Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  Sylvia Fox’s was a genteel life of privilege and culture. She rode side-saddle and executed dressage as if the horse were an extension of her slim body. She was brought up to read widely, and loved art, music, theatre and ballet. In her youth, Sylvia was taken to cultural events that came to town, and there was always a horse to ride on one of her father’s farms. Later, when the family fell on harder times, she mixed in circles where mounts were available and money for concerts was found regardless. Sylvia and Ngaio went to St Margaret’s College together. One was poor and the other privileged, and although Ngaio was three years older they became firm friends. Sylvia went on the Marsh camping trips to Glentui, and discovered High Church Anglicanism with less fervour than Ngaio, although her Faith remained.

  Beyond high-school years, their lives continued to overlap. Sylvia was a close friend of Evelyn and Frederick Page, Olivia Spencer Bower, Betty Cotterill, and many people Ngaio knew in art and theatre circles. Ngaio’s imaginative, indulgent parents allowed her to follow her dream of studying art, while Sylvia’s father had a more pragmatic path in mind. ‘You must make yourself useful in life,’ he told his daughter, ‘so you need to get a qualification and I’m just setting up this cancer thing. You can be one of my first nurses.’ Walter Fox was involved in establishing the first cancer clinic in New Zealand, which began as a crude system of radium treatment with needles. Aged about 20, Sylvia was among the first intake of five student nurses trained in the specialist procedure. They wore heavy lead aprons for protection, but after years of the work it seemed that they had been absorbing radiation along with their patients and were succumbing to cancer themselves. They were quickly pensioned off in their late 40s. ‘Tipped out,’ as Sylvia’s nephew Richard Fox said, ‘with a fairly useful pension.’

  Sylvia Fox’s passion was travel. She worked at the hospital until retiring in 1948 and nursed her parents for some years, but whenever she could she escaped overseas. Richard Fox estimates that she took four or five trips abroad with Ngaio, beginning possibly in the 1930s, but certainly from the 1949-51 trip onwards. She took the boat over to Britain with Ngaio and sometimes flew back independently.

  Richard Fox remembers his stay with Ngaio and Sylvia in the mid-1950s, when Sylvia kept house at their Hans Road address in Knightsbridge. He stayed with them for ‘five amazing weeks’. Ngaio, who liked to ‘pin nicknames on people’, announced his appearance at the door: ‘the man-child has arrived’. Fox was 21 and his flight to Britain was a birthday present from an uncle. Sylvia showed him London on foot ‘like a native’. They walked everywhere, and at night went to concerts and the theatre. Each morning, they sat in Ngaio’s ‘large bedroom [beside] her large bed and we would have a cup of tea, and she would have her breakfast, usually a hearty one…and expect us to give her a full briefing about what had happened the day before and a shorter briefing on what we were doing that day.’ Ngaio was always interested.

  They shopped for provisions at Harrod’s. ‘You’re the housekeeper,’ Ngaio would say to Sylvia, when a cheaper option was suggested, ‘and you buy at Harrod’s.’ No money ever passed hands, but Ngaio kept Sylvia in a style her pension could not afford. She was part of Ngaio’s everyday life, but also of a private world never mentioned in Black Beech. This was a decision they reached mutually. Sylvia was self-contained and very independent. It was this, along with her poise, pragmatism and delightfully dry sense of humour, that appealed to Ngaio. Public exposure went against the grain of this outwardly imposing, meticulously mannered, caring and humble woman. She wanted nothing more from Ngaio’s notoriety than the pleasure of sharing her company.

  ‘Sylvia has got her house on the hill just above Ngaio’s and hopes to move in, in Spring—Overjoyed!’ Anita Muling told Olivia Spencer Bower in July 1963. Sylvia took possession of 2 Sherwood Lane on 9 October 1963. The old friends were so pleased at the prospect of living close that a hole connecting the properties was quickly cut in the hedge. From then on, they dashed between houses and their lives became enmeshed. Even when separated, they were often in touch. ‘Both houses had landscape windows looking out at the view’, and Richard Fox remembers Ngaio ringing Sylvia to discuss the sunset. ‘“Isn’t that splendid.” “Yes. Yes, and did you see the next-door neighbour…” They just wanted to share it.’

