Dornford Yates

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dornford Yates was the pseudonym of the British novelist, Cecil William Mercer (August 7, 1885 – March 5, 1960).

He was born in 1885 at Walmer, Kent, and lived in Pau, France from 1922 to 1940, and Umtali, Rhodesia, (now Mutare, Zimbabwe) from 1946 until his death in 1960.

The son of a solicitor, 'Dornford Yates' attended Harrow School and University College, Oxford. He idolised his older cousin, the writer 'Saki', pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro, whose mother's family name was Mercer. He moved from Kent to London when he joined Harrow as a 'day boarder' in 1899, his father selling his solicitor's practice in Kent and setting up office in Carey Street. After Harrow he went to Oxford in 1904 where he was active in the Oxford University Dramatic Society, (OUDS) becoming Secretary in 1906 and President in 1907.

He made many useful friends during his time at the OUDS including Oscar Asche, theproducer of Kismet and writer of Chu, Chin, Chow. His 'third' at Oxford was not good enough to gain traditional access to the bar but his father used a little known 'back door' by getting Mercer a post in 1908 as pupil to a prominent solicitor, H. G. Muskett.

Muskett appeared on behalf of the Police Commissioner and as his pupil, Mercer saw a great deal of the seedier side of London life, much of which experience is evident in his books. During this period a major section of the London criminal underworld was of Jewish extraction and the charge of 'anti-semitism' that is sometimes made against him as a result of many of his villains being Jewish is tempered by the fact that he was writing about what he knew.

Mercer was called to the bar in 1909 and worked there for several years; his involvement in the trial of the notorious Hawley Harvey Crippen is recalled in his first book of memoirs, As Berry & I Were Saying. In his spare time he wrote short stories which were published in Punch, The Red Magazine, Pearsons Magazine, and the Windsor magazine; he maintained his relationship with the latter until the end of the 1930s. He also assisted in the writing of the memoirs of C.W.Stamper, What I Know (published by Mills & Boon) who had been motor engineer to King Edward VII.

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he joined the County of London Yeomanry and was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant. The regiment left for Egypt in 1915 and in November 1915, as part of the 8th Mounted Brigade, he was sent to The Balkans where the war was in stalemate. Suffering severely from rheumatism he was sent home in 1917. Although still in uniform the War Office did not post him again and he was released from the army in 1919.

The family home had been Elm Tree Road, St. John's Wood since 1914 and close neighbours and friends were Oscar Asche and his wife. A visitor to their home was a member of the cast of Chu, Chin, Chow, an American girl called Bettine (Athalia) Stokes Edwards, who was to become Mercer's first wife in 1919.

Mercer decided not to return to the bar but to concentrate on writing. The couple stayed in the family home at Elm Tree Road and their son Richard was born in 1920. After WW1 there were a number of ex-officers in London who found that the rise in the cost of living precluded maintaining the style of a gentleman to which they had become accustomed and some looked beyond the boundaries of England. The Mercers moved to France where it was possible to live far more cheaply, and the climate was kinder to his muscular rheumatism.

They chose fr:Pau, a resort in the western Pyrenees - in what was then the département of Basses-Pyrénées, now Pyrénées-Atlantiques - where there was quite a large British colony, but the exact timing of their move is unknown. Smithers in his biography of Dornford Yates states "exactly how he hit upon the place is not clear" but Pau figures several times in the memoirs he is presumed to have ghost-written for C. W. Stamper and so that may be the answer – anywhere good enough for King Edward VII was good enough for him. They rented the Villa Maryland.

He was an exacting husband, Bettine was a social woman, and by 1929 it was clear that the marriage was failing. Bettine had been less than discreet in her liaisons and Mercer sued for divorce. Bettine did not defend and in September 1933 the divorce was made absolute. In February 1934, Mercer married Doreen Elizabeth Lucie Bowie (Jill), the daughter of a London solicitor, whom he had met on a cruise in 1932.

Villa Maryland had many 'Bettine' memories for Mercer and they decided to build a new house. They chose a spot 20 miles from Pau near fr:Eaux-Bonnes on the route to the Spanish frontier, the whole project being related in fr:The House that Berry Built, the house 'Gracedieu' in that book being in reality called 'Cockade'. With the invasion of France in 1940 the Mercers arranged caretakers for Cockade, travelled through Spain and Portugal to South Africa and arrived in Salisbury, Rhodesia in 1941.

He was re-commissioned in the Royal Rhodesian Regiment and attained the rank of Major. As the war drew to a close the couple's hoped-for plan to return to Cockade was achieved but they were disappointed in both the state of the house and the attitude of their one-time servants. After some months they obtained exit visas and returned to Umtali, Rhodesia where Mercer was to spend the rest of his life. He supervised the building of a replacement for Cockade, another hillside venture, and they moved into 'Sacredown' in 1948. The furniture in France was shipped to Rhodesia as were the Waterloo Bridge balusters (see The House that Berry Built), which had never actually reached Cockade but had been stored in England during World War II.

Mercer continued writing, although by this time more money was not a problem. He died in March, 1960.

Some of his books are sentimental romances, often in the form of short stories, and featuring in particular 'Berry' Pleydell. These include:

Berry and Co (1921),
Jonah and Co (1922),
Adele and Co (1931).

They capture the social attitudes of the English upper middle classes of their time, self-confidently assured of their own perfection. But much better are the thrillers featuring Jonah Mansel, and narrated by his friend and accomplice William Chandos and summed up for all time as 'Snobbery with violence'....The first of these is a spectacularly well-crafted novel, Blind Corner (1927); others include Perishable Goods (1928), She Fell Among Thieves (1935), Blood Royal (1929) and An Eye For A Tooth (1943). The Stolen March (1926) is a remarkable achievement: a fairy story for adults. Lower than Vermin (1953), based on a phrase used by the Socialist politician Aneurin Bevan to describe members of the Conservative party, is an unfortunate hysterical rant in which Mercer defends his anti-Semitic and highly class-conscious attitudes.

Mercer wrote two books of memoirs, As Berry and I were Saying (1952) and B-Berry and I Look Back (1958). These contain many anecdotes about his experiences as a lawyer, but are in the main an elegy for an upper-class way of life which has passed -- ironically, a way of life which Mercer himself never really was a part of.

[edit] Films

Although none of Yates' books has yet been filmed for the cinema, the BBC produced an adaptation of She Fell Among Thieves in 1977.

An episode of the ITV Hannay series, A Point of Honour, was based on a Yates short story of the same name that appeared in The Brother of Daphne but was uncredited.