The BBC is filming a new cosy-crime series, The Detection Club (written by Kit Lambert), starring, above left-to-right, Bryony Hannah as Agatha Christie, Miles Jupp as G.K. Chesterton and Cara Theobold as Dorothy L. Sayers. My friend Alan Jacobs (whose biography of Sayers comes out next month from OUP) notes:
The Detection Club looks like it might be fun, but I wonder about one thing: why did the creators decide to make Miles Jupp look exactly like Chesterton but make Bryony Hannah and Cara Theobold look nothing like Christie and Sayers?
For the record: Christie was tall (5′ 8″, unusual for the time) and fair, and somewhat formal in her public appearance; Hannah is short, dark, and petite, and is dressed like a dumpy schoolmarm. Sayers was also often called tall (though there’s no record of her actual height), increasingly stout from her late 20s on, with short dark-brown hair and a flamboyant eccentricity of dress often remarked on; Cara Theobold in the show is bright blonde and almost a fashion plate.
There’s no reason why the show should adhere to the facts in this matter — but it’s so particular about getting GKC right (the hair, the pince-nez, the cape)! I find myself thinking that she show would be more visually interesting if Christie’s traditionalism were contrasted to Sayers’s eccentricity.
I was struck that nobody knows officially what height Sayers was. As Alan says, she has been called tall, described by Vera Brittain as ‘long and slim’ during her university days at Oxford; and Janet Hitchman’s biography Such a Strange Lady calls her ‘tall and awkward’, and records that others spoke of her as ‘a large, commanding presence’.
This photograph does make her look quite tall: she is standing with three men, J A Kensit of the Protestant Truth Society, Dr J W Welch, Director of Religious Broadcasts at the BBC, and, in his Home Guard uniform, Derek McCulloch, producer of BBC’s Children Hour and radio presenter. The occasion was the BBC’s broadcast of Sayers’s The Man Born to be King (the play ran from December 1941-October 1942; this photo was from when the first installment went out).
It’s a slightly wonky framing: I assume all four are not leaning to the left (though if we angle the image right a touch to straighten them the door behind looks out of skew). But Sayers is a good half a head taller than Kensit, and a little taller than Welch and McCulloch (though McCulloch is leaning forward a little: if he straightened up he might be Sayers’s height). This doesn’t help us, since the heights of these individuals is nowhere recorded. We could estimate that Derek McCulloch, known to radio-listeners as ‘Uncle Mac’, was not a particularly tall person—in this photo it’s clear that the young woman at the piano would tower over him if she stood:
(Excuse the watermark here, and in the next image)—and in this photo, Sayers looks really quite small:
She’s standing directly next to actor Ivan Brandt (1903–1972; born Roy Francis Cook, he changed his name to make himself seem more exotic and so get better film roles). Brandt has his arm round stage designer Norah Lambourne, who seems taller than he (though she’s wearing heels, and is closer to the camera than Brandt and Sayers). The seated figure is Irish actor Veronica Turleigh, who is in costume as Saint Helena—the occasion of the photo was a rehearsal for Sayers’ play Christ's Emperor (a shortened version of her last play The Emperor Constantine) at St Thomas’s Church, Regent Street, January 1952. Brandt’s height is not recorded, but if he is 6ft then Sayers would be somewhere in the 5′ 3″, 5′ 4″ range. My estimate from this image is that if Turleigh were to stand she’d be of a similar height to Sayers, and Turleigh was a relatively short woman.1 Here, in a still from The Card (1952), she is standing with a seated Alec Guinness (height an accredited 5′ 9¼″) who, were he to stand, would manifestly be a lot taller than she:
She’s leaning forward a little, which makes it a little hard to gauge. Anyway: I’m making my official and scientifically rigorous judgment of Dorothy Sayers’s height: 5′ 3½″. I assume her forceful personality magnified her relatively small frame in the experience of others.
I would suggest Turleigh and Sayers had torsos of similar length: possibly they had different lengths of leg, but if not they’d be more or less the same height.
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Thank you, dear Adam, for taking up this vital question. I am honored to have provoked it. Some points:
1) Though Sayers is indeed called “long and slim” (by Vera Brittain among others) during her Oxford years, her height is simply not mentioned, as far as I have been able to discover, by anyone who knew her later in life. As can be seen in photos of the young DLS, she had a long and elegant neck — one nickname for her was “Swanny” — and I suspect that that gave the impression of greater height that she actually had. (It may be relevant that Brittain says “long” rather than “tall.”)
2) By contrast, people often commented on Christie’s height throughout her life. (Ditto Virginia Woolf, who by all accounts was an inch shorter than Christie.)
3) It’s worth noting that — as best I can discover — the average British woman of the AC/DLS generation was 5’2”, so 5’8” was significantly out of the ordinary.
4) People often shrink as they get older. For instance, thanks to some lumbar and cervical issues that have led to compression, I am a full two inches shorter than I was when I was 20.
5) As Phil Edwards says, none of the photographs you post give us unambiguous evidence.
My conclusions from all this? That in her youth Sayers was no taller than 5’6”, more probably 5’5”, and that she may well have lost an inch over the years.
Also, a note for casting directors: By the tme of the founding of the Detection Club in 1930, GKC and DLS were both quite fat and Christie was well on her way to the stoutness that she would keep for the rest of her life. (There’s a letter from DLS in the Fifties in which she says of Christie “She’s even bigger than I am!”) I sort of like the idea of three Brits about the size of the people on the Axiom in WALL•E lumbering about in voluminous wool outfits solving crimes.
When I first saw the picture, I thought it was pretty accurate and was impressed with the accuracy... But that's because I thought Christie was on the right and Sayers on the left! Now I can't look at it without frowning