The Man who Would be Sherlock

by Christopher Sandford

  Conan Doyle’s final battle concerned a review by the SPR of a book by one Ernesto Bozzano describing the spiritualist activities of an Italian nobleman, Marquis Carlo Scotto, at his Millesimo Castle near Genoa. The marquis had taken solace in the séance room following the death of his son in a flying accident in 1926. He quickly became an occult cause célèbre. At one sitting, he was said to have listened through a brass ear-trumpet to the ‘unmistakable sound’ of an aeroplane engine, followed by that of the plane falling. There were many other such phenomena as recorded by Bozzano, and later enthusiastically endorsed by both Conan Doyle and his wife. ‘It is all in the truest sense of the word a miracle,’ Doyle told Hamlin Garland.

  The SPR was not impressed. On the whole, the society’s researchers took a dim view of the goings-on at Millesimo Castle:

  The sittings were held in complete darkness, for the most part without control and without any searching of those present, [despite which] they are described by Sir Arthur as ‘on the very highest possible level of psychical research’.

  Conan Doyle responded first by lodging a complaint against the SPR’s ‘insolence’, and then by ending his thirty-six-year membership of the society. It was unfortunate, one Sunday newspaper gloated, that the ‘high priest of Spiritualism [had] come down to the earthly plane to squabble’, but Doyle was in no mood to compromise. The whole business ‘makes one ashamed that such stuff should be issued by a [body] which has any scientific standing,’ he wrote in his brusque letter of resignation from the SPR, which, rather disarmingly, the society published in the next issue of its journal.

  Despite such controversies, both Conan Doyle and his wife remained remarkably loyal to the spiritualist cause. Both were subject to tests of their faith, and Doyle went through periods of doubt as his health deteriorated. He suffered grievously in his final days.

  Arthur Conan Doyle died at home at Windlesham early on 7 July 1930, propped up in his favourite armchair by the window, where he could look out at the sun rising over the nearby hills. His last words were to Jean. ‘You are wonderful,’ he told her. Doyle was buried in his garden, just as he had asked, but when Windlesham was sold in 1955 his remains were moved to a quiet corner of All Saints churchyard in Minstead, near his summer home at Bignell Wood. The inscription on his marker reads, ‘Steel True, Blade Straight’. It serves as a reminder of his determination not to abandon the struggle on behalf of the weak or oppressed, and never to give up in the face of adversity.

  SOURCES AND CHAPTER NOTES

  The following pages show at least the formal interviews, published works, or other archive material used in the preparation of the book. I should particularly acknowledge the help of Thomas Toughill, author of the best and surely definitive treatment of the Oscar Slater case (see bibliography), even if I may differ slightly from him in our ultimate conclusions.

  Please note that I’ve sometimes referred to the subject of this book as ‘Conan Doyle’ and at other times simply as ‘Doyle’. They are the same individual. He was born as ‘Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle’, generally called himself ‘Arthur Doyle’ as a young man, and later adopted the compound surname from his great-uncle Michael Conan.

  The unusually volatile recent exchange rate for the pound against the dollar has been a challenge, but I’ve tried to adjust both currencies throughout the text to show approximately what a sum of money in Doyle’s time would be worth today.

  Chapter 1

  The question of Arthur Conan Doyle’s real-life model for Sherlock Holmes has been addressed quite thoroughly over the years, not least by Doyle himself. ‘It is most certainly to you that I owe Holmes,’ he wrote to his old Edinburgh medical lecturer, Dr Joseph Bell:

  … and though in the stories I have the advantage of being able to place him in all sorts of dramatic positions, I do not think that his analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some of the effects which I have seen you produce in the out-patient ward.

  Bell, in turn, seems not to have actively discouraged his identification with Holmes, although he once modestly told a journalist, ‘Dr Conan Doyle has, by his imaginative genius, made a great deal out of very little, [and] his warm remembrance of one of his old teachers has coloured the picture’. Perhaps it’s fair to say that like almost every great fictional creation, Holmes was a composite of the real and the imagined. In the same spirit, Doyle drew heavily for the role of Professor James Moriarty on the German-born, Anglo-American criminal Adam Worth (1844–1902), who in 1876 spirited away Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, a painting he eventually returned twenty-five years later. ‘The original of Moriarty was Worth, who stole the famous Gainsborough, [but] even that master criminal might have taken lessons from the Moriarty of Holmes and Watson, a figure of colossal resource and malevolence,’ wrote Vincent Starrett in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933). Again, it was a case of Doyle basing his fictional type on a real figure, while drawing aspects of his character from other sources.

  For further details of the Langham Hotel mystery, see Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (pp.130–32); and of the murder of Irene Kanthack, see Conan Doyle’s Our African Winter (pp.182–84), as well as sources including Benjamin Bennett, The Clues Condemn, originally published in 1900 by Howard B. Timmins of Cape Town, but later revised and updated to include the events in Johannesburg of 24 November 1927.

