The Chalet School

[ShellacB]

There seem to be plenty of old Chalet School Threads, but I can't find a current one.

In the middle of a re read. I have just finished the Tyrolean and Herefordshire ones. I loved them!

I do remember the Swiss books not being quite of the same quality, so not sure whether to read them all.

Could anyone recommend the best Swiss books if I was to skim through?

The first book I read was New Mistress when I was 9. I’m now 57 and I’ve been hooked ever since.

The class thing has always intrigued me. EBD is always clear that one doesn’t judge by class or being foreign - if one is a ‘gentlewoman’
But this is in a world where the only people they talk to are in their class or they are servants.

Very much of it’s time but it leaps out with the disdain for shop bought cake and ‘cheap’ ideas. It starts early, when they found Biddy O’Ryan and the school adopted her, she didn’t go to the school. She was sent to the village school first as clearly she wasn’t ‘suitable’ to mix with the young ladies. But as ever with EBD it all works out well and she marries a doctor…

‘Our Lady was the wife of a carpenter.’

And Biddy, like Ros Lilley, was the daughter of a lady’s maid who learned to be ladylike from her mistress.

Ladies maids were definitely top tier servants. 😁

There are plenty of MN posters who will still be rude about shop bought cake. EBD was just early on the UPF bandwagon.

But yes, agree. It’s noblesse oblige rather than any sort of real equality. Very much what you’d expect of these characters at this time.

It’s more than that, though. It’s not just that the best kind of working-class people, according to EBD, are former upper servants who have learned ‘gentility’ from their employers (Mrs Lilley, Biddy’s mother, the salt-of-the-earth granny in Gay who has unexpectedly pretty handwriting which she’d learned as a maid when her ‘young ladies’ were in the schoolroom — whereas Joan Baker’s mother, also working-class but who worked in a shop, clearly hasn’t learned gentility or at least hasn’t passed it onto Joan, who eats fish and chips in the street with ‘unsavoury’ Vic Coles), it’s that she thinks the upper classes even look different.

When Gay runs away, she’s wearing a disgraceful old coat and her heaviest shoes, ‘but there was no mistaking what she was’. And it’s not just her accent that gives her away, it’s her ‘highbred little face’ and ‘graceful carriage’ that show she’s not ‘a cottage girl’.

But that is all fairly standard for the time, jarring though it reads to us now. Back when EBD was growing up and malnourishment and hard physical labour were standard, poorer people would often look physically different to those who had none of that. My mother, born in the 30s, said that girls were drilled in posture and given exercises for flat feet etc at her grammar school. My father by contrast, born into a much poorer family, had bowed legs all his life.

Not that it was a universal truth of course.

And the red sarafan

Just wanted to add that it was a fairly accepted view that poor people looked generally less ‘well bred’ at that time. Probable also exacerbated by access to dental treatment, hairdressers etc as much as anything else.

Older people, sure — signs of physical labour, missing teeth (for women, didn’t they used to say ‘one tooth per child’?) etc.

But no one suggests for instance that pallid, skinny Joey (who looks incredibly unhealthy at the start of the series) looks indistinguishable from a malnourished slum child, for instance.

No, of course not! She was of middle class stock and therefore obviously innately different to any poor person, as any fule no.

Just because there was some truth at the bottom of a fixed idea doesn’t mean it’ll always be right.

But the physical differences would still have been very apparent even in young people in the 20s, and very much so in the north east at the end of the 19th century when EBD was born. The impact of the welfare state on the physical health of working class people was enormous. IIRC one of the factors in play in the creation of the NHS was the number of working class men deemed physically unfit to serve during the war.

But no one suggests for instance that pallid, skinny Joey (who looks incredibly unhealthy at the start of the series) looks indistinguishable from a malnourished slum child, for instance.

She'd have been clean and well groomed and her clothes of good quality.

the concern about the number of men unfit for military service goes back as far as the Boer War, certainly the First World War, when conscription was first used.

I think that a lot of what she writes is very much of the time and whilst some of the more classist and sexist parts are jarring to us now, in some ways she was probably ahead of her time (for the period she was writing in.)

The stereotypical Scottish and Irish accents of the Highland Twins and Biddy O'Ryan are jarring, as is the repeated chastising of them by Chalet Staff for not using 'proper English' just because they are speaking in their own natural accents. As is the repeated depiction of Irish girls being wild etc. I don't think this demonstrates any ill feeling EBD had towards the Irish or Scottish as Biddy, and the McDonalds are all clearly well liked by her, but it is jarring in the present day.

