Daphne Du Maurier (1907-1989), author of, amongst other works, `Rebecca’ (1938), `Jamaica Inn’ (1936) and `My Cousin Rachel’ (1951), was a native of London, though her father, the actor and impresario Sir Gerald du Maurier may have possibly owned the Medieval Slaybrook Hall in Sandgate, near Hythe. Du Maurier herself spent much of her life in Cornwall. But her marriage to Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Browning in 1931 meant that at the start of the Second World War in September 1939 she was based for about 9 months in Hythe, while he was posted to the local Small Arms School as Assistant Commandant.
According to an article in `Hythe Life’ issue number three, published in December 2014, Du Maurier with her two young children and her husband (she learned she was pregnant with a third while in Hythe, in January 1940) lived in the Commandant’s House along Sir John Moore Avenue. Their quarters today are divided into flats with the large garden (one of the features of the house Du Maurier evidently liked) occupied by a Sainsbury’s store. Writing to her sister, she spoke approvingly of the place saying `it is heavenly here and I’m sure we should have loved it but for all this’ – a reference to the war preparations going on then. The following year she wrote of how `this is a good place in the summer, anyway for the children and they seem to happy that I see no point in suddenly upheaving yet awhile. The kitchen garden too, bursting soon with produce. But of course if raids start I should shift’ (https://issuu.com/hythelifemagazine/docs/hythe_life_magazine_issue_3, 21)
In a biography of her, Margaret Foster refers to how `change of residence [from Fleet where they had moved from in Hampshire] unsettled Daphne, and Tommy [the nickname for her husband] was irritated by the temporary disorder. He was working very hard and when he came home wanted peace…. His wife’s inability to run [the house] as efficiently as he had always run his battalion resulted in some heated rows. One was over a cook who served poor food, which Daphne maintained was not her fault.’ (Margaret Foster, `Daphne du Maurier’, Doubleday, New York, 1993, 145). While staying in the town she became involved in Civil Defence Preparations. She enrolled in a first aid post, learning how to deal with gassed casualties. In May, when her husband resigned from his post to become commander of the 128th Hampshire brigade, they moved to Fowey in Cornwall. The Hythe interlude was over.
Despite the brevity, she evidently liked the people she had met in Hythe – the `uniformed harpies’, as she called them, `who have lain perdu since 1918 and now come into their own again.’ One, `Mrs G’, the quartermaster’s wife, wore `a large gent’s lounge suit plus her cloche hat’, and `the fair and fluffy wife of the staff sergeant had suddenly become brisk and determined’ (Ibid, 146). And while her time in Hythe was not long, and she was to spend the rest of her life in other places, the very particular circumstances which prevailed at the time she was there, with the intensification of war, give it a symbolic importance. The combination of this particular person, and this particular time, in this particular location facing continental Europe at a time of great strife, is one worth commemorating.