  Chapter 2

  Conan Doyle’s early life, and his experiences as a struggling provincial doctor and aspiring writer, have been thoroughly treated in a number of biographies. I should particularly mention John Dickson Carr’s The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Andrew Lycett’s The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, and Daniel Stashower’s Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, all as cited in the bibliography. Regrettably, Doyle’s home and surgery at Bush Villas in Southsea, the birthplace of Sherlock Holmes, no longer exists. Following extensive bombing of the area in the Second World War, Portsmouth City Council saw fit to finish the job and destroy many of the properties around Elm Grove. All that remains of Holmes today is a small plaque mentioning his origins nailed to the side of a red-brick block of flats. That notwithstanding, Michael Gunton and his supremely dedicated team at Portsmouth City Council very kindly put their Conan Doyle archive, largely the product of the Richard Lancelyn Green Bequest, at my disposal. I am grateful to them for their time and help.

  For an account of Doyle’s early occult experiences, see his The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, first published in 1921. I should also properly acknowledge Harry Houdini’s 1924 book A Magician among the Spirits, a lively account of his own role in the post-Great War debate between the world’s psychics and materialists, if not one that labours under any false modesty on its author’s part. Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Resident Patient’ was one of the stories collected in the cycle known as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and first appeared in The Strand magazine of August 1893.

  Newspaper archives consulted included Collier’s Weekly, The Times, the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror, the Illustrated London News, the London Daily Illustrated Mirror, and The New York Times. It’s perhaps a reflection of our still imperfect knowledge of Conan Doyle that the name of his first wife is given as ‘Louise’ by some biographers, and as ‘Louisa’ by others. The second seems to me the more likely.

  For archive material in this chapter I should also particularly thank the History Museum at the Castle of Appleton, Wisconsin; the US Library of Congress; the Magic Circle; and the staff of the Manuscripts Reading Room of the Cambridge University Library, where I spent rather longer in the course of a week than in my three years as a Cambridge undergraduate. I visited Conan Doyle’s surviving homes at South Norwood, Hindhead and Crowborough.

  Chapter 3

  Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels The Refugees and A Duet with an Occasional Chorus were first published in 1893 and 1899 respectively; I consulted the archives of the Cambridge University and British libraries, and the coll
ection held by Portsmouth City Council, in seeking to better understand Conan Doyle’s creative process, and his more recreational activities of the time.

  Doyle’s letter to his editor friend W.T. Stead was dated 22 January 1893. Stead was to lose his life on the Titanic, only to apparently return in spirit form at intervals throughout the 1920s.

  Doyle’s primary account of the sad case of Ella Castle of San Francisco and her excessive taste for souvenirs of her London visit appeared in the Times of 10 November 1896.

  Doyle’s visit to the supposedly haunted house in Charmouth, Dorset, took place in June 1894, although he was to give a full account of it only in his 1930 book, The Edge of the Unknown. In his published version of events, Doyle adds the detail that the house in question had burned down shortly after his visit, and that the skeleton of a young boy was discovered buried in the garden. It has proved difficult to corroborate that particular aspect of the story.

  For details of the events of May 1899 at Moat House Farm in Essex, see Macdonald Hastings, The Other Mr Churchill (London: Four Square Books, 1966) and Carl Sifakis, The Catalogue of Crime (New York: New American Library, 1979), as well as published accounts in the Times, The Daily Telegraph, the Illustrated London News and the Spectator. For the story of the July 1907 removal of the so-called Irish Crown Jewels from their refuge in the library of Dublin Castle, see Kenneth E.L. Deale, ‘The Herald and the Safe’, included in Memorable Irish Trials (London: Constable, 1960), and ‘The Great Jewel Robbery (By Our Sherlock Holmes)’, published in The Leprechaun, August 1907, p.53.

  Other periodicals consulted included the American Weekly, Boston Herald, Chambers’ Journal, Light, Magic, New York Sun, The New York Times, the New York World, the Saturday Evening Post, The Strand, the Spiritualist and the Sunday Express.

  I visited the countryside around Great Wyrley, and should particularly like to thank the staff of the Staffordshire Record Office.

  Chapter 4

  Several books have been published dealing (in some cases, exhaustively so) with the strange events involving George Edalji and his alleged series of cattle mutilations and other offences. Many readers may be familiar with the loosely fictionalised treatment of the case in Julian Barnes’ 2005 novel Arthur & George. For a more drily factual account, see Gordon Weaver, Conan Doyle and the Parson’s Son (Cambridge: Vanguard Press, 2006) or Roger Oldfield, Outrage: The Edalji Five and the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes (Cambridge: Pegasus Elliot Mackenzie Publishers, 2010). For more archival information, I consulted the papers and illustrations held on the case by the Staffordshire Record Office; the records of the Indian Church Gazette; the files of the Cannock Advertiser, the Wolverhampton Express and Star, the Lichfield Mercury, the Birmingham Post and Pearson’s Weekly. The UK National Archives at Kew hold several papers on the case, among them Home Office File 989, which includes notes and correspondence to and from Honourable the Captain George Anson. Under ground rules of anonymity, I interviewed one of Anson’s direct descendants who was familiar with family records of the case; his thoughts are included here only to give a degree of background context to the known facts. I should also acknowledge the insights provided by Home Office Files 986 and 988, UK National Archives, and of course by Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Case of George Edalji, as cited in the bibliography.

