The Chalet School - Link to Radio 4 programme

The Chalet School

The crime writer Val McDermid on her love of the Chalet School boarding school novels. She credits them with inspiring her to go to Oxford and becoming a writer. So what did they have that the other boarding school books did not?

Nearly sixty Chalet School novels were published between 1925 and 1970, written by the South Shields novelist, Elinor Brent-Dyer. The school was initially located in Austria, but moved to Guernsey following the Anschluss. It relocated again after the Nazi invasion of The Channel Islands. The books centred on Madge Bettany, the founder of the school, and her young sister Joey, its first pupil. The books dealt with financial hardship, illness and politic, which Val argues, is absent from most other boarding school novels of the period.

Donating to the Seven Stories National Centre for Children's Books

As our reading group has confirmed, the UK has a wonderful heritage of writing and illustration for children and British children’s books are among the best known and most widely read in the world.  Seven Stories is the National Centre for Children's Books, based in the beautiful Ouseburn Valley in the north-east of England at Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 2PQ.  It describes itself as "custodian of a unique and ever-growing national archive of modern and contemporary children’s literature".

 

One of our book group members has recently made a contribution to the national collection at Seven Stories.  She was excited to discover an incredible cache of beautiful, uncut printers' proofs of pages and book covers designed for (circa) 1930s children's painting and alphabet books in the loft of her Victorian house in Bath during building works.  The pages were being used as lining underneath a layer of very old insulation material and had been spread out over the lathe and plaster between the beams.  She contacted the Collections Director at Seven Stories, who was delighted to accept them.

Seven Stories collects original artwork, manuscripts and books by British writers and illustrators for children from the 1930s to the present day. Since its foundation in the 1990s, it has established a nationally important collection documenting the richness, diversity and innovation of modern British authors and illustrators for children. Many of the original manuscripts of the books we have been reading (including Philip Pullman, Lucy M Boston, Geoffrey Trease and Joan Aiken) are already held at Seven Stories.

 

If you would like to support the Seven Stories in building the collection and preserving our literary heritage, there are a number of ways to get involved.  They're on Twitter as @7Stories and here's a link to their website.

Seven Stories: UK National Centre for Children's Books