The Princess of the School by Angela Brazil - #1920Club

Angela Brazil was one of the first authors to write from children's own point of view, and to entertain, rather than moralise to, her readers. Although she did not invent the school story genre, between 1905 and 1946 she wrote forty-nine books of girls’ fiction; The Princess of the School, published in 1920, follows the fortunes of sisters Lilias and Dulcie Ingleton, pupils of the 'luxurious but "down-to-earth"' (though whose earth that might be is indeed a question) Chilcombe Hall school.

We first meet Lilias and Dulcie as they prepare to leave Chilcombe for the Christmas Hols. The school is, of course, set in glorious countryside, and has only twenty pupils –

‘just enough of them to develop the community spirit, but not too many to obliterate the individual, or, as Ida Spenser put it: “You can get up a play or a dance…and yet we all know each other like a kind of big family.”’

Poster for a Chilcombe production

Run by the ‘artistic but practical’ Miss Walters, the school is decorated with her watercolour paintings and stencils and filled with vases of fresh flowers;

‘The “beauty cult” was a decided feature of Chilcombe Hall.’

Brazil was interested in progressive education; her half-Spanish mother Angelica had loathed her own Victorian boarding school so had brought Angela and her siblings up in a creative, liberated environment unusual for the time:

'We are made up of body, mind and spirit, and the developing soul needs satisfying as much as the physical or mental part of us...the lovely things of nature, assimilated half unconsciously when we are young, equip us with a purity of heart and a refinement of taste that should ...keep our thoughts at a lofty level.'

The pupils, all with names like Bertha, Prissie and Gowan, share (centrally heated - in 1920!) bedrooms called ‘The Blue Grotto’ and ‘The Gold Room’. They say things like ‘Ripping!’ and ‘Jolly good! and ‘Don’t be a blighter Laurette!’ and love nothing more than to put on shows for one another, play practical jokes on girls they find lacking in team spirit, and go on outings in charabancs to places of interest.

When the girls discuss how they will each travel home – by train, or by car (as in ‘Daddy’s sending the touring Daimler for me’) – Lilias comes out with a novel piece of one-upmanship;

‘We are RIDING home! Grandfather thinks Rajah and Peri need exercise, so he’s sending two of his grooms over with them.’

And so it continues.  

Lilias and Dulcie live with their siblings at Cheverley Chase, their Grandfather’s huge country estate, their father and mother having been handily dispatched in a shipwreck, but so long ago that no-one needs to feel upset about that. Grandfather is known only as ‘Grandfather’, except to the lowly, cap-doffing villagers, for whom he is ‘The Squire’. It is hard to remember that this book was written just two years after the end of the Great War, which is itself only mentioned once and seems to have had no effect whatsoever on the privileged lives of the Ingleton clan. The Chase positively teems with servants, when in fact many such estates were already falling into rack and ruin as men who had gone to the Front failed to return, and women began to realise that there was more to life than domestic service. But this is fiction.

The children’s other companion is Cousin Clare, the archetypal spinster, always Good and Kind:

'She was one of those calm, quiet...women who in the early centuries would have been a saint.'  

Clare is able to hand out support and sympathy without having the authority of a parent, which leaves the children free to do more or less what they like throughout the holidays. The oldest boy, Everard, is an arrogant 17 year old;

‘a fair, handsome, dashing sort of boy of a type more common thirty years ago than at present.  He held closely to the old-fashioned ideas of privileges of birth…’

Which is not surprising, since, relying on the convenient privilege of his own birth, Everard has already assumed that on his Grandfather’s death the estate will be coming to him - a fact that does not go down well with one of his sisters;

‘”Haven’t I as much right here as you?” persisted Dulcie…

“No you haven’t; the heir always has the best right to everything…When the place is mine I mean to have a ripping time here!”’

That the girls are able openly to discuss the unfairness, or otherwise (Lilias being much more willing than Dulcie to accept the status quo), of Everard’s position is itself an indicator of Brazil’s progressive outlook and interest in young people’s own views and concerns. Such an approach did not, however, go down too well with many adults; some schools banned her books, and in 1936 the Headmistress of St Paul’s Girls School threatened to collect up all the copies she could find and make a bonfire of them.