  Also missing from Ngaio’s autobiography was the subject herself. There were few intimate psychological or emotional insights, and her sexual life was completely missing. A few unfulfilled and not entirely convincing liaisons were identified, and she never mentioned the fact that from an early age she had health problems. It appears that Ngaio had an operation when she was young, although her wider family were never exactly sure what it had been. It was understood, however, to have affected her sense of her own marriageability. This was private and she was understandably reluctant to share it, but along with other gaps it left readers feeling there was a riddle to be solved. When Collins was contemplating a reprint of Black Beech in 1980, memos went back and forth between the London and Auckland offices. New Zealand publisher David Elworthy explained that he had discussed the possibility of ‘revising, extending and updating’ her autobiography. Crime Club editor Elizabeth Walter’s response was incisive. She thought ‘the original book…pretty dull—largely because of her reticence. I have every sympathy with this, but if you are going to write an autobiography you have got to be prepared to let your hair down a little, and this she didn’t do.’

  In 1966, however, there were bigger things on the horizon. In the Queen’s Birthday Honours List of 11 June, Ngaio was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Letters and telegrams of congratulation from across the world flooded into her London address and to Roses Greene, who was handling Ngaio’s correspondence in Christchurch. It was not until the early hours of a July morning that Ngaio finally found time to write to Doris McIntosh: ‘I have just been out to post today’s lot (17) of acknowledgements’. This had been happening for three weeks at the rate of 30 letters a day. She found it ‘touching & gratifying’, but the volume was an ordeal. There were some special highlights among the correspondence. The former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Sir Walter Nash, wrote to convey his personal congratulations, and a telegram from the Australian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, declared him to be ‘one of your most devoted readers’. Her achievements were celebrated in newspapers around New Zealand. The Dominion in Wellington announced her award with the comment: ‘In a country where women play less than their due part in public life, it is refreshing to find a woman’s name heading the Queen’s Birthday Honours list.’

  ‘The Damery was an enormous surprise & a great delight’ for Ngaio, but the investiture was not until November, so she delayed her October return to New Zealand. She snatched time to work on the dramatization of Singing in the Shrouds and continued with her engagements, which included lunch with Bob Scott, an old university player now in London. He was one of her ‘four liners’, who had also handled marketing. For the 1958 production of Hamlet, he had advertised in the newspaper for a skull. Controversy and a flurry of disgusted letters to the editor brought in the crowds. He was now an Anglican minister, and at lunch he told her of a planned trip to the United States. ‘How much money do you have?’ she asked. He explained that he had $900 saved. ‘What! That’s not enough for three months,’ Ngaio exclaimed, reaching for her chequebook. He watched as she scrawled something and handed it to him. The cheque was signed and dated. ‘But you haven’t put anything in,’ he said. ‘You take it just in case,’ she replied. She also gave him the name of her agent in New York. When he contacted Dorothy Olding, she said, ‘Yes. Ngaio said you were coming.’ She sent her chauffeur around to the YMCA and insisted he stay in her enormous penthouse apartment. No matter what honours she received, Ngaio’s underlying humility kept her in touch with people’s needs.

  Before she arrived in England Ngaio had planned a barge trip, so in mid-July she took a five-day canal cruise on the Trent. She was looking for new material for a murder.
Long experience had taught her that the most vivid and lasting impressions in her writing were her own, and her imagination was captivated by the idea of a body floating on the river. What would it feel like to look over the side of the boat and see the bloated face of an aging Ophelia bobbing below the surface with river weed in her hair billowing to the idle rhythms of the current? She would visualize the scene and the horror in Clutch of Constables, which she began writing towards the end of the year. Meanwhile she stashed her boating experiences away.

  The story that was having an immediate impact when she arrived back in London was Death at the Dolphin, which was serialized in Woman’s Journal before being released in the United States in the second half of 1966 under the title Killer Dolphin. She had handed the manuscript over to Edmund Cork as soon as she arrived in London.

  The book plunges into a pocket of her memory and returns to her beloved theatre. It begins with director-playwright Peregrine Jay visiting a derelict dockside theatre that has been bombed during the war. He is hoping it might be restored. This is a reconnaissance trip like the one Ngaio had taken in 1951 with the Guthries and Bob Stead. Peregrine Jay, however, is alone. He picks up the key from a property agent’s office, where there is something uncanny about the clerk’s parting words. He warns Peregrine that there is considerable damage, especially on the stage. ‘You will watch how you go. Underfoot.’ Peregrine thanks him and promises to be careful.

