She called it “the loveliest place in the world”

Greenway is a place to get to know Agatha Christie, to sneak beyond the curtain and see the personal world of the Grand Dame

When Agatha Miller was performing in amateur theatricals at Cockington Court, sharing midnight picnics at Ansteys Cove or rollerskating along Princess Pier as a girl, Torquay was a much quieter town than the “Queen of the English Riviera” is today. Genteel folk took the train down from London to sit on the broad veranda of the Imperial Hotel and watch the fishing fleets come in and out of Tor Bay. As part of the local set of gentry folk, Agatha was right at home.

During the Great War, the Town Hall in Torquay was converted into a military hospital for soldiers grievously wounded in the trenches of France or Belgium. Agatha worked in the dispensary, and picked up a knowledge of medicines, and poisons, that she would later put to good use. When she married Lieutenant Archibald Christie, they honeymooned at the Grand Hotel—just before her young husband was shipped off to the stagnant and deadly battle front.

Agatha Christie went on, of course, to become the best-selling author in the world. And she still is, more than 30 years after her death in 1976. With Christie’s success as a writer beginning in the 1920s, in one sense she left the localized world of Torquay behind. Her marriage to Archibald did not last, perhaps yet another casualty of that devastating war. In 1930, Christie married noted archaeologist Max Mallowen. They made “home” in Berkshire. After all, by then, Agatha was becoming in demand by the literary world. And together, they were making periodic expeditions to archaeological digs Mallowen directed in the Middle East—places like Ninevah and Tyre.

In another sense, however, Agatha never left Torquay and the incredible beauty of Torbay behind. She returned to it again and again in her fiction, setting many of her classic murder mysteries in its golden arch of beach, cove and island. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple both ventured to Torbay to solve heinous crimes.

In 1938, now independently affluent from her writing, Agatha Christie herself returned to Torbay, and purchased a Georgian manor, Greenway House. On the River Dart, just around the bend from Dartmouth and the Dart estuary, and a country lane out of the village of Galhampton, Greenway sits on rising ground overlooking the placid Dart river valley.

This year, for the first time, Greenway House is open to the public. It is, in fact, the first time a residence of this most famous author has been open—to give a personality, a face to her intriguing life and work.

Though the property had been deeded to the National Trust (and its gardens open to the public for several years), Greenway was home to her daughter and son-in-law, Rosalind and Anthony Hicks until their recent deaths. Agatha’s grandson, Michael Prichard, then determined that the home as Agatha herself knew and loved it, be made available to the public.

While Greenway was never Agatha’s primary residence, it was for a generation the family holiday retreat—where the family gathered for Christmas and Easter, and where she spent her summers. As her grandson and the NT developed Greenway House for “public consumption,” they determined that it ought to remain her home—and not a museum to Miss Marple. Today, Greenway is restored and furnished as Christie and Max Mallowen would have known it in the 1950s.

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