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Background to this article.

As this article was written for a readership that would be familiar (if only in general terms) with the works of the two authors mentioned throughout the article, some explanation would benefit the wider audience of the Internet. The children's writer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce (1885-1970), wrote many books for school-girls, many of them in series. The best known of the series are the nine "Dimsie" books, the eight "Nancy/St Bride's" books and six "Springdale" books. This article focuses on certain books from the latter two series, specifically those referred to in the footnotes at the end of the article. More information about these books and their author can be found at the Dorita Fairlie Bruce website.

A contemporary of D. F. Bruce, Elinor M Brent-Dyer (1894-1969) is best known for her "Chalet School" series for school-girls, though she too wrote many other books. Many of the references to her characters are taken from the "Chalet School" series while one or two are from a second series known as the "La Rochelle" series. More information about the works of Elinor M Brent-Dyer (including summaries of many of her books) can be found at the New Chalet Club website.

When I "met" Winifred Arrowsmith for the first time in Nancy at St Bride's it somehow didn't register that she was, in my words, "on four wheels". Looking back on things, I am moved to wonder whether this is because to me this is a state of affairs that is far from unfamiliar to me, as I too have a physical disability and get around in a wheelchair like Miss Arrowsmith.

To me, Winifred is as ordinary a person as characters like Nancy Caird or Jo Bettany, but it started me wondering all the same. How is it that she is not only allowed to stay disabled but, even more interestingly, to grow up and have a full-time voluntary job at St Bride's. The fascination I have with Winifred is partly the fact that here is a girl who is not only physically disabled but who is at school and partly the fact of her staying disabled! It is extremely rare to bump into this type of disabled person in fiction, and I began to wonder why. Was it because children with a disability were either shut up in institutions or were they just not educated at all?

Brent-Dyer's Naomi Elton and Cherry Christy and Bruce's Nicola Carter all fall into the first group, while Brent-Dyer's Rosamund Sefton, Jessica Wayne's sister-by-marriage, is a very good example of the second group. Even Phoebe Wychcote is "cured" of her rheumatoid-arthritis - up to a point! The other type of fictitious disabled person that I have encountered is a "saintly" disabled person like Cousin Helen in the Katy books. I'm sorry to say that despite sharing the same name, I always long to shake Cousin Helen into reality!

On re-reading Bruce's The Girls of St Bride's again, I discovered that Winifred is in fact a person who could step out of the St Bride's books and into a modern wheelchair and actually talk to me. She is jealous, but her jealousy is an ordinary jealousy; she is sarcastic but again this is just ordinary sarcasm. She is as ordinary as Simone, Marie or Frieda - and all of them are somewhat average next to Jo in the Chalet School series. The only "differentness" about Winifred that I can see is that she gets around on wheels instead of feet. So why am I so intrigued by Winifred Arrowsmith? I started to wonder about the real-life instances of a child with a disability going to an ordinary schools well before the current move towards integration in education.

I know a woman called Marjorie who is disabled and went to an ordinary school in the 1930s and 1940s, roughly the time when Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Elinor Brent-Dyer were writing and creating characters like Winifred Arrowsmith and Cherry Christy. So I decided to compare Marjorie's real-life experiences at school with Winifred's fictional experiences.

Marjorie was in her late 60s in 1994, and I knew that she had acquired an education at a time when Dorita Fairlie Bruce was writing some of the Nancy/St Bride's books, which would make her more or less a "contemporary" of Winifred. What I discovered about Marjorie's school life has basically supported what I had fitted together from Dorita Fairlie Bruce's image of Winifred at St Bride's. One aspect of Marjorie's schooling did surprise me, though. At its start, her education depended on the headmaster and teachers. If they had refused to take Marjorie at the age of five it would have been the end of her formal learning before it even started. It made me wonder whether the fictional Mr and Mrs Arrowsmith had been as dependent on Miss Caldwell's consent (St Bride's headmistress) before their daughter began her slightly stormy career at school. By the way, the head-teacher's (and/or governors) decision can still be final - even today. If the school perceives a child as requiring more assistance than they feel that they can cope with, they can decline to enrol the child at the school.

Both Marjorie and Winifred were the 'odd one out' at school: watching games rather than taking part in them and both disabled people had remarkable physical stamina - as much, in a different way, as the most athletic person in their respective schools. Marjorie cycled on her tricycle to and from school in all weathers, a distance of a couple of miles (return) each day, up and down a steep hill, while Winifred must have had incredible strength in her arms and back to push herself around in her "invalid carriage".

As late as the early 1970s wheelchairs had heavy steel frames, not the nice, lightweight aluminium alloys used nowadays, and looking at the illustrations in the St Bride's books, it would have needed quite a lot of muscle power to propel a heavy steel-and-wood "invalid carriage" which was common from the 1930s up to the 1950s - especially being as well wrapped up as she is always pictorially portrayed.

Neither Marjorie or Winifred conforms to the standard image of a disabled person in fiction, or I would guess, in real life either. After all, the standard image in fiction is of a "poor, sweet, courageous" fragile person, while the real-life image, even in the enlightened 1990s, tends to be one of a "brave and courageous, but needy" person.

I find the episodes where Winifred is portrayed as effortlessly wheeling herself around St Bride's are very fascinating, not least because of the sheer weight of the chair. She must have had the muscles of a weight-lifter to have been able to beat Morag Maclean in a race - either that, or Morag can't run at all!¹ Not at all like the standard disabled person in fiction. Despite the dated phraseology, I find Dorita Fairlie Bruce's characterisation of Winifred relatively positive in this respect. Yet after the storm, the school nurse is clucking over Winifred's 'delicate' back!