  Outside, the sun is starting to burn misty moisture off the damp cobblestones. Seagulls wheel above the Thames and he can hear the distant honk of barge horns. Inside the theatre portico, he finds a maze of peeling bills and agents’ notices. Peregrine has difficulty turning the heavy key until the caretaker oils the lock, then disappears. He pushes the hefty door open to find a dark, dull world of ‘rats, rot’ and decay. The stench of old hobos who have dossed down here is almost overpowering. He makes his way to the stage and, stepping backwards, plunges into the filthy, freezing waters of a bomb shaft. It is ‘nightmarish like a small death’. He struggles to lift himself out, but falls back feebly each time. After what feels like hours floating in the black, brackish water, he realizes that if he is not rescued soon he will certainly die.

  Peregrine Jay’s rescuer arrives in the form of mysterious millionaire, Vassily Conducis. What is he doing there? How can he have known? But Peregrine is soon seduced by his redeemer’s offer. Conducis will bankroll his restoration of the Unicorn Theatre and the establishment of a company. ‘producing Shakespeare and other plays of high cultural quality’. This is Ngaio’s dream, too: if only Tyrone Guthrie had seen more promise in the Woolwich theatre, her future as a director-playwright might have been different. Ngaio describes the Dolphin Theatre, ‘high, square and unbecoming’, as the object of Peregrine’s ‘greed and deep desire’. He is tempted as Faust was, and his desire is deepened by the discovery of a fragile cheverel glove, reputed to be that of Shakespeare’s beloved son Hamnet, who died at the age of 11. This is in Conducis’s possession, and Peregrine Jay decides to write a play about it and to help put it on display in the refurbished Dolphin.

  In August, Ngaio took an Aegean cruise with Joan Pullen, the secretary she often used when she was in London. Ngaio described her as a heavy-set, jolly sort of woman who was congenial company ‘We only call for a day in Venice,’ she reported to Doris McIntosh, ‘so no chance of going to Rome.’ Ngaio had just heard the ‘exciting’ news that Alister McIntosh had been made New Zealand High Commissioner in Rome. Already thoughts of visiting the couple began to whirl around in her head: ‘I swear that somehow or another I will visit you there’.

  Ngaio worried about her tax and how long she was spending in England. The extension of her stay for the investiture potentially put her over the time limit, so a second trip to County Cork in Ireland with her old friend Gwendoline Jellett gave her a two-week absence. Jellett was the daughter of the doctor with whom Ngaio had collaborated on Exit Sir Derek in 1935. Ireland had strange echoes of New Zealand, but the difference lay in its combination of stunning scenery with ruined castles and rustic thatched cottages, which were often as picturesque as they were primitive. The cottage she stayed in was particularly cold and archaic, but this did not detract from the experience.

  Ngaio was back in London at the beginning of November. She described her long-anticipated investiture as being ‘like a fairy-tale’, but it was not without its bad magic. The Rhodes family were notorious for their practical jokes, and Denys Rhodes was on the staff at Buckingham Place. While he was staying at Balmoral he told the Queen that Ngaio preferred to be called ‘Dame Edith’ and was a semi-cripple. On the day of the investiture, as the cars swept down the driveway carrying their distinguished guests towards the main gates, a security man waved Ngaio’s limousine out of the line and directed it around the back. The car stopped at a small side entrance. She stepped out and was greeted by an exquisitely groomed footman pushing a wheelchair. Ngaio was shocked, and not a little bit disappointed that she had missed her announcement and glamorous front entrance. She politely turned down the offer of wheelchair assistance, explaining that she could manage without help, but had the distinct feeling that the Queen, who ‘was smiling broadly’, was in on the joke. This was a pinnacle of achievement for Ngaio, and although she was never conceited or pushy about it, the honour meant a great deal because she felt it was deserved. She had worked hard.

  The fairytale finished with an enchanting party two days later at Eileen Mackay’s Knightsbridge flat. This was doubly exciting, because it also celebrated Bear Mannings’s Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air, which was presented in the same list. He received his honour for the part he had played, during the 1960s, in training aircraft pilots in newly emerging African nations. It was a risky job that sometimes involved heart-stopping near-misses by inexperienced African air cadets. Bear was the adventurous, fun-loving cousin, whom Ngaio grew to appreciate more and more over the years. She was as thrilled with his achievement as she was with her own. This was a moment to take pride in one of her special surrogate sons.

