Secret Passages/Secret Rooms/Islands/Rocky tunnels under the

[Daisy]

Many older houses have/had stairs closed off with a door and I have always understood this to be what is portrayed in "Hike". I guess the old woman is no longer able to manage the stairs so sleeps downstairs. Goodness knows where Dirty Dick slept. It can't have been his room or the old woman would not have let Anne use it.

[Lucky Star]

Not really secret if it can just be accessed by opening a regular door so it's a No from me. It was probably a servant's room or a child's room many years before which has been left idle for a long time. The fact that there is a window also counts against it being a secret.

[pete9012S]

I am grateful for the serious input on this most important topic from my two learned friends.

The fact that it 'looked like the entrance to a cupboard' built my secret passage hopes up too high!

[pete9012S]

May I offer another one for Famous Five expert appraisal - too tenuous perhaps...

Chapter Three
BIG HOLLOW - AND TINKER AND MISCHIEF AGAIN!

The four children and Timmy went through the big, heavy gate, which groaned loudly. Timmy was very startled to hear the mournful creak, and barked sharply.
‘Sh!’ said George. ‘You’ll get into trouble with the Professor, Timmy, if you raise your voice like that. I expect we’ll have to talk in whispers, so as not to disturb the Professor - so just see if you can whisper too.’
Timmy gave a small whine. He knew he couldn’t whisper! He trotted at George’s heel as they all went down the steep drive to the house. It was a queer house, built sideways to the drive, and had astonishingly few windows.
‘I expect Professor Hayling is afraid of people peering in at his work,’ said Anne. ‘It’s very, very secret, isn’t it?’

Here's the bit:

‘Ha - I enjoyed that!’ said the Professor, having cleaned his plate thoroughly. ‘Nothing like a good breakfast!’
‘It was midday dinner, Dad!’ said Tinker. ‘You don’t have pudding at breakfast.’

‘Dear me, of course - that was pudding!’ said his father, and laughed his great laugh. ‘Now you can all do exactly what you like, so long as you do NOT go into my study, OR my workroom OR that tower. AND DON’T MEDDLE WITH ANYTHING! Mischief, get off the water-jug, you’ll upset it. Can’t you teach that monkey some table-manners, Tinker?’

And with that he marched out of the room, and disappeared into some mysterious passage that apparently led to his study or workroom. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

[timv]

We used to have a semi - 'secret passage' in my old primary school in Sussex, a converted 1870s Gothic mansion. It was disused rather than 'secret' as such and was not blocked up, but it had a low door , not the usual height for an adult, and its door into the bedroom at the end of the passage was disguised as a cupboard door. It led from a 'back' staircase, used by the house's servants not the family, along a short 'passage' (in fact only about 5 yards long,between two deep cupboards in the wall, but it seemed a proper passage to us children) into the back of an ex- bedroom. Presumably it was used by servants to carry items through and down the backstairs to avoid using the main entrance onto the main stairs where they might bump into the family.

This abandoned former bedroom had been used by the school since it took over the house in 1935 as a classroom until the weak floorboards made rot a problem and it was taken out of use as unsafe. By the time I was at the school (1968-9) it was just a storeroom for a few light articles, but if one of us children was sent up there to collect material for the class (eg new exercise books) we used to use it rather than the official entrance, a proper door off the main stairs about 20 yards further along. I was reading about Enid's secret passages in the Famous Five books at the time and found it most intriguing! It all got pulled down when the school was sold off to make way for an office; the common fate for a lot of Victorian houses in the pragmatic 'new build' era of the 1970s, eg Bursledon Towers as used by the ITV FF series in 1978.

[Lucky Star]

Interesting story Timv. It's such a pity that so many fine old buildings were (and continue to be) pulled down to make way for modern functional monstrosities. A large old Victorian guest house near me is probably going to suffer the same fate as it has been closed for some time and a planning permission application for an apartment block has now been posted up outside it.

[Ed Fulcrum]

Not really a secret room or passage but in Hike there are cellars in Two Trees!

[Chrissie777]

In Five Get into Trouble is there a coal hole at Owl's Dene? Also Goon springs to mind as you say where coal holes are concerned. I imagine every almost every house had a coal hole in the 30s etc though or something similar. We had some sort of outside coal bunker that was redundant.

One of the best FFO books "Mystery of the Secret Room" has a coal cellar through which they enter the house.

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[Chrissie777]

I thought the whole route to the treasure in The valley of Adventure was utterly thrilling. First the signs leading to the cave entrance and the descriptions of the scenery encountered along the way, then the passageways, the cave of stalactites, the cave of stars, the enormous studded door, the caves of statues, paintings, books and gold..... I have always been gripped by that strange journey although I suppose, technically, the secret passage in Ship is just as exciting. The world inside the Mountain is a very richly thought out piece of writing and really comprises a totally seperate universe to that of the gentle Welsh countryside around it. Its almost like a James Bond story in many respects. It is indeed very thrilling as is the somewhat similar descriptions in The Secret Mountain, vastly differant peoples maybe but a similar sense of creeping through a thrilling but claustrophic underground lair.

