Ngaio Marsh Her Life in Crime

by Joanne Drayton

  It was while recovering on the vast plains of South Africa’s veldt that he discovered one of his great loves: Nature. ‘I fairly took to the country and found its appeal very strong being exceedingly keen on animals, natural history and field sports…I simply adored the life and the surroundings.’ He reluctantly returned in England in July 1884. For about two years he worked in a leather factory office, before another opportunity surfaced and he ended up in New Zealand in 1888. Forced to take a position with the Bank of New Zealand in Dunedin, he was in Dunedin for two years before moving to nearby Palmerston for a year, and then to Christchurch. It was a lonely life of single-men’s boarding establishments, punctuated by the highlight of amateur theatre. Henry began acting in Dunedin and continued it in Christchurch where he met Rose Seager. ‘I married as fine a woman as any man could deserve, and although poor were very happy and blessed with our child a daughter who was the pride of our life.’ Often during his memoir he drifted onto the subject of his wife and daughter.

  Henry’s potential was never realized in New Zealand. Poverty was always near, but Rose stoically made so much of what they had and did not complain. She was his great source of pleasure, and Ngaio was ‘brightness itself…A most intelligent child a keen sense of humour and always drawing or writing stories as soon as she could do anything and of course we thought the world of her.’ His wife was the authority figure; Henry was the fun. A fervent atheist, he believed the Church was a scourge. ‘Why can’t there be a religion of universal brotherhood & ethics and rules for the whole of mankind expedient & suitable for the life of communities without all the fictitious dogma of the different religions which have been the curse of humanity?’

  Henry’s instinct was to do the best for his family, so when he lost everything that might have put them ahead he was broken. Because he was in charge of his till at the bank, he was responsible when one day a shortfall was discovered—and not just a small amount, but £500. Henry knew who the culprit might be, but could never prove it. The missing cash was nearly 10 years’ income for a housemaid; Henry himself earned not much more than a pound a week. It was a fortune to find; his fortune, as it turned out, because he repaid the money with a family inheritance that could have settled his future. Henry never recovered. It was hard on the family because there were rumours and rumblings, but worse still was the fact that he could not forgive himself for being so trusting or, perhaps, absent-minded.

  When his father-in-law, Edward Seager, was in his 90s he used to stay with them at Marton Cottage, look out over Christchurch and shake his fist at the city for which he had done so much but which had forced him to retire ignominiously from Sunnyside Hospital in favour of a man with qualifications. He had spent his last years as a court usher. His son-in-law came to understand his anger.

  Although it haunted him still, Henry chose not to mention the missing money in his memoir. What he did highlight, however, was his great foresight in buying on the Cashmere Hills. The family were free now from chest infections and Christchurch’s lowland epidemics and, like his daughter, he rejoiced in the outdoor life. ‘I travelled on a bicycle the 2 or 3 miles from town carrying most of our supplies and as soon as I got home I got into rough working clothes and worked hard with pick, shovel and wheelbarrow and got as hard and strong as a horse.’ He was proud of his wife’s strict upbringing of Ngaio, because he felt she had given Ngaio the best values and opportunities to succeed—the right things to read, the right schools, the right acquaintances—and look how it had paid off. He could not have been more pleased.

  He mentioned Ngaio’s early days playing with Tahu Rhodes, but not the disaster of her 10th birthday party. Henry had added the sparkle to an otherwise flat life, and his ginger-beer brewing was a case in point. The family’s gardener had made it when Henry was young in Essex, and he bragged about how good it was. His mother sent out the recipe, and in preparation for his daughter’s birthday he laid down a ginger-beer brew in the cellar under the verandah. He bought ‘half a used brandy cask’ and all the ingredients, and pungent fumes wafted through the rooms of Marton Cottage. For weeks he eyed the bottles in anticipation. By the time Ngaio’s birthday came round they were ripe for the popping. Gramp Seager was there, playing the piano, and all the myriad aunts, uncles, friends and relations. Henry disappeared into the garden and arrived back with a tray laden with fizzing glasses. It was a super-brew, they all agreed. Then suddenly everyone was screaming with laughter while ‘children, unreproved, tacked about the room, cannoned into each other, fell, threw cream cakes or subsided on the floor in a trance’. No one could remember quite how it ended. Henry was adamant. ‘It’s no good you thinking it was my ginger-beer,’ he told his wife. But these were famous last words, because on a second sampling Rose and Ngaio were left comatose on the carpet, staring at the ceiling for an afternoon. In the end, Henry decided the impregnated brandy cask was to blame.

