Anyone seeking all the essential information about the family origins and life of Joan Rundall / Joan Grigsby / Joan Savell-Grigsby might expect to find it in the biography Dreamer in Five Lands by Faith G. Norris (Philomath, Oregon: Drift Creek Press.1993). After all, the author was her daughter, born in 1917, a university professor. Surely a reliable witness? So I thought.

However, it soon became clear that the contradictions which I found existed between the account of Joan's family and her childhood given by Faith Norris (based largely, she says, on things her father told her in the years after Joan died) and the facts revealed by certificates of birth, marriage and death as well as other sources were very considerable.

Finally, I wrote to Faith Norris's own daughter in California, Joan Norris Boothe, who had published Faith's book after her death, in the hope that she might be able to help. She replied that she had only learned the truth about her mother's family origins a few weeks before I contacted her, through a phone call from Philip Rundall, the son of Joan's brother, John Wingate Rundall. He had, amazingly, bought and read Dreamer in Five Lands at almost the same time as I had. Born in 1947, he knew the whole family story very well and had met all the members of Joan's generation in his youth (some very briefly), but had never had any contact with Joan's daughter. Bewildered by what he read in Faith's book, he felt that he should tell Joan Norris Boothe the truth and finally traced her phone number, while I found her mailing address.

She told him of my research, and he emailed me with much additional information. This page is therefore an attempt to record as accurately as possible the true picture of Joan Rundall's family; the reason why she set about creating a fictional family and childhood for herself is something we can only guess at.

A brief summary of Joan's origins begins the page containing the rest of the Joan Grigsby story.

Photos of Joan

Joan’s parents and her childhood

     B. The Facts from the  official record and the family memory

The official Scottish records of births show that the woman known to us as Joan Rundall (later Grigsby) received at birth the names Charlotte Ada Joan. She was born at 9:30pm on December 19, 1891 at the house called Gowan Bank, Moffat, Dumfriesshire (Scotland). Her father’s name is given as John William Rundall (clergyman), but her mother’s name was not “Janet McLeod” but Constance Ethel Rundall (born Pearse). Their marriage date is given as April 10, 1890, in Walton near Bletchley, Buckinghamshire (England).



Another official Scottish record shows that John William Rundall’s widow, Joan’s mother, Constance Ethel Rundall, died of cancer of the liver on September 22, 1909, aged 49, not in 1901 as Faith Norris believed. The names of her parents (Joan’s maternal grandparents) are given on her death certificate as George Wingate Pearse (Clerk in Holy Orders, deceased) and Charlotte Pearse (Smith, deceased). She died at 20 Dublin Street, Edinburgh and the death was reported by her brother H. C. Pearse of Mildenhall, Suffolk.

            C. The riddle

             There are, then, two almost completely different accounts of Joan Grigsby’s parents, that related by Joan to her husband (and to her daughter, to some degree) and that which we can reconstruct from the official record. Faith Norris makes it clear (p.17) that she first heard the story of the Jewish grandfather, Herman Rundall, from her father after her mother’s death, between 1937 and 1947, when her father died. She implies that the story of Herman Rundall’s gifts to the school having perhaps been the reason why Joan’s father became headmaster was also her father’s, as also the account of her father’s “strongly marked Jewish features.”

She says that her father first learned of Joan’s Jewish ancestry five years after their marriage. Elsewhere she indicates that the revelation of this “truth” was the result of Joan’s conversion to Catholicism, and that she wrote it to her husband, then in France, at the command of a priest. There is only one indication that her mother ever told her anything about her childhood; Faith Norris mentions “what my mother called her mother’s ‘Gaelic-haunted Highland lilt’.” She seems to be saying that she heard those words directly.

    The essential facts of Joan’s father’s adult identity are preserved in her own account :  he was an Anglican (i.e. in Scotland “Episcopalian”) priest who had come to St. Ninian’s School as a teacher and had become headmaster of the school, a position he held until his death. The year (though not the month) of his death is correct. Her grandparents, Faith Grigsby correctly says, had five children (p.17), she names two boys as “John and Tony” (p.18) as well as Joan's sisters Margaret and Eleanor.

