On the beach itself were floats, lilos, rubber and canvas boats, balls and rubber toys. A series of terraces led down to it from the hotel. Hercule Poirot, resplendent in a white duck suit, with a panama hat tilted over his eyes, his moustaches magnificently befurled, lay back in an improved type of deck chair and surveyed the bathing beach.

There was one very important person (in his own estimation at least) staying at the Jolly Roger. Very comfortable and no trippers or charabancs. “Ever been to Leathercombe Bay? Awfully jolly hotel there, on a sort of island. It was enlarged and improved in 1934 by the addition of a cocktail bar, a bigger dining room and some extra bathrooms.

And from June till September (with a short season at Easter) the Jolly Roger Hotel was usually packed to the attics. The Jolly Roger Hotel, Smugglers’ Island, Leathercombe Bay, came triumphantly into being. There were two tennis courts, sun terraces leading down to a little bay embellished with rafts and diving boards. “Walks” and “Nooks” were cut and devised all round the island. A concrete causeway was laid down from the mainland to the island. The sturdy house was added to and embellished. In 1922 when the great cult of the Seaside for Holidays was finally established and the coast of Devon and Cornwall was no longer thought too hot in the summer, Arthur Angmering found his vast inconvenient late Georgian house unsaleable, but he got a good price for the odd bit of property acquired by the seafaring Captain Roger. Their own acres dwindled, and their heirs grew steadily poorer. That cousin and his descendants thought little of the bequest. He did not marry, the sea was his first and last spouse, and at his death the house and island went to a distant cousin. So he built his house-a sturdy house too, as it needed to be, on the little windswept gull-haunted promontory-cut off from land at each high tide.

A man of good family such as he was should have had a decorous mansion set in wide meadows with, perhaps, a running stream and good pasture.īut Captain Roger Angmering had only one great love, the sea. When Captain Roger Angmering built himself a house in the year 1782 on the island off Leathercombe Bay, it was thought the height of eccentricity on his part.

Evil under the sun book