What Agatha Christie did in the Great War
The best-selling crime novelist's days in a VAD hospital shaped her literary future
An unexpected find in the archive of the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) provides a fascinating insight into Agatha Christie’s life in the first world war, her early development as the world’s biggest-selling crime fiction author, and her connection with Sylvia Payne, one of the leading figures in 20th-century British psychoanalysis.
Ewan O’Neill, the Society’s archivist, says: ‘The Christie typescript was discovered among the papers of Sylvia Payne, who had been the Society’s President in 1944-1947, and who died, age 95, in 1976. One of the BPAS’s distinguished fellows, Dr Michael Parsons, had collected her papers from Payne’s son, Kenneth Payne, who donated them to the growing archive at the British Psychoanalytical Society.’
The archivist’s detective work with the mysterious envelope and its contents recalls Poirot puzzling over the identity of the sender of anonymous letters in 1936’s The ABC Murders.
O’Neill continues the story: ‘A plain foolscap manila envelope is addressed in ink pen to Sylvia Payne, the address part-obscured by a sticker and overwritten in biro as ‘property of (son) Kenneth Payne’, with the words ‘script by Agatha Christie (3rd Dispenser) in Torquay Hospital Devon 1914-18’ scrawled on it.
‘Inside was an astonishing document. What we did in the Great War is a hand-made magazine bound with turquoise ribbon, containing typewritten pages with pasted-in watercolour illustrations, musical notation and original pen and ink cartoons.’
This collection of skits, poems, songs and pastiche newspaper articles about the experiences of Torquay’s Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurses includes jokey police reports and a problem page - ‘Aunt Agatha’s Corner’ - but while not solely the work of Agatha Christie, it gives us a fascinating window into her life and literary development after the outbreak of the first world war.
Miss Agatha Miller, age 24, swapped her pre-war life of croquet lawns, tea parties and dress fittings for the drab uniform and distressing duties of a Red Cross VAD nurse in wartime. In the hospital hastily set up in the Town Hall of her home town, the fashionable seaside resort of Torquay, she worked alongside regular qualified nurses, caring for soldiers wounded on the battlefields of France. The first trainload of 40 arrived in October 1914. That December Agatha married her fiancé, Archie Christie, who was in the Royal Flying Corps, but continued at the hospital, moving from the ward to the dispensary in 1916.
Put together at the end of the war by Agatha and some of her VAD pals, who sign their joint and solo contributions with initials, ‘A.C.’ prominent among them, What we did in the Great War doesn’t dwell on the horrors they have seen - on at least one occasion Agatha had to dispose of an amputated limb in the hospital furnace - though there are some poignant references to deaths from the Spanish flu epidemic. Overall it gives a vivid idea of the resilience, good humour, common sense and camaraderie needed to work in such circumstances.
‘Dr Parsons recently visited the BPAS archive at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in west London,’ says O’Neill. ‘He recognised the item he had brought in nearly 40 years ago and began humming the tunes in the musical notation to a comic opera entitled ‘The Young Students’. He identified them as popular wartime songs his father used to whistle along to when he was a boy.’
The tone is educated and witty, and, says O’Neill, ‘the skill of the typist is clearly evident, there is a range of creative layouts.’ In its pages ‘Pericles’ answers spoof legal queries, and ‘Aunt Agatha’s Puzzle Page’ includes a dig at Cubist art. The writers demonstrate a deep warmth and affection for the foibles of their colleagues (including a running joke about trying to keep chickens). The recommendation by advice columnist ‘Hygiea’ of ‘Purlitusco’ toothpaste shows a keen sense of the ridiculous - an essential counterbalance to the appalling injuries and shattered lives they cared for every day on the wards.
The detailed watercolour illustrations give a sense of real individuals, including the ‘Portraits of Queer Women’, with their short hairstyles and red painted lips. Queer didn’t necessarily mean lesbian, more membership of a gang of women who’d been through extraordinary times together. Though the term was coming into use to denote homosexual, so perhaps Christie was playing with the idea. ‘The Pink Leucocyte’s answer to an imaginary problem posed by ‘S. Cocci’ gives the contemporary reader pause for thought: ‘Rest tranquil, little ones. No one is likely to discover you and if they do they will call you something else. You have little to fear from the two to whom you allude, so disport yourselves and be happy.’ Though maybe it’s just about incompetent identification of the cause of an infection.
We can search the pages for clues that reveal the young Agatha, from what she wrote and what was written about her. Is the spoof ‘job wanted’ ad how her pals saw her? ‘Literary Lady seeks situation: Dispenser, Musical, Thoroughly domesticated, Good cook, Toilet Specialist’? These gently-raised young women have come a long way from their sheltered pre-war lives.