    John William Rundall was not simply the headmaster of St. Ninian's, he was its owner, having bought it from the original owners. On his death, it became his wife's property.  Philip Rundall writes: "Immediately behind the school is another largish house called Wykeham Lodge. This I believe may be where Constance lived with Joan. In the history of the school it says, after her husband's death, 'Mrs Rundall, however, moving to a nearby house, remained the owner of the property, and even after she died in 1910 [really 1909], leaving two young sons still as pupils at the school, she bequeathed it not to Frank, who, had already been its headmaster for four years, but to her brother Hugh, who, however, soon left to be ordained at Ely, and in 1911 conveyed the property and the school to his brother Frank in consideration of the paying-off of debts which, unsurprisingly in view of the declining numbers, were by now substantial.' 

The school's history has a section entitled Interregnum: 1903 - 1906 :  'It is not surprising that on the sudden death of Rundall, at only 44 years of age, a difficult period should have followed. He left the school to his widow (nee Constance Pearse), and she was in nominal command for a while, assisted by her brother Hugh Chernocke Pearse. Nor is it at all surprising that in this unsettled situation numbers declined still further, till in the Spring term of 1906 there were only 15 boys in the school, which must have been on the verge of closure, when another brother, and the second dominating figure in the School's history, came from Wales to the rescue.'

Philip Rundall writes: "My father (John Wingate Rundall, Joan's brother) worshipped his mother; he regularly talked to me about her (although we have no photo of her). He described her as a saint, an incredibly tolerant woman. I have a history of St Ninian's in which she is described as being unusual as she related kindly to the domestic staff. I read a letter in Canada, in which she describes Joanie as being an extraordinary support after John William died. Incidentally she wrote to the general asking for financial support to keep the school afloat. The school was regarded as one of the two top preparatory schools in Scotland. I have John William's diary of 1896 in which he describes the slow process of buying the school from Dowding, the then Head."   The school buildings are now a home for elderly ex-RAF men, called Dowding House, after the WW2 Chief of the Royal Airforce, Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, the son of the school's founder.

                Faith Norris says (p.19) that after Joan’s father died in 1903, her brothers remained as boarders at St. Ninian’s while the two girls (who were aged 8 and 6 in 1903) went to live with “Herman Rundall and his wife” in Edinburgh. On p.38 she says that in 1916 Margaret and Eleanor had finished their education at George Watson’s Ladies College in Edinburgh and both came to London, Margaret to train for the Women’s Army Corps and Eleanor to study at a home economics institute. This raises the vexed question of Joan’s own education. Primary education had been compulsory in Scotland since 1872. But in 1903 Joan was nearly 12, while Margaret and Eleanor were still small children. There seems no reason to suppose that in fact any of the children left their mother’s side before she died in 1909. By that time, their uncle was headmaster of St. Ninian’s and might well have taken decisions for their ongoing education and careers. For Joan, already aged nearly 12 in July 1903 when her father died, there was probably nowhere she could go for secondary education and the story that she received informal classes from teachers at St. Ninian’s might well be true.

    Joan Rundall apparently came to London in 1910 and she met Arthur early in 1912. Since Faith Norris had ample opportunity to talk with her father in the years after Joan’s death, we can assume that the narrative from that point is fairly reliable. It seems that Joan invented at least part of her story about her family at that moment. We know that her mother died in September 1909, but Arthur clearly believed she had died years earlier, before her father. Her paternal grandfather was not in fact alive to provide for her as Herman the Jew was later said to have done, but her uncle the headmaster of St. Ninian’s might well have felt obliged to do so. The London clergyman to whom she was sent might have been, Faith says, a university friend of her father’s and Francis Wingate Pearse might well have had such a friend, for even though he studied at Trinity College, Dublin, (B.A. and M.A.) he was ordained in the English diocese of Rochester. But the 1911 census shows that in fact the clergyman was no other than her uncle, Hugh Chernocke Pearse, still unmarried at 42.

