Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  Conan Doyle’s poetic gifts were modest beside Kipling’s, but no one—with the possible exception of Shaw—could fault the sentiment behind his verses, which concluded with a heartfelt tribute:

  There’s a glowing hell beneath us where the shattered boilers roar,

  The ship is listing and awash, the boats will hold no more!

  There’s nothing more that you can do, and nothing you can mend,

  Only keep the ragtime playing to the end.

  Don’t forget the time, boys! Eyes upon the score!

  Never heed the wavelets sobbing down the floor!

  Play it as you played it when with eager feet

  A hundred pairs of dancers were stamping to the beat.

  Stamping to the ragtime down the lamp-lit deck,

  With shine of glossy linen and with gleam of snowy neck,

  They’ve other thoughts to think tonight, and other things to do,

  But the tinkle of the ragtime may help to see them through.

  Shut off, shut off the ragtime! The lights are falling low!

  The deck is buckling under us! She’s sinking by the bow!

  One hymn of hope from dying hands on dying ears to fall—

  Gently the music fades away—and so, God rest us all!

  21

  England on Her Knees

  “The Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if you only know how to use it.”

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES IN “THE SIX NAPOLEONS”

  In May of 1914, Conan Doyle set sail for America aboard the White Star liner Olympic, sister ship of the Titanic. Two years had elapsed since his quarrel with George Bernard Shaw, and if he felt any qualms about the Olympic’s captain or his crew, he managed to conceal them as he waved cheerfully from the departure deck.

  Twenty years had passed since Conan Doyle’s first visit to New York, and his reappearance sparked some fanciful speculation in the press. “Sherlock Holmes as a citizen of New York in the near future is one of the delightful possibilities suggested by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” reported the New York Times. “It seems that Sir Arthur finds New York a not unworthy field for the exercise of the great detective’s abilities—and we may be reasonably certain that if the American metropolis is large enough and wicked enough for Holmes, it will surely furnish an agreeable residence for the indefatigable Dr. Watson.”

  Actually, the great detective had nothing to do with the visit. The Canadian government had invited Conan Doyle on a goodwill tour of its national parks. Conan Doyle may have hesitated to leave Britain at such a politically volatile time, but he could not resist the chance to see the North American wilderness he had read about as a boy. Lady Conan Doyle accompanied him on the trip, leaving their children—including their daughter Jean, born two years earlier—in the care of a nanny.

  The Conan Doyles planned to spend six days at New York’s Plaza Hotel before making their way to Canada by train. Upon landing in New York, Conan Doyle found that much had changed since his 1894 visit. “I am amazed, fairly paralyzed at the sight of New York,” he told the New York Times. “It seems as though someone had gone over the city with a watering pot and these stupendous buildings had grown up overnight as a result. When I was here twenty years ago, the World Building was your skyscraper. Today it is lost—a mere pedestal. New York is a wonderful city, as America is a wonderful country, with a big future.”

  William J. Burns, founder of the William J. Burns National Detective Agency, was there to greet the Conan Doyles at the dock, and played host for much of the visit. Known for his investigations into land fraud and political corruption, Burns enjoyed a reputation as “the Sherlock Holmes of America.” Conan Doyle had received him at Windlesham the previous year and spent a pleasant evening pumping him for details of his days as a Pinkerton detective. Burns had, Conan Doyle wrote, “the easy and polished manners of a diplomat over something else that can be polished—granite.”

  The detective laid on a full itinerary. Conan Doyle lunched with Mayor Ardolph Kline, dined with publisher George H. Doran, toured the Sing Sing prison facilities, and took in a baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Athletics. He enjoyed the ball game, but Conan Doyle—who, at age fifty-five, still played in an amateur cricket league—expressed some reservations about professional sports. “[I]t means that the largest purse has the best team,” he wrote, “and there is no necessary relation between the player and the place he plays for.”

