(Click on image to enlarge)
P.Y. [Phyllis Yvonne] Betts (1909-1990?), novelist (French Polish (Gollancz, 1933) and remarkable memoirist (People Who Say Goodbye: Memories of Childhood (1989). Grew up in Magdalen Road during WWI - grandparents lived Sherbrooke Lodge, Nightingale Lane - frequent references to WC and other local places (cemetery, prison, asylum etc).
[PY Betts] had a promising writing career during the 1930s and then disappeared from view. [She was a complete one-off, someone whose angle on the world was entirely her own. Rediscovered fifty years later living alone on a remote smallholding in Wales, she took up her pen again and wrote this poignant and very funny memoir of growing up in an unconventional family near Wandsworth Common during the First World War. Graham Greene called it "the most amusing book of childhood memories I can remember reading". It's a treat.
[From the blurb to the Slightly Foxed edition, 2005, see below.]
PYB was born in 1909.
Her mother had grown up on the other side of the Common, and her affluent grandparents still lived nearby, at Sherbrooke Lodge on Nightingale Lane. her parents married at St Luke's and moved to the "new houses" on Magdalen Road.
PYB describes in detail the 11-acre field behind her house, and the buildings opposite - an undertakers, and a small school.
The house number varies in different censuses, but I think the Betts family always lived at what is now 77 Magdalen. The undertaker/monumental mason [Buchanan's?] and Mrs Stroud's school was opposite. Behind them was a nursery and the prison. There were no cottage-style semis opposite. Notice "London Playing Fields" came up as far as Ellerton Rd.
Among many fine passages, she describes the local "lunatic asylum", the prison, and the cemetery - her description of the (daily?) funeral processions from the 3rd London General Hospital at the RVPA during WWI is particularly moving.
See e.g. here
Majolica
1930
Wins Comp 16 A (£2.2s.0d)
Wins Comp 17B (£1.1s.0d)
1931
Wins Comp 56B: 10s 6d
A "she", according to the report in 57A/B.
1932
Wins 111A: £1.1s.0d
Wins 124B: £1.1s.0d
1933
Wins 167B: £1.0s.0d.
PB: I have downloaded some of her winning entries.
"Competitors are asked to come up with 'six suggested improvements to the human frame'.">
"A has been lent a house in the country by B. A's letter of thanks is asked for, in which there is an apology for something (fairly slight) done. (It also to contain some idea of the house."
More here
"the story of a group of lascivious girls at a Swiss finishing-school. The plot seems less important than its characters' off-the-wall observations and comments. Virginia rebuts Millicent's allegation that she is always thinking about sex: "I guess if you thought a little more about sex your circulation would be a whole lot better; there's nothing like sex for keeping a girl warm."
Charles Hawtree, "In Search of..." (see below)
PYB wrote articles and short stories for Graham Greene's important but short-lived magazine Night and Day - it closed thanks to a defamation suit brought by 9-year-old Shirley Temple, who objected to an article by GG alleging that her performance was highly sexualised.
In 2020 I could not readily find any issues online, but I have come across numerous references to Christopher Hawtree's 1985 anthology from Night and Day. This includes a number of pieces by PYB, though not [CHECK] any of her short stories.
CF was so intrigued that he went looking for PY Betts (about whom he knew nothing), and struck lucky. Now more than 70 years old [check], she was living on a smallholding in Wales, where he interviewed her. An article was published in the Daily Telegraph [I have not found this yet.], and a publisher commissioned her to write a memoir - he was more interested in her adult life, when she was acquainted with various mid-century literary greats (Greene, Auden et al), but she wanted to write about her childhood in Wandsworth and Battersea. I am so glad that she held out.
At a desk beneath the dome of the British Museum Reading Room, as sombre Ph.D. types on either side of me pored over earnest looking volumes, I had to restrain myself from yelling for joy at item NN 20963: the catalogue number for French Polish by P. Y. Betts. It was her only book, a novel published by Gollancz in 1933. It looked as if nobody had opened it for some while - perhaps for more than fifty years.
It was 1985 and I was at work on an anthology from the rare, weekly magazine Night and Day which in 1937 had sought to be an English incarnation of The New Yorker. But after six months it had come a cropper, its funds even scarcer in the wake of a libel suit brought by Twentieth-Century Fox against its co-editor Graham Greene for his review of the 9-year-old Shirley Temple's performance in Wee Willie Winkie. Many of the magazine's contributors, such as John Betjeman and Alistair Cooke, and indeed Greene himself, were to become very well known. Yet often as interesting were those of whom little, if anything, was later heard, among whom was P. Y. Betts. She wrote entertaining pieces for the magazine on French food, and a Snobs' Guide to Good Form which was twenty years ahead of Nancy Mitford's "U and Non-U".
