Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  At the same time, his loss of faith created a hole he would spend the rest of his life trying to fill. “I had a very keen perception of the wonderful poise of the universe,” he would write, “and the tremendous power of conception and sustenance which it implied. I was reverent in all my doubts and never ceased to think upon the matter, but the more I thought the more confirmed became my non-conformity.”

  This nonconformity would take him down some very strange paths. “Never will I accept anything which cannot be proved to me,” he declared as a young man. “The evils of religion have all come from accepting things which cannot be proved.” As he grew older, however, he would begin to substitute his own opinion for proof. As a result, many of the causes he took up—legal reform, defense of the falsely accused, and, finally, the so-called spirit revelation—were approached with what can only be called a religious fervor. In each case, he followed the example set by his younger self—the headstrong doctor with a burst life-belt.

  Following the standoff at Cambridge Terrace, Conan Doyle was ready to jump at any chance that came along. In May of 1882, a strange telegram arrived from Plymouth, sent by an Edinburgh classmate named George Turnavine Budd. “Started here last June,” the message ran. “Colossal success. Come down by next train if possible. Plenty of room for you. Splendid opening.”

  Conan Doyle did not catch the next train. He had reason to be wary of George Budd, whom he once described as “half genius and half quack.” At Edinburgh, Budd had caused a scandal when he eloped with a girl who was not only underage but also a ward of the court. Anxious to mask his identity, he doused his blond hair with an inferior black dye, creating a two-tone effect that made him all the more conspicuous. Somehow the couple managed to escape detection long enough to exchange marriage vows, whereupon Budd set up housekeeping in Edinburgh under conditions of Dickensian poverty. “I have dined with them there on an apple dumpling,” Conan Doyle wrote, “seated on a pile of thick volumes as there was no chair.”

  Upon leaving Edinburgh, Budd tried to establish a practice in Bristol, where his late father had made a huge success as a physician, lecturer, and town benefactor. Hoping to trade on this renown, Budd assumed all the expensive accoutrements of his father’s practice, including the lavish mansion his father had owned at the height of his success. Shortly before Conan Doyle’s stint on the Mayumba, he had received a telegram from Budd asking him to come to Bristol. Budd, it emerged, had gone bankrupt trying to create the appearance of prosperity, and now turned to Conan Doyle for counsel. Conan Doyle advised him to assemble his creditors and ask that they defer his debts while he tried his luck elsewhere. Budd took the advice, bringing local tradesmen to the point of tears with an emotionally charged account of his struggles. Having secured a grace period, he packed his bags and moved on to Plymouth, where an uncle had enjoyed a successful practice.

  Now, apparently, Budd had made such a success that he required a partner to cope with the flood of patients. Uncertain whether to accept the offer, Conan Doyle solicited advice from his three closest advisors—his mother, Bryan Waller, and Dr. Hoare. All of them advised against any further association with Budd. It was one thing to befriend such a person, the Ma’am declared, but quite another to join his medical practice. Still undecided, Conan Doyle wrote to Budd asking for clarification of the terms. Budd, indignant at the delay, sent a blistering reply. Thirty thousand patients had crossed his threshold in the past year, he insisted. Business was so good that he would not bestir himself to cross the street if Queen Victoria herself desired a consultation. Conan Doyle need only board a train to be guaranteed a salary of three hundred pounds. “This looked like business,” Conan Doyle wrote, “so off I went.”

  What he found in Plymouth defied all expectations. Budd and his wife lived in an expensively furnished house at 6 Elliot Terrace, a fashionable neighborhood, but ran the surgery out of a large building on Durnford Street in the city’s working-class district. Budd had hit on a surefire plan to attract patients: he offered consultations for free, but charged a hefty price for his prescriptions. He doled out medicines in a “heroic and indiscriminate manner,” according to Conan Doyle, sometimes for no other reason than to earn a fee.

  When Conan Doyle arrived on the scene, he found “something more like a cattle market than a medical practice.” Well over a hundred patients spilled out of the consulting room onto the stairs and into the hallways of the surgery building. Budd claimed that he drew patients from fifty miles away, some of whom sat on his doorstep eating bread and treacle in the early hours of the morning, so as to be first in line when the doors opened.

