Ashfieldand Agatha Christie (1890–1976)

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born at Ashfield, Barton Road, Torquay, on 15th September 1890. Her father Frederick Alva Miller was American and her mother Clarissa was English. With her older sister Madge and her brother Monty away at boarding school, Agatha spent her earliest years in the care of an elderly nurse. Ashfield, a large Victorian house typical of the villas built for the middle class families of that era, was her first home. It was purchased by her mother with a £2,000 legacy from an uncle; the previous owners, the Browns, were Quakers, and when Mrs Brown told her "I am happy to think of thee and thy children living here," Mrs Miller regarded it as a blessing on the house. Of all her homes, Agatha loved Ashfield the most.

Barton Road led into the rich Devon country lanes and fields where Agatha picked primroses on walks. She described the garden at Ashfield as a magical place in three parts: a walled kitchen garden providing large quantities of raspberries and green apples which she loved, a garden with its stretch of lawn, and a wood of ash trees with a path winding through to the tennis and croquet lawn. When you emerged there, she wrote, "enchantment ended." The property also included a conservatory and lean-to greenhouse which feature in her books, and inside Ashfield a nursery and school room where Agatha received her lessons.

With three servants, a cook, a housemaid and a parlour maid, the family did not own a carriage and walked or hired a hansom cab when required. As Agatha grew up she went to dance and drama classes, roller skated on Torquay pier, swam at local beaches and went horse riding at Cockington. Her father was of independent means, receiving income from his American grandparents, and with little need to work he would regularly walk from Ashfield to the Royal Torbay Yacht Club to spend time with friends. During the summer months he was often seen in Barton Road, usually accompanied by Agatha, on his way to the Cricket Club where he was President. On Sundays the family attended services at the new All Saints Parish Church, where Agatha was christened, and with her father having donated money to the building, Agatha was deemed a founder member.

Agatha was eleven years old when her father died of pneumonia in 1901, and thereafter life was never quite the same again. Poor investments in America meant economies had to be made, and although Ashfield ought to have been sold, the pleading of the children made Clarissa decide to keep the house.

In 1912 Agatha met the dashing young Lieutenant Archibald Christie at a dance at Ugbrooke House near Exeter, and after an on off courtship they married in Bristol on Christmas Eve 1914, returning to Torquay to spend that night at its Grand Hotel. Archie became a Colonel in the Royal Flying Corps, and after the war they lived in St John's Wood, London, until the time came when Agatha returned temporarily to Ashfield for the birth of her daughter Rosalind, born on 5th August 1919.

At the outbreak of war in 1914 Agatha had started working on the local hospital wards, and after marrying Archie was transferred, as Nurse Christie, to the Torquay Hospital Dispensary. It was here that she passed her apothecary's examination, gaining that so important knowledge of poisons later used in her ingenious murder plots.

When Clarissa died in 1926, Agatha returned to Ashfield again to sort out the family estate, and just weeks later Archie came down from London to request a divorce. The much shocked Agatha now disappeared for those widely reported missing eleven days, after which she was found at Harrogate suffering from a loss of memory. It was not until 1928 that the marriage was formally terminated.

She decided to get away on the Orient Express to Baghdad. This trip eventually led to Agatha meeting the archaeologist Max Mallowan, whom she married in 1930. She accompanied him on numerous archaeological expeditions in the Middle East and became an expert archaeologist herself. Their long and happy marriage would last forty-five years.

Although her first detective story was created while working at the hospital Dispensary, Agatha would eventually write eighty crime novels and books of short stories, a book of poems and her autobiography. Her books outsold everything except the Bible and Shakespeare. Of the nineteen plays produced from her work, "The Mousetrap" is still the longest ever running play. Many of her books and plays have been produced for cinema, film and television.

Agatha produced six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and during her earliest writing in Torquay she had been encouraged by neighbour and family friend Eden Phillpotts, himself a famous writer of the era. Her most celebrated detective, Hercule Poirot, was based on Belgian refugees she had met in Torre during the First World War, and she said that Miss Jane Marple reminded her of some of her grandmother's cronies. Honoured for her work in 1956 when awarded the CBE, Agatha was finally created Dame of the British Empire in 1971. Her husband Max meanwhile had received a CBE in 1960 before being knighted for his work in archaeology in 1968, when Agatha became Lady Mallowan.

Agatha sold Ashfield in 1938 to acquire the beautiful Georgian property Greenway on the banks of the River Dart. Ashfield and its adjoining villas were later bought by a property developer who, in 1962, planned to demolish them to build a new estate on the site. Agatha recalled, "I went to see my lawyer to ask if it would be possible for me to buy the house and make a gift of it to an old people's home perhaps, but that was not possible, so there would be no respite for dear Ashfield." A year and a half later, driving up Barton Road, she was shocked to see her lovely trees had gone and that the present houses obliterated all signs of the Christie property. Today the only reminder of Ashfield is part of the boundary wall near where the blue plaque is sited, adjacent to the original entrance.

Agatha left a memorial east window in Churston Ferrers church, and at Torquay a bronze bust of her is situated on Cary Green. Dame Agatha Christie died on 14th January 1976 at her home in Wallingford and was buried in the nearby Cholsey churchyard. She always maintained that her main aim in life "was to give pleasure to other people through her writing," and this she certainly achieved.

Agatha's daughter Rosalind married Hubert Pritchard in 1940, and her grandson Mathew was born in 1943. Rosalind's husband was killed on active service a year later. She married her second husband, Anthony Hicks, in 1949. When Rosalind died in 2004, Greenway passed to the National Trust, and today Agatha's grandson is Chairman of Agatha Christie Limited.

This pamphlet was written and compiled by Mrs Joan Nott and the pictures were supplied by the family. The blue plaque, courtesy of a private anonymous donor, was unveiled at Barton Road by Torbay Civic Society and Mathew Pritchard on Wednesday 21st March 2007, in the presence of the chairman of Torbay Council, Councillor John Dunn.