The same spirit was evident in French Polish, the story of a group of lascivious girls at a Swiss finishing-school. The plot seems less important than its characters' off-the-wall observations and comments. Virginia rebuts Millicent's allegation that she is always thinking about sex: "I guess if you thought a little more about sex your circulation would be a whole lot better; there's nothing like sex for keeping a girl warm." Angela asks, "Have you ever noticed that people who are quite disintegratingly beautiful in the nude are often dreadfully pedestrian in clothes?" - to which Pat makes the logical reply, "And the ruefulness of it is that those who look dreadfully pedestrian in clothes?' - to which Pat makes the logical reply, "And the ruefulness of it is that those who...
About the contributor
Christopher Hawtree has edited Graham Greene's letters to the press and other writings (Yours Etc) and, for the World's Classics, John Meade Falkner's novel The Nebuly Coat. At present he is working on a book about language: The Fear of Saffron.
[Foxed Quarterly: Christopher Hawtree, "In Search of P. Y. Betts"]
[LOTS MISSING, I THINK, and only accessible online by buying a subscription, or by finding the volume in which it featured, Slightly Foxed, issue 7 (1 Sep 2005), which is available to buy at £14.
I have since found a copy of the entire 6-page essay. Very interesting.]
Several editions followed, a number with very large type for sight-impaired, presumably older people, and a nicely produced edition for Slighly Foxed in 2005 [?]
Synopsis
Phyllis Yvonne Betts grew up in Wandsworth during the First World War. She observed the conversations and the behaviour of the adults around her and now brings them back to life in this look at the leafy suburb that has changed so much.
Review
"A read for sheer pleasure and intense delight... Haunting, unforgettable... nudges memory wonderfully, sadly, with great hilarity." -- Dirk Bogarde
"An author, and book, I never dared dream could exist." -- 'The Spectator'
"One of the warmest and funniest autobiographies on the shelves." -- 'Daily Telegraph'
"Sharply focused, coolly observant, very funny... an entrancing, ruthlessly authentic and immensely entertaining memoir." -- 'The Listener'
"The most amusing book of childhood memories I can remember reading." -- Graham Greene
Programme Catalogue - Details: 22 September 1990 19900922
Producer: I. GARDHOUSE
Description: Ned Sherrin introduces an hour of conversation, comedy and music, with guests Kirk DOUGLAS, Richard JOBSON, Desmond MORRIS, Victoria MATHER, P. Y. BETTS, James ELLROY, Steven WELLS and Cynthia PLASTERCASTER.
Broadcast history: 22 Sep 1990 10:02-11:00 (RADIO 4)
Contributors
Mike Coleman (Author), Victoria Mather (int), Steven Wells (int), Janet Lee (Producer), Alison Vernon-Smith (Producer), Charlie Bunce (Producer), Desmond Morris (Speaker), Richard Jobson (Speaker), Kirk Douglas (Speaker), Jessica Mann (Speaker), James Ellroy (Speaker), Cynthia Plastercaster (Speaker)
P Betts (Speaker)
Aron Elkins (Speaker), June Thompson (Speaker), BBC Programme Number: 90HS0039
[Source: Link]
We hope there's room on your shelves, too, for the latest of the Slightly Foxed Editions, P. Y. Betts's People Who Say Goodbye (see p. 17). Betts, who had a promising writing career during the 1930s and then disappeared from view, was a complete one-off, someone whose angle on the world was entirely her own. Rediscovered fifty years later living alone on a remote smallholding in Wales, she took up her pen again and wrote this poignant and very funny memoir of growing up in an unconventional family near Wandsworth Common during the First World War. Graham Greene called it "the most amusing book of childhood memories I can remember reading". It's a treat.
[Foxed Quarterly: Link]
I have found a copy of the Hazel Wood's essay.]
When Slightly Foxed was young, only a few issues old in fact, the writer Christopher Hawtree came to us with the story of P. Y. Betts and her childhood memoir People Who Say Goodbye. We loved the book, and a piece about it by Christopher appeared in Issue 7. Now, several years later, we're delighted to have the chance to issue People Who Say Goodbye as a Slightly Foxed Edition.