There is also one passage in camp where 'Bill' also does a speech about a woman's place being in the home and as a homemaker. It is completely outdated and sexist now, but in 1932 it would have been considered to be the perfectly acceptable viewpoint.

Likewise the idea that a brilliant woman like Madge who had started her own school etc must immediately give up all her work just because she is marrying Jem. Ditto for Simone, Mollie Maynard, Miss Carthew, Miss Leslie etc etc etc.

In other ways she was far ahead of her time. Examples being her promoting the idea that girls should be as well educated as boys, promoting Catholics and Protestants as being educated together in such harmony and also all of the different nationalities being educated together.

She was also far ahead of the times in the late 30s and early 40s, in terms of being able to distinguish Germans from Nazis, the peace league etc. Part of what makes Exile so brilliant.

I've recently returned from a weekend in Newcastle with the New Chalet Club, where we celebrated 100 years since the publication of The School At The Chalet (and 30 years since the formation of the NCC) with talk, laughter, and a fair amount of light country wine. There was a talk by Gill Sims (Peter and Jane blog and Why Mummy Drinks), a book launch from Sheena Eastwood, whose writing career was inspired partly by Jo Returns, and another talk from people who'd visited Pertisau this year for the centenary.
I can thoroughly recommend it!

I wanted to go to this but was nervous because I wouldn't know anyone there. Is it ok to go alone or do most people know others?
I am thinking of trying to go to the next one. I really enjoy the Facebook group and journals

Oh, do it! I joined my local group first so I knew a few people, but honestly, you can just turn up and introduce yourself and be welcomed. I am generally very unconfident socially but this weekend I sat with complete strangers and made new friends. Some people "recognised" me from the Facebook group, too.

Oh that's really encouraging to hear @pontefractals

This was the frontispiece from my copy of Problem (which I still have somewhere) and although Joan isn't big, there's definitely a hint of lipstick on that mouth and a very saucy tilt to the head. Rosamund seems to have come down in her nightie, although it's probably a decent plain wool frock as opposed to Joan's common (and no doubt store-bought, not homemade) skirt and sweater. She does look a bit wet, to be fair.

One thing that always confused me about the Chalet School was all the girls who had male nicknames - Len and Con Maynard, Tom Gay, "Bill" (who is Bill?). I'm sure the Robin gets referred to as "Auntie Rob" at some point by one of the triplets, and Joey has a baby daughter who's actually named Cecil. My grandmother (b.1925) was a Josephine and would have been of an age to attend the CS but I don't think she was ever called Jo or Joey as a child.

Rosamund looks as if she’s from a different era!

Bill is Miss Wilson, & Cecil was short for Cecilia (after Robin).

Charlie for Miss Stewart too! I wish they had kept her for longer.

Is there ever much mention of Miss Stewart or Miss Maynard in the Swiss stories?

Another unique thing about The Chalet School is how well drawn the teaching staff characters are. Unique for school stories at the time.

Miss Maynard pops up (fat) in Reunion. Charlie moves to Australia and ends up as Emerence’s next door neighbour I think?

Don’t forget Tom Gay, Dickie Christie and the awful Jack Lambert!

Doesn’t she get fat-shamed in Reunion and then have an operation fir her ‘glands’ and get thin again?

I think you’re thinking of Mollie Bettany, Dick’s wife. She’s seriously ill with goitre(thyroid?) problems and either Peggy or Bride have to postpone their plans to have a year as ‘Millie’s,’ to stay at home instead to housekeep at the Quadrant.

RE Grizel: Does anyone else feels as though she like a reformed character by Head Girl (number 4 in series) then several books afterwards when she returns to the Tyrol post college, she regresses to back to the character she was in the first book?

She comes across as being quite selfless and thoughtful in Head Girl and then regresses back to being rather cold and selfish again afterwards.

“Thank goodness for asbestos!” 😂 When there is a fire.

The main characters being so “delicate” (Joey, the Robin) can be strange to a modern reader, but I’ve learned that my grandfather was like that: was a sickly child, so was moved to a seaside town for his health.

Also the whole premise of Madge starting the school on a whim seems strange, in these Ofsted times.