Chapter Twenty-Seven
Unforeseen Ripples

 

After Agatha’s death the wall of silence she had built around herself during her lifetime remained inviolate. Biographers and journalists seeking to penetrate it were frustrated by a lack of cooperation from the Christie estate, family and friends. Officially Agatha has now sold in excess of 2.3 billion copies of her books. This is a conservative estimate because many records were lost and destroyed during the Second World War. Given that Agatha is the undisputed best-selling novelist of all time, it is hardly surprising that there has been continued speculation over the truth behind her disappearance so many years ago.

Those close to Agatha and Nan, who know the truth of what happened on Friday 3 December 1926, have always refuted tales of an extraordinary encounter between Agatha and a journalist in the lounge of the Harrogate Hydro on the afternoon of her discovery, Tuesday 14 December, which first surfaced two weeks after her death. According to Ritchie Calder, the former Daily News reporter, there was no melodrama when he walked up to Mrs Teresa Neele and addressed her as Mrs Christie. She was not flustered, and when he asked her how she had got there she said she did not know and that she was suffering from amnesia, whereupon she retired to her room for the rest of the afternoon. The Daily News report the following day, in breaking the news of Archie’s identification of Agatha in the hotel, never mentioned such an encounter taking place, and Lord Ritchie Calder, as he later became, only wrote of the incident eight years before his death in an article, ‘Agatha and I’, that appeared in the New Statesman on 30 January 1976.

In the article he advanced the opinion that ‘Amnesia was much too clinical a word for someone supposedly surprised into conversation, and if, as her doctor later suggested, she had an identity crisis, well, there was no Theresa [sic] Neele lurking in the self-possessed woman I met.’ Ritchie Calder said he had been in Harrogate because he had been sent there to assist the Daily News’s night reporter Sidney Campion.

Two separate searchers, Kathleen Tynan and Gwen Robyns, seeking to establish the veracity of the encounter, have told me that Ritchie Calder repeated to them how he had immediately followed Sidney Campion by train to Harrogate to help him cover the story. However, before his death in 1978 Sidney Campion, who knew Ritchie Calder in later life, told Kathleen Tynan in a letter dated 27 September 1976: ‘I am very mystified that I never met Ritchie Calder on the Harrogate story. When two or more of the staff were on the same assignment, it was the rule for them to get together and work out any necessary plans for success. I called at the Manchester office, and there was never any mention of Ritchie Calder, and until the death of Agatha Christie I never heard of Ritchie Calder being on the Harrogate story.’

This information has not been public knowledge until now, since the research Kathleen Tynan undertook during that period was not incorporated into the screenplay she was commissioned to write for the 1979 film Agatha, which proposed a fictional solution to the mystery of the disappearance.

There has been further confusion about an alleged ‘fourth letter’ Agatha is said to have written before she disappeared that has intrigued and tantalized her fans. The late Deputy Chief Constable Kenward’s daughter, Gladys Kenward Dobson, gave Gwen Robyns to understand in her 1978 unauthorized biography, The Mystery of Agatha Christie, that a ‘fourth letter’ had been written by Agatha on the night of the disappearance and that in this communication she had appealed to Deputy Chief Constable Kenward for help because she was in fear of her life. Gladys Kenward Dobson’s account of what her father is supposed to have done after receiving this letter on the morning of Saturday 4 December 1926 is unequivocal: ‘He received it in the 10 a.m. mail on Saturday and brought it to our home near by to show me before going over immediately to inform the Sunningdale Police Station and begin investigations.’

Sunningdale falls between the counties of Berkshire and Surrey and it was policed until the early 1990s by the Surrey Constabulary, who have confirmed that there was no police station there in 1926 and that the village did not get one until the early 1960s.

Gladys Kenward Dobson claimed that the reason she knew about the letter was because she had spent ‘many years of active service in the police force as her father’s secretary’. After an extensive search, however, the Surrey police have been unable to find any records of her alleged police career, although they were able to confirm that from the early 1970s until her death in 1980 she presented a cup and runner-up prizes, in memory of her father, at the Surrey Constabulary’s annual bowls match.