  Conan Doyle drew “wild huzzahs” at the Pilgrim Club, an organization dedicated to Anglo-American friendship, which held a luncheon in his honor. “I stand here as a pilgrim,” he told the gathering. “In the old days, the kit of a pilgrim consisted mainly of a staff and an empty wallet. In my case, I have a good substitute for a staff in the shape of a good, stout English umbrella. As to my wallet, Mr. Lloyd George has taken care to see that it is empty. ‘England expects every man to do his duty’ was a slogan of other times. In this day, ‘England expects every man to pay his duty.’”

  Two days later, a visit to Coney Island found the author mixing easily with a “motley crowd of ballyhoos, frankfurter men and noisy sightseers,” according to the New York Times. “Conan Doyle Like Big Boy at Coney,” declared the newspaper’s headline; “Laughs at Everything,” observed the subhead. Cheering crowds greeted his arrival, and a brass band struck up “God Save the King” as he entered the Steeplechase Pavilion. An enthusiastic Conan Doyle rode the “seemingly perilous” Whip Ride, had his fortune told, and visited the “ridiculous Crazy Village” fun house, managing to keep his equilibrium amid the tilting walls and sliding floors. He emerged “somewhat disheveled, but unrestrainedly merry.”

  “Coney Island doesn’t give one time to think,” he told reporters, “but I certainly had a good time.”

  On reflection, he might have wished for less fun and more time to think, as his frequent press interviews would soon cause him considerable embarrassment. On his earlier visit, Conan Doyle managed to discharge his obligations to the press with one grueling press conference, facing his interviewers “like a rat among terriers.” Now, with reporters dogging him at every stop, he offered an unguarded comment about the suffrage movement, a cause for which he had no sympathy. “People are getting tired of all this window smashing, house burning and picture mutilating,” he told an attentive press. If the militant suffragettes continued in this vein, he warned, they would surely be lynched by an angry public.

  On the strength of such comments, Conan Doyle is generally thought to have been something of a dinosaur on the issue of women’s rights. Though he never wavered in his opposition to the suffrage movement, his true sentiments were far more complex—and not nearly so belligerent—as his off-the-cuff remarks suggested. Despite his work on behalf of divorce law reform, Conan Doyle’s stand on women’s rights had changed little since his days as a parliamentary candidate. A woman could expect the right to vote, he believed, only if she paid her own taxes. In fairness, this was not quite so narrow-minded as it appeared. He had seen by the example of his own mother that a woman could hold her own in a man’s world, and he saw no reason why women should not enter professional life.

  In the main, however, he wished to preserve the accepted social order of the previous century. It must be remembered that his own childhood had been anything but conventional. He had overcome a great deal of hardship to embrace the values of that time, and clung to them all the more tenaciously because of it. Sherlock Holmes once referred affectionately to Dr. Watson as “the one fixed point in a changing age.” On this one point, the same must be said of Conan Doyle. For him, the suffragettes represented social chaos, not equality for women.

  Conan Doyle’s outspokenness on the subject excited much interest. Back home in England he had sulphuric acid poured through his letterbox as a response to his opinions. Now, as he read an exaggerated version of his comments in the New York press, he felt obliged to offer an immediate retraction. “I am in a wretched humor,” he told a press co
nference, “all of it due to American journalism.” He went on to describe his horror at opening the newspapers to find himself “headlined as desiring to lynch” the female suffragettes. “I must correct that or I shall not dare to return to England,” he told the reporters. “I have many very good friends among the militants and among them who favor the militant movement. Now, what I did say to your reporters was that I was afraid the time was close at hand when some very drastic action would be taken. That I very much feared that the people would take the law into their own hands, and that the result would be nothing short of lynching. That would be a terrible outcome—I can conceive of nothing more horrible, except that I myself should subscribe to such an action!”

  In still another interview, this one chronicling a visit to Sing Sing prison, Conan Doyle amplified his sentiments toward the press. After sitting in the facility’s cane-bottomed electric chair for a moment, Conan Doyle allowed himself to be locked away in a seven-by four-foot cell to experience the sensation of prison confinement. “It was the most restful time I have had since I arrived in New York,” he declared, “for it was the only chance I had to get away from the reporters.”