  It was something of an enchanted life, and letting go was harder than he expected. He warded off the boys who hung around Ngaio. He and Rose had ambitions for her, and a male on the horizon was a threat. They could not face Ngaio going away. Allan Wilkie became a great friend, as did the Rhodes family, but both parents expected these relationships would enhance her life rather than separate her from them. ‘Ngaio was invited to spend a weekend at Meadowbank the end of it was Nellie Rhodes and she became such great friends we could hardly get her home sometimes,’ he remembered. ‘I can never feel grateful enough for the chances they gave her to meet interesting people & people of note and their experience & knowledge of different kinds of fellow beings and varied surroundings.’ And that was where his memoir ended. His health had deteriorated so much that he struggled to write.

  Henry was 85 years old in May 1948, and slipping, although not so fast that he did not take great pleasure in Ngaio being awarded the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in June. He was delighted and so was she. She had won the award, not specifically for her crime writing, but more it seemed for her services to the theatre. She had worked tirelessly over the past decade, directing, writing about directing and the stage, and pushing vigorously for a national theatre. He knew she deserved it. But he would have taken special pleasure if there had been more mention of her detective novels, because he was the inspiration for these. Ngaio knew he ‘was keen on detective stories’, and one day she said, ‘I’ll write you one.’

  Success followed success, so that Henry found it hard to share his famous daughter. He did not think much of young John Mannings, whom Ngaio seemed to have adopted as a surrogate son. He came to the house too often. Henry, jealous and irascible, persecuted the boy when he could do so out of sight. Old age made him angry. John’s sister, Jean, remembers ‘Uncle Harry’ just before he died. She was passing through Christchurch on the way to an inter-provincial hockey meet in Dunedin:

  Ngaio left me in charge looking after Uncle Harry who was bedridden.

  [There was a] booming voice from the bedroom: ‘Girl…Girl…get me a whisky.’

  ‘How much do you have?’ I asked him. So he showed me on a glass. I poured out that much whisky.

  ‘Girl, it’s neat!’ he cried in frustration, and died two or three days later. He probably shouldn’t have had it.

  Henry died at St George’s Hospital in Christchurch on 4 September 1948. Ngaio ‘missed him dreadfully’. Her grief was palpable, and close friends knew it cut her to the core, ‘but there was no bitterness’ in his death. He was old and ready to go, and his passing was the end of a relationship that had satisfied them both.

  Ngaio barely had time to grieve before life swept her off in another direction. Dan O’Connor had a stunning piece of news. In association with the British Council, he was promoting a tour of The Old Vic Theatre Company to Australia and New Zealand, and the stars of the show were Sir Laurence Olivier and his wife, Vivien Leigh. The visit seemed almost impossible to comprehend when there were other more strategic destinations like the United States and Canada
. ‘Why are you, the greatest actor in the world, making a tour of Australia of all places?’ asked an astonished Sam Goldwyn, who was one of Olivier’s friends. Leigh’s 1939 Gone with the Wind was legendary, and Laurence Olivier was internationally renowned for his renditions of Shakespeare’s greatest roles, especially Richard III, but also Hamlet, Henry V, Othello and Macbeth on stage and film. His 1944 film version of Henry V won him an Oscar nomination, as did his 1948 Hamlet. He had been made a Knight Bachelor in 1947, and in 1948 he was on the board of directors of The Old Vic. To raise money for the theatre, Olivier had decided to tour the Antipodes. As well as being a money-raising venture, ‘the tour was a grand gesture of showing the flag, in an empire that still just existed’. They were coming to Christchurch, so Dan O’Connor wanted Ngaio involved. It was an extraordinary opportunity.

