Dorita Fairlie Bruce (20 May 188521 September 1970) was a Scottish children's author who wrote the popular Dimsie series of books published between 1921 and 1941. Her books were second in popularity only to Angela Brazil's during the 1920s and 1930s. The Dimsie books alone had sold half a million hardback copies by 1947.
Early life
Dorita Fairlie Bruce, was born as Dorothy Morris Fairlie Bruce, in Palos, Heulva, Spain, on 20 May 1885, to Alexander Fairlie Bruce (7 September 185720 January 1944), a Scottish civil engineer, and Katherine (Kate) Elizabeth Fairbairn (c.18611931), the daughter of William Freebairn of Drummilling, West Kilbride, Ayreshire. Alexander was working on the Heulva waterworks in Spain at the time. The early years in Spain resulted in Dorothy begin known as "Dorita".
Bruce's early childhood was spent in Scotland, first at Blanefield among the Campsie Hills, Stirling, an area that was to feature in many of her early stories, and then at Blairgowrie, Perthshire, where her brother Alan Cathcart Fairlie Bruce (2 March 189410 October 1927) her only sibling, was born. In 1895 her father got the contract to build the Staines Reservoirs, next to what is now Heathrow Airport and the family moved south to Ealing in west London.
After moving to London Bruce was sent to a boarding school at Clarence House in Roehampton, the model for Dimsie's school, the 'Jane Willard Foundation'. Many of her holidays were spent with relations in Scotland, particularly the Firth of Clyde area around Largs in Ayrshire, which was later to become her particular literary landscape. Her mother's family lived in West Kilbride, a few miles south of Largs.
At the time of the 1901 census, the family were living at 28 Inglis Road in Ealing. By the 1911 census the family have moved to 27 Boileau Road in Ealing, which was to remain the family home until at least 1944 when Bruce's father died there.
Bruce's paternal grandmother, Roberta Cadell, was a daughter of Robert Cadell, Sir Walter Scott's publisher, who is mentioned briefly in her historical novel, A Laverock Lilting. The Cadell family genealogy is available online.
Apart from her writing, Bruce seems to have led a life similar to that of many other unmarried middle-class women of her time, devoted to family duties and voluntary work. She looked after her invalid mother and later her ageing father, and helped to bring up her brother's three children after his early death. For more than 30 years, from about 1916 to the late 40s, she was engaged in the Girls' Guildry. This was a uniformed girls' organisation founded in 1900 by Dr William Francis Somerville and originally associated with the Church of Scotland, but later spread over other parts of Britain and the Empire. She was for a period in the 30s President of its West London Centre. She contributed factual articles to the Lamp of the Girls' Guildry magazine and Girls' Guildry plays a role in her Nancy series and gets a mention in her Dimsie series. In July 1965 The Girls' Guildry merged the Girls' Life Brigade Service of England and the Girls Brigade of Ireland to become the Girls' Brigade.
Bruce was above all, in spite of all her years in London, a Scottish writer. She often went back to Scotland for holidays, as witnessed by the detailed descriptions of the landscape in her many books set there. Not until 1949 was she free to move back to Scotland, to the big house she had bought in Upper Skelmorlie in the northern part of Ayrshire. In this house with its marvellous view of the Firth of Clyde, and named 'Triffeny' after one of her own books, she spent the last 21 years of her life, dying there aged 85 on 21 September 1970.
Writing
Like so many other writers she started writing at an early age and is said to have won a competition for poetry at the age of six. The first time she used her pen name 'Dorita' was in small hand-written magazines. After leaving school she wrote a great number of poems and short stories in various genres for juvenile periodicals and anthologies from about 1905. Most of her short stories are set in Scotland, like the 'Regiment' stories, about two children and their pets living with their grandmother in the Campsie Hills. This is also partly the setting of the long historical romance "Greenmantle" (The Girl's Realm, 1914–15).