  After the rigors of New York, Canada provided a welcome relief. The president of the Grand Trunk Railroad placed his “gloriously comfortable” private railroad car at the disposal of the Conan Doyles, complete with a parlor, dining room, and modern plumbing.

  The tour had been designed as an exercise in goodwill between Canada and Britain, and Conan Doyle threw himself into it with his usual enthusiasm. He gave speeches, toured government facilities, and admired the natural beauty of the Jasper and Algonquin national parks. He posed for photographs with a baseball bat in hand, nearly decapitating the photographer when he knocked out a solid line drive. He marveled at the clear, unspoiled lakes and tried his hand at fishing with no particular success, though Jean managed to hook an eight-pound trout.

  “Canada is like an expanding flower,” he wrote, “wherever you look you see some fresh petal unrolling.” Unlike New York, the vast open spaces of Canada seemed to him to be aglow with the “iridescence of romance.” Grain elevators struck him as “not unlike the columns of Luxor,” and his first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains brought the frontier tales of Mayne Reid, a boyhood favorite, flooding back. “What deeds have I not done among Redskins and trappers and grizzlies within their wilds!” he wrote. “And here they were at last glimmering bright in the rising morning sun. At least, I have seen my dream mountains. Most boys never do.”

  As he sailed for home in June, Conan Doyle would later recall, he had “little perception of how near we were to the greatest event of the world’s history.” In fact, Conan Doyle saw the coming of war with greater clarity than most. Three years earlier he had participated in a goodwill automobile rally called the Prince Henry Tour, an amateur competition that pitted fifty German drivers against some forty British drivers from the Royal Automobile Club. Organized by the German prince to coincide with the coronation of George V, the three-week event was designed to strengthen Anglo-German relations, though ultimately it served only to expose the growing rift between the two countries.

  Conan Doyle had looked forward to the event. He was an eager motorist, and his car-flipping, turnip-battering episodes were now a thing of the past. With Jean as navigator, he took his own 16-horse-power Dietrich-Lorraine landaulet to Hamburg for the start of the rally. The 2,500-mile course wound through Cologne to Bremerhaven, then crossed by steamer to Southampton, moving as far north as Edinburgh before the finish in London. The ninety drivers covered as much as 150 miles each day as they proceeded from checkpoint to checkpoint. Conan Doyle did his best to keep pace, even when it required climbing out to push his car up a steep hill.

  Each car carried a military observer from the opposing country. The stiff and overly formal Count Carmer, Rittmeister of the Breslau Cuirassiers, rode along with the Conan Doyles, growing slightly more genial as the rally wore on. Other competitors fared less well. Conan Doyle was shocked by the warlike attitudes of the other German observers and overheard many remarks about the inevitability of war. The British drivers, for their part, had to be restrained from settling disputes with their fists. “The only thing I want to do with these people is to fight them,” declared one British colonel. By the time Britain claimed victory in London, carrying away an ivory trophy inscribed with the word “Peace,” Conan Doyle had come to regard the episode as a “clumsy bit of stage management,” designed to distract attention from German naval activity in Morocco. “I came away with sinister forebodings,” he recalled.

  Publicly, he continued to espouse friendship with Germany. In a letter to the Times of London, he acknowledged the warm hospitality of his hosts in Germany. An endless line of friendly Germans had cheered the British motorists as they drove past, he wrote, sending a “true message of good will” to Britain. “The only contretemps,” he added, “arose from ignorance of the fact that even a small bunch of flowers received in the face when you are travelling at high speed may become a dangerous missile.”

  It was typical of Conan Doyle to express his thanks in a public forum, despite his private misgivings. Even in later years, after the war had exacted a devastating personal toll, he could not look back on the Prince Henry Tour without recalling the kindness of a German officer who left flowers for Jean each morning.

