"Did her mother kill her father or was it the father who killed the mother?"
--Bossy Mrs. Burton-Cox badgers Ariadne Oliver about the deaths of General Sir Alistair Ravenscroft and Lady Ravenscroft in Elephants Can Remember
"I never can remember what years are, what dates are. You know, I get mixed up."
--Dizzy Mrs. Oliver dithers to Hercule Poirot in Elephants Can Remember
"All these dates are so difficult."
--Young Celia Ravenscroft has trouble with her memory too in Elephants Can Remember
"So many things are difficult to explain."
--Hercule Poirot's little grey cells falter momentarily in Elephants Can Remember
"All this is very, very difficult, isn't it?"
--Mrs. Burton-Cox chimes in with the general confusion in Elephants Can Remember
"What we've really got to do is to get at the people who are like elephants. Because elephants, so they say, don't forget."
--Ariadne Oliver suggests their best recourse to getting at the Ravenscroft problem in Elephants Can Remember
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| Death in Durford Wood |
Based on a comment from my old mystery fan internet pal Nicholas Fuller (I think we first "met" 25 years ago, when he was young and I was, well, somewhat shy of middle-aged), I researched the real-life historical case concerning the shooting deaths of Sir William and Lady (Beatrice) Reid, which took place nearly 85 years ago in England on November 21, 1939, nearly three months after the commencement of the Second World War. As Nick stated in his comment, the Reid case bears marked similarity to the fictional deaths of General Sir Alistair Ravenscroft and his wife Lady (Margaret) Preston-Grey that are investigated by Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver in Elephants Can Remember (1972), the final Poirot detective novel which Agatha Christie wrote.
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I had resolved not to reread Elephants (I had read it twice before over the last thirty years, neither time feeling it was very good at all) after feeling discouraged by the first two chapters. However, the novel's seeming connection to a real life case of unnatural death intrigued me and drove me onward. I am glad I persevered: the book is not quite as unbearable as I thought it would prove on a third reading and its connection to the real life tragedy of the Sir William and Lady Reid lends it some melancholy interest.
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| former factory in Fulham (see below) |
The real life William James Reid was a born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1871 and educated at Glasgow High School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He served as a magistrate and civil servant in India, eventually becoming acting governor of the province of Assam in the years 1925-26, and was knighted for his services to the Empire after his retirement at age 55 in 1926.
Returning to England, Reid and his wife, the former Beatrice Marion Edwards, daughter of John Hyde Edwards, an assistant engineer with the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, India's first passenger railway, settled at a substantial brick home, Durford Rise, in an affluent neighborhood located by Durford Wood in the vicinity of the town of Petersfield in the southern central coastal county of Hampshire. There the couple lived, seemingly harmoniously, until another outbreak of global hostilities in 1939.
For the last few months the well-off, childless couple, who at their deaths were worth about 1.4 million dollars in modern value, had taken into their home three boys, aged 13 to 8, who had been evacuated from London: Donald, William and Alfred Tomes.
These boys were the youngest children of Catherine Tomes, a 54-year-old widow who resided at 1 Silvio Mews in Fulham, London with five older children: Frederick, 30, a roof tiler's mate (Catherine's late husband, Henry Tomes, had been a slater); Florence, 20, a bottler at a brewers; Katherine, 19, an assistant at a laundry; and Reginald and Ronald, 17 and 15, assistants respectively to a fishmonger and greengrocer. Clearly this was a family where everyone did their bit.
The trio of younger Tomeses whom Sir William and Lady Reid took into their big house at the edge of Durford Wood were but a tiny part of the mass of city youngsters--some 1.5 million school-age children eventually--who under the mission known as Operation Pied Piper were evacuated from London and other British cities in waves, beginning with the declaration of war with Germany on September 1.
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| youthful city evacuees in Operation Pied Piper |
In one way, at least, the routine at Durford Rise did not alter with the war. Every afternoon Lady Reid, who at 64 was four years younger than her husband, would exit the house to take her black spaniel--a "favored dog" of the couple's--out for a walk in the woods around the big brick house. However, on the afternoon of Tuesday November 21st, 1939, Sir William uncaracterisitcally accompanied his wife and their spaniel on the daily round.
