Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

“Danger!” is perhaps the most remarkable piece of propaganda Conan Doyle ever wrote. With its loving descriptions of the submarines and their armaments, the story not only anticipates the modern military thriller but also reveals the degree to which Conan Doyle had immersed himself in technical literature. As for the plot, it soon ran aground on the shoals of political diatribe. “Ah, Johnny, Johnny Bull,” Captain Sirius intones as he sets off on his grim mission, “you are going to have your lesson, and I am to be your master. It is I who have been chosen to teach you that one cannot live under artificial conditions and yet act as if they were natural ones. More foresight, Johnny, and less party politics—that is my lesson to you.”

  Subtlety, it seems, was not Conan Doyle’s primary concern. The story, he would later say, was intended not to entertain but to “direct public attention to the great danger which threatened this country.”

  To accompany the story’s publication in The Strand, Conan Doyle and Greenhough Smith solicited the opinions of a dozen prominent naval experts. In his autobiography, Conan Doyle had sharp words for these commentators, many of whom were retired admirals: “I am afraid that the printed results, which I will not be so cruel as to quote, showed that it was as well they were retired, since they had no sense of the possibilities of the naval warfare of the future.”

  The assessment was unjust. One commentator found the story “eminently probable,” and another declared that “the only safe defense against an attack in the near future as depicted lies in the establishment of national granaries or Channel Tunnels.” Nearly all of the twelve commentators agreed with the assessment of Mr. Arnold White, a naval historian, who declared that “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has placed his finger on the neuralgic nerve-centre of the British Empire—i.e., the precarious arrival of our food supply.”

  “Four-fifths of our daily bread and a large portion of our other food is sea-borne,” added Mr. Douglas Owen, a lecturer on naval subjects. “By some it may be thought that for a popular writer to employ his talents in the creation of general alarm is to make ill use of them. If so, I think they will, on reflection, agree with those who hold, on the contrary, that a far-seeing citizen who places before his slumbering countrymen a graphic and awakening picture of a danger hanging over them is rendering them the highest service.”

  Others mentioned the nation’s “lasting obligation” to Conan Doyle, and the “great national service” he had performed, but it was not enough for him. Impatient for immediate action, Conan Doyle fixed his attention on the few notes of dissent. Admiral C. C. Penrose Fitzgerald, while admitting that the debate was “all to the good,” disagreed with Conan Doyle’s assessment of the danger. “I do not myself think,” Fitzgerald wrote, “that any civilized nation will torpedo unarmed and defenceless merchant ships.”

  “I do not think that territorial waters will be violated, or neutral vessels sunk,” said Admiral William Hannam Henderson, taking up the theme. “Such will be absolutely prohibited, and will only recoil on the heads of the perpetrators.”

  If opinions were divided on the threat from submarines, the idea of a national food stockpile drew universal support. “The moral of the story is, of course, that we should have vast stores of grain in this country,” wrote Admiral Sir William Kennedy, “in which opinion I cordially concur.” As to Conan Doyle’s insistence on a Channel tunnel, Kennedy, like many others, had grave reservations. “God made us an island,” he declared, “by all means let us remain so.”

  By this time, however, the idea of a tunnel had gained independent momentum. A House of Commons debate on the matter was scheduled for June 29, 1914. As fate would have it, Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo one day earlier, rendering the debate moot. The official declaration of war followed six days later.

  Conan Doyle’s warning about the perils of submarine warfare had been dismissed as a Jules Verne fantasy by one naval expert. Within a year, as German Unterseebooten, or U-boats, began to prey on merchant ships, the story no longer seemed so improbable. Worse yet, reports from Germany made it appear that Alfred von Tirpitz, Grand Admiral of the German navy, had been more attentive than the British government. On February 18, 1915, the London Times carried a report of Die Blockade Englands, culled from German newspapers under the byline of “a neutral observer.”

  “Every German’s heart welled with pride and delight,” the story ran, “as he read the official communiqué announcing ‘that on and after February 18 every British merchant ship entering British water would be destroyed.’”

  When asked how this destruction would be carried out, several “well-informed Germans” pointed to Conan Doyle’s story. “We had the idea ready-made for us in England,” one source was reported to have said. “Conan Doyle suggested the outlines of a plan which every German has hoped would be used. His story, ‘Danger,’ will tell you far better than I can what we intend to do.”

  “This was said to me with all seriousness,” the correspondent added, “and I heard Conan Doyle’s story referred to repeatedly in defence of the blockade.”

  Horrified, Conan Doyle now found himself in the most awkward position of his career. Whatever his private feelings, he clearly understood that this was no time for finger-pointing. By the same token, any further elaboration of the dangers of submarine attack would only add to the public’s distress and reinforce the image of himself as the architect of Germany’s master plan.

  Eager to respond quickly and forcefully, Conan Doyle made an immediate statement to the press. His remarks, which appeared under the headline “Doyle Doesn’t Fear Submarine Raids,” were designed to downplay the German report. “I need hardly say that it is very painful for me to think that anything I have written should be turned against my own country,” he said. “The object of the story was to warn the public of a possible danger which I saw overhanging this country and to show it how to avoid that danger.

  “In the story I place the incidents of the submarine blockade some years hence,” he continued. “It was a story of the future, and my reason was that after studying the subject, I concluded that the submarine at present was not capable of the results which I depicted. But it is still my opinion that if this war had been delayed for five years, and if the submarine during that time had gone on improving as rapidly as it had done in the past, England would have been placed in a most serious position, exactly as outlined in the story. I am quite sure, in the present circumstances, that although we may possibly lose more ships, the German blockade can have no serious effect on the war.”

  Germany’s efficient fleet of diesel-powered submarines did, of course, have a serious effect on the war, and one can only imagine Conan Doyle’s thoughts at the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915. What Conan Doyle had not anticipated, however, was the development of depth charges, underwater listening devices, and submarine attack vessels to counter the German threat. Looking back on “Danger!” at the close of the war, Conan Doyle was glad to admit that he had underestimated the energy and ingenuity of Britain’s response. “The great silent battle which has been fought beneath the waves has ended in the repulse of an armada far more dangerous than that of Spain,” he wrote.

  Given the scope and complexity of Germany’s naval agenda, it seems extremely odd that her commanders should have found time to tip their hats to Conan Doyle. The Imperial Naval Office had managed its strategy quite competently up to that point, and it is difficult to imagine von Tirpitz and his staff sending their U-boat commanders out to sea with copies of The Strand in their dispatch kits. As an exercise in demoralizing propaganda, however, the episode made perfect sense. If