The Chudleigh Hold Series

This article has been slightly adapted for the website from the one which appeared in the Third Chalet Annual, Christmas 1998.

As a child, reading the hardback Chalet titles available in the mid-1960s, I used to look at the beginning of each book where it said under 'other books available by Elinor Brent-Dyer': The Chudleigh Hold Series. As I did with the words, The La Rochelle Series which were also listed, I imagined another set of school stories, perhaps also lasting for 50+ books. I know that I was not alone in being disappointed when I discovered, in the mid to late 1980s, that the 'series' consisted of only three titles. Could this be right, I wondered? In fact it isn't really. The 'official' Chudleigh Hold Series consists of Chudleigh Hold (1954), Condor Crags (1954) and Top Secret (1955). Linked to them, and forming just as much of a series, are Fardingales (1950) and The Susannah Adventure (1953).

Many Chalet fans dislike the Chudleigh Hold series, but are the books as bad as some people claim? First of all, I think it depends on your personal reading tastes. If you enjoy, as I do, authors who write 'adventure' stories - for example Jack Higgins, Dick Francis and Len Deighton on the adult side, and W E Johns, and Enid Blyton on the children's -  then you may well enjoy the Chudleigh Hold series. If you don't, then these books, with the possible exception of Chudleigh Hold itself, are probably not for you.   

It is also important to take into account the atmosphere of the 1940s and 1950s when the books were written. Looking at the series from today's point of view, some of the accusations made against it may well be valid. However, Elinor was not writing these books as a thirty-something in the 1990s; she wrote them in her fifties roughly between 1944 - 1954 (see below), and forward thinking as she was in some ways, her view of the Empire and the men who ran it was very much of that of the pre-World War I world in which she had begun her adult life.

I have read Chudleigh Hold many times over the years, but the other books only three times each, and only twice as a series. Initially, I read them as I got them, but last year I was inspired to read them, after a gap of several years, for the first time as a series. I enjoyed them so much that I felt inspired to write an article for the Annual, and in preparation for this article I have just re-read them all again - and enjoyed them as much.   

The problem is in which order to read the books, and in fact since the links are fairly tenuous it doesn't much matter. I read them this year in a different order from last year, and I think it is the order in which I would read the books next time, but it is not a 'must' and I would be interested to hear other people's views.

Although Chudleigh Hold was not published until 1954, EBD certainly had the idea for the book a good ten years earlier, since we first learn about the story in the final chapter of Gay from China at the Chalet School (pp 230 - 231) which was published in 1944. This is one of the interesting episodes cut from the paperback version of the book (Gay Lambert at the Chalet School, 1989). In the hardback, Gillian Culver is urged by Gay Lambert to tell "that yarn about the German spy who pretended to be your cousin, and was really a spy", and when Gillian elucidates we learn that she lives at Culver's Hold and that ' "Mrs Maynard's going to make it into a book some time, only changing the names, of course" '.   

The plot is neatly summarised, and clearly EBD had most of the book in her head, if not written down on paper. I suspect that she may have written it fairly soon afterwards, and that for one reason or another it was not actually contracted until 1953 (and published in 1954). For this reason, I take Chudleigh Hold as the first title in the 'series'. It was not, of course, the first of her non Chalet titles which Elinor had 'advertised' in this way. She had used exactly the same device in Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School, published the year before Gay, when she revealed the plot of The Lost Staircase which was also to be 'written by Josephine M Bettany', although in this case no names were to be changed, and The Lost Staircase appeared in 1946, only three years after its advertisement.

Chudleigh Hold is in some respects an adventure story, but it is also one of EBD's best 'family' stories. Gill Culver of Culver Hold has become Arminel Chudleigh, otherwise known as Crumpet, of Chudleigh Hold, second youngest of a family of eight whose parents have both died. (Several Chalet fans have pointed out that EBD makes one of her famous 'bloopers' on page 57 when she refers to a Chudleigh ancestor as a Culver ancestor: I have never noticed this in all the times I have read the book.)

Headed by Crumpet's eldest brother, Sir Godfrey, the other members of the family are Merle (21), Charlotte, known as Cherry, and Charles (19 year old twins), Peregrine or Hawk (17), Venancy or Ven (nearly 16) and Benny who is the baby of the family at seven.   Their mother has died 'when Ben arrived on the scenes' and their father was killed in a motor accident two years before the story begins. All of them are ruled over with a rod of iron by Nanny. I won't give away more of the plot than EBD herself does in Gay but suffice to say that Cousin Merrill who appears is not a cousin at all but a German spy, and her unmasking makes a thriller which is at the least a gripping read. To me, the book is almost a 1950s combination of Seven Scamps and Heather Leaves School, two of EBD's La Rochelle series published in 1927 and 1928 respectively.