By sunset neither the couple nor their spaniel had returned to Durford Rise. A search for them was commenced, which ended 36 hours later when Sir William and his wife were discovered together in the woods, both of them dead from gunshot wounds. Their bodies were found by the gamekeeper, James Hall, who also spied the spaniel lying between the couple, off his lead, which was still held in Lady Reid's cold, lifeless hand. Lady Reid was lying on the path, Sir William in a ditch five feet away from his wife.
Accounts varied as to whether the dog had been shot as well, or had merely been asleep. I tend to think the dog was still alive. "Dog Guards Bodies in Woods for Two Days" and "Dog Kept Vigil over the Dead" read maudlin newspaper headlines, which doubtlessly appealed to the sentimental, dog-loving British public.
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| the dog kept vigil over the Reids |
Whether or not it was the dog that died along with his mistress and master was a mere fal-lal for the felony file, however. The really important question was, who killed the husband and wife and why? And here, regrettably for real-life mystery fans, the answer seems to have been clear cut.
The coroner's inquest that assembled on Saturday the 25th (they moved quickly in those days) concluded that the culprit was none other then Sir William himself, who had shot his wife in the back of her head and then himself in the chest.
What motivated this dreadful deed? Well, for one thing, Sir William had been very troubled and depressed by the war. The housekeeper, Grace Cunningham, testified that Lady Reid had told her that the conflict had hit them hard financially and that her husband was much worried about it.
The late Lady Reid's brother-in-law, F. Hyde Edwards, who also lived in the vicinity at a house named Landfall, told the coroner that since the war had commenced Reid had become obsessed with cheeseparing to save money, though he had both a civil service pension and private means. Asserted Edwards of Reid: "He said he must live more cheaply, give up his house and car." Sir William would not even allow his wife to lay a fire in the house until six o'clock in the evening, owing to his perception of the couple's straitened financial circumstances.
Lately Sir William had become much vexed with the matter of those London evacuees--the trio of young Tomes boys--whom he and his wife had been legally compelled to shelter. In the days leading up to his death he had told a friend and neighbor, a retired tea planter named Charles Prettejohn, that he wanted these children out of his home. Prettejohn thought his friend "had largely lost his sense of proportion" about things since the war had started in September.
"It was owing to his intense fondness for his wife that he attempted to get rid of the evacuee children billeted with them," Prettejohn explained to the coroner. "He told me that he was quite sure that his wife could not carry on. He said she would break down."
Sir William had asked Prettejohn to accompany him when he visited the authorities to plead, "on behalf of his wife," for the removal of the young evacuees from Durford Rise. Prettejohn drove the fretful Reid, who presumably was saving his petrol, eighteen miles to the town of Midhurst, which itself had taken in about 400 urban evacuees, and there he stated his case for evicting the Tomeses.
Reid, however, had been "very dissatisfied" with the outcome of his errand into Midhurst, Prettejohn reported, because "he got rather short shrift" from the authorities. There were people with rather less than the Sir William, it must have been generally felt, who were doing more and complaining less.
Back at Durford Rise Reid's mental state deteriorated further. Hyde Edwards divulged that on one occasion his sister told him that she had becomes terribly frightened of her husband, whom she feared had become mentally unbalanced. "I really believe he is going out of his mind," the distraught woman told her brother.
The coroner's court agreed, concluding that Sir William had murdered his wife and then shot himself while the balance of his mind was disturbed. The case then was closed and the one-week wonder was dropped by the press, barring one postscript. What was to become of the Tomes boys? Where were they to go after the deaths of the couple who had taken them into their home?
Over a week after the jury rendered its verdict on the Ried deaths, the Sunday Mirror reported, under the banner headline "Mother Fears Gossip--Not Bombers," that the boys' incensed parent, Catherine Tomes, had personally traveled some sixty miles southwest to Petersfield and taken her boys back with her to Fulham. She complained volubly to the Mirror:
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| wartime evacuation poster |
It hurt my feelings when I read what was said at the inquest. The tragedy was not the fault of the boys, and I brought them back because I believed it would harm them to stay on. You cannot expect me to keep them down there with a lot of gossip going on around them. It is not fair to the children. Some of the allegations which have been spreading round might do my children harm. They will remain at home until after Christmas. Then perhaps they will be billeted somewhere else.
For their part, the boys piped up that they had enjoyed their stay in pastoral Hampshire. One boy told the Mirror: "Lady Reid often took us for car rides in the country" [think of the petrol!]. We were very happy down there. We miss the lovely fields."
