Hello, and welcome to Tophole, the podcast about Elinor M Brent-Dyer, the Chalet School, and anything vaguely connected. I’m Deborah Lofas, and I’m a fan.
The usual provisos apply, with respect to pronunciation, spoilers and bonkersness; please see episode zero.
As we approach the summer holiday season, there’s one holiday from the past which I keep thinking about. It’s a holiday which changed the life of the woman who went on it, and indirectly affected lots of our lives. I wouldn’t be sitting here now, doing this, and you wouldn’t be listening to me, but for that holiday. And it happened a hundred years ago, when a schoolteacher in Hampshire decided to spend her 1924 summer holiday in the Austrian Tirol.
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Anybody attempting to do any sort of account of Elinor’s life owes an enormous debt to her biographer, Helen McClelland. I certainly do. I consult her book Behind the Chalet School when preparing almost every episode of Tophole, to put whatever I’m talking about into the context of Elinor’s life and output. And it was Helen’s “Well, I’ll do it myself then!” attitude to researching and writing about Elinor’s life which I adopted when I couldn’t find a podcast about the Chalet School.
Behind the Chalet School was first published in 1981. I have the revised 1996 Bettany Press edition. I know that in the nearly 30 years since this edition was published, there has been further research into Elinor’s life, so I am going to apologise in advance for any comments I make, which don’t properly take account of this.
Elinor herself was 30 when she took that momentous holiday in Austria, in 1924. A thirtieth birthday is significant to many people; it’s the point where you realise that, while not exactly middle-aged, you’re probably pushing it to describe yourself as young. You certainly feel there is a cavernous gap in experience and understanding between yourself, and any young people you know. And for many women today, 30 can be an alarming milestone, if you had hopes your future would include marriage and children.
The carnage of the 1914-18 war meant that many women of Elinor’s generation would not have the opportunity for marriage and children. They were dubbed ‘superfluous women’, because patriarchy never misses a chance to be offensive, but the fact that so many women were affected in this way may, I think, have been helpful. It is much worse when you are the only one not doing what society brought you up to do.
But it’s still not always easy, and I wonder what Elinor’s thoughts were on this. Her female characters are constantly getting married – usually to doctors – and having children, which gives the impression of wish-fulfilment. But there are enough single women in her fiction – women who are entirely satisfied with their lives and have no apparent intention of converting to domesticity – to suggest an acknowledgement by Elinor that actually, not getting married is OK. In the early books we have Mademoiselle Lepattre in this role, but generally this attitude came much later in the Chalet School series. And I think Elinor, at 30, may have thought that marriage and children were unlikely to come her way now. So, why not take a holiday abroad? You don’t need a husband for that, you can go with a friend. And you never know, you might meet a nice Austrian count while you’re out there.
This wasn’t Elinor’s first trip overseas. The previous year, 1923, she had spent the summer in Guernsey – which, although part of the British Isles, is different enough in language and customs to feel foreign. This holiday had inspired her to write The Maids of La Rochelle, which suggests the trip was a success. And while Elinor was on holiday in the Channel Islands, one of her friends was holidaying in the Austrian Tirol, and undoubtedly told Elinor all about it afterwards. So, having put a toe into the water of foreign travel, so to speak, why not be even more adventurous in 1924?
You see, Elinor needed somewhere to spend the summer. She disliked her stepfather, so she had no enthusiasm for returning to South Shields. And she also disliked her landlady in Hampshire – a woman who may have been the inspiration for Matron Webb in Princess, which tells you all you need to know about her. Under those circumstances, the decision to go away for 8 weeks seems eminently sensible. But her salary as a teacher was a modest one, and her income from writing did not add a great deal to it, so Elinor needed to go somewhere cheap.
And Austria was a ridiculously cheap place to stay, at the time, compared to the UK. Madge, when she is explaining her plan to start a school there to Dick, describes the Tirol as a place where you could live for next to nothing. Elinor knew this from her own experience of spending a summer there, and she wasn’t exaggerating about this. So starting a school there made sound economic sense, because Madge was charging UK equivalent fees in a location where the costs of running a school – rent, food and so on; living costs, not salaries to teaching staff – would be minimal.
