down to Dorset and swam in the pool carved out of rock which had inspired the one in malor Towers and it was entirely fab