    One thing is clear. The fantastic stories that Joan told about her father’s family and her mother served to erase completely one essential fact: her parents were both utterly English, she had no immediate Scots blood. Her father was the son of an English general, born in India into a family that was traditionally part of the colonial establishment while her mother was the daughter of an English rector. Something in Joan might have rebelled for some hidden reason.  Faith Norris in the opening lines of her memoir testifies that to her dying breath Joan affirmed her Scottishness by her accent, by singing the song of all Scottish exiles, and dreaming of a return to the Highlands and the Hebrides that, in fact, she had never seen.

    Joan created an archetypal Hebridean mother for herself, her voice at least still touched by the Gaelic, deeply rooted in Scotland’s traditions, poor and uneducated. She called her Janet McLeod, a common enough name. Curiously and perhaps significantly, the fictional aunt Fiona McLeod, with whom she claims she lived and worked at St. Ninian’s "after her parents’ death," has the same name as a Scottish poet who might well have had an influence on Joan’s writing. Her name usually spelled Fiona MacLeod, she was considered a Celtic visionary and romantic in the late nineteenth century, her works being read together with the poems of W.B. Yeats. Readers of the period were enchanted by the marvelous weaving of folklore, myth, vision, and personal observation in her prose and poetry. It caused a great scandal when it was revealed in 1905 that the works attributed to Fiona MacLeod had in fact been written by the male Scottish poet and writer William Sharp. The fictional female pseudonym, and the Celtic identity might both have spoken strongly to the dreamer awakening within Joan Rundall. See the text by Dr. Robert Irvine  where he writes:

Arnold once wrote: "no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus particularly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret." What links the Celtic to the feminine is their common marginality to a public culture understood as predominantly masculine. After all, the qualities Arnold accords the Anglo-Saxon ("steadiness", practicality, rationality) are usually gendered masculine, the qualities of the Celt (sensitivity, emotionality, imagination) are usually gendered feminine. The Celt, one might say, seems designed to be, not so much the partner of the Anglo-Saxon in their joint Imperial project, as his wife. By adopting a female persona Sharp is assimilating himself as author to the celtic world that his fictions portray. (. . . ) putting women at their centre, with a fair degree of authority, but as exotic creatures, as inhabitants par excellence of that "alien" celtic world Sharp is setting out to explore. Hence the feminine pseudonym: this exotic world is one to which women might have privileged imaginative access.”

               At some point Joan also created an archetypal rich, European Jewish grandfather with a Belgian wife (to talk with whom, she claimed, she had learned French). There was, then, only one person she could not recreate: her father. The clergyman and his wife to whom she was sent in London, and in whose house she met Arthur and his mother, would obviously have been told the identity of her father, the deceased clergyman and headmaster. Even the year of his death was clearly fixed in the family memory, and the cause, too, for he did indeed die of heart problems.

 Her father's death certificate says he suffered from Endocarditis for 4 months, General Oedema for 1 month, and that then affected his lungs for the last 3 days. Faith talks of two heart attacks. The person who reported the death was a nurse, Mabel Pearse, his sister-in-law (obviously an as yet unmarried sister of his wife) but it is not possible to know why he was in Cornwall though the mild climate might have been thought good for someone with a weak constitution. His wife would have been running the school in his place, presumably.

Joan Rundall was certainly a rebel when possible; even her conversion to Catholicism might be seen as a rejection of her parents’ and grandparents’ Anglicanism. Her first poems were published in a magazine of the Labour Party. She was always aspiring to a better life elsewhere, she sympathized as she could with the plight of the Koreans, and when they had to leave Asia, she clearly did not consider a return to England, where she still had family, for Francis Wingate Pearse served as priest in Moffat until he retired in 1938. Instead, she insisted on Vancouver because it had looked so beautiful as they left for Japan.

It seems unlikely that we shall ever know if her departure from Moffat after her mother’s death was marked by some traumatic event that made her want to reject her mother’s and father’s family’s identities completely. It seems unlikely that wanting to be a Scot and an outsider would provide a strong enough motivation for a whole lifetime, however short, of silence. For it is the Pearse family and the Rundall family that she denies, substituting the McLeods and the Hirondelles for them. Now ‘hirondelle’ is the French word for a skylark, or just a ‘lark,’ though not in the joking sense, but perhaps that was her little joke?