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Yates, Dornford, 1885-1960We have 2 books for this author.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. BiographyYoung Mercer, son of a solicitor, attended Harrow School and University College, Oxford. He idolised his older cousin, Hector Hugh Munro (the writer Saki), whose mother's family name was Mercer. He 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. After Harrow he went to Oxford in 1904 where he was active in the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS), becoming secretary in 1906 and president in 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. 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. 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 Dornford 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. 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 Newplan 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 WorkThe Berry books are semi-autobiographical humorous romances, often in the form of short stories, and featuring in particular Bertram "Berry" Pleydell. 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. 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 are thrillers mainly set in Continental Europe in which the heroes, Jonah Mansel, who also appears in the Berry books, and his friend and colleague Richard Chandos, 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." 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. In Valerie French, the sequel to Anthony Lyveden, Lyveden is suffering from amnesia and cannot recall the events of the previous book. 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 anti-Semitic and highly class-conscious attitudes. BibliographyThe Berry Books
The Chandos Books
Other Volumes
FilmsAlthough none of Yates' books has yet been filmed for the cinema, the BBC produced an adaptation of She Fell Among Thieves in 1977. 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. External links
This biographical information was gathered from the Dornford_Yates page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project. BooksBerry And Co.The Brother of Daphne |
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