  Budd set his new partner up in a large consulting room with a simple table and two chairs. From there, Conan Doyle began to handle a small trickle of surgical cases, watching with growing wonder as Budd dealt with the majority of the patients. “His behavior to them was extraordinary,” Conan Doyle wrote. “He roared and shouted, scolded them, joked them, pushed them about, and pursued them sometimes into the street, or addressed them collectively from the landing. A morning with him when the practice was in full blast was as funny as any pantomime and I was exhausted with laughter. He had a well-worn volume on Medical Jurisprudence which he pretended was the Bible, and he swore old women on it that they would drink no more tea.” As to whether Budd’s eccentric methods served any useful purpose, Conan Doyle offered a diplomatic assessment: “I have no doubt he did a great deal of good, for there was reason and knowledge behind all that he did, but his manner of doing it was unorthodox in the extreme.”

  This was not, as Conan Doyle well knew, a conventional medical practice. For the first time, however, he was earning money and practicing medicine on dry land. If working with Budd required a certain ethical flexibility, Conan Doyle briefly permitted himself this luxury to enjoy the rewards of an active practice.

  Soon enough, his conscience began to bother him. It did not escape his notice that Budd showed no sign of paying off his creditors in Bristol, even though he could now well afford to do so. As always, Conan Doyle had been writing regularly to his mother, and reporting fully on the strange foibles of his new associate. Predictably, the Ma’am strongly disapproved of Budd and was not shy about saying so in her letters. In her view—as recorded in The Stark Munro Letters, where Conan Doyle presented a fictional treatment of these events—Budd was a man of “unscrupulous character and doubtful antecedents,” and her son’s association with him threatened to soil the family honor. Conan Doyle now found himself in the uneasy position of having to defend Budd’s character, which provoked an even more outspoken stream of commentary from the Ma’am. Over the course of six weeks, a “serious breach” opened between Conan Doyle and his mother.

  One day Budd began to complain that his profits had fallen sharply. Conan Doyle saw no cause for alarm, since the fine summer weather had cut down on sore throats and other cold weather ailments. The explanation did not satisfy Budd, who voiced an opinion that patients were being chased away by Conan Doyle’s brass nameplate beside the door to the surgery. The patients wanted to see him, Budd reasoned, and would sooner turn away than risk having their cases fobbed off on Conan Doyle. If the account in The Stark Munro Letters is accurate, Conan Doyle promptly picked up a hammer, marched outside, and pried the offending nameplate off the wall.

  Clearly, the partnership had reached its crisis. Somewhat contrite, Budd tried to calm Conan Doyle by advising him to go into practice for himself. Since Conan Doyle had no capital, Budd offered to provide him with a loan of one pound per week until he got himself established. Mollified, Conan Doyle accepted the offer, gathered his few belongings into his trunk, and parted with Budd on cordial terms.

  After scouting the nearby town of Tavistock, Conan Doyle settled on Portsmouth as a likely spot for his new practice, being fairly “analogous” to Plymouth. He boarded an Irish steamer at the end of June 1882 and alighted at the Clarence Pier in Southsea, a residential suburb of Portsmouth that attracted visitors to its seafront in the
summer months. Leaving his trunk at the pier, Conan Doyle made his way into town to find a rooming house. From there, he would study a plan of the town and try to find a suitable house for rent. With less than £10 to his name, Conan Doyle needed to get himself established as quickly as possible. If the prospect seemed intimidating, he could take comfort in the security of the weekly pound note from Budd.

  Or so he thought. No sooner had Conan Doyle rented a house and purchased medical supplies on credit than Budd “hurled his thunderbolt” and withdrew his support. A curt letter informed Conan Doyle that one of his mother’s letters had been discovered in the fireplace. It was unforgivable, Budd declared, that such a vicious attack on his character could have been tolerated beneath his own roof.