P.Y. Betts was one of those mysteriously disappearing authors, successful early on as a short-story writer and contributor to Graham Greene's prestigious but short-lived magazine Night and Day, which was scuppered by a libel suit in 1937. In the 1930s she also published French Polish, a funny and sharply observed novel about a girls' finishing school. She was then heard of no more until, fifty years later, the writer Christopher Hawtree came across her name in the British Library and ran her to ground, living contentedly alone on a remote smallholding in Wales. Encouraged by a publisher, she took up her pen again and wrote People Who Say Goodbye.
The unconventional course of P. Y. Betts's literary life seems all of a piece with her character. There is a humorous, clear-eyed detachment about her view of the world and those around her - no doubt inherited from her energetic, forthright mother and her father, a laid-back character always ready with a joke, who refused to kow-tow to his superior in-laws - that tells you she was always going to be her own person; someone, indeed, whose voice is as wonderfully alive and individual today as it was seventy years ago.
She was born in 1909, in a house on the edge of Wandsworth Common. Up the road was a military hospi
[Foxed Quarterly: Hazel Wood, Learn-As-You-Burn, issue 29 (1 Mar 2011).]
While editing an anthology from the magazine Night and Day, famous for Graham Greene's libelling of the 9-year-old Shirley Temple, I found some delightful, very funny pieces by P Y Betts, and went to the British Library to read her one book, the novel French Polish (1933). This was a hoot which had me suppressing laughter as I sat amidst the ardent PhD aspirants. It tells of the mischief, and talk, amidst a group of lascivious schoolgirls at a Swiss finishing school.
What could have become of her? Was she still alive? When the anthology appeared, there were two particularly interesting developments. Shirley Temple got in touch, and, pleased by the anthology, said that she would be writing about the case in her autobiography. When the excellent Child Star appeared, she said that Greene was spot on in his review. They exchanged letters, and she was going to give a party for him in Czechoslovakia. Alas, he became too ill to travel, and they never met.
Meanwhile, mention in the Observer by Michael Davie of the brilliant P Y Betts brought a message from the biographer of publishers' editor Edward Garnett. He enclosed a copy of the letter in which Garnett recommended that Jonathan Cape reject Samuel Beckett's first novel ("I wouldn't touch this with a barge-pole!") but take PY Betts's novel.
What's more, Lady Eirene White was in touch to say that she had been at St Paul's Girls' school in the Twenties with P Y Betts, who had then travelled the world, written the novel, along with articles, and in the war joined the Land Army, from which she had fled the marauding American servicemen in Lincolnshire.
She had gone to a smallholding, miles from anywhere in the middle of Wales. And she was still there, with her animals, land, and had only once left it, briefly, ever since. I went to visit it for a piece which I wrote up in the Daily Telegraph.
[PB: "William", below, says this was "Tyn y Gwyrdon, on the mountain behind Cellan, near Lampeter."]
It had taken a long while to find this low cottage, which only got electricity in 1970, and I was greeted by the fiercest goat this side of Scoop.
It was an amazing day, as her brilliant talk ranged across her childhood upbringing by Wandsworth Common, the outlandish contemporary Welsh scene, and indeed a whole world to which she was more attuned than many many a wired spirit. The mobile library made a special visit up the long road to her home. She had a unique combination of great humour and unforced wisdom which was deeply calming, encouraging.
The piece duly appeared, with a photograph of her by a peacock, and another element in this saga of chance was that it caught the eye of publisher Ernest Hecht. He had the brilliant idea of asking whether she would write another book.
Through that winter she wrote People Who Say Goodbye. Graham Greene gave a quote for the cover when I sent him a proof copy. Bit by bit, the book got attention, and she appeared on Ned Sherrin's Loose Ends (visited in Wales by Victoria Mather), Dirk Bogarde made it his book of the year, it was read on Radio Four in eight instalments, and went through various paperback editions.
And so it is good news that it will continue as an elegant Slightly Foxed edition. It is one of those books that makes anybody who reads it exclaim with delight.
Of course, anything to do with Graham Greene could take one in unexpected directions, but it was amazing to think that by troubling to read a long-lost novel in the British Library, a second book by her would be added to its catalogue. An unforgettable woman.
She later sent me a lengthy piece, similar in style, about her Twenties sojurn with a family in Hamburg. It would be pleasing if this could appear in print.
FOLLOW UP! "She later sent me a lengthy piece, similar in style, about her Twenties sojurn with a family in Hamburg. It would be pleasing if this could appear in print."