Additionally, I find it intriguing that not only are the buildings portrayed as being extremely wheelchair-friendly but also the grounds are too! I can just about accept the school buildings being more-or-less accessible for Winifred. After all, there are old buildings which do have level access and wide doors and St Bride's had been the home of a religious order, which might also have a bearing on its accessibility.

Although Marjorie attended Council Schools she was treated by teachers and pupils alike as if she did not get around on a tricycle and that her limbs had a life of their own. Winifred, on the other hand, isn't really treated the same as her peers by the either staff or students until the arrival of the Maclean sisters. For some reason, never explained, Morag always seems to be able to ignore the chair, and stand up to Winifred and her dictatorial ways. Morag effectively points the way to the entire school community over the best way to react to Winifred.

Like Winifred I suspect, Marjorie was included in all the lessons including cookery lessons. Unlike Winifred though, she was treated as an equal by her fellow pupils: was this because Marjorie didn't have a chip on her shoulder which kept others at arms length? Probably. Winifred also seems not to have been considered fit enough to take exams either, unlike Marjorie who sat the same school-leaving exams as her school-fellows.

Another Dorita Fairlie Bruce character who experiences some physical limitations is Nicola Carter, younger sister of the (slightly) autocratic Sydney Carter in The New House Captain. When Anne Willoughby and Primula Mary Beton first meet Nicola in the garden of the house Sydney had rented, she is described as being "... frail and delicate, with a cloud of fluffy golden hair round her small white face....".² Compare this with the first description of Winifred in The Girls of St Bride's, pushing herself towards St Bride's when Morag bumps into her "... a pale dark haired girl, whose eyes seemed too large for the rest of her face. ...".³ Nicola is clearly pretty, while, reading this, my instant impression of Winifred is that she is very plain, almost plainer than the twelve year old Joey Bettany in The School at the Chalet. However, Nicola does the usual thing and becomes well enough to go through the rest of the Springdale series as an ordinary girl at school; her health only temporarily packing up in the last of the series - but she still ends the book, Captain Anne, at school.

Descriptions of individuals who lack some kind of physical ability (they do not need to be disabled, they can often just be "ill") are always linked to the person's temperament, and that temperament is universally either "warped" or extremely "saintly". Rather like Nicola Carter, Bernadine (Dina) Willoughby, in Brent-Dyer's Seven Scamps, is the metaphorical blonde, blue eyed, saintly character who is physically weak with a twisted shoulder. In standard story-book fashion, a great surgeon straightens the shoulder and Dina "gets well".

This type of characterisation also applies to Winifred to a certain extent, but in the case of Naomi Elton, the two things, physical appearance and personality, are very interdependent. As Naomi lessens her grip on the enormous chip on her shoulder, which Elinor Brent-Dyer attributes to the combined beneficial and "healthy" influences of Mary-Lou and the Chalet School, her physical abilities improve, to the ultimate extent of her body being physically straightened. Then, and only then, is Naomi deemed by Elinor Brent-Dyer to be a useful/valid member of society. Why? After all, to quote Sybil Grierson in Nancy at St Bride's, Winifred returns to St Bride's as an "honorary secretary", and she can't walk at all! True, Elizabeth Hawthorn's subsequent comment to Sybil "'... She always had such a good business head that one felt that she would have done well in a profession if she hadn't been a cripple, poor soul! ...'"⁴ is a little bit incriminating, but the sentiment is a product of times.

Unusually for D. F. Bruce, Winifred is very vaguely described as a girl - apart from in terms of her disability - even in The Girls of St Bride's which is after all, the book where one meets her most often. It is as if the author can only perceive Winifred in terms of her "invalid carriage", over which Morag almost topples the first time the two girls meet. True, we are eventually told that Winifred is dark-haired and dark-eyed and that she is pale of complexion, but that is all, and the description seems to be scattered like a trail of breadcrumbs through the stories. I don't know whether Winifred is tall or short, thin or fat, or whether her hair is long or short; and I want to be told by her creator. I suspect that she is tall and somewhat thin, but I know that this image is influenced by the illustrations in the books! Her personality is described in almost loving detail, but that still doesn't tell me what she looked like! This lack of any real description is carried on into the later books, when Winifred returns to St Bride's as an adult.

However, I think that Dorita Fairlie Bruce's portrayal of Winifred in adulthood, although vague, is fairly unbiased and un-stereotyped. The girls regard her as a friend, rather like Rosalie Dene in the Chalet School series, and seem not to notice her chair. A refreshing change from the picture of Winifred as a school-girl! Even the temporary headmistress at St Bride's, Miss Warren (in Nancy Returns to St Bride's) appears to treat Winifred as bossily as if she was on two feet. The Winifred of the last few chapters of The Girls of St Bride's is the forerunner of the adult one; friendly, interested in people, as Winifred learns the meaning of Miss Caldwell's words "'... (think about) what you can do - a great deal more, I assure you, than many girls who run about and hit balls hard and fast. ...'"⁵ I like to think that Winifred is made a prefect in the following year as that would reinforce the idea that the wheelchair-bound girl is as of as much value as any of her peers. In conclusion then, other than the obvious differences between a boarding-school and a Council School of the pre-war years, there seems to be little difference between the imaginary and the real worlds. Dorita Fairlie Bruce has managed, almost against the odds, to create a viable disabled person who is allowed to have a life with a disability and a career of sorts. I think this is why I am fascinated with Miss Winifred Arrowsmith.

References
¹ The Girls of St Brides ch. 9
² The New House Captain ch.19
³ The Girls of St Brides ch. 4
⁴ Nancy at St Bride's ch.1
⁵ The Girls of St Bride's ch 20