From 1926 to 1956, the British actor and writer Noel Coward (1899-1973) maintained a country house in Kent, and was a frequent visitor. Born in the highly unexotic Teddington, Middlesex, the son of a piano salesman, through his mother’s family he was related to a long series of naval figures, including Field Marshall Douglas Haig. His early life in London was involved in appearing in a number of music hall and theatrical performances, till, by the 1920s he was already a successful playwright, with `Hay Fever’ (1925) the first of a long list of works which garnered both public and critical acclaim. In the Second World War Coward was involved in a series of different intelligence activities, from directing propaganda from Paris before the downfall of France towards Germany, to attempting to influence US public opinion in supporting their entry on the British side in the conflict. He was effective enough at this to be placed on a death list by the Nazis – an achievement that placed him alongside Virginia Woolf, H G Wells, and Rebecca West. The latter was to quip to him once this was uncovered after the war, `My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with’! After the war, he was to continue producing plays, but became better known as an actor. He moved from the UK to Jamaica in 1956, where he died and is buried.
Coward from early on clearly had an affinity for Kent. He came to the Romney Marsh area in the early 1920s with a friend, and rented a cottage at St Mary in the Marsh. He found the peacefulness of the place conducive. While living there, his time at the beginning briefly overlapped with Edith Nesbit, who he came to know, and whose book `The Enchanted Caste’ was found, half a century later, next to his bed when he died. In 1926, he made a bigger commitment, placing an advert for a more permanent place to stay in the `Kentish Gazette’ and receiving a reply from a Mr Body about Goldenhurst Farm, a 17th century farmhouse in Aldington, a village close to Ashford. Aldington had also been the home a decade or so earlier of Joseph Conrad, though in the somewhat less salubrious environment of rooms above a butcher’s shop in the centre of the village. In 1927, Coward bought the house, renovated it, and moved in from 1928. This was to operate as his country retreat till the war. It was here that he wrote his 1931 play, `Cavalcade.’
With the requisitioning of the farmhouse during the war by the army, Coward decided by 1945 to buy the White Cliffs house directly by the sea at the St Margaret’s Bay Norton, just along the coast from Dover. As with Goldenhurst Farm, the house needed substantial renovation. But the magnificent views across the Channel, and the initial sense of peace, evidently appealed to the new owner. And while his original plan to buy the other houses in the row in order to have maximum privacy was derailed because of government regulations preventing the purchasing of too many properties due to a housing shortage, Coward solved this by simply asking friends like the war novelist Eric Ambler to buy the adjacent houses.
A notice on the Dover Museum website goes into detail about his life in this place. He received guests as exotic as Daphne du Maurier (who had lived briefly in nearby Hythe), Gertrude Lawrence, and, even more spectacularly, the Oscar winners Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, the former of whom apparently delighted in swimming in the seawater around the house. Coward enjoyed attending film shows in Folkestone and Dover, and catching the nearby ferry for visits to Paris. While not in residence, he would often loan White Cliffs to the Duke of Kent and his family. (https://www.dovermuseum.co.uk/Information-Resources/Articles–Factsheets/Coward–Flemming.aspx) .
Complaining that the beach had become `crowded with noisy hoi polloi’ he sold it to Ian Fleming in December 1951, and returned to Goldenhurst. `We arrived at 1.55 -,’ he wrote in his diary, `the house and land seemed to envelop me in a warm and lovely welcome. We spent the day hanging more pictures etc. Utterly exhausted but deeply and profoundly happy. I am home again’ (Noel Coward, `The Noel Coward Diaries’ ed Sheridan Morley and Graham Payne, London, Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1982, 182). Financial constraints however meant that six years later, he was forced to sell his properties in the UK, and took up tax exile in Jamaica and Switzerland.
In `There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner’, written in the early 1950s, Coward had written `They’re out of sorts in Sunderland/And terribly cross in Kent…In Tunbridge Wells/You can hear the yells/Of woe-begone bourgeoisie.’ But in a reference closer to home, he goes on:
`There are black birds over
The grayish cliffs of Dover
And rats are preparing to leave the BBC.
We’re an unhappy breed
And very bored indeed
When reminded of something that Nelson said.
While the press and the politicians nag nag nag
We’ll wait until we drop dead.’
(`The Cream of Noel Coward,’ Selected by Michael Cox, Folio Society, London, 1996, 231)