Upon learning of Catherine Tomes' chagrin over the inquest testimony, another neighbor and friend of the Reids, Lady (Flora Macbeth) Rigsby--wife of Sir Hugh Mallinson Rigsby, the former Sergeant-Surgeon to the King, who had had famously operated on George V when the king was suffering from life-threatening empyema in 1928--wrote Mrs. Tomes, assuring her of the district that "no one connects the boys with the tragedy."
Lady Rigsby offered to take the boys into her and her celebrated husband's own home if they returned to the district from London to escape the dangers of the impending German Blitz. Did Catherine Tomes take Flora Macbeth Rigsby up on her kind offer?
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| the Blitz in Fulham |
Unfortunately, what the outcome was to this acrimonious postscript to a couple's tragic demise seems to have gone unreported; and the deaths of an aged British knight and his wife were soon forgotten in the rush of bad news that buffeted the Empire seemingly on every side in 1940. But there was someone who didn't forget the strange story: the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, then 49 years old. One of her homes, Winterbrook House, was located seventy miles north of Petersfield in Wallingford.
Christie seems to have tucked the Reid tragedy away in a corner of her mind for more than three decades before making use of it. 32 years later, when she was 81 years old, Christie clearly employed the murder-suicide as the basis for her book Elephants Can Remember (1972), the final Hercule Poirot novel that she ever wrote.
Admittedly Elephants as a detective novel is eminently forgettable, being but a poor thing compared to the work from her heyday, like those two non-series mysteries from 1939, the year of the Durford Wood tragedy, Murder Is Easy and the incomparable And Then There Were None (the latter the bestselling mystery in history and arguably the best thing the author every did). Although in 1972 Elephants received good, sometimes gushing, reviews, especially from indulgent Anglophile reviewers in the United States, at least one reviewer was willing to call it like it was, despite the octogenarian Christie's status as a n international bestseller and beloved literary institution.
In the Manchester Evening News, reviewer Brian Bearshaw, a crime writer himself, under the headline "Tired and Weary" wrote sadly of Elephants that he much preferred to remember the author's better books from better days:
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| A gun, dog, wig and an elephant add up to...what? |
Agatha Christie books abound in our house. Hickory Dickory Dock, 4.50 from Paddington, Dead Man's Folly, Ordeal by Innocence [apparently Bearshaw began reading Christie in the Fifties]--they and many more sit on the shelves, regularly read and as baffling at a third reading as the first.
But the latest, Elephants Can Remember, will not be joining them. If it had been written by an unknown novelist, I could not have finished it. The plot is poor, the characters, including Mrs. Ariadne Oliver and Hercule Poirot, weak and for once unconvincing.
It is an up-to-date story in an out-of-date style, tired and wearisomely drawn out. A mystery involving wigs and [spoilerish] that falls apart halfway through. The book will sell because Miss [sic] Christie's name is on the cover. It is a pity it is there at all, for it falls far short of the consistently high standard that had marked Miss [sic] Christie's work for so many years.
I agree with this blunt yet honest criticism. However, when one is interested in Christie as a person, one can still find pleasure in her last books discerning what they tell us about the author. In Elephants we find yet another case of Christie in her work drawing on a real life crime (murder/suicide), like she did in The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962) and Murder on the Orient Express (1934). (In the case of Mirror she denied that she had done so, but I don't see how anyone can possibly believe her.)
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As I discussed in my immediately previous blog post, Elephants opens with Christie's scatty mystery writer surrogate, Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, at a literary luncheon encountering the imperious matron Mrs. Burton-Cox, who, upon ascertaining that Mrs. Oliver is the godmother of one Celia Ravenscroft, demands of her to know: "Did her mother kill her father or was it the father who killed the mother?"
Celia, you see, is planning, perhaps, to marry Mrs. Burton-Cox's son Desmond, and the lady apparently is concerned that Celia may have spouse-killer genes in her DNA. It's an arresting question, the import of which, however, largely escaped me; yet the characters seem to lend some credence to the notion that it would be worse for Celia if her mother killed her father, apparently based on the notion that a mother is more likely to pass the killer gene to her daughter than would be the father. (And I suppose fathers, by this reasoning, would be more likely to pass it on to their sons.)
This starts a most vexing memory maggot in Mrs. Oliver's inquisitive mind that Ariadne simply can't shake, so she does what she always does in these situations: she pays a call upon her friend Hercule Poirot, still ensconced at his London fastness at Whitehaven Mansions with his secretary Miss Lemon and manservant George, waiting for visitors to present him with nice murder problems for his little grey cells.