  Ngaio travelled back aboard the Gothic, arriving in Christchurch on 27 December 1966. ‘I hated leaving Home this time,’ she admitted to Doris McIntosh. ‘This house, one or two friends & one or two of my student players are the only anchorage.’ She felt disillusioned about what she had achieved while she was abroad, but had no time to dwell on it.

  In March she announced: ‘I’m about to direct Twelfth Night for the opening production in the new University theatre which they have very touchingly named after me.’ Gerald Lascelles and Ngaio had begun corresponding the year before about the possibility of her directing the play. She was ‘delighted’ and ‘touched’, but hesitant about the rigours of the ‘rehearsal marathon’ on her health. She could not see herself standing up to midwinter ‘show ground conditions’. In the end she was persuaded. The theatre itself, however, presented staging problems. After years of waiting for a student theatre to be built at Canterbury University’s new Ilam site, there were functional difficulties, particularly with space and access. There was nowhere to move scenery to the side or to fly it in the ceiling. Access for heavy scenery onto the stage was through a door one storey up, which meant it had to be lowered. This was ultimately solved, two years later, by a hydraulic lift. A similar problem existed for the audience, who entered the theatre from the second storey, making access impossible for anyone with compromised mobility. In the future this would include Ngaio.

  Coming back to Twelfth Night after a break of nearly 20 years was refreshing. She found it ‘lovely, delicate & haunting’ and wondered how her rough-and-ready band of players would ‘shape up to it’. There were the usual hitches during rehearsal, and more. ‘Every kind of pest & hindrance besets us…illness, non-arrival of essential properties, absenteeism owing to other obligations’, and Gerald Lascelles, her production assistant, had ‘stones in his waterworks’. ‘I suppose we shall muddle through.’ Ngaio wanted ‘Sticky’ Glue to play Si
r Toby Belch, but he already had a major part in a review and could not rehearse properly until 18 days before opening night. ‘I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Mr [Fred] Betts,’ Ngaio told Lascelles in a note that accompanied get-well ‘grapes from Crawsie for her lovely young gentleman’.

  The inaugural production of Twelfth Night at the Ngaio Marsh Theatre opened in June 1967. Betts did play Sir Toby; Robin Alborn was Orsino; Vincent Orange, Sir Andrew Aguecheek; Barry Empson, Malvolio; David Hindin, Feste; Judie Douglass, Olivia; and Annette Facer, Viola. This was Ngaio’s stable of players mixed with some emerging talent. Her formula for success combined experience with raw enthusiasm to bring both the dynamism and intellectual solidity of Shakespeare to life. The Press critic described the production as being like a full-bodied red wine, ‘sometimes delicate with a bouquet of romance, sometimes intoxicating with mirth’. Vincent Orange as Sir Andrew ‘elevated this silly sop to the peerage of clowns’; Fred Betts’s Sir Toby ‘kept the comedy driving forward’; Barry Empson’s Malvolio ‘had moments of inspired delight’; Judie Douglass’s Olivia ‘shone out like the rose she carried’; and Annette Facer ‘was clear and pert and feminine and boyish and all the things a girl dressed up as a boy should be’. The main criticisms were technical issues to do with the theatre and lighting. Beyond the formal criticism, there were rumblings that Ngaio sometimes over-used her stable.

  After the production closed, Ngaio settled down to serious work on her novel Clutch of Constables. She was tackling a new structure. ‘It’s all in flashback from a lecture Alleyn’s giving to C.I.D. recruits & I can’t tell you what pitfalls lurk in that seemingly straightforward formula.’ She had more and more misgivings as she struggled on, but this was typical. The plot is, in fact, cleverly spliced with sections of Alleyn’s talk counterpoised with Troy’s involvement in the murder he is describing. Clutch of Constables is a pun, because the plot revolves around a gang of art forgers who are planning to plant a clutch of Constable paintings in the area where he painted, to be ‘discovered’ and sold for a fortune. The story is lulled along by the quiet rhythms of the river until the body of Miss Hazel Rickerby-Carrick is found tied to a weighted suitcase and floating. This novel achieves a retrospective telling of murder much more engagingly than Died in the Wool.