And why was Austria such a cheap place to run a school (or, in 1924, to take a holiday?) Well, before the first war, Austria had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with access to the empire’s shared resources and wealth. But the peace treaties which followed the war split the empire into smaller states. The new republic of Austria was a small, mainly German-speaking area, with a small economy – even farming was limited, because most of the former Austria’s arable land now lay within other countries. So Austria as a nation had few means of generating wealth, and by 1922 half the population was unemployed, and the currency had plummeted in value.
This all meant that tourism had a significant part to play in the Austrian economy. And, strange as it may seem, in 1924 this didn’t really mean winter tourism, which is the tourism we associate with Austria nowadays. 2024 is the centenary not only of Elinor’s holiday in Austria, but also the first winter Olympics, and to these Austria sent only a team of ice skaters. Downhill ski-ing – which is what, I think, many people would today associate with an Austrian holiday – does not appear to have been invented at this point; it wasn’t among the ski-ing events in that first Olympic programme, which consisted of the ski-jump and cross-country ski-ing.
As an aside, this might explain why although by the end of the series the Chalet School girls have a downhill ski run, in most of the winter sporting sections of the books the girls appear to be learning and executing cross-country ski-ing, that is, ski-ing as a means for getting from one place to another, rather than just from the top of a slope to the bottom of a slope. There’s no evidence to suggest that Elinor herself experienced winter conditions in the Alps – and no reason why she should, given that winter tourism, as we would think of it, was not really a thing in the 1920s. I think that Elinor probably researched winter in the Tirol while she was there on her summer holiday, by asking people about it.
Which brings me back to summer tourism. The importance of tourism to the Tirol is mentioned over and over again in the Chalet School books, for the money it brings to the local economy. And this means summer tourism, of the sort which Elinor herself experienced. Tourism as an industry was just starting to come together around this time – the first attempt to regulate tourism came in 1925. Of course, there have always been tourists, in the sense of people travelling to see other places – early pilgrims might count as tourists, and long-distance mariners on their voyages of discovery. But some people travelling to a place to see what’s there isn’t the same as tourism as an industry. Proper tourism requires transport, for both the tourists, and the supplies and labour required to service them; it requires suitable accommodation – one or two ladies were prepared to rough it on their travels but they were exceptions – and it requires publicity or even, dare I say it, some sort of organising. In the mid 1920s, Austria experienced a tourism boom, as families living in its cities began to travel to the countryside by train on weekends. Wealthier families might travel to the countryside for longer, and it seems likely Elinor observed this during her own holiday, replicating it with the Mensches and the Maranis during the Chalet School’s first term. And some people, and organisations, were quick to see the potential for international visitors.
Thomas Cook had been running excursions internationally since 1841, showing other entrepreneurs how it might be done; but there was no Thomas Cook Tourist Handbook for the Tirol, which suggests that this part of the world was rather off the beaten track for British travellers. But it was not particularly difficult to get to – the Orient Express had been running from Paris to Vienna since 1883, stopping at Innsbruck on the way. And OBB (Austria’s answer to British Rail) was, about now, starting to run adverts in newspapers and magazines to promote travel to Austria, pitched as ‘the most beautiful and cheapest tourist destination in Europe’, while the Austrian equivalent of a tourist board eventually had offices in several European capitals, to attract tourists from abroad. So Elinor was ahead of the curve here, in choosing to holiday in the Austrian Tirol.
And whereas nowadays a holiday abroad is usually for ten days or a fortnight, Elinor was holidaying for 8 weeks. This seems extraordinary; I don’t know anybody, even those working in educational settings which give them 8 weeks off over the summer (and there aren’t many of them) who would do this now. But it’s something the characters in Elinor’s books – or her earlier ones, at any rate – seem to do as a matter of course. Think of all those families spending the entire summer on Guernsey, in the La Rochelle books. In times gone by, when cities were more polluted, and often, in the summer, foul-smelling and hot, it did make sense, especially if some members of the family were frail, to go somewhere else for a couple of months. I have to say, I’m quite keen on promoting the comeback of the 8 week summer holiday.
