The idea of the Chalet School ethos pops up frequently in discussions on other topics, but I wondered if it might be fun to pull all our ideas together in one place?

So: what is the Chalet School ethos?

Are there over-arching expectations that apply throughout the whole series, wherever the school is set and whatever the external political stresses (so does it alter in the war years at all, for example?)?

Are there different ethoses (! that can't be right!!!!) in different places and times?

I suppose a good place to start would be to think about what the CSE was right at the beginning, and to see whether or not the time in which it was set, the prevailing social status and situation of the characters influenced what the ethos was expected to be at that point (so Madge, as a MMC person, needing to make some money in an 'appropirate way), the geography of the CS - so Austria, in the beginning - and (if we can take it this far!) how a British ethos was influenced by, or influenced an Austrian ethos.

As far as the last point goes, we know, for example, that Austrian girls were much more chaperoned than British, and this then affected how the school was run (female Mistresses sitting in with Mr Denny - at first).

And finally, what caused any change in identified ethos? Such as (perhaps?) Mr Denny no longer needing female chaperonage, perhaps due to familiarity, so families of girls getting to know Mr Denny, making it more acceptable for him to teach unchaperoned. Or the war, which had huge social effects all round?

I think that to an extent, I'd differentiate between the 'ethos' in the sense of guiding ideals, and the purely social context things like chaperoning, which are Tyrol- and time-specific. I think it's clear from the stuff Joey thinks in the Stuffer and Maria episode that Madge doesn't believe in chaperonage, she's just going along with local custom. I bet the chaperonage was simply quietly dropped during the war removals, possibly even as early as when the CS moved to the Sonnalpe and started losing its Austrian pupils, and certainly by Guernsey, when it was turning into an actual English school.

I confess the retaining of the curtsey in the UK always strikes me as just a pretentious frill, rather than a genuine nod to the CS's continental roots. (But then, I'm not entirely sure why a school known for being 'English' would have even started that custom, especially when all the initial Austrian girls are dying to be as English as possible? Likewise calling Madge 'Madame', rather than Miss Bettany/Mrs Russell in the English way. It's clear during Christmas in Jo Of that Joey and Madge are not accustomed to curtseying, and only do it to old Frau Mensch because they are in an Austrian household.)

In fact, I think what I like about the very early CS is that it's too new to really have an ethos - it's just a brand-new school set up by a woman who needed an income, to give a reasonable education in nice, simple surroundings to Joey, Grizel and Simone, and any other pupils picked up locally. I suppose you can see how the 'Must Be English' ethos emerged, given that that must have been the USP for the parents - not 'Oh, we're just trying out the new place because it's convenient' but 'English schools are HEALTHIER, didn't you know?'

Yes ... I should have started with a definition of 'ethos', shouldn't I? I suppose I'm not pinning it down too much (which gives us the chance to go in many different directions with it). If we leave it to people to decide how they want to define it, it would open up the discussion to talk about the 'feel' of the school during its history or its guiding ideals at different points, or social mores enforced ... and so on.

This bit struck me as interesting in Goes To It:



I'm not sure what Frieda means by the CS being an 'idea' - what's wrong with it just being a successful boarding school at which both Joey and Frieda were happy, and with which they both remain very involved? Is it the rhetoric of wartime, forced exile and the Peace League etc that is inflecting what Frieda is saying? And the 'great idea' is international co-operation in the face of war...?

Part of it's the general "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton" (yeah, right!!) idea that you get in most boarding school books - standing by your friends, being honourable, being a good sport, not sneaking, being truthful and trustworthy, etc. I think the big difference at the CS is the emphasis on health: most boarding school characters are obsessed with sport and would be rather scornful of someone who spent a day in bed after getting their feet wet, but the CS is very concerned with health. I think we sometimes get a strange clash of two Victorian ideas - the delicate female with her smelling salts versus the "muscular Christianity" idea of jolly women striding up and down mountains in their sturdy boots.

What I find "different" is the complete lack of a work ethic. I know that it's because I'm not from a CS background, but Miss Bubb, with her ideas of prioritising good exam results and university entrance, would have done very well as the head of my school (well, apart from her rude remarks about people sitting about on the grass!), and people like the Ozannes who just dossed about would have been called into the head's study, along with their parents, and given a good rollicking; and Reg would have been respected for qualifying as a doctor against the odds instead of being considered a suitable partner for Len only because he'd inherited money from his aunt. I know it's different times, different social classes, but so many of the CS ideals are Victorian values and yet the ideas of hard work and self-improvement just aren't there at all.