So where does the link to Sylvia Payne come in? At 34, just ten years Agatha’s senior and one of the few women in England to have qualified as a doctor (in 1906) - about 3 per cent of doctors in the UK were women in 1914 - Payne was living in Torquay with her GP husband and three young sons. She was drafted in to run the Town Hall hospital in Torquay. It was her work with shell-shocked soldiers that led to her interest in psychoanalytic theories. At the end of the war Payne was awarded the CBE.
Psychoanalyst Ken Robinson, formerly Honorary Archivist of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, says: ‘After the Red Cross Hospital in Torquay Sylvia Payne went to the Medico-Psychological Clinic in Brunswick Square, London. Founded in 1913 by a “queer” couple, Dr Jessie Murray and Julia Turner, it provided mainly psychological help, including, increasingly, treatment for war shock. Payne’s decision to seek psychoanalytic training grew out of her experience of war shock, and it’s not surprising that she wasn’t alone in that. After Torquay, the strong, independent feminist atmosphere of the clinic, run by and mostly staffed by women, will have appealed to Payne.’
Any nagging doubt that the ‘A.C.’ who signed contributions to the album was anyone other than Agatha Christie had been quickly dismissed when O’Neill’s sleuthing took him to the Christie Archive Trust, run by Mathew Prichard, the writer’s grandson. He discovered that Prichard’s archive contained a version of What we did in the Great War, which had been among his grandmother’s papers.
‘They are hand-made so the illustrations are different,’ says O’Neill. ‘Our portrait of Queer Woman No 5 has a bottle boy in the picture, theirs doesn’t. Both are hand-typed, neither is a carbon copy. I have recently discovered that the address in ink pen on the envelope is probably Agatha Christie’s own hand’.
It appears that Agatha kept the two copies and sent this one on later to her former boss, who had become a pioneering figure in the world of psychoanalysis. The bestselling novelist was, not surprisingly, friends with many exceptional, high-achieving women, but no details have yet come to light about the connection between Sylvia and Agatha in the post-war world.
From her earliest life, Miss Agatha Miller had been imaginative and creative. Agatha Christie was sending off poems and short stories during the war - and also, between her hospital shifts, working on something more substantial.
And that makes What we did in the Great War such an essential and revealing addition to our understanding of Agatha Christie’s genius. For she was already plotting her first book, which owes an important chunk of its inspiration to the hospital dispensary, where the aspiring crime novelist first experienced the power of drugs to heal - and to kill. There are quite a few jokes in the magazine about mishaps with mixing Toluene and other compounds, and even killing patients through incompetent dispensing.
A report on a ‘Coroners Inquest at Torquay’ informs its readers that ‘The deceased was supposed to be progressing favourably when he died suddenly, immediately after swallowing a dose of medicine.’ None of the album’s contributors puts her initials to this item, but the resonance with a certain literary output is pretty unmissable.
In that first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles - finished in 1916 and published in 1920 - Belgian war refugee Hercule Poirot, aided by Captain Hastings, a soldier who had been invalided home, debuts his unique sleuthing style on a murder committed with strychnine. Throughout her novel-writing career, poisons recurred as a powerful plot driver, including in Three Act Tragedy in 1934, 1945’s Sparkling Cyanide and The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side in 1962.
‘The BPAS Archive is delighted to lend this fascinating document to the Royal College of Nursing for its exhibition Shining a Light: A History of Nursing Support Work,’ says O’Neill. ‘It will run at the Royal College of Nursing’s London HQ from May to October 2024, and provides a great chance to see Christie’s wartime experience as a springboard for her creativity.’
The final item in What we did in the Great War is a ‘Harlequinade’ (Agatha Christie later wrote a dark short story called Harlequin’s Lane), a drama with ‘Pharmicello’, ‘Chemistene’ and ‘Dispensella’ among the cast. Its concluding line acknowledges Agatha and the VADs’ intensely close-knit lives, and looks to a brighter future: ‘The war is o’er, The Club must close.’
Little did they suspect just how dazzlingly bright one member’s future was going to be.
The Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society are an important resource for the history of psychoanalysis in Great Britain and abroad, reflecting the Society’s role in medicine, mental health and wider society. The collections include a wealth of material relating to the history and clinical practice of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the papers and correspondence of eminent psychoanalysts such as John Rickman, James and Alix Strachey, Sylvia Payne and Michael Balint psychoanalysis.org.uk/resources
Shining a Light: A History of Nursing Support Work opens on May 10 at the Royal College of Nursing Library and Heritage Centre, 20 Cavendish Square, London W10RG https://www.rcn.org.uk/library/About-us/Library-and-Heritage-Centre
The Christie Archive Trust manages and preserves the personal photographs, letters and other family possessions that belonged to Agatha Christie www.christiearchivetrust.org
Wow! Fascinating!