  While it was certainly true that Mary Doyle had written such a letter—many, in fact—Budd could not have happened upon it as he claimed, since Conan Doyle had brought the offending correspondence with him to Portsmouth. Budd, Conan Doyle now realized, had been prying into his mail all along, and quietly plotting his revenge. By waiting until Conan Doyle had made financial commitments in Portsmouth, Budd had all but guaranteed his former partner’s financial ruin.

  “Well, I wrote him a little note,” Conan Doyle declared in The Stark Munro Letters. “I said that his letter had been a source of gratification to me, as it removed the only cause for disagreement between my mother and myself. She had always thought him a blackguard, and I had always defended him; but I was forced now to confess that she had been right from the beginning.”

  Conan Doyle may well have wanted to put a brave face on the situation, but Budd’s broken pledge left him in desperate straits. He knew no one in Portsmouth, and had no good reason to believe he could make a success there. As the full weight of Budd’s connivance sank in, Conan Doyle must have felt a strong temptation to return to Edinburgh, or to throw himself on the mercy of Dr. Hoare, the benefactor of his student days. If so, his pride would have prevented any serious consideration of either option. He had joined Budd in Plymouth over the loud objections of his mother and his friends. He must now face the consequences on his own. “For a moment I was staggered,” Conan Doyle recalled. “But my boats were burned and I must go forward.”

  In all, he had spent no more than two months in Plymouth, but the experience would make itself felt for years to come. Traces of George Budd can be found in every phase of Conan Doyle’s literary career, from The Stark Munro Letters to the volatile Professor Challenger. Though the experience had been chastening—it would be some time before Conan Doyle rejected any further advice from the Ma’am—Conan Doyle could not bring himself to bear a grudge. “Even now,” he admitted in his autobiography, “I can’t help liking him.”

  George Budd died in 1889, in his early thirties, only seven years after the collapse of his partnership with Conan Doyle. At the time of his death an investigation into his unorthodox medical practices was under way, and he left his wife and four daughters in virtual poverty. In his autobiography, Conan Doyle disguised Budd as “Cullingworth,” the name he adopted for The Stark Munro Letters, to spare Budd’s widow any additional embarrassment. That account, written some forty-two years after the fact, offered a magnanimous view of their parting: “He had, of course, no real grievance,” Conan Doyle wrote, “but I am quite willing to admit that he honestly thought he had.”

  Conan Doyle omitted one detail. Though Budd had attempted to engineer his financial ruin and social disgrace, Conan Doyle felt a debt of honor toward his widow. For years afterward, he quietly put up money for the support of Mrs. Budd and her daughters.

  Publicly, Conan Doyle confined himself to an ambiguous final comment. “He was a remarkable man and narrowly escaped being a great one,” Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography. “I understand that an autopsy revealed some cerebral abnormality.”

  5

  Three Pounds of Furniture and a Tin of Corned Beef

  Dr. Doyle begs to notify that he has removed to 1, Bush Villas, Elm Grove, next to the Bush Hotel.

  —NOTICE IN THE PORTSMOUTH EVENING NEWS, 1 JULY 1882

  “First of all,” Conan Doyle wrote in The Stark Munro Letters, “I walked down to the post office and I bought a large shilling map of the town. Then back I came and pinned this out upon the lodging-house table. This done, I set to work to study it, and to arrange a series of walks by which I should pass through every street of the place. You have no idea what that means until you try to do it. I used to have breakfast, get out about ten, walk till one, have a cheap luncheon (I can do well on threepence), walk till four, get back and note results. On my map I put a cross for every empty house and a circle for every doctor. So at the end of that time I had a complete chart of the whole place, and could see at a glance where there was a possible opening, and what opposition there was at each point.”

  Conan Doyle’s first days in Portsmouth almost certainly resembled those of his fictional hero, and like Munro he also found himself skirting the edge of financial ruin. His acrimonious parting with Budd—and the subsequent withdrawal of the promised £1 per week—left him gasping “like a cod on a sand-bank.” He tried to adopt a cheery insouciance over his situation, but with less than £10 in his pocket, his outlook could not have been entirely lighthearted. Worse, he had championed Budd’s character in defiance of his mother. “I knew, of course,” wrote Munro, “that my mother would have sold everything down to her gold eye-glasses to help me, and that no thought of our recent disagreement would have weighed with her for an instant; but still a man has his feelings, you know, and I did not propose to act against her judgment and then run howling for help.” In fact, Conan Doyle did run howling for help, and somehow the Ma’am managed to provide the weekly pound denied by Budd from her own resources.