  In Australia, the company performed Shakespeare’s Richard III, Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. The actors were treated like royalty, with media coverage and civic receptions wherever they went. After six exhausting months, the company flew from Brisbane to New Zealand, arriving in September 1948 for the last six-week stint of their tour. On paper printed with the letterhead ‘The Old Vic tour of Australia and New Zealand’, Vivien Leigh crossed out the word ‘Australia’ and wrote ‘Over, God be praised’. Their Australian tour had left them shattered. ‘You may not realise it,’ Olivier told a New Zealand reporter, ‘but you are looking at two walking corpses.’ The continuous grind of performances, sometimes two a day, and often in mediocre venues, was exhausting. By the time Olivier reached Sydney, he had limped his ‘club-footed’ way through so many performances of Richard III, that his knee gave way on stage, permanently damaging the cartilage. In Christchurch, he was in so much pain that he was forced to perform on crutches.

  Three weeks before their arrival in Christchurch, Dan O’Connor sent Ngaio a telegram, asking if she would put on supper and an evening of entertainment for the company at the Little Theatre. Leigh and Olivier were recruiting for The Old Vic: this was an opportunity to showcase New Zealand talent. In spite of her grief over her father’s death, Ngaio applied herself to the problem of what to present. The evening was set for 27 September, at 11.30pm, after The Old Vic’s performance of The School for Scandal. Ngaio gave in to her ‘obsession’, choosing Six Characters in Search of an Author.

  As always, she worked shrewdly with the talent she had. There was a big new star—Brigid Lenihan—to match the calibre of her men. Lenihan, breathtakingly beautiful and a dancer, moved across the stage with elegance, and, although her voice was not epic in strength, she could capture the nuance and equivocal intimacy of experimental theatre brilliantly. She was perfect for Six Characters, in which she played the Stepdaughter. Other talent had emerged during previous student productions. There was the gifted Pamela Mann, who had proved her skills as a producer of William Congreve’s The Way of the World, and, with Bernard Kearns, as joint producer of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches (The Flies). Both were clever actors: Mann played the Mother and Kearns the Father in Six Characters, along with William Scannell as the Son, Rodney Kennedy as the Boy, and Beth Wilson as the Child.

  The Old Vic tour had pushed Leigh and Olivier’s relationship to its limits. They were already a volatile personality mix. For years Leigh had suffered from bipolar disorder, and her mood swings and nights of manic insomnia took their toll. Immediately before going on stage in Christchurch the stars argued violently, creating a backstage scene when, according to local accounts, Leigh, refusing to go out, slapped Olivier across the face and he slapped her back. For the local cast and crew it seemed too amazing to be true: silver-screen sexual tension happening in Christchurch.

  But the fraught relationship did not dampen the post-production performance of Six Characters or the reception at the Little Theatre. Ngaio, her players and crew had worked and ‘rehearsed as if the devil was after’ them. They would be performing in front of the most acclaimed actors in the world and were understandably nervous. ‘The entire power for the stage lighting [still] came from a single wall socket’ and the stagehands worried it might overload. ‘There was a rumour—possibly apocryphal,’ remembers crew member Alistair Johnson, ‘that for this performance, Max McGlashan, the stage manager, climbed up the electricity supply pole in the street just outside the Little Theatre, to “strengthen” the fuse to prevent an unexpected blackout.’

  ‘At the end [of the performance] there was warm applause from the audience, and…drinks were served,’ recalls Harry Atkinson, who was a violinist in the play.

  Everyone gathered around the seated Olivier (and Vivien Leigh). I was somewhat shyly standing apart from the main crowd: but then, in a gap between several people, I suddenly saw Vivien looking straight at me with the most beautiful blue eyes. I looked back—and wonder Oh wonder, she beckoned me over, reaching out her hand towards me and saying: ‘It’s so very good to see you!’ Well! We talked a little…and after the party I went back to my college room walking on air!

