Agatha Down Under

A trip to New Zealand in 1922 provided excellent raw material for the British crime writer.

- Redmer Yska

Agatha Christie sailed into Wellington on a perfect day in July 1922, surrounded by a cast of characters that could have come out of Murder on the Orient Express.

There was the bombastic Major Belcher; his sinister secretary Francis Bates; Mr Hiam, the root-vegetable expert from East Anglia; and his twitchy daughter Sylvia.

Christie was the wife of a member of a British trade delegation travelling the Dominions to promote an “Empire Exhibition” – a kind of world fair – to politicians and businessmen. In her seaboard diary, she called New Zealand “the most beautiful country I have ever seen”.

She was midway through a challenging voyage. A devoted wife to the debonair Archibald (Archie) Christie, she looked after the entire delegation as they struggled through three overheated months in South Africa. “I iron their clothes for them … deal and shuffle for them when we play cards,” she wrote.

In Australia, she spent two more months living out of suitcases. When Belcher got a septic foot in Melbourne, Christie went out and bought him socks and linen. He repaid the favour by shouting at her.

She would later write: “If anything put him in a bad mood he was so impossible … he’d go red in the face like a turkey cock … when he recovered his temper he could display so much bonhomie and charm.”