For me the secret passage in "The Castle of Adventure" was very thrilling. But "Valley" is EB's master piece. No doubt about it.

[Chrissie777]

On the subject of tunnels etc. There has been a labyrinth of tunnels discovered under the streets of Penzance, leading from the docks to one of the pubs (can't remember which one sorry), which were used by the smugglers many years ago. Now that's real life Blyton

Julie, this is your post from page 3, a few years ago.
A pub called Sarazen's Head in Penzanze actually has an underground passage towards the harbor which was used by smugglers. I've been there in 1987.
Unfortunately it's not accessible to the public, because they worry that it might no longer be safe.

[timv]

There's also the secret passages in the Central European (presumably) castle of 'Borken' in Tauri-Hessia in 'The Circus of Adventure' - the first of the Adventure series which I read, aged eight, and the fourth non-Famous Five adventure book which I read. There were secret passages in two of the first three that I read, ie the second Adventurous Four book (where the smugglers use one) and Spiggy Holes, so by this point I was expecting a secret passage in virtually every Blyton adventure!

The Borken Castle passage plays a crucial part in the plot as it's how Jack manages to get out of the castle after he has located Philip, Dinah, Lucy-Ann and Gussy in one of the towers - he can't get out using the ladder that he used to get in (via a window in a deserted side-wing) as it fell down after he used it. I seem to recall that he's alerted to the passage by seeing the enigmatic Mme Tatiosa, the sister of the castle's owner Count Paritolen, using it to get in - presumably she sneaks in that way so as not to be spotted by any watching spies for the King using the main gate to visit her brother to plot? Jack then follows the passage out of the castle and luckily discovers that it emerges outside the walls and next to the bell-tower - which is usefully within a short distance of the others' room's window so the rescue can be planned using an acrobatic wire run across to the window from the tower. The plotting here is ingenious , if helped by a lot of luck - and I later found, intriguingly, that the architectural quirk of building large free-standing bell-towers next to important buildings (usually churches) was a genuine practice in medieval Transylvania, now part of Rumania, so that the locals could hide there from raiding Mongol horsemen and the bell could be used to ring and alert the locals that raiders had been spotted. (The towers were stone so that once the doors had been barricaded behind a portcullis they were safe from being set on fire.)

I wonder if this creation by Enid of the Borken bell-tower for a mysterious country somewhere in central or eastern Europe (a few hours' flight from the UK and ruled by a sort of 'Balkan' monarchy with restive noblemen busy plotting) came from her reading about this phenomenon , perhaps in a magazine article - it seems a bit too much of a coincidence !

[Chrissie777]

There's also the secret passages in the Central European (presumably) castle of 'Borken' in Tauri-Hessia in 'The Circus of Adventure' - the first of the Adventure series which I read, aged eight, and the fourth non-Famous Five adventure book which I read. There were secret passages in two of the first three that I read, ie the second Adventurous Four book (where the smugglers use one) and Spiggy Holes, so by this point I was expecting a secret passage in virtually every Blyton adventure!

That was so special about EB books for me when I discovered them in the fall of 1965, aged 10.
I hadn't read any book with a secret passage before, except maybe "Clockwork Castle" by Norman Dale (Das Schloss des Erfinders) which I read around the same time.
Astrid Lindgren's books contained no secret passages and at that point I had not yet read Nancy Drew.

"Circus" was also my first adventure series book.
I read "Spiggy Holes" much later as a teenager when it was finally available (in the German translation) at my mom's Bertelsmann book club. However, the English original is a lot better (I read it in English for the first time last year).

And "The Secret Island" has this wonderful cave.

[dsr]

Jack then follows the passage out of the castle and luckily discovers that it emerges outside the walls and next to the bell-tower - which is usefully within a short distance of the others' room's window so the rescue can be planned using an acrobatic wire run across to the window from the tower. The plotting here is ingenious , if helped by a lot of luck - and I later found, intriguingly, that the architectural quirk of building large free-standing bell-towers next to important buildings (usually churches) was a genuine practice in medieval Transylvania, now part of Rumania, so that the locals could hide there from raiding Mongol horsemen and the bell could be used to ring and alert the locals that raiders had been spotted. (The towers were stone so that once the doors had been barricaded behind a portcullis they were safe from being set on fire.)

You can find these a bit closer to home as wel. There's one in Warwick, for example, though they are rare in the UK. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa was a bell tower as well - or it was supposed to be. I don't know if it ever had bells in it. If they had only stuck in onto the church in the normal way, I dare say it wouldn't have leaned!

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