Former Police Constable Eric Boshier remembers her in the mid-1920s as a friendly, outgoing young woman, since his duties often took him to the Woodbridge Road Headquarters. She was a familiar sight around the police yard. He also maintains that Deputy Chief Constable Kenward did not have a secretary. He states there were no secretaries in the Surrey force in those days, least of all female ones, and he recalls that the first one was a male officer who learned shorthand shortly before the Second World War.

Gladys Kenward Dobson also told biographer Gwen Robyns that she burned all her father’s papers after he retired from the police force in 1931, including the ‘fourth letter’. She gave Gwen Robyns to understand that she had personally destroyed the letter Agatha had left for her secretary Charlotte, when, in fact, this letter, the only surviving document in the case, was held by the Berkshire police and subsequently returned to Charlotte after Agatha’s discovery.

Gladys Kenward Dobson always asserted that the strain of the case led to her father’s early death in 1932 at the age of fifty-six, although medical records show that his death was the result of a chronic degenerative condition of the heart. Her testimony must be in doubt, as no one close to Agatha has ever confirmed the existence of a ‘fourth letter’. Gladys Kenward Dobson made the same misleading claims to Kathleen Tynan about the letter. The policeman’s daughter felt deeply resentful of the attacks the press made on her father and repeatedly told Kathleen Tynan: ‘They crucified you in those days.’

Ironically, following the public release of the existing Home Office police records from the case, it was discovered that Deputy Chief Constable Kenward himself had tried to play down the scale of the search. Although he had given Arthur Dixon of the Home Office the impression in a telephone conversation on 9 February 1927 that the search of the Surrey Downs had only been carried out over two days, Kenward indirectly admitted in his report, written later that day, to having searched for five days. Yet one of his most loyal officers, Tom Roberts, who, after he had risen to the ranks from Police Constable to head of the Surrey CID years later, unwittingly revealed in his autobiography, Friends and Villains, that he had personally spent nine days on the search.

Understandably, Deputy Chief Constable Kenward’s report on 9 February made no reference to a ‘fourth letter’, since Agatha had never written to him. The police officer was quick to point out, however, the failure of the Berkshire police to locate Agatha: ‘As for prosecuting enquiries in other parts of the country, this was entirely a matter for the Berkshire police, in whose district Mrs Christie disappeared from.’ He went on to point out with justification that the number of police said to have been engaged had been greatly exaggerated and to confirm that he had received ‘invaluable assistance’ from the public and ‘innumerable special constables (unpaid)’.

Official police figures for 1926 show that the Surrey police force was made up of 356 regular police officers, and there can be no doubt that the press misinformed the public over the number of regular policeman engaged on the search, citing 600 in one instance. Tom Roberts came to his mentor’s defence in his autobiography by blaming Deputy Chief Constable Kenward’s most dismal hour on the sensational press coverage; he also understates the number of police involved. He mentions in his book the ‘many’ press cuttings in his career scrapbook in which photographs reveal no more than twelve policeman at any one time involved in the search of the downs. I have been shown his scrapbook at Camberley Police Station by a member of his family and the press cuttings alluding to Agatha’s disappearance amount to a total of three articles. Before he died Tom Roberts privately admitted that, to his knowledge, as many as 250 police officers were involved in the combing of the Surrey Downs.

Obviously Deputy Chief Constable Kenward found himself in an unenviable position after Agatha was located. He would have been open to criticism if he had not searched the Surrey Downs for the crime writer, especially if her body had later been found, but because he had actively sought to find her he became a target for criticism for having wasted people’s time and the taxpayers’ money.

Former Police Constable Eric Boshier has confirmed that Deputy Chief Constable Kenward later suffered for his conviction that her body would be found. ‘He made an ass over it. The word of mouth among police officers was that Kenward was convinced she would be found at Newlands Corner. The press had a good laugh at him when she was found elsewhere. But he solved a lot of cases in his time. He was a very good chap.’ Commentators who blame Deputy Chief Constable Kenward for turning the disappearance into a sensation forget that he took his orders from the Chief Constable of Surrey, Captain Sant. They also underplay the voracious interest of the press over which these two police officers had no control.

