Old
Swan Hotel, Harrogate
Who hasn’t heard
of Agatha Christie, the English the stupendously commercial crime novelist,
whose novels have sold over two billion copies (only surpassed by the Bible and
the works of William Shakespeare)?
Here I am outside the Old Swan Hotel on a quiet street
in Harrogate, Yorkshire and it was Dame Agatha Christie’s hiding place when she
mysteriously disappeared for eleven days in a firestorm of publicity.
On Friday 3rd December 1926 the 36-year-old
novelist was at Styles her home in Berkshire. Around 9.45pm she went upstairs
to kiss her sleeping daughter Rosalind then drove off into the night. For 11
days the media buzzed with conjecture as to where she had gone – and why? She
had written her sixth novel and established herself as an effective novelist
and money wasn’t an issue as she had been born into a wealthy middle-class
family.
The most common theories are that she crashed the car
and had suffered some memory loss or she was trying to thwart her husband's
plans to spend a weekend with his mistress (at a house near where she abandoned
her car.) On the day she disappeared she had quarreled with her husband, a
dazzling first World War fighter pilot, and he’d walked out saying he would be
spending the weekend with his mistress.
Mystery deepened when her abandoned Morris Cowley car
was found down a slope at Newlands Corner near a chalk pit near Guildford. There
was no sign of her. She had just abandoned the car with the lights still on and
she’d left behind a bag of clothes and an out-of-date driving license.
A thousand police officers and 15,000 volunteers
joined in the search for her - some in biplanes in the sky and some with
bloodhounds in the countryside. Lakes and streams were dredged. The home
secretary William Joynson-Hicks pressurized the
police to dig deeper and find her. A £100 reward was put up. Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who was interested in the occult, took a
discarded glove of Agatha’s to a medium. Novelist Dorothy L Sayers visited the
scene of the disappearance (later using it in her novel Unnatural Death.)
All the time Agatha was ensconced here in The Old Swan
Hotel (the “Swan Hydropathic” then) in a quiet street away from the centre of
Harrogate under the name Mrs Teresa Neele (the surname of her husband's lover). She was living
on cash hidden in a belt hidden upon her person. A musician noticed her and the
police were summoned. She told them she had lost her memory and two doctors
confirmed this. When she wrote her autobiography no mention was made of the
mysterious eleven days she’d disappeared. The mystery remained so as Agatha
didn’t ever publically talk about this odd episode. She was probably suffering
from depression as her mother had died, her husband was no longer in love with
her and she was over-worked. A 1979 a slightly far-fetched film called Agatha suggested the novelist was
contemplating suicide in a way as to frame her husband’s mistress for murder.
In later years she found happiness with her marriage to a young archaeologist
who she met on a trip to Mesopotamia.
As I was
taking a few photos I spotted a familiar face on a man walking up to the hotel.
Was it the broadcaster and journalist Mark Lawson? Blimey, I’ve watched so many
of his “Mark Lawson Talks To…” programmes sat in the dark eating supper before
heading up to bed. Being into books and films I’ve also been listening to him
on Radio 4’s “Front Row” for about fifteen years.
“Are you Mark Lawson?” I asked rudely, not
even prefaced with an “excuse me.”
Yes he was and we had a chat for a few
minutes. A crime-writers festival had been held as the hotel that weekend and
he was one of the interviewers peppering invited novelists with questions. I
peppered him with questions on a bit of a high (couldn’t quite believe it was
him.) He was open, friendly and chatty and didn’t mind me taking a photograph.
“Sorry to bug you,” I said after we said
goodbye and he was walking away, “You must get it all the time.”
“It’s a pleasure,” he said. It had been for
me.
The disappearance was big news…
Pointing to the tent. There’d been a
crime-writer’s book festival held that weekend…
As the hotel looked then and now…
Hang on….I recognise that chap…
It was Mark Lawson from the
television….
