THE country house where Agatha Christie wrote some of her most popular mysteries is to be opened to the public for the first time since her death in 1976.
Greenway House, on the banks of the Dart, was acquired by the National Trust on the death of Christie’s only daughter late last year. The announcement was made to coincide with the start of the first “Christie Week” to celebrate the works of the world’s most successful modern author.
Christie sold more than two billion books, translated into 103 languages. Only the Bible and Shakespeare’s works are said to have sold more.
Many of the mysteries, such as those featuring the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, were written at Greenway, which makes a thinly disguised appearance in at least two of them: Dead Man’s Folly, written in 1956, and Five Little Pigs, written in 1943. The National Trust opened 30 acres of gardens and the boathouse of Greenway House to the public in 2002 after it was donated by Christie’s family. The trust was given the 225-year lease to the house after the deaths of Christie’s daughter, Rosalind Hicks, and her husband, Anthony, who lived there.
Before opening Greenway to the public, the trust intends to spend at least £2 million on restoring it to the glory of its heyday in the 1930s. Among Christie’s possessions still there is the desk on which she wrote many books.
Robyn Brown, the Greenway property manager, said that the trust hoped to restore the “heart and soul” of Christie’s “much loved” house. “This will help tell the fascinating story of holidays spent at Greenway by Agatha and her family. It is important that visitors understand its history and the many characters that lived in and enjoyed this magical part of the Dart Estuary.”
The restoration is expected to take three years, but before then the house will be open for special tours, details of which will be announced next year.
The trust plans to open parts of the ground floor to visitors in 2008 but the top two floors will be used as holiday and staff accommodation, and storage.
Mathew Prichard, Agatha Christie’s grandson, is helping the National Trust to sort some of his grandmother’s possessions, including souvenirs of her travels with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan.
Christie was a bestselling author when she purchased Greenway in 1938. In 1944, during the build-up to D-Day, the house was requisitioned by the Americans.
One of the events to mark Christie Week, which celebrates the 75th anniversary of the creation of Miss Marple, is an exhibition at Harrods, in West London, of important Christie artefacts, including the 1937 Remington typewriter on which she wrote many novels.
COLD COMFORT
- Agatha Christie was born Agatha Miller in 1890 in Torquay, Devon
- She began writing at 15 when indoors with a cold. Her first ambition was to be an opera singer
- She married Colonel Archibald Christie, of the Royal Flying Corps, in 1914 and learnt about drugs and poisons at work at a Red Cross hospital
- In 1926 she vanished for 11 days, turning up in Harrogate, with amnesia caused by her husband’s request for a divorce