Next in reading order, I would choose Fardingales which was actually the first book in the series to be published and came out in 1950. Interestingly, it was not published by Chambers as were the other titles in the series, but by Latimer House. Possibly the publishers were chosen by Elinor's new literary agent, Sidney Matthewman, since they also published books by his wife, Elinor's friend Phyllis Matthewman. In any event, the book is advertised on the back of the wrapper as being part of 'The Crossways Series for Girls' which included five other titles, at least some of which were thrillers.

This, too, is very much a family story, but it is primarily an adventure story. Indeed it was clearly written by EBD as a thriller and the dedication reads "To my mother who loathes thrillers, but persevered with this one, and says she enjoyed it after all!" Fardingales does not feature any of the Chudleighs, but has as its heroes Humphrey Anthony, his cousin Anstace Rosevere and their friend Tom Vinton who at this stage refers to the others as Master and Miss, although in the next book, when his station in life has been improved, he is asked to drop these titles. The one drawback to Fardingales is that it is a horrible book, physically, to read. Like many Latimer House titles, the type is incredibly small, and the pages always seem to have gone rather brown. It is the rarest book in the series, and can be very difficult to find.

Following on from Fardingales is The Susannah Adventure (1953, and published by Chambers as were the rest of the series) which also stars Humphrey, Anstace and Tom and in which they meet Roger Treatt who, by the end of the book, has 'clearly' stated his intentions towards Anstace in a way typical of EBD. The Condor Crags Adventure, published in 1954, stars Godfrey and Hawk Chudleigh but also features Anstace and Roger as well as Tom. Last in the series is Top Secret and the only connection it has with the others is that Hawk Chudleigh is the lead character. These last three titles are very much thrillers, and indeed Condor Crags is set in an inaccessible part of South America, and Top Secret on an island off New Zealand, making them particularly out of the ordinary for Elinor's British readers, in particular.

Fardingales was the only one of Elinor's titles to be published by Latimer House, who were at that stage part of the Purnell Group. The same group published The Sceptre Girls Story Annual in which Fardingales was published, in abridged form, as The House of Secrets. This is much easier to obtain that the full length book, and is certainly worth while as a stop-gap. Whether Elinor abridged the story herself is not known.

Tony Chambers told me, when I met him in 1994, that Elinor's thrillers had not been a success, and indeed Chambers' lack of confidence in the books is reflected in the terms of their contracts for them. At the time, Elinor was being paid an advance of £200 for her Chalet School stories, and, once 20,000 copies had sold a royalty of 5% on the published price. For the four thrillers contracted by Chambers, the terms were an advance of £100 and once 10,000 copies had been sold £7.10s per 1000 copies.

It is probably best to compare Elinor's thrillers not with her other books, but with other contemporary thrillers of the time, most of which were probably written for boys. I am not a great reader of boys' books from the 1940s and 1950s, with the exception of those written by W E Johns. Johns was a master of the boys' thriller, having created Biggles in 1932 and Gimlet in 1944. He was also a master of the girls' thriller, having started his Worrals books in 1941. An almost exact contemporary of EBD (she was born in 1894 and died in 1969; he was born in 1893 and died in 1968), he wrote over 100 Biggles books, as well as ten featuring Gimlet and eleven starring Worrals. Like EBD, he was most prolific in the post war period of 1948 - 1960.  

Having just spent some time reading his post war books, all of them thrillers, when I moved on to the Chudleigh Hold series it was to find that Elinor's thrillers stood up to those by W E Johns very well indeed. In that post war period, particularly, a number of Johns' books were set in inaccessible parts of South America, islands where 'no white man has been before' and other such settings which would give his tales credence. Why then is the Chudleigh Hold Series disliked by so many of EBD's fans? It is probably true to say that the main reason is because, with the exception of Chudleigh Hold itself, all the books are real thrillers and most EBD collectors do not collect 1950s thrillers.  I suspect that very few members of Friends of the Chalet School or the New Chalet Club are members of Biggles Flies Again; and how many of you, reading this on Barbara and John's website, have checked out, or plan to check out, the W E Johns section?

Clarissa Cridland