Agatha Christie is the queen of intrigue of the 20th century, and her Hercule Poirot disputes the title of king of detectives with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. One of the mysteries of the work of the great lady of detective novels is what a Belgian detective, whom many mistakenly believe to be French, was doing in London. To understand it, we must go back to one of the silenced human dramas of Europe at the beginning of the 20th century: the Belgian refugee crisis after the German invasion of 1914.
Poirot debuts in Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920 but written in 1916, in the middle of the Great War and just when Britain was experiencing the refugee crisis from occupied Belgium up close. It is estimated that around 250,000 Belgians settled in British cities.
Germany had begun the invasion of neutral Belgium on August 4, 1914. It was key to its strategy for a rapid occupation of Paris. Around 1.5 million Belgians were displaced, one in five. Many settled in the unoccupied part of the country, but about 600,000 chose to flee to Holland, France and especially Great Britain.
The exodus across the English Channel was incessant for months. The day of greatest collapse was recorded in the port of the town of Folkestone on October 15, when it received 26,000 people. It was a human movement on a scale hitherto unprecedented in Europe.
The arrival of those thousands of Belgians to British cities had a great impact on the country. At first they were received with great enthusiasm and open arms. According to a chronicle published on October 21, 1914 in La Vanguardia: “The Government and the people of England know perfectly well that they are under the moral obligation to maintain the Belgian refugees, in relative comfort, until the war ends; “They know that we must attend to their needs and try to make their lives among us pleasant, as far as possible, trying to provide employment for men and women capable of working.”
The chronicler also conveys the willingness of cities and towns to distribute themselves to displaced families, providing them with accommodation and food. The newspapers opened popular subscriptions that soon raised significant amounts of money.
Hercule Poirot himself attests to the great reception. In the second chapter of The Mysterious Case of Styles, the detective meets again with the one who will be his assistant in many cases, Captain Arthur Hastings, his particular Dr. Watson. They hadn’t seen each other since they became friends in Belgium years ago. “If I am here it is thanks to the kind Mrs. Inglethorp. Yes, my friend, she has offered hospitality to seven refugees from my country. We Belgians are eternally grateful to him.”
Not all British people thought the same. Already at the beginning of the refugees’ arrival in 1914, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was very critical of their presence. He argued that Belgian citizens fleeing the war should have stayed in their country, fed on “continental food” and occupied the attention of German politics. “This is not the time for charity,” he declared.
The hospitality and solidarity of the British lasted only a few months. It was thought that the war would last until Christmas 1914, but expectations were soon dashed, and with them the realization that refugees could become permanent guests. Many families who had given them asylum had run out of money and had had enough of them.
Then friction emerged, especially due to the difference in habits. For the rigid post-Victorian society, the customs of the Belgians began to be annoying. For example, women did not wear hats in public, or men consumed alcohol in the street. However, the most barbaric thing for the British was that their hosts appreciated the consumption of horse meat.
Contributing to the unrest of the locals was that the Belgians came to form their own communities, in some cases with schools, newspapers, shops, hospitals, churches, prisons and police, with the aim of maintaining their traditions and way of life despite exile.
Some of these areas were considered de facto Belgian territory. Even the country’s currency was used. One of those enclaves was Elisabethville, named after Elizabeth of Bavaria, the queen of Belgium. She had running water and electricity, a luxury that the inhabitants of Birtley, the town where she was located, lacked. Tensions did not take long to arise.
The Belgians largely replaced the natives mobilized on the European fronts. It is estimated that they filled 60,000 jobs that had been left vacant, half employed directly in the war industry. Of them, 7,000 were women. The exiles in France contributed in equal measure. Some 22,000 were hired in various industries and 15,000 in the countryside. However, in Holland they mainly swelled the unemployment lists. In Great Britain, in addition, 500 Belgian companies were established. The most important was the Pelabon Works, in Richmond, which manufactured hand grenades.
The most famous Belgian refugee, the fictional Poirot, considered himself “the greatest detective in the world.” Conceited, short, obese, asocial, unfriendly, pedantic, impertinent, self-centered and obsessively neat. His most characteristic physical feature was a rigid, military-looking mustache that he carefully maintained.
To conceive Poirot, the writer was inspired by the tragic episodes of the First World War and the refugee crisis, which she experienced closely in her youth, in her early twenties. Apparently, Christie met in Torquay, her hometown, a former Belgian gendarme who, according to some sources, was called Jacques Hornais and, according to others, Jacques Hamoir. The confusing and poorly rigorous local records of the time make his identification difficult.
Other influences also converge on Poirot. Among them, Hercule Popeau, a detective born from the prolific English writer of intrigue novels Marie Belloc Lowndes. The adventures of Jules Poiret, a Belgian detective created by Frank Howell Evans, also played a role. Both investigators appeared in the 1910s, and their cases occupied many hours of Christie’s youth. And, obviously, Doyle’s analytical and deductive Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin also left their mark, which shaped the genre.
Poirot quickly gained great popularity among readers. His creator shaped the detective case by case, cultivating his brilliant skills for investigation, but also his most odious traits, to the point that she came to detest him deeply. And, although she wished him horribly, he managed to restrain himself and not prematurely kill his creation.
“Why, why, why did I have to give life to this obnoxious, bombastic, tedious little creature? However, I confess that Hercule Poirot has won. Now I feel a certain affection that, although it costs me, I cannot deny,” the author wrote in the introduction to Telón, the novel in which she finally killed the detective in 1975. He died of a heart condition and solving his last case from his bed. of death. She died just a year before Agatha Christie herself.
Such was the celebrity that the researcher had acquired that even the New York Times dedicated an obituary to him, an unusual and unique fact, given that he was a fictional character.
After the armistice of November 1918, Poirot was one of the few who continued to reside peacefully in England. The thousands of royal citizens displaced by the war were pushed by London to return to their country, although it must be said that their willingness to return was already the majority, in the hope of recovering their properties.
The liberal government of David Lloyd George had already created a special committee for repatriation in 1917, a year before the end of the war. By 1921, 90% of the refugees had already left British soil. To promote this, employment contracts were canceled and free one-way tickets were provided.
Those who returned home were not treated very well. Those who had remained in the country described them as cowards, traitors and deserters. They received indifference at best, and their contribution to the war was considered marginal. Belgium drew a curtain of oblivion on the first great refugee drama in Europe.
Today, a solitary monument, the Belgian Refugees Memorial, stands in London, on Victoria Embankment, next to Waterloo Bridge. Apart from this sculptural group, the trace of those refugees in British cities has practically vanished. Of course we will always have Poirot.
This article was published in issue 621 of Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