  Conan Doyle still faced a formidable task in setting up a practice with almost no capital. However poor he might be, he understood that he would have to create an impression of prosperity if he hoped to attract patients. His wanderings through Portsmouth and neighboring Southsea led him to an unoccupied, three-story brick house at 1 Bush Villas, Elm Grove, Southsea. The eight-room house had stood empty for some time, and Conan Doyle was able to rent it for £40 a year. Despite his recent falling out with his uncles, he was not above dangling their names before the leasing agent in lieu of an actual cash deposit.

  The house came unfurnished, and Conan Doyle went scavenging for chairs and a table—“possibly tenth-hand”—at a mark-down sale, coming away with just enough to fill his consulting room. Even these modest purchases placed a serious drain on his cash reserves, but he had resolved, he told a friend, “to make a spoon or spoil a horn.” He returned to Bush Villas with “three pounds’ worth of furniture for the consulting room, a bed, a tin of corned beef and two enormous brass plates with my name on it.”

  The young doctor lavished attention on his front room, the only area of the house his patients would see. Had any of them pushed back the curtain leading to the rest of the house, they would have seen that the consulting room was little more than a stage set. The other seven rooms were almost entirely bare, leaving Conan Doyle to camp out with the few remaining sticks of furniture he owned. His trunk served as both a food locker and a dining table, while he perched unsteadily on a small stool. To save the expense of gas for the stove, he learned to cook over the flame of a gas illumination jet, becoming expert at frying up thin slices of bacon so as to stretch his rations. At times his supplies dwindled to plain bread and water, and his burly frame shrank by more than ten pounds in the first months of practice.

  Conan Doyle hung out a red lamp—purchased on credit—to signal that a doctor was in residence, and spent his days waiting at the front window for patients to arrive. He did his shopping and housework at night, so that he would not be seen polishing his own nameplate or sweeping his own front stoop. He also took his exercise at night, for fear of missing a potential client during the day. In the early months he spent hours walking through the city, soaking up the historical reson
ances of the port where Nelson’s Victory lay at anchor. “There is a great glamour there to anyone with the historic sense,” he wrote of Southsea, “a sense which I drank in with my mother’s milk.”

  In truth, the nearby naval dockyard gave the town a seedier character than Conan Doyle may have wished to remember. On his first night in town he came upon a “burly brute” threatening a distraught young woman. Conan Doyle stepped in to intercede while a large crowd gathered, hoping for blood sport. He now found himself, as he recorded in The Stark Munro Letters, “within a few hours of my entrance into this town, with my top-hat down to my ears, my highly professional frock-coat, and my kid gloves, fighting some low bruiser on a pedestal in one of the most public places, in the heart of a yelling and hostile mob! I ask whether that was cruel luck or not?” Conan Doyle landed a single blow before the jostling of the crowd threw him clear of the fight. He picked up his fallen walking stick and made for home, counting himself lucky to have escaped arrest.

  This same “low bruiser” appeared at Conan Doyle’s door a few days later, wanting to know if he needed any scissors sharpened. He did not recognize Conan Doyle as his top-hatted assailant. Only a small group of other visitors crossed his threshold in the early days of his practice. One, a “horse-faced old lady” of regal bearing, could be found sailing china plates at the heads of passersby when a certain mood came over her. Only Conan Doyle, it seemed, had the power to calm her when the plate-hurling impulse was felt. Whenever new patients appeared, Conan Doyle attempted to apply the diagnostic methods of Joseph Bell. Once, when a well-dressed man entered the consulting room amid much coughing and throat clearing, the young doctor hazarded a guess of bronchial trouble. “No,” answered the visitor. “There’s a small sum due on the gas meter.”