Cecil William Mercer (7 August 1885 – 5 March 1960), known by his pen name Dornford Yates, was an English writer and novelist whose novels and short stories, some humorous (the Berry books), some thrillers (the Chandos books), were best-sellers during the Interwar Period.
The pen name Dornford Yates, first in print in 1910, resulted from combining the maiden names of his grandmothers – the paternal Eliza Mary Dornford, and the maternal Harriet Yates.
Early life
William (Bill) Mercer was born in Walmer, Kent, 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); Bill Mercer is said to have idolised his elder cousin.
Mercer attended St Clare preparatory school in Walmer from 1894 to 1899. The family moved from Kent to London when he joined Harrow School as a day pupil in 1899, his father selling his solicitor's practice in Kent and setting up office in Carey Street. Leaving Harrow in 1903, he attended University College, Oxford in 1904, where he achieved a Third in Law.
At university, he was active in the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS), becoming secretary in 1906 and president in 1907, his final year. He acted in the 1905 production of Aristophanes’ The Clouds, of which the Times reviewer said: "Among individual actors the best was Mr. C. W. Mercer, whose 'Strepsiades' was full of fun, and who possesses real comic talent." After a small part in the 1906 production of Measure for Measure, in his final year, he appeared as 'Demetrius' in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and as 'Pedant' in The Taming of the Shrew, a production which included the professional actresses Lily Brayton as 'Katherine', and her sister Agnes as 'Bianca'.
Among the many useful friends Mercer made in the OUDS were Gervais Rentoul, who asked him to be his best man, and Lily Brayton's husband, actor Oscar Asche, later producer of the play Kismet, and writer of Chu Chin Chow. After university, Mercer took a caravanning holiday in Hampshire, with Asche, Lily, Agnes, and another theatrical couple, Matheson Lang and his wife, Hutin Britton; both Asche and Lang recall that holiday in their memoirs.
Mercer's third-class Oxford law degree was insufficient to gain him traditional access to the bar. However, in 1908 his father obtained his son a post as pupil to a prominent barrister, H. G. Muskett, whose practice often required his appearing in court on behalf of the police commissioner. As Muskett's pupil, Mercer saw much of the seedy side of London life, some of which is evident in his novels.
In 1909, he was called to the Bar where he worked for several years. In his first memoirs, As Berry & I Were Saying, he recalls his involvement in the trial of the poisoner Hawley Harvey Crippen, when he returned from acting with the Old Stagers, at Canterbury, to have first look at the legal brief. Mercer is in a photograph of the Bow Street Court committal proceedings, published in the Daily Mirror of 30 August 1910.
In his spare time, he wrote short stories that were published in Punch, The Harmsworth RED Magazine, Pearson's Magazine, and the Windsor Magazine, maintaining a relationship with this last until the end of the 1930s; after it closed he wrote for the Strand Magazine. He also assisted in the writing of What I Know (Mills & Boon, 1913) - US title King Edward As I Knew Him - the memoirs of C. W. Stamper, who had been motor engineer to King Edward VII.
The Great War and afterwards
At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Mercer was commissioned as Second Lieutenant in the 3rd County of London Yeomanry (Sharpshooters), although his stories continued to appear in the Windsor until March 1915. In 1915, his regiment left for Egypt and, in November 1915 as part of the 8th Mounted Brigade, he was sent to the Salonika/Macedonian front where the war was in stalemate. Suffering severe muscular rheumatism he was sent home in 1917 and, although he was still in uniform, the War Office did not again post him. He eventually left the army in 1919. In June of that year the Windsor carried his first story since the end of the war.
Since 1914, the Mercer family home had been Elm Tree Road, behind the north-west side of Lord's Cricket Ground in St John's Wood, where his friends Oscar and Lily Asche were close neighbours. In autumn of 1919, he and Asche combined to write the stage show Eastward Ho!, but the production was not a great success and he did not again attempt to write for the stage. A frequent social – and then romantic – Elm Tree Road visitor was Bettine (Athalia) Stokes Edwards, an American girl who danced in Chu Chin Chow (and daughter of Robert Ewing Edwards of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) who became Mercer's first wife. The New York Times announcement of their engagement (28 August 1919) states: "Mr & Mrs Glover Fitzhugh Perin of 57 West Fifty-eight street have announced the engagement of Mrs Perin’s oldest daughter Miss Bettine Stokes Edwards. . . ." suggesting that her father either was dead or divorced; her remarried mother then lived in New York City. Mercer and Bettine married at St James's, Spanish Place, in the Marylebone district of London, on 22 October 1919. The month of October also marked the appearance of a story in the Windsor called Valerie whose female lead made a living as a dancer; this story never appeared in book form.
Mercer decided not to return to the bar, and to concentrate on his writing. He and Bettine lived in Elm Tree Road, where their only child, Richard, was born on 20 July 1920. After the Great War, many ex-officers found that the rise in the cost of living in London precluded maintaining the style of life of a gentleman to which they had become accustomed; some looked beyond England. In 1922, the Mercers emigrated to France, where it was possible to live more cheaply, and where the climate was kinder to Mercer's muscular rheumatism.
French residence
They chose the resort town Pau, in the western Pyrenees, in the Basses–Pyrénées département (now Pyrénées-Atlantiques) – where lived a sizeable British expat colony, but when the Mercers moved in is unknown. In Dornford Yates – A Biography (1982), A.J. Smithers</blockquote>Besides these two genres, some of Yates' novels do not easily fall into either the humorous or the thriller category.
Anthony Lyveden was Dornford Yates's first novel, telling the story of an impoverished ex-officer. Originally, it was published in monthly instalments in The Windsor Magazine,
Valerie French, the sequel to Anthony Lyveden features mostly the same cast. At the start of the book Lyveden is suffering amnesia, and cannot recall the events of the previous book, leading to romantic complications.
The Stolen March is a fantasy 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, B-Berry and I Look Back, where Yates mentions abandoning the book as it failed to "take charge".
This Publican features a scheming woman and her hen-pecked husband. Some critics have suggested that the portrayal of the villainess represented a thinly veiled attack on Mercer's first wife, although that could imply that the husband was a self-portrait, and as Smithers' states, "...he would hardly have held himself out in a character so feeble and flaccid."