Dorita Fairlie Bruce

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.