Dornford Yates
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Dornford Yates was the pseudonym of the British novelist, Cecil William Mercer (August 7, 1885 – March 5, 1960).
His novels and short stories, some humorous (the Berry books) and some thrillers (the Chandos books) were best-sellers in the period between the two World Wars.
| Cecil William Mercer | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 7, 1885 Walmer, Kent |
| Died | March 5, 1960 (aged 74) Umtali, Southern Rhodesia |
| Pen name | Dornford Yates |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality |  United Kingdom |
Contents |
[edit] Early Life
Bill Mercer was born in Walmer, Kent, the son of Cecil John Mercer (1850-1921) and Helen Wall (1858-1918). His father was a solicitor, whose sister Mary Frances married Charles Augustus Munro; their son was Hector Hugh Munro (the writer Saki); Mercer is said to have idolised his older cousin.
Mercer's pen name, which first appeared in print in 1910, came about by combining the surnames of two grandparents - his paternal grandmother, Eliza Mary Dornford and his maternal grandmother, Harriet Yates.
Mercer attended St Clare preparatory school in Walmer from 1894 to 1899. The family 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. Leaving Harrow in 1903 he went to University College,Oxford in 1904 where he achieved a Third in Law.
While at Oxford he was active in the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS), becoming secretary in 1906 and president in his final year,1907. Among the stage roles he played was Pedant in The Taming of the Shrew[1], a production including the professional actresses Lily Brayton as Katherine and her sister Agnes as Bianca [2]. He made many useful friends during his time at the OUDS including Lily Brayton's husband, actor Oscar Asche, subsequently the producer of the play Kismet and the writer of Chu Chin Chow. After leaving university he took a caravanning holiday in Hampshire with Asche, Lily, Agnes, and another theatrical couple, Matheson Lang and his wife Hutin Britton. Both Asche[3], and Lang[4], recall this holiday in their respective memoirs.
His third-class degree 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 large part 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 poisoner Hawley Harvey Crippen, when he returned from performing with the Old Stagers at Canterbury in order to have first look at the brief, is recalled in his first book of memoirs, As Berry & I Were Saying. A photograph of the committal proceedings at Bow Street Court, in which Mercer can be clearly seen, appeared in the Daily Mirror on Tuesday August 30th, 1910.
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 Windsor until the end of the 1930s. He also assisted in the writing of What I Know, the memoirs of C.W. Stamper, who had been motor engineer to King Edward VII.
[edit] Great War and after
After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he joined the County of London Yeomanry and was commissioned Second Lieutenant. The regiment left for Egypt in 1915 and in November 1915, as part of the 8th Mounted Brigade, he was sent to the Salonika/Macedonian front where the war was in stalemate. Suffering severely from muscular 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 and Lily Asche. Asche and Mercer combined to write the stage show Eastward Ho! in the autumn of 1919 but the production was not a great success and he did not attempt to write for the stage again.
A visitor to Elm Tree Road was a member of the cast of Chu Chin Chow, an American girl called Bettine (Athalia) Stokes Edwards, daughter of Robert Ewing Edwards of Philadelphia[5], who was to become Mercer's first wife. The New York Times announcement of their engagement (28th August 1919) states "Mr & Mrs Glover Fitzhugh Perin of 57 West Fifty-eight street have announced the engagement of Mrs Perin's oldest daughter Miss Bettine Stokes Edwards...." suggesting that her father was either dead or divorced and her re-married mother was then living in New York City. Mercer and Bettine married at St James, Spanish Place, in the Marylebone district of London, on 22nd October 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 only child, a son named Richard, was born on 20th July 1920. After the war many former officers in London 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. In 1922 the Mercers moved to France where it was possible to live far more cheaply, and the climate was kinder to his muscular rheumatism.
[edit] Residence in France
They chose 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. A.J. Smithers, in his biography of Yates,[6] 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 on Rue Forster.
Mercer was an exacting husband, Bettine was a social woman, and by 1929 it was clear that the marriage was failing. She returned to her family in America. 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.
On 10th February 1934, at Chertsey Register office, Mercer married Doreen Elizabeth Lucie Bowie, the daughter of a London solicitor, D.M.Bowie of Virginia Water[7], whom he had met on a cruise in 1932. Elizabeth was twenty years younger than her husband, and he clearly felt he had met the incarnation of his fictional Jill Mansel, as he referred to her as "Jill" for the rest of his life.
