Baby daughter abandoner Agatha Christie enjoys some Waikiki surf

🗞 Extra! Extra! Read all about it! “Baby daughter abandoner Agatha Christie enjoys some Waikiki surf.” We are not judging. Because what wouldn’t a girl do for some decent surf?

I (Zuz Wilson who runs this joint) love a good, old-fashioned murder mystery. I’ve watched every TV adaptation of Agatha Christie’s works. Even with Kenneth Branagh. Bottom line: I’m a total Agatha Christie stan. But I never knew Agatha Christie was a surfer until I started reading The Grand Tour: Around the World with the Queen of Mystery.

✉️ Letters from the Grand Tour

It’s not actually her biography—it’s based on a collection of letters she sent back home during the British Empire Exhibition Mission, known as the Grand Tour, that lasted 10 months in 1922 and hit South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawai’i, and Canada. It is incredible that these letters survived. What’s probably even more incredible is that they had to travel by ship, and in either direction, they took weeks or months to arrive.

👶 But what about the baby?

And yes, Agatha Christie and her husband Archie did leave their 2-year-old daughter Rosalind behind. Christie’s grandson, Matthew Pritchard, wrote a preface to the book and offered an insight into why she would do such a thing, even though she’d miss her daughter dreadfully. BTW, Nima is what Matthew called his grandmother.

I suspect their decision to go arose from Archie’s restlessness and dissatisfaction with his current job (a position which might not be kept open for his return); coupled with Nima’s passionate desire to see the world, and her suspicion that marriage to a businessman with two weeks’ holiday a year would make further opportunities for such adventures non-existent. She could not see her life spreading out before her, and who are we to blame such a passionate and enthusiastic person.

🏄‍♀️ Surf bathing with planks

At the time, Agatha Christie was 32 and had only published The Mysterious Affair at Styles, so you see—for her, it was one and only chance to see the world. She was leaving her daughter in good hands, with the entire family support system, including her mother, a sister, and servants. I am so glad she got to surf.

Here’s another shocker: Agatha didn’t discover surfing in Hawai’i. No, the first time she surfed was in South Africa, and she didn’t even call it “surfing”—she called it surf bathing with planks. How fun.

🌊 Surfing in Muizenberg

In 1922, the surfboards in South Africa were made of light, thin wood, and were easy to carry. And Agatha claimed that surfing was an easy sport and great fun—apart from an occasional painful nose dive, the only time Agatha loathed surfing.

Surfing in South Africa wasn’t popular yet in 1922. It didn’t take off until the 1940s and ’50s. So Agatha trying to surf there as a woman? Extremely rare. Kudos.

Agatha and Archie surfed in Muizenberg, Cape Town, in February, where I quote: “the sea is really hot.” I’ve checked—hot meant 19°C or 66°F. Within a week, they were buying their own surfboards. From what I can tell, they surfed every other day for almost 3 weeks.

✈️ Hello, Honolulu

Then, for months, no surfing as they traveled inland, and then to Australia and New Zealand.

Oh, I forgot that you guys can’t see the photos and I am terrible at descriptions. To surf, Agatha wore a swim cap and a bathing suit that kinda looked like a tennis dress. The surfboards literally looked like wooden planks.

Here’s how Agatha describes arriving in Hawai’i:

We arrived in the early morning, got into our rooms at the hotel, and straight away, seeing out of the window the people surfing on the beach, we rushed down, hired our surf-boards, and plunged into the sea. We were, of course, complete innocents. It was a bad day for surfing – one of the days when only the experts go in – but we, who had surfed in South Africa, thought we knew all about it. It is very different in Honolulu.

It was different alright. In South Africa, the surfboards were thin wooden planks. In Hawai’i? Slabs of wood reminiscent of the Olo—too heavy to carry. In South Africa, Agatha could just step into the surf. In Waikiki, she had to paddle all the way to the reef—which to her seemed like a mile away (it’s not actually THAT far).

Agatha might’ve discovered surfing in South Africa, but she only appreciated the complexity of it in Hawai’i. She talks about having to recognize the waves, being a good swimmer, and positioning yourself on a board appropriately. Honestly, it’s so much fun to read because you can relate to it despite 100 years having passed.

Especially as Agatha comments:

Honolulu had proved excessively expensive. Everything you ate or drank cost about three times what you thought it would. Hiring your surf-board, everything costs money.

Sounds so familiar.

And it gets better—there are so many great stories, including one about how Agatha almost ended up surfing naked. But you have to read it yourself. If you don’t care for Agatha Christie, just get it on Kindle so you can skip to the surfing parts.

🕵️‍♀️ Did she meet the Duke?

Because all of this is happening in 1922, I was thinking—did Agatha ever meet the Duke or Tom Blake? They were all hanging out in Waikiki building their Olo replicas around that time. 

But no—no mention of it. It would’ve been so cool though, don’t you think?