It was in a Chalet School book by Elinor M.Brent-Dyer (1894-1969) that I picked up the following tip: if you want to wake at a particular time of the morning and you haven’t an alarm clock, before you go to sleep, bang your head against the pillow for the number of times of the hour you want to wake -five times for five o’clock, six times for six, and so on. This actually works. Childhood reading is lifelong learning.
We had a few late 1960s paperback Armada editions of the Chalet School books in our house growing up – Jo of the Chalet School, The Chalet School in Exile, The Chalet School and Barbara, Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School, probably a few more, and we borrowed as many of the others as we could from the library and from friends. It was the sister just older than me who was the chief fan and expert, but we all relished these books for the Alpine locations, the adventures, the food and the multi-linguality of the school, but most of all, I think, because of the respect that flowed teacher-pupil in both directions, and from the pupils to each other. There was no sarcasm or belittling, and very little ridicule or teasing. The pupils were of all nationalities and creeds. Nearly all the British or American childhood books we read purported to be carefully non-denominational and ethnically neutral, but the default setting was always (for want of a better phrase) white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The Chalet School respected non-English people and sometimes even had Catholic pupils. This made the books all the more realistic for us.
The girls’ ‘school story’ sprang up in Britain in the late nineteenth century. (Up to this, girls were neglected in fiction and in entertainment – Molly Hughes, who grew up in a very loving and liberal middle-class London home in the 1870s, tells us that when she was small, all books and entertainments and excursions were for her brothers.) There had been Catholic girls’ boarding-schools run by convents for centuries, but the secular (or Protestant) girls’ school only really spread from about the 1860s, for a lot of complex historical reasons I won’t go into. The 1890s saw the emergence of the girls’ school story, and over the following decades authors like Angela Brazil, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Elsie J. Oxenham and many, many others were widely read, and not just by girls who attended such schools. This entirely female world, with female figures of authority, friendships, rivalries, rules and regulations, found its way into the comics too. ‘The Four Marys’ in the Bunty were Mary Simpson, Mary Raleigh, Mary Field and Mary Cotter, earnest girls in shapeless gymslips, and their headmistress was Dr Gull. Why would a doctor be in charge of a school, we wondered? Only in later years did I realise that ‘Dr’ meant PhD, and that D.C.Thomson (the Dundee firm who published this and many other well-loved comics) were giving a nod, here, to the high academic achievements of many of the women involved in girls’ education.
Madge Bettany, a 24-year-old Englishwoman in The School at the Chalet (the first book), does not have a PhD, or even a degree (or if she does, we are not told), but she needs to earn a living for herself and her delicate but strong-minded younger sister, Joey. Their brother Dick, a civil servant in India, can just about support himself. Madge decides to set up an English school in the Tyrol, not too far from Innsbruck, where she spotted a likely-looking chalet-type building when they were on an extended stay there for Joey’s health. Madge has just enough capital to buy it and furnish it – there is something about East India stock. The school fees are £360 a year; £360 in 1925 equals about £23,000 in today’s money, which is almost exactly what Cheltenham Ladies College (the most exclusive English girls’ school) charges for boarders nowadays. The Chalet School gets day-pupils locally, too,however, and we aren’t told how much they are charged. Initially, English is the language of the school, although Madge and Joey are fluent in German and French, but as the school develops over the various books, they have French-speaking days and German-speaking days, and all the meals have German names. And those meals! Baskets piled high with brown rolls, glass dishes of amber honey and a big earthenware jug of coffee poured into mugs.
That first book, The School At The Chalet, is all about settling in and getting to know the mountains and the people living there. Though the point of view and central characters are English, that Englishness is never over-bearing. Caught unawares by a storm on the mountain, some of the girls and Madge have to seek refuge in a herdsman’s hut, and bed down on clean straw, after a night-time snack of wood-smoked milk, bread and cheese. (Madge pays for an earlier snack of milk which they’ve availed of at the hut, and probably for this food too. This is an important detail.) The herdsman is described as an authority in his own realm, without a hint of condescension. The same is true of all the local people, who are never ‘funny natives’. In a novel by Ann Bridge, Peking Picnic (1932), set in China, one of the resident English characters remarks unblushingly on the profusion of ‘foreigners’ staying at some hotel locally. The Chalet School books avoid this kind of unintentionally comical (and sadly, widespread) Anglo-centrism.
They also also avoid seeing the school as the Alpha and Omega; there is a world outside it. Madge and Joey’s eventual marriages, though implausibly fertile – each has several sets of multiple births – are part of the school’s life. This is unusual in school stories, where life outside the school is barely glimpsed and reproduction is never, ever referred to. The classic school story was timeless. When I read Angela Brazil books in the 1970s (The Head Girl At The Gables, The Luckiest Girl in the School) I thought that they were set in my own time, when they were actually published in the early decades of the century. The same is true of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and Saint Clare’s series, published in the 1940s and ’50s, which I read as contemporary in the 1960s and ’70s. But the Chalet School changes with the times and takes notice of politics. It has to. After the Anschluss it moves to Guernsey and then to Britain for a while and after the war, to Switzerland.
So is the Chalet School a classic school story? An incident in the first book both supports and subverts this categorisation. The Austrian and French girls are attracted to the school in the first instance because they are so fond of English school stories, with headmistresses, prefects and other traditions. Gisela invokes a book, ‘Denise of the Fourth’, written by a (fictional) author, Muriel Bernardine Browne, and suggests the Chalet Schoolgirls emulate some of the practices in it, much to Joey’s amusement. They do actually adopt some of the practices – a school magazine, and celebration of the headmistress’s birthday (they club together and buy her a china tea-set in Innsbruck). So Brent-Dyer manages, cleverly, to have it both ways.
Girls Gone By, based in south-west England, are bringing out delightful reprints of the Chalet School and similar books. Their website is not just a trip down memory lane, but important social history, too. They have also reissued some of the Chalet School fan magazine newsletters in book form. Brent-Dyer’s letters in the Chalet School Club Newsletter in the 1960s, from her home in Thistle St in Edinburgh, reveal her as a kindly and lively person, with lots of information about her own doings, and tips for aspiring writers. In one letter in 1964 she reminds her readers that ‘neither status, nor colour nor even religion should set us apart from each other, the same God made us all and not one of His created children has the right to claim superiority over others.’ This was the ethos of the Chalet School as I remember it.
Molly Hughes, A London Child of the 1870s (Oxford University Press 1934: London, Persephone 2011).
Elinor M.Brent-Dyer, The School at the Chalet (London: Chambers 1926: Armada 1967, 1992.)
____________Jo of the Chalet School (London: Chambers 1926: Armada 1967, 1992).
___________Eustacia goes to the Chalet School (London: Chambers 1930. Armada 1968.)
___________The Chalet School in Exile (London: Chambers 1940: Armada, presumably late 1960s also.)
__________ The Chalet School and Barbara (London: Chambers 1954; Armada 1968.)
Girls Gone By, Chalet Club Newsletters (Somerset: Girls Gone By 2016).
Girls Gone By Publishers website: I couldn’t cut and paste the website address bar here, but google Girls Gone By and you are in for a treat.
Clear Classics is where I, Caitriona Clear, write about my literary and historical enthusiasms. Some time I might set up a publishing house to reprint old books which deserve a new audience, or just good books generally. I have just completed A Concise History of Ireland for Cambridge University Press (due out April 2026), and I have embarked on a biography of the writer Alice Curtayne (1898-1981). These will be my 5th and – I hope – 6th books.
Clear Classic Books 
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