Villa Maryland had many memories of Bettine for Mercer and they decided to build a new house. They chose a spot 20 miles south of Pau near Eaux-Bonnes on the route to the Spanish frontier, the whole project being related in The House That Berry Built, the house "Gracedieu" in that book being in reality called "Cockade". They were not to enjoy a long residence there.
With the fall of France in 1940 the Mercers hurriedly arranged caretakers for Cockade, and with old friends Matheson Lang and his wife, who had been visiting them, fled the country ahead of the advancing Germans, crossing through Spain to Portugal[8]. They subsequently took ship for South Africa and arrived in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, in 1941.
[edit] World War Two and the Rhodesian Years
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 new 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, Southern Rhodesia, (now Mutare, Zimbabwe), 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 "Sacradown" on Oak Avenue 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 the Second World War.
Mercer died in March 1960.
[edit] His Work
Yates originally wrote short stories for the monthly magazines, and many of his works began as stories in the Windsor Magazine before being collected together in book form. However, his first known published work, Temporary Insanity, appeared in Punch in May 1910, and his second, Like A Tale That is Told appeared in the Red Magazine in July 1910. The first known Berry story to be published, Babes in the Wood, appeared in Pearsons Magazine in September 1910. None of these were ever included in his books.
His first story for the Windsor Magazine was Busy Bees in 1911, and this and subsequent stories from that publication were republished in book form as The Brother of Daphne in 1914. Some of the stories were edited for the book to eliminate events such as marriage for the leading characters, which suggests that originally Yates had not planned to use the same characters for a series of stories. In fact the narrator, (eventually identified as Boy Pleydell), marries in both Babes in the Wood and again in Busy Bees, which became The Busy Beers as a chapter in The Brother of Daphne with the end of the story altered to leave him single.
For the stories that made up his second book, The Courts of Idleness, Yates initially introduced a new set of characters similar to, but separate from, Berry & Co, but then killed off the male characters in Salonika during the Great War and the second half of the book returns to the Berry characters. The book's final story, Nemesis, was written for, and rejected by, Punch, and subsequently appeared in the Windsor Magazine in November 1919, with the main character called Jeremy; for the book he became Berry. It was written to the Punch length and is therefore much shorter than most of the other stories.
The Berry books are semi-autobiographical humorous romances, often in the form of short stories, and featuring in particular Bertram "Berry" Pleydell ("of White Ladies, in the County of Hampshire") and his family - his wife and cousin, Daphne, her brother Boy Pleydell (who narrates the stories), and their cousins Jonathan "Jonah" Mansel and his sister Jill. Collectively they were known as "Berry & Co". Although all five appear in Babes in the Wood their precise relationships were not stated, and Berry and Daphne are referred to as second cousins as late as Jonah & Co; later works feature a simple family tree showing them to be first cousins descended from two brothers and a sister. They capture the English upper classes of the time, still self-assured but affected by changing social attitudes and a decline in their fortunes. Grand houses, powerful motor cars and foreign travel feature prominently, as in many of his other books. In the 1950s Mercer wrote two books of fictionalized memoirs, As Berry and I were Saying and B-Berry and I Look Back, set in the form of conversations between Berry and his family. 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.
The Chandos books, starting with Blind Corner in 1927, marked a sea change in both style and content, being thrillers mainly set in Continental Europe (frequently in Carinthia, Austria) in which the hero and narrator, Richard Chandos, with various colleagues including George Hanbury and Jonathan Mansel (who also appears in the Berry books), tackle criminals, protect the innocent and hunt for treasure. It is the Chandos novels which are especially referred to by Alan Bennett when he mentions Dornford Yates in Forty Years On (1972): "Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature". Yates also wrote a number of other thrillers in the same style but with different characters.
Apart from the two main genres in which he specialised, a number of his novels do not easily fall into either the humorous or thriller categories-
Anthony Lyveden was Yates' first full-length novel, although it still initially appeared in monthly instalments in the Windsor Magazine, and tells the story of an impoverished ex-officer, ending on something of a cliff-hanger.
Valerie French, was written as the sequel to Anthony Lyveden, and features largely the same characters; at the start of the book Lyveden is suffering from amnesia and cannot recall the events of the previous book, leading to romantic complications.
