You won’t find Mrs. Macatta in the new Seven Dials on Netflix. You won’t find her in the original Seven Dials novel either, because she never makes it to the Wyvern Abbey house party. But it’s interesting to take a further look at her character.
Because her children have the mumps, Mrs. Macatta cancels her visit to Wyvern Abbey where George Lomax of the Foreign Office has arranged a house party supposedly to further political alliances, but actually to discuss the acquisition of a secret steel formula. Bundle, who wants to do some sleuthing, is relieved to learn she won’t have to fake civic-minded conversations with the Member of Parliament, Mrs. Macatta.
Readers do get to meet Mrs. Macatta, however, in a different story. “The Submarine Plans” was a short story first published in 1923 in The Sketch magazine and included in a collection from the 1950s. The story was expanded into a novella called The Incredible Theft in 1937, so her appearance in 1929’s The Seven Dials Mystery was published between the two versions.
It sounds very progressive that Mrs. Macatta is an MP in the 1920s, doesn’t it? Women only gained the right to vote in 1918, as long as they were over the age of thirty and owned property. For context, men who didn’t own property were also unable to vote until 1918, which was almost half of men over twenty-one.
Since more than 5 million men were involved in a horrific war and wanted a say in how such things were handled, previous electoral reform discussions were revisited, culminating in the Representation of the People Act of 1918. Not until 1928 did women between the ages of twenty-one and thirty gain voting rights like their male counterparts.
The first female Members of Parliament were elected almost immediately. After all, there was a war monopolizing the male population with the Armistice signing in November of 1918, and the Treaty of Versailles the following June. England held their first General Election since the War began in December of 1918, and the first woman was elected: Constance Markievicz.
Markievicz represented the constituency of Dublin St. Patrick’s, but as a Sinn Féin member, she refused to take her seat and was actually in prison for political activism when Parliament convened.
Bill Eversleigh in Seven Dials talks about Mrs. Macatta “always going off the deep end about Welfare and Pure Milk and Save the Children,” and in The Incredible Theft, she is described as “a great authority on Housing and Infant Welfare,” neither of which sound much like Constance Markievicz’s platform, so she was probably not the inspiration for the character of Mrs. Macatta.
In The Incredible Theft, however, Mrs. Macatta says “The evils of gambling, M. Poirot, are only slightly less than the evils caused by drink. If I had my way this country should be purified,” and that sounds a lot like another early female MP, Nancy Astor.
Although elected a year after Markievicz, Nancy Astor is known as the first woman to be seated in Parliament since Markievicz never attended. A by-election was scheduled because her husband, Waldorf Astor, had become Viscount Astor following his father’s death in October 1919, and therefore an automatic member of the House of Lords. Wife Nancy ran for his former seat in the House of Commons and was elected in November.
Nancy Astor’s life makes for quite a story. Both Nancy and Waldorf were born in America but made England their home. Waldorf was Nancy’s second husband. She was first married to Robert Shaw II for five years and had a son with him, Robert Shaw III. Shaw’s drinking and carousing ran up against Nancy’s strait-laced sensibilities, leading inevitably to separation and divorce.
Nancy came from money, and Waldorf came from even more money. They bought fabulous historical estates in the English countryside and were fashionable leaders of high society. His wife encouraged Waldorf to get involved in politics, and he served in the House of Commons starting in 1910. Perhaps surprisingly, Waldorf supported several welfare-for-workers programs.
While in office, Nancy supported early childhood education and nursery schools, which sounds a bit like Mrs. Macatta, but she was also involved in women’s rights. In addition to politicians and other members of the British upper crust, she was also friends with people like Charlie Chaplin and George Bernard Shaw. Nancy was known to be witty and charming, but also anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and a militant teetotaler. Her witticisms frequently slipped into offensive insults.
In the 1930s, Nancy’s anti-communism beliefs took on a fascist tinge, and there were pro-German rumors. Her political career, as well as her general popularity, never recovered, and Nancy retired from Parliament in 1945. But all that is long past the time of The Mystery of the Seven Dials.
Nancy Astor certainly has a fascinating story. If you’re interested, this six-minute video tells a little more about her. She was not the only female Member of Parliament during the 1920s – 23 women were elected during the decade – but perhaps it was Nancy that helped inspire the Agatha Christie character of Mrs. Macatta.
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