My wife Dale and I vacationed in Torquay on “the English Riviera” (hmmm…) in the summer of 2019. We took a trip out to see Greenway House, the home of English crime writer Agatha Christie and we found on the wall of her library this depiction of the shipyards in Orange, Texas.

Why? Greenway House overlooking Torbay had been acquisitioned as a lodging for officers in the months leading up to the D-Day invasion in June 1944. Officers of the 10th U.S. Coast Guard flotilla headquartered in Torbay used the house and one of them painted (or hired someone to point) a series of linked images (friezes) on the upper walls depicting the wartime efforts of their flotilla.

The friezes in the library begin with this image depicting the construction of their ships in Orange, Texas, and the initial—and apparently disastrous—trials of the ships in Galveston Bay. This image depicts an officer with arms raised screaming at ships’ crews!

The Consolidated Steel Corporation of Orange produced 39 destroyers and 110 destroyer escorts for the war effort. I don’t know if their ships were the ones used by the Coast Guard in the D-Day invasion depicted here.

When the war was over, Agatha Christie and her family returned to Greenway House. Officials offered to remove the friezes in the library including this image, but she insisted that they leave them. The author of Murder on the Orient Express had her daily morning coffee where she could see this depiction of the shipyards in Orange, Texas.

See Mike Louviere’s article on the Orange shipyards at: https://www.orangeleader.com/2022/01/26/what-made-orange-great-texas-only-wwii-warship-builders-were-in-orange/