Dornford Yates

Dornford Yates was the pseudonym of the British novelist, Cecil William Mercer (August 7 1885 – March 5 1960). Born at Walmer, Kent, he lived in Pau, France from 1922 to 1940, and in Umtali, Rhodesia, (now Mutare, Zimbabwe) from 1946 until his death.

Early Life

Bill Mercer was 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. He made many useful friends during his time at the OUDS including Oscar Asche, the producer of the play Kismet and writer of Chu Chin Chow.

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 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 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.

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 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 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. The Mercers moved to France where it was possible to live far more cheaply, and the climate was kinder to his muscular rheumatism.

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, 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.

Mercer 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 memories of Bettine for Mercer and they decided to build a new house. They chose a spot 20 miles from 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". 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.

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, 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 "Sacradown" 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.

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 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 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 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.

Anthony Lyveden was Yates' first full-length novel, although it still initially appeared in monthly instalments in the Windsor Magazine. In Valerie French, the sequel to Anthony Lyveden, Lyveden is suffering from amnesia and cannot recall the events of the previous book.

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 As Berry and I Were Saying, where Yates mentions abandoning the book as it failed to 'take charge'.

In Lower than Vermin, its title based on a phrase used by the Socialist politician Aneurin Bevan to describe members of the Conservative party, Mercer defends his highly class-conscious attitudes, and takes swipes at socialist thinking.

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
• The Berry Scene (1947) - short stories
• As Berry and I Were Saying (1952) - memoirs
• B-Berry and I Look Back (1958) - memoirs

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)
• Red in the Morning a.k.a Were Death Denied (1946)
• Cost Price a.k.a. The Laughing Bacchante (1949)

Other Volumes

• Anthony Lyveden (1921) - full-length novel
• Valerie French, a sequel to Anthony Lyveden (1923) - full-length novel
• 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
• Shoal Water (1940) - full-length thriller
• Period Stuff (1942) - short stories
• Lower than Vermin (1950) - full-length novel
• Ne'er-Do-Well (1954) - full-length novel featuring Chandos in retirement
• Wife Apparent (1958) - full-length novel

Films & Media

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.

External links

• The Life and Works of Dornford Yates from ibooknet
• Works by Dornford Yates at Project Gutenberg
• IMDb entry for BBC version of She Fell Among Thieves
• Discussion group with photos of Cockade and other information
• A 1980 essay on Yates by British antiquarian, O. F. Snelling