Then there's the Chalet School's big USP of being international and multicultural.

Also, in times of crisis, people do tend to come out with these remarks about how "big" the school/company/football club/whatever is, and how its ideals and ethics must go on!

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I think for me it's what Alison calls the USP - despite the fact that Madge sets up what the Austrians regard as "an English" school the fascination of the series, certainly in the early days, has always been how comfortable I felt with the internationalism of the school. It isn't "English" as I understand it, there is always an acceptance of other ways of doing things and I don't imagine that any girl would hear what I heard on one occasion at school "You can't possibly understand - you're not British!"

(In fairness to the person who said it - 59 years on she is my oldest friend and she still blushes when she thinks of it)

And I like to think that that is what Frieda was talking about....

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I think that Elinor shows brilliantly how different cultures influnce and change each other. Right at the start, there's a great desire to be as 'English' as possible, expressed by Austrian girls, and yet AUstrain traaditions such as curtseying to adults is taken on without a comment and becomes part of the Chalet School universe. Very interesting - not that one is better than the other, but we're shown what different people can learn from each other - not just 'told'. For me, this particular idea, that we can all learn from each other (and taken to it's (almost) extreme, that 'not all German are Nazis') is demonstrated so clearly at this point.

I think, too, that a strong ethos in the series is the importance of home life, and women's role within it, regardless of whether or not one later has one's own family. The stress on home-making, shown in various places within the school itself, and then when we get to see the working home lives of different characters in different countries, is implicit and explicit in Chalet School thinking.

Going back to curtseying, here's a quote from Mrs Sidgwick:



Yes, I know we're at least 20 later, and we're in Austria and not Germany, it what I find interesting is how this very un-English tradition became part of what was intended to be, but its first pupils, a very English school.

When is the first reference to curtseying to a mistress at the school? Was it something the Austrian girls started doing and all the others took up until it became a school tradition, or was it something required by the staff? Gisela drives the wish to be as 'English' as possible in the early days, and I think it's she who first calls Madge 'Madame'. How much of the ethos/tradition is established by the girls, especially the prefects, and how much by the mistresses?

I think it was Madge who liked the idea, maybe as a way of encouraging respect for a very young and inexperienced headmistress, but I'm not sure when it's first mentioned.

I'd say that the CS ethos is very much of the late 1920s/early 1930s. I don't think publishers would've been so keen on the idea of an international school, especially one set in Austria and with pupils from Germany, in the years immediately following the Second World War. Also, I think that the start of the CS series fitted in very nicely after the soppiness of the Angela Brazil era, with people being madly in love with their friends and having crushes on prefects, but before the jolly hockey sticks Enid Blyton era in which it was considered OK for the in-crowd to push a non-swimmer into the pool and drag her under water. People are pleasant and kind but without being overly sentimental.

There's also the role in the community in the Tyrolean years - helping Vater Stefan's "poor parish" in Innsbruck, sponsoring a free bed at the San, etc. I think that any organisation, whether it's a local business which provides a lot of jobs and sponsors local events or a top sports club which organises training programmes for local kids or anything else like that is probably going to think of itself as being more than just a [whatever its primary function is].

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

I wonder, too, how much of any CSE can be linked directly to the Guide Movement? Things like honour? I know that school-girls of the time in other books often express the idea that they should be honourable, so I'm not sure if the CS idea of 'honour' can be linked in to Guides.

And in one of the early books there's a mention of someone - a Prefect? - having to attend a Court of Honour. The thing is, I thought this was a Guide thing, and was only done when there was some accusation of dishonour, and the accused had to attend such a court, and be put on their honour to tell the truth. Whatever she said then was accepted as the truth.

But I have no idea who it was being called to such a court at the Chalet School, and we don;t hear anything more of it - what happened, or why it was convened. Very odd and strange.

Anway. So I'd say 'honour' forms a strong part of CSE. Telling the truth and not sneaking, things like that. Although as Alison points out, a lot of this is simply down to the ideas of the age rather than CS-specific ideas.

As far as the curtseying goes I think it will have been so engrained in the non-British/non-American girls' consciousness as an appropriate way to show respect that it would have been almost impossible to eradicate it had Madge wished to do so because to all the young Europeans of that time it would have been highly disrespectful not to curtsey.

I think I mentioned elsewhere that when I lived in Germany in 1959/60 it was still very much expected of small girls to "mach deinen Knicks!" (make your bob). And little boys would still bow. And in fact there are still vestiges of this habit both in Germany and the Czech Republic nowadays.