  Ngaio and Dan O’Connor introduced young New Zealand players to the world of the West End, and the experience was unforgettable. A private party afterwards at Marton Cottage celebrated, early, Vivien Leigh’s birthday, which would take place on the ship, and Ngaio presented Olivier with Edmund Kean’s ancient coat, given to her by her grandfather so many years before. Ngaio described the students’ performance as ‘rough but not too bad’ and was quietly pleased that her famous guests were so encouraging.

  At the end of their week-long season in Christchurch, Olivier went into hospital for a knee operation. He was still there the day before their boat was due to leave for England. Unable to move, he was placed on a canvas stretcher and hoisted by crane onto the boat. ‘I soared into the sky,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘smoothly floating over the side of the ship and gently down.’ It was an ignominious end to an internationally acclaimed tour.

  Their legacy in New Zealand was considerable. Not only were Pamela Mann and Robert Stead, from the Unity Players in Wellington, offered places in The Old Vic’s production course, but Brigid Lenihan was given a huge endorsement. She was so good, according to Olivier, that there was no point in her attending drama school. ‘She has star quality. Let her sweat it out in Rep,’ he announced. But the stellar outcome of their visit was impetus for an Australian tour. Dan O’Connor, struck by the talented acting he saw in Six Characters, suggested a two-play tour of Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne over the summer break. Ngaio’s superb Othello, Paul Molineaux, was available, so that was her Shakespearian selection to companion Pirandello’s play.

  The tour represented a pinnacle for Ngaio. She had worked hard to build the acting, directing and technical experience in Christchurch to carry off such a venture. It was a crowning achievement, and she was delighted. But she knew it was an immense challenge, so the moment the end-of-year examinations finished, rehearsals began. They were daily and rigorous, and she spent hours with principal characters going over their roles. The actors were clever and eager to be involved, so Ngaio’s direction became more of an exchange of ideas rather than a prescriptive approach. She modified her methods accordingly.

  This was the first New Zealand theatre company to tour abroad, and with the prospect of international exposure and acclaim the University of Canterbury offered Ngaio an honorary lectureship in drama. Her appointment, ‘greeted by prolonged applause’, was announced at a special reception. This was belated recognition, but Ngaio accepted it graciously. There was no time, anyway, to calculate grievances or rest on laurels. They had just seven weeks to rehearse two plays; then 24 student players, plus 2 tons of scenery and props, had to be shipped to Australia for the opening of Othello at the Sydney Conservatorium on 10 January 1949. Everything had to be ready.

  They arrived in Sydney to a celebrity-style welcome, with reporters boarding the Wanganella before they came ashore. Ngaio’s international reputation as a mystery writer attracted immediate attention. Before opening
night, however, a burglary left the company seriously rattled. Costumes, traveller’s cheques and a recording of Douglas Lilburn’s music were stolen from one of the dressing rooms.

  The first night of Othello only suggested the magic and momentum the production would assume as the tour progressed. Paul Molineaux grew into his character. Initially, his Othello was a little too admirable to be a convincing antihero, but he would find the despot as well as the deceived. When Six Characters switched from afternoon rehearsals to evening performances a week later, it was an instant success. Brigid Lenihan’s Stepdaughter had the depth Olivier had predicted. She had exactly ‘the right air of soiled allurement, defiance, smouldering spite and wretched self-loathing’, wrote the critic for The Sydney Morning Herald. Her Desdemona was initially a little too confident.

  Reviews reached a fever pitch of enthusiasm the longer the company toured. In Canberra, they were complimentary; in Melbourne, they were ecstatic. Ngaio’s production of Shakespeare was likened to that of The Old Vic. Her tempo, simple stage settings, and subtle lighting were highly commended. An English company of Stratford Players, also performing Othello in Melbourne, at the Prince Theatre, were negatively compared with Ngaio’s company. According to the Melbourne Herald, the students were ‘far more interesting and compelling’. To avoid competing with the Stratford Player’s Othello, Ngaio alternated her plays in three-day blocks. This meant there was no clash. In the end the English production made hers look better.