Elephants presents Poirot and the readers with a murder problem, for sure, but it's hardly one worthy of his powers. At the beginning of Book II, about three-fifths of the way into the story, we receive some information about two characters that had been previously withheld from us; and after that there should be no mystery left to the mystery.
The narration is prolix and dithering, particularly in Book I, which largely consists of Mrs. Oliver wandering about, visiting old "elephants" (people who remember things), and asking them about the deaths of Celia Ravenscroft's parents. Their memories wander all over the place, with numerous loose threads left that have no functional place in the fabric of the case, and only two or three clues amid the welter of irrelevant data that really matter--though these are so obvious, one in particular, that surely upon presentment they give the game away to most readers.
III.
So, what is the case, exactly? Well, it concerns the unnatural deaths of General Sir Alistair Ravenscroft and his wife Margaret, or Molly, Lady Ravenscroft, both of whom were found fatally shot on a cliff overlooking the Channel by their country house (named Overcliffe, appropriately enough), located somewhere in coastal southern England. Only the fingerprints of the general and his wife were found on the gun, so the case seemed open and shut, either a murder suicide or double suicide/suicide pact--what Japan calls shinju, or love suicide.
But what would have caused one spouse to shoot the other, when they were a seemingly happy couple according to all the evidence? Was it a true love suicide, with both man and woman wanting to die? Or is there some completely different explanation for the calamity? Poirot, old and sighing a great deal (with boredom, like the reader?), investigates, with the "help," if so it may be called, of Mrs. Oliver.
You can already see, I imagine, the similarity to the Reid case, with the real life Reids, dead in the dark woods in Hampshire, altered to the fictional Ravenscrofts, dead on a cliff somewhere in coastal southern England. In both cases the explanation seems to be either murder suicide or double suicide. (Actually in the Reid case, it was determined that there was no way that Lady Reid could have shot herself in the back of the head; hence the conclusion that Sir William was the murderer.)
But, wait, there is more. We learn, for example, that the Ravenscrofts spent time in Malaya, recalling the Reids who spent decades in India. Both Sir Alistair and Sir William were in the diplomatic service.
Additionally there is the matter of the dogs. In several of her books Christie characters allude to a couple of cases of Sherlock Holmes: the one concerning the parsley that sank into the butter on a hot day (never detailed in a story) and the other, which is highly relevant in the famous horse racing mystery "Silver Blaze," the matter of the dog that didn't bark in the nighttime.
In Elephants, when Poirot is having lunch with good old Superintendent Spence of Mrs. McGinty's Dead and Hallowe'en Party, and Chief Superintendent Garroway, who had headed the Ravenscroft investigation, Garroway alludes, like clockwork, to the cases, prompting Poirot to ask whether the Ravenscrofts had a dog.
This leads to the following exchange:
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| what the spaniel saw |
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said did they have a dog? General and Lady Ravenscroft? Did they take a dog for that walk with them on the day they were shot? The Ravenscrofts."
"They had a dog, yes," said Garroway. "I suppose, I suppose they did take him for a walk most days."
"If it had been one of Mrs. Oliver's stories," said Spence, "you ought to have found the dog howling over the two dead bodies. But that didn't happen."
Garroway shook his head.
"I wonder where the dog is now?" said Poirot.
"Buried in somebody's garden, I expect," said Garroway. "It's fourteen years ago." [Actually it's twelve, though at a later point, Poirot, exhibiting the poor memory of the other characters, says it's fifteen or twenty."]
"So we can't go and ask the dog, can we?" said Poirot. He added thoughtfully: "A pity. It's astonishing, you know, what dogs can know."
Well, that dog plays an important role in the elucidation of the mystery (Poirot always knows!), though we never actually meet it. (Likely it is buried in a garden by now.) I don't believe we ever find out what breed it was, nor do we ever discover whether it accompanied its master and mistress--or father and mother as we would say in these doting days--on their last earthly walk together. But the similarity to the Reid case, in which a dog prominently featured, is obvious.
IV.
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| Durford Wood |
Agatha Christie set the year of the Ravenscroft deaths as 1960, though her characters seem needlessly confused about the matter, just as they are about the ages of the Ravenscrofts themselves and the ages of two children. At one point in Book Two Poirot himself confusedly thinks that the murders took place fifteen or even twenty years previously, which would set them as far back as 1952.