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I don't know whether things are different in the UK, but in my experience, Courts of Honor (adult leaders - captain & lieutenants in CS parlance; patrol leaders; secretary & treasurer in some troops) mostly held ordinary business meetings. Patrol leaders reported on what their patrols had done/wanted to do/how they'd responded to whatever had come down from the previous court of honor meeting. Leaders made suggestions and reported on what they'd heard at district meetings. Treasurer gave report and secretary took notes on the discussion. In more hierarchical troops, whole troop activities could be voted upon at the court of honor rather than in the full horseshoe. I don't think we ever called people in to defend their honor, though there were stories about such doings....

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Although I'm always very tickled when some of the first Austrian pupils have absorbed the idea from school stories that English schoolgrls are cheats and thieves, and at how annoyed Joey gets!



(Actually, I've always wondered whether it's realistic for so many of the early Austrian girls to be quite so familiar with English school stories - would they really have been so readily available and popular in 1930s Austria that people like Gertrud, Bette and Gisela are very familiar with ideas like prefects and HGs?)



I'm sure that's absolutely true, but it need not necessarily have become an official school policy, even if some of the original pupils happened to greet Madge that way regularly - clearly at some point it became officially required, whatever the nationality of the girl. Plus someone obviously decided to keep the custom alive in Guernsey and the UK, even when there were very few non-UK pupils or teachers at the CS?

The first regulation curtsey is mentioned in Princess:





That's actually in Gay, and the reason given is 'because she is a Patrol Leader' which makes it sound more as if it was a regular thing than a special meeting, particularly as there is no reason given for it.

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The information about Courts of Honour is illuminating. See, I have a book somewhere on my shelves which uses this term specifically to refer to Courts held to test the truth of a matter. Wish I could remember which one it is - it's a non-EBD, anyway.

And given what people are saying, perhaps the author had heard tales of CoH being held for such things and put it into her book, but actually, it's a myth?

How is Madame pronounced? Last night I was trying it both ways, with the emphasis on the rfirst or second syllable and neither sounded right somehow. I realised that I'm more used to the look of the title (reading it as a word, I mean) than the sound.

And I suppose that giving outward respect to Those in Authority (all embodied in one person - the Head Mistress) is expressed in the curtsey and title afforded Madge. It's implied in these things.

It's extremely unlike that the English girls would have pronounced it with the emphasis on the first syllable. Even then that word had its own special meaning with its links to the oldest profession...

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The writer's credo: 'Sometimes you've got to sacrifice the things you like' (Delta Goodrem - Born To Try)

While I understand what you say KB, it's a very English way to say it with the emphasis on the first syllable!!! In some places, for an English person to pronounce it the 'French' way, it would be considered a little pretenious. If the first syllable is emphasised but said softly, it loses the implication that it's the other thing ... !

It must have the French pronunciation, surely, for the reasons KB says, but I've always found its apparently spontaneous adoption in the early days to refer to the very young Englishwoman Madge, rather than the older French colleague who continues to be referred to by all as Mademoiselle, pretty odd. No French person would use it to address someone of Madge's age and marital status at the start of the series, whereas they would naturally address the older Mademoiselle Lepattre as 'Madame' - their relative authority within the school wouldn't make a difference.

Plus who starts it? The only native French speakers at the early CS are Simone and Mademoiselle herself, and while I could imagine Madge wanting a name that sounded more Head-like than plain 'Miss Bettany', her fluent French would mean she knew perfectly well that it was an older/married woman's title. And yet, like the curtsey, it quickly becomes official school policy, to the point where we see Madge quite early on asking a new English member of staff to address her as Madame. It's possible, I suppose, that the new matron finds it pretentious, or just surprising, that a fellow-Englishwoman asks her to address her by a French title...?

Hilda remains 'Miss Annersley' throughout, on the other hand.

I've always understood that the two words are pronounced differently. "Madam", without an e, has the emphasis on the first syllable. "Madame", with an e, is a French word and consequently has the emphasis on the second syllable. It's nothing to do with being pretentious or not - they are just different words (in my experience).

I agree with Cosimo's Jackel - it seems such an unlikely thing for Madge to be called!

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The Chalet School has done it again!

The historical use of "Madame" would be the French equivalent of "Duchess of York", i.e. the wife of the king's second son or younger brother; and the only time it usually turns up in books is as a title for a French or Russian head of a ballet school!

The Mensches' maid refers to Frau Mensch snr as "Madame", though, so EBD must have got the idea from somewhere that it was a title used in Austria to show respect.

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.