It seems likely that Lilian, to whom The School at the Chalet was dedicated, was Elinor’s travelling companion on this trip. There was a teacher called Lilian Kirkby at Elinor’s previous school, St Helens, in Northwood Middlesex. She was just a few years younger than Elinor, and she wrote an article for the school magazine describing a trip to the Austrian Tirol in 1922 or 23. So the holiday with Elinor wasn’t the first time she had travelled to this part of the world. That must have made the whole expedition much less daunting to Elinor – I know from my own experience that travel abroad is much less fraught when you are with somebody who has done it before.
Lilian left St Helens at the same time Elinor did, but we don’t know where she went, so I’ve been unable to imagine her journey to Victoria Station. From Fareham in Hampshire, Elinor could have travelled by coach, but I think it’s more likely she would have caught a train to Waterloo, and travelled from there to Victoria. I think she would have done this by taxi – the underground journey between Waterloo and Victoria involves a change onto the circle or district line, and Elinor would have had luggage to take with her. Elinor’s characters usually undertake long-distance journeys with just a handbag, but as this bag often included knitting, cards, make-up, soap, flannel and towel, a book, and food, alongside money and paperwork, it must have been quite big. And her clothes and other essentials for an 8 week holiday would probably have travelled in a trunk. Lightweight suitcases for women had been invented by this time, but trunks were still the preferred form for luggage. Either way, Elinor would have needed a porter, which again makes a taxi most likely for her journey from Waterloo to Victoria – where she presumably met up with Lilian.
I like to think that Lilian had been able to advise Elinor about what to pack for the holiday. Elinor makes clear that Austria in the summer can be very hot – hotter than England, and much hotter than the North of England where she had grown up. And it might have felt even hotter, to someone wearing clothes intended for an English summer. But women’s dresses at this time were loose-fitting, calf-length with a drop waist, and day dresses were usually made of cotton, so Elinor might not have done too badly. She would also have needed an evening dress – changing for the evening was obligatory – and of course a hat and coat. Quite why Elinor was so obsessed with waterproof coats when nobody in her books is allowed out in the rain is a bit of a mystery, but I can’t imagine that she would have travelled without one. There would also have been underclothes, stockings – going bare-legged was not an option at this time – and nightwear, and for hiking and walking Elinor would have had a fairly long, full skirt, and a blouse. She might have dared to wear knickerbockers – some women were wearing these for hiking and climbing by 1924 – but it seems unlikely, given the clothes she puts her characters into for this activity. A stout pair of boots, though, and some thick socks, would have been in her trunk.
At Victoria, Elinor and Lilian presumably met up, either on the concourse or at the platform. Elinor often describes busy railway stations, and she is good at conveying the mixture of excitement and anxiety at the start of a journey, as characters bob up and down looking for the person they are there to meet. Victoria station in 1924 would have been a noisy place, but differently noisy to how it is now. Today, there are constant pre-recorded (and largely unintelligible) tannoy announcements; but the Tannoy company (who knew?) wasn’t set up until 1928, so when Elinor was there, if there were announcements they would have been made by men, shouting. It must have been very busy and confusing, but I think there would have been signs to the boat train platform, as it would have been tiresome for staff if every single passenger had to ask where it was, and I’ve not been able to find out when the departure board was invented. I do know that the clickety-clack sort didn’t come in until the late 1950s so perhaps in 1924 everyone was managing with chalk and blackboards at the platform entrances.
From Victoria, Elinor and Lilian caught the boat-train to Dover, but at Dover passengers had to get off, and go onto the ferry on foot. The train-ferry – where sleeping carriages were loaded onto the ferry – didn’t come into operation until 1936, and was initially Pullman only (that is, even more luxurious than first class). The train-ferry also sailed from Dover to Dunkirk, rather than to Calais or Boulogne, the usual arrival ports for Elinor’s characters. So I think she and Lilian would have set off fairly early in the day, with a view to arriving in Paris in time for an early evening meal. They might have stayed overnight – or even for a couple of nights – in Paris, to do some sightseeing, but I think we would have had more detailed descriptions of Parisian sightseeing in Elinor’s books if this were the case.