The children’s lives are chugging along in their usual comfortable way when Grandfather disobligingly dies in the middle of term time, the butler stops all the clocks, and Everard, brought home from Harrow, prematurely assumes the role of Young Squire;

‘”It will be very hard to succeed (Grandfather), but I shall try to do my best.”’

only to discover that the estate has in fact been left to the child of his father’s brother, Tristram, who had also predeceased Grandfather, but had first married a Sicilian and made his permanent home in Italy. 

To say that Everard is put out is to put it mildly; he decides to run away to ‘Sweep a crossing or go to sea!’ and (being the independent, self-sufficient chap he is) promptly orders the chauffeur to drive him to the station to catch the midnight express.

After Everard has flounced off, Cousin Clare drops a further bombshell – the heir may have been Christened  Leslie, but she is in fact a girl known as Carmel. And with that Clare is off to Italy to find Carmel and bring her home to her new abode.

The rest of the story revolves around the arrival of Carmel, first at the Chase and then at Chilcombe Hall, where she boards with Lilias and Dulcie and swiftly endears herself to everyone as a Good Sport and friend to all (though not before bossy Gowan has a few words to say about Carmel’s homesickness;

 ‘Home-sick people do always cry harder if you sympathise….the new kids always turn on the waterworks at first’

 - this of a 14 year old girl who has been uprooted from her large Italian family and sent to a boarding school thousands of miles away from her home!)  

Carmel soon becomes even more popular when she reveals herself to be a brilliant actress and wonderful dancer, able to contribute to the girls’ numerous tableaux and entertainments; once the holidays begin she is equally successful with the younger Ingletons, playing their games, helping them with their collections and ‘slaving after those boys like a nursery governess!’ according to the slightly jealous Lilias.

Before the story is brought to its inevitable happy conclusion, Brazil treats us to a few of the travelogues that seem so frequently to appear in school stories. First a summer ‘motor tour’ of the West Country with her stepfather’s English relations leads Carmel, through a series of highly fortunate coincidences, to find out what has happened to the missing Everard, then in January the need for Lilias to convalesce after an even more fortuitous (but obviously not too serious..) illness sees Cousin Clare and the older Ingletons sailing off to Sicily to stay with Carmel’s own family in Montalesso. Everard is accompanied by his extremely affable tutor, Mr Stacey (Carmel: ‘they can use daddy’s gun room for a study’) who knows about everything and is thus a most useful vehicle for the recounting of myths, legends and local history. 

It is interesting to note just how much general knowledge the girls themselves seem to have – at school they frequently amuse themselves by reciting and writing poetry, including a series of anonymous Valentine verses addressed to one another, and they also quote Shakespeare, write plays, and know the names of a vast range of flora and fauna. It is unclear whether these skills were learned at school (where the lessons never appear to be particularly arduous, and the girls spend most of their time going for hearty walks, doing Indian Club exercises or larking about in their rooms) or at home, - or whether they are added simply to allow Brazil to wax lyrical about her own interests. The children have been brought up in the company of their distant, autocratic Grandfather, and it seems unlikely Cousin Clare, saintly though she may be, could have taught them everything. 

'"I vote we ask to bring tea up here, and have a Valentine party." exulted Gowan. '"Don't you think it would be rather scrumptious?"'

There are, of course, many aspects of this book that would now be considered unacceptable; the casual and condescending racism shown to all foreigners and the assumption that privilege is the right of the upper classes, who are also somehow uniquely qualified to run the country (Everard is apparently destined to be an MP) being just two.  The children are also encouraged to engage in pursuits that today would be seen as criminal; they catch (and kill for their collections) butterflies, and pick wildflowers with abandon. 

The relationships between the girls, and even between the girls and some of the mistresses, seem highly inappropriate now:

'(Laurette) monopolised Miss Herbert.....wrote notes to her, left flowers in her bedroom and walked arm-in-arm with her in the garden....Miss Herbert allowed Laurette to be on terms of great intimacy.'

In the 1920s such 'romantic friendships' were common and did not necessarily imply anything more - though the jury is out as to Brazil's own awareness and intentions. 

Angela Brazil was one of the first children’s writers to address the new opportunities opening up for girls while still producing stories that those girls loved to read. Although the final denouement of the plot could hardly be labelled controversial, The Princess of the School is both a good story and a fascinating glimpse into the lives of women at a time of perhaps unprecedented change.

 The Princess of the School  by Angela Brazil was published by Blackie & Son Limited in 1920