The novel's Book One and Book Two contradict each other, as if they were written at different times and the author had become confused in the interim between their composition about what she had written earlier.
Yet we know that the Ravencroft deaths took place in 1960 because late in the novel Poirot visits the cemetery where they lie buried and reads their headstones, which give the date for both as October 3, 1960. There cannot be doubt about this, at least.
In Book One, General Ravenscroft and his wife are stated to have been around 60 and 35, respectively, at their demises. Their daughter Celia would have been about 14, her younger brother around 10.
In Book Two, however, the General is stated to have been a young man when he fell in love with Molly, and Mrs. Oliver, who could barely remember the case or her goddaughter Celia in Book One, tells Poirot in great detail about how she and Molly had been students "in a sort of pensionnat in Paris together. People used to send girls to Paris then to be finished." [This sounds like Christie herself; see pic below.]
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| Agatha Christie getting "finished" in Paris around 1906 |
Yet if Molly and Ariadne were close contemporaries, assuming Molly was 35 at her death in 1960, she would have been 47 in 1972, when the book is set. That means that Ariadne would be around 47 too. I won't get into the fact that Mrs. Oliver first appears in the Christie canon back in the 1930s and had been regularly featured in the Poirot series over two decades.
There simply is no way that Mrs. Oliver, as she is depicted in Elephants, could not be at least in her late Sixties. It also means, by the by, that the two "girls" would have been at the Parisian finishing school in the early Forties, when France was occupied by the Nazis--now that would make an interesting tale to tell! Ariadne Oliver, secret agent!
Mrs. Oliver far more likely would have been General Ravenscroft's contemporary. But Molly herself would then have had to have been around 60 when she died and around 46 when Celia was born, which doesn't work either.
To me it seems as though Christie originally wanted to make both spouses in their sixties, like the real life William and Beatrice Reid, but then she realized that the math was way off in that case with Molly and her children and she tried to straighten things out but only succeeded in making them messy in a different way.
So the whole book is a chronological farrago. It's amazing to me that her editors didn't bother to try to square any of this, but evidently most reviewers and readers did not care anyway. They were reading a Christie with good old mustachioed, sirop quaffing Hercule Poirot, and that was good enough. Nobody had more loyal fans than Agatha Christie--or was as deserving of them, after all those decades of pleasure she had given.
V.
A story more directly based on the real life Reid case--one about a murder investigation at a provincial country house in the early days of World War Two when three rambunctious young cockney evacuees were present--actually would have been more interesting than the one which Christie produced in Elephants Can Remember. All the suspects we might have had: Lady Reid's brother F. Hyde Edwards, living nearby at Landfall; the neighbors Cecil Prettejohn and Sir Hugh and Lady Rigsby; the gameskeeper James Hall; the housekeeper Grace Cunningham; the Tomes boys themselves, those little buggers.
Yet the similarities that we have between the real life case and the novel are sufficiently telling as things are. By 1971 did the octogenarian Christie actually realize that she was incorporating elements from the Reid case into Elephants Can Remember, or had she forgotten the thing? At another point in the novel the author seems to recall the Reid case and the discontent and fear that fatally gripped the troubled couple during the early months of the war.
"For some reason those two didn't want to go on living," wonders Poirot to Mrs, Oliver. "Why?" To which Ariadne, reflecting a strongly held Christie credo, chattily responds:
I knew a couple...in the war--the second war, I mean--they thought that the Germans would land in England and they had decided if that happened they would kill themselves. I said it was very stupid. They said it would be impossible to go on living. It still seems to me stupid. You've got to have enough courage to live through something.
Sir William Reid's courage seems to have failed him in November 1939, as he saw--or imagined he saw--problems surmounting everywhere around him and his wife. Lady Reid seems to have been engulfed by fear to--fear of her mentally deteriorating husband. Though her brother and others around them knew that there was something rather wrong at Durford Rise, no one stepped in to take decisive action with Sir William in his funk, with tragic consequences.
Will we ever find out anything more about the deaths in Durford Wood now, 85 years later? What did the Tomes boys know? Of the three evacuees then staying at Durford Rise, I know that the middle boy, William, died back in 1997. What of Donald, who would be 98 this year and Alfred, who would be 93? Could they still be around to tell us something? If so, are they elephants? As Mrs. Oliver observed, it's the elephants who remember.
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| Japanese netsuke elephant--oh, what it could tell |
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