Regardless of how long they stayed in Paris, the next leg of the journey was overnight on the Paris to Vienna train, which left at around half past eight in the evening. This train had corridors and compartments rather than through carriages, and each seat could be extended by a pull-out tray, to allow passengers to put their feet up while they slept, wrapped in a travelling rug or blanket. Nowadays you can travel from Paris to Basle in around 3 hours but for Elinor, it took around 10 hours, arriving in Basle at six the following morning. But there was still a long way to go – another 12 hours on the train, to get to Innsbruck. I’m sure Elinor and Lilian spent some of this time dozing, and at some point they would have needed to eat. But it’s likely Elinor, at least, spent much of the journey looking out of the window at landscapes completely unlike those she was used to. Even if she had previously seen photographs, these would have been black and white, and quite small. They can’t have prepared her for the grandeur of the mountains, or the architectural differences, or the lack of English hedges, which she would have seen as the train passed through Switzerland and into Austria.
And then they arrived at Innsbruck which, as destinations go, is an impressive one, because you step out of the station and find yourself surrounded by mountains in all directions. Regular commuters probably get used to this, but for first time arrivals it is definitely a ‘wow’ moment (not that Elinor herself would have used the word ‘wow’). It’s possible Elinor and Lilian didn’t linger here, and completed their journey to Achensee the same day, but they must have explored Innsbruck at some point, judging by the detail Elinor includes in her books.
From Innsbruck they took another train to Jenbach, which is Spartz in the Chalet School world, and from Jenbach the funny little mountain railway took them to Achensee. This last leg, on the funny little mountain railway – and honestly, there is no better description of it – is the best railway journey I’ve ever done, and I think Elinor might well have said the same, even if she was by this stage totally exhausted from 2 consecutive days of travel.
Pertisau – Briesau in the books – is some distance from the station, and Elinor and Lilian may have had their trunks with them, if they hadn’t been able to send them on ahead. So they probably took the steamer boat from the station to the village, and hopefully a porter met them there to take their luggage on to the hotel. We don’t know exactly where Elinor stayed – she might conceivably have taken a room in a private house, but, given the relative cheapness of accommodation in the area at the time, it seems more likely that she and Lilian stayed in one of Pertisau’s hotels. This must have been such a treat after her digs in Hampshire, even if she and Lilian were sharing a room.
They may not have stayed in the hotel for the entire 8 weeks, though. In a Chalet Club newsletter in 1959, Elinor says:
‘Years ago I was spending a holiday in Tirol and the friend who was with me and I made our headquarters at a chalet by the shore of the beautiful lake you know as the Tiern See.’
So she refers to a chalet, rather than a hotel. Of course, all the hotels were chalets. But maybe Elinor and Lilian rented a small chalet and fended for themselves. Elinor goes on to say that they made friends with two other visitors, who were there for 3 weeks, who are named (along with Lilian) in the dedication to The School at the Chalet: Jean and Flo. The four women, according to Elinor, made many expeditions together, and we can get an idea of these from the descriptions Elinor includes in her books. Certainly they climbed up some mountains, including to the location which eventually became the Sonnalpe, and they can hardly have missed the dripping rock. The steamer would have taken them around the lake to explore Buchau, Achenkirch, and Scholastika. They probably returned to Innsbruck for some sight-seeing, and from there it is relatively straightforward to get to Fulpmes with its glacier – Elinor’s characters visit more than one glacier and the keenness of Elinor’s descriptions suggests she saw one herself. We don’t get many descriptions of Jenbach (or Spartz) which suggests Elinor passed through this location without really exploring it, but quite apart from having to return to Jenbach to get to Innsbruck, they would have had to pass through Jenbach to get the train to Mayrhofen and the Zillerthal. The Chalet girls visit the Zillerthal in Princess, and again much later in one of the holiday books, so I’m sure this would have been one of Elinor’s expeditions.
Elinor describes the clear skies which make the Tiernsee the bluest thing you ever saw, but she can’t have had glorious weather for the entire 8 weeks, and she tells us about Alpengluck, rain, and storms – particularly storms – so I’m sure she experienced them all. She must also have asked local people about winter conditions, and learned about the significance of a harsh winter, as well as about Christmas customs and the ice carnival, and skating and ski-ing.