Additional confusion over why Agatha was in Harrogate has arisen from contradictory claims made by the literary critic Eric Hiscock about his former employer, Sir Godfrey Collins, who died in 1936. Although Sir Godfrey had instructed his publishing staff during the disappearance not to speculate to the press on Agatha’s possible whereabouts, Eric Hiscock discussed the issue in his 1970 autobiography, Last Boat to Folly Bridge: ‘I have always believed that Sir Godfrey knew, and that he wasn’t the least bit surprised when she was ultimately discovered holed up in a Harrogate hotel.’ However, on 19 April 1980, in The Bookseller, Eric Hiscock asserted that on the morning after Agatha had disappeared Sir Godfrey instructed him not to talk to the press about the matter because ‘she’s in Harrogate, resting’.

While Agatha certainly became a household name as a result of media interest in the disappearance, claims of an alleged ‘fourth letter’, together with ones of an ‘encounter’ and ‘prior knowledge’ of her whereabouts, have confused commentators ever since.

It is indicative of the tight hold Rosalind Hicks kept on her privacy that fans of her mother had to wait eight years after Agatha’s death before an authorized biography appeared in 1984. Rosalind’s approval of Janet Morgan’s biography was clear for all to see: not only was it released by Agatha’s publisher Collins but included precious photographs of her from the Christie family’s private albums.

Janet Morgan mistakenly claims that, on the night of the disappearance, Agatha left Styles around 11 p.m. Janet Morgan’s hypothesis is that Agatha may have missed a crucial gear change at Newlands Corner and incurred amnesia after running her car off the road. In her reconstruction, which incorrectly identifies the chalk pit into which the car almost plunged, Janet Morgan has Agatha travelling from Guildford in the direction of Shere. She suggests the missed gear change came after Agatha drove over the crest of the hill and that the car ended up on the left-hand side of the hill, about half-way down the A25 Dorking Road where there is a small quarry, which, according to Janet Morgan, is so steeply embanked that this seems to her to be the only place where a car might run off the road.

Water Lane is, however, on the right-hand side of the descending A25 Dorking Road, and the fact that Alfred Luland’s refreshment hut (which has since been replaced by Barn’s Café) is on the left-hand side of the road, along with the gravel pit described by Janet Morgan, makes her reconstruction impossible. After examining the car on the morning it was discovered the witness, Frederick Dore, crossed over the road to the refreshment hut to ask Alfred Luland to take charge of it while he told the police about his discovery.

Janet Morgan goes on to suggest that Agatha caught a penny bus into Guildford on the morning of Saturday the 4th and that after proceeding by train from Guildford to London she caught ‘either the Pullman leaving King’s Cross at 11.15 a.m. or the 11.45 a.m. from St Pancras’. Railway records show none of the trains departing for Harrogate left at these times.

It may well be that the immediate family allowed the biographer to infer that Agatha consulted a psychiatrist and a Regius Professor of Pastoral Theology at Oxford to recover her memory, but there is no evidence of this whatsoever. Janet Morgan also tells readers that Agatha left for the Canary Islands in February 1928, instead of five weeks after the disappearance in January 1927. Her suggestion that Agatha may have disappeared because she was a ‘somnambule’, capable of hypnotizing herself at will, is no more credible than her contention that unrelated recent work in this field ‘suggests a useful line of thought for those who are interested in Agatha’s case’.

The disappearance has captured the imaginations of more people than anyone could ever have imagined, and it is perhaps ironic that in March 1993 the creators of the London Weekend Television series Agatha Christie’s Poirot unwittingly blended fiction with history. In a scenario that was never envisaged by his creator Hercule Poirot finds his investigation of ‘The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan’ hampered by the public – who are convinced he is the newspaper creation ‘Lucky Len’, for whom there is a ten-guinea reward for recognizing him from his newspaper photographs.