The Stolen March is a fantasy novel set in a lost realm between Spain and France, where travellers encounter characters from nursery rhymes and fairy tales. A planned sequel, The Tempered Wind, is referred to in the quasi-autobiography B-Berry and I Look Back, where Yates mentions abandoning the book as it failed to 'take charge'.
This Publican is a novel featuring a scheming woman and her oppressed husband, and some critics have suggested that it may have been a thinly-veiled attack on the author's first wife; however it is difficult to believe that the weak-willed husband is intended as a self-portrait.
Lower than Vermin, its title based on a phrase used by the Socialist politician Aneurin Bevan to describe members of the Conservative party, was written by Mercer to defend his views on class, and to criticise the path Britain was following under the post-war Labour government.
Ne'er-Do-Well is a murder story narrated by Richard Chandos, with whom the investigating policeman is staying, and also features Jonathan Mansel as a visitor.
Wife Apparent is an attempt to portray Yates's type of people in a 1950s setting; given that they remain essentially Edwardian in outlook this is not wholly successful.
[edit] Bibliography
The Berry Books
- The Brother of Daphne (1914) - short stories
- The Courts of Idleness (1920) - short stories
- Berry and Co. (1921) - short stories
- Jonah and Co. (1922) - short stories
- Adele and Co. (1931) - full-length novel
- And Berry Came Too (1936) - short stories
- The House That Berry Built (1945) - full-length novel UK Ward Lock; US Edition Putnams
- The Berry Scene (1947) - short stories UK Ward Lock; US Edition Putnams
- As Berry and I Were Saying (1952) - memoirs Ward Lock
- B-Berry and I Look Back (1958) - memoirs Ward Lock
The Chandos Books (all full-length thrillers)
- Blind Corner (1927)
- Perishable Goods (1928)
- Blood Royal (1929)
- Fire Below a.k.a. By Royal Command (1930)
- She Fell Among Thieves (1935)
- An Eye for a Tooth (1943) UK Ward Lock; US Edition Putnams
- Red in the Morning a.k.a Were Death Denied (1946) UK Ward Lock; US Edition Putnams
- Cost Price a.k.a. The Laughing Bacchante (1949) UK Ward Lock; US Edition Putnams
Other Volumes
- Anthony Lyveden (1921) - full-length novel
- Valerie French (1923) - full-length novel, a sequel to Anthony Lyveden
- And Five Were Foolish (1924) - short stories
- As Other Men Are (1925) - short stories
- The Stolen March (1926) - full-length novel
- Maiden Stakes (1928) - short stories
- Safe Custody (1932) - full-length thriller
- Storm Music (1934) - full-length thriller
- She Painted Her Face (1937) - full-length thriller
- This Publican a.k.a. The Devil in Satin (1938) - full-length novel
- Gale Warning (1939) - full-length thriller Ward Lock; US Edition Putnams (1940)
- Shoal Water (1940) - full-length thriller UK Ward Lock; US Edition Putnams
- Period Stuff (1942) - short stories Ward Lock
- Lower than Vermin (1950) - full-length novel Ward Lock
- Ne'er-Do-Well (1954) - full-length novel featuring Chandos in retirement Ward Lock
- Wife Apparent (1958) - full-length novel Ward Lock
[edit] Plays, Films & Media
The 1919 musical play Eastward Ho! was written by Oscar Asche (author) with lyrics by Dornford Yates and music by Grace Torrens and John Ansell. Produced by Edward Laurillard and George Grossmith Jr, it opened at the Alhambra Theatre in London on September 9th and ran for 124 performances.
Although none of Yates' books has yet been filmed for the cinema, the BBC produced an adaptation of She Fell Among Thieves in 1977 featuring Malcolm McDowell as Chandos, Michael Jayston as Mansel and Eileen Atkins as Vanity Fair.
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.
An audiobook edition of Blind Corner, read by Alan Rickman, was produced by Chivers Audio Books but is currently out of print.
[edit] References
- ^ Smithers, A.J. Dornford Yates - A Biography (1982) London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, ISBN 034027 547 2
- ^ Times review February 7th 1907
- ^ Oscar Asche:His Life (1929)
- ^ Mr Wu Looks Back (1940)
- ^ Who Was Who (1960)
- ^ Smithers, A.J. Dornford Yates - A Biography (1982) London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, ISBN 034027 547 2
- ^ Who Was Who (1960)
- ^ Smithers, A.J. Dornford Yates - A Biography (1982) London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, ISBN 034027 547 2