I’m not confident Elinor would have tried bathing in the lake, because this may not have been a suitable activity for ladies in 1924, but she might well have discovered from paddling how icy its waters are. Rowing, though, is an activity she and her friends could have tried. They certainly saw meadows of wildflowers, and cows wearing bells, and people wearing traditional Tyrolean clothes, and the Tzigane gypsy bands. It’s possible they saw – and maybe were invited to – a local wedding; it’s clear from Elinor’s descriptions that she found the people of the area warm and friendly. She also refers to a curious fatalism and simple piety, and it’s likely the friends would have explored the local churches even if they did not go as far as to worship in them. But perhaps it was here, in the mountains that brought her closer to God, in quite possibly the most beautiful place that she had ever seen, that Elinor started her journey to Roman Catholicism.
And I’m absolutely certain that Elinor started thinking about a school story while she was still here. She had had 3 books published by this point, so she could justifiably refer to herself as a writer, and, on this basis, ask questions of local people about customs and traditions, if visitors ever got stuck on mountains and so on. Maybe she talked with Lilian about her ideas for a story, while they were out walking, or travelling on the steamer. I’m not so sure Elinor made notes – this would suggest a degree of organisation – but she might have started drafting, and I am sure she started to think about her characters and plot, and soaked up as much of the location as she could. Her descriptions of buildings, rooms, furniture, and food, are all detailed: all Chalet fans know about the porcelain stove in the corner of the room and the plumeau on the bed (now of course the standard UK bed covering, but I can remember when the ‘continental quilt’ was new, in the 1970s, and any normal British bed would have had sheets, blankets and a bedspread). We know about the window-boxes of flowers, and the crescent-shaped rolls with black cherry jam. Kaffee und kuchen in particular appears to have made an impression on Elinor – I get the feeling that after visiting Austria, she never felt the same way again about an afternoon cup of tea and slice of Victoria sponge, although apparently when back home she did continue to drink tea almost by the gallon. So perhaps she simply never drank British coffee again, after experiencing the Austrian version.
We don’t often hear much about the journey home in Elinor’s books. It’s possible she took a route via Germany – and maybe even encountered her own Frau Berlin – as this is the route the girls vote for in one of the early books. Or she could have stopped off in Switzerland, sampling coffee with a featherbed of whipped cream and discovering just how expensive it was. Or she could have had a quick detour to the South Tyrol, where Jo and Madge go on holiday at the end of School At – although this isn’t on the way home, unlike Germany or Switzerland. At some point there will have been another night on a train, and it’s likely Elinor returned home to her dismal digs exhausted rather than refreshed by her holiday. Burying herself in a new story, and picking over her memories of Achensee in order to write it, must have helped hugely as the nights got darker and the weather got colder.
We don’t know if Elinor ever returned to Achensee. Her passport expired in July 1932 and was never renewed, so any further travel abroad must have been complete by that date. Between 1926 and 1933, Elinor did no regular teaching, so she was not tied to term dates for taking holidays, but she also had no regular income, and was living back in South Shields – which is also a much more distant starting point for continental travel. It’s entirely possible, though, given her vivid descriptions, that she travelled to Oberammergau for the Passion Play in 1930 – rail tickets from South Shields were available for £4, and the proceeds of one her books could easily have covered the costs of the trip, so it was certainly affordable, and she apparently had lots of souvenirs from Oberammergau and the Passion Play. And it’s not so very far from Oberammergau to Jenbach. So maybe she was able to go back – although, if so, it seems strange that Elinor never mentioned it in any of the Chalet Club newsletters.
So at the end of the summer in 1924, Elinor had returned home, her foreign adventures quite possibly complete. And while she had not fallen in love with an Austrian Duke, she had indeed found a lifetime companion. She just didn’t know that it was a fictional school.
You have been listening to Tophole, written and researched by Deborah Lofas, with grateful thanks to the late Helen McClelland. Music and production by Kit Lofas.
We’ll be back in a couple of weeks, for the last episode of this series. In the meantime, you can contact us on topholepodcast@gmail.com, or find us on Facebook.
Tophole is a Lofas Towers production.
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