  Even so, as he became convinced that war was coming, Conan Doyle’s attention turned toward military readiness. As early as 1906, he had written to the Times about organizing the motorists of Britain into a rapid response unit, ready at the first word of a coastal invasion to convey local riflemen to “the danger point.” In 1910, he sent a letter to the Daily Express to weigh the merits of replacing mounted cavalry with bicycle regiments. After the Prince Henry Tour he began to study German war literature, notably the works of General von Bernhardi, whose hawkish Germany and the Next War filled him with dread. Conan Doyle responded with a lengthy article called “England and the Next War,” published in the Fortnightly Review in 1913, in which he described powerful new forms of warfare that had never been tested in the hands of “competent” men. “These new factors are the submarine and the airship,” Conan Doyle wrote, expressing a view that had not been widely discussed at the time. “The latter, save as a means of acquiring information, does not seem to be formidable—or not sufficiently formidable to alter the whole conditions of the campaign. But it is different with the submarines. No blockade, so far as I can see, can hold these vessels in harbour, and no skill or bravery can counteract their attack when once they are within striking distance.”

  Merchant vessels as well as military craft would be vulnerable to submarine attack, he continued, raising the fearsome prospect of Britain reduced to starvation if her food supplies were cut off. The only solution, as Conan Doyle saw it, lay in the building of a Channel Tunnel. He had studied the idea for some time and estimated that it would take three years to build and cost the British taxpayer five million pounds. In peacetime, the tunnel would encourage continental travel and bring thousands of tourists to Britain who might be deterred by sea travel. In time of war, the tunnel would insure the free movement of troops and supplies to the European mainland, and remove the threat of a total blockade.

  Conan Doyle never claimed to have originated the idea of a Channel Tunnel, but he happily used his influence to bring it to the attention of the public. The idea provoked a lively debate in the newspaper letter columns, with more than one correspondent writing to ask what would happen if an enemy should seize the tunnel. Conan Doyle responded that an invading force would have to win and hold both ends of the tunnel. “Such a contingency is, I hold, beyond all bounds of common sense,” he declared. Suppose, other correspondents wondered, Britain should find herself at war with France? Again, Conan Doyle found the prospect unlikely, but allowed that the tunnel could easily be sealed in such an event. As the debate stretched on, he came to resent each day that passed without any concrete action on
the matter. “I wonder what our descendants will think of the whole business,” he wrote, “probably what we think of the men who opposed the Suez Canal.”

  Frustrated to find his proposals “subordinated to party politics,” Conan Doyle took his case to the general public. Six years earlier, in “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” a “certain gracious lady” bestowed an emerald tie-pin on Sherlock Holmes for his role in recovering a stolen submarine blueprint. Now, with Britain on the brink of war, Conan Doyle renewed the theme with a cautionary tale called “Danger! Being the Log of Captain John Sirius.” Written in February 1914, “Danger!” was published in The Strand shortly after his return from Canada. Set in the near future, “Danger!” finds Britain embroiled in a frontier dispute with a relatively weak European ally, artfully disguised as “Norland.” As Norland’s king contemplates surrender, Captain Sirius, who commands Norland’s modest fleet of eight submarines, proposes a plan to paralyze British merchant shipping. “Sire,” the captain tells his despairing king, “I will stake my life that if you will follow my advice you will, within a month or six weeks at the most, bring proud England to her knees.”

  The captain’s plan, not surprisingly, is to choke off Britain’s supply lines. Though Britain soon annihilates Norland’s surface fleet, the eight submarines under Sirius’s command slip past her torpedo boats and launch a series of devastating attacks on supply vessels headed for England. Soon Britain is gripped in a nationwide famine, and Norland’s submarines have penetrated as far as the mouth of the Thames. “It is an amazing thing that the English, who have the reputation of being a practical nation, never saw the danger to which they were exposed,” Captain Sirius observes. “Their ruin could not have been more complete or more rapid if they had not possessed an ironclad or a regiment.”