  Innes Doyle’s remark about ‘Much talk of Edalji’ appeared in his diary of 12 January 1907, and is quoted in Andrew Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, p.321. There is also an account of the affair given in Conan Doyle’s own Memories and Adventures, as cited in the bibliography. I also consulted Daniel Stashower’s very fine Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle (2007), which rightly concludes:

  Conan Doyle believed the entire episode constituted an ugly blot on British justice. [However] recent investigations suggest that the final chapter of the Edalji case has yet to be written … Subsequent research indicates that Edalji may not have been entirely pure of heart.

  Hopefully the account given here may go some small way to balancing the rival claims of those who portray George Edalji as an animal-ripping psychopath who hid behind a carefully maintained veneer of respectability, and others for whom he remains a potent symbol of the institutional racism of the British Police, and British society in general of his time.

  Chapter 5

  For specific details of the arrest, deposition and trial of George Edalji, see Home Office File 986, UK National Archives; Statutory Declarations to Home Office, 2 and 7 January 1904, Home Office No. 45/6, File 984; Charlotte Edalji letter to Home Secretary, 8 January 1904, Home Office No. 48, file 984; and Home Office File 989, which contains correspondence and other notes to and from Captain Anson.

  The True Crime Files of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle edited by Stephen Hines, as cited in the bibliography, gives examples of the sometimes forbiddingly technical debate about the exact state of George Edalji’s eyesight at the time of the crimes of which he was convicted. Perhaps rashly, Doyle himself began the exchange in the course of his two lengthy articles published in The Daily Telegraph on 11 and 12 January 1907. Edalji in turn wrote in The Telegraph of 15 January 1907:

  I have several times been to optical experts and ophthalmic surgeons, with a view to getting glasses to suit me, but until Dr Kenneth Scott made a very long and careful scrutiny of my eyesight I have never got glasses of any use to me … but even these do not give me normal sight, as I find other people can see things without glasses at a far greater distance than I can with them. Another well-known ophthalmic surgeon declares my sight to be considerably less than one-tenth of the normal.

  Further correspondence followed in The Telegraph of 16 and 17 January 1907, and at intervals both there and in several other papers, some of which again condemned Edalji, and others of which began to agitate for an official Home Office inquiry, as a result.

  Among other archive or published material, I read Herbert Gladstone’s memo of the case dated 6 June 1907, included in the Herbert Gladstone Papers, British Library, File 46096; John Churton Collins, ‘The Edalji Case’, National Review, March 1907; and George Edalji’s ‘My Own Story: The Narrative of Eighteen Years Persecution’, Pearson’s Weekly, 7 February–6 June 1907.

  Other periodicals consulted included the Birmingham Midland Express, Birmingham Weekly Mail, Cannock Advertiser, Wolverhampton Express and Star, Birmingham Gazette, Lichfield Mercury and the Walsall Observer.

  Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’ and ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ both appeared in 1891; his novel The Valley of Fear was published in instalments in The Strand between September 1914 and May 1915.

  An account of the Enoch Knowles case, under the headline ‘Labourer Sent to Penal Servitude’, appeared in The Times of 7 November 1934.

  I should again acknowledge the great help of both Liz Street and Rebecca Jackson, duty archivists at Staffordshire Record Office. Several other libraries and archives assisted with a variety of material on the Edalji case, including the Cambridge University Library, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, House of Lords Record Office and the John Murray Archive.

  Chapter 6

  For details on the case of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen and his unfortunate wife Cora, see Douglas G. Browne, Sir Travers Humphreys (London: George G. Harrap & Co, 1960); John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (London: John Murray, 1949); and Filson Young, ‘Dr Crippen’, in Famous Trials (Birmingham: The Legal Classics Library, 1985). I also consulted reports of the case published in The Daily Telegraph, the London Globe, the Daily Chronicle, the Manchester Guardian and the Spectator.

  For details of Conan Doyle’s exposure to early twentieth-century criminal life in North America, see William John Burns, The Masked War (New York: George H. Doran, 1913); Harry Golden, The Lynching of Leo Frank (London: Cassell, 1966); Allan Pinkerton, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, reprinted 1973); and Conan Doyle’s Our American Adventure and Our Second American Adven
ture (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1923 and 1924 respectively).

  For details of the Roger Casement case, see the Casement Papers archived in the National Library of Ireland, which include the trial notes of Casement’s solicitor, George Duffy. Among many other biographies, I should mention H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trial of Sir Roger Casement (London: William Hodge & Co., 1960) and Brian Inglis, Roger Casement (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973). I also consulted accounts of Casement’s trial and execution, and of Doyle’s petition on his behalf, in the Daily Express, The Daily Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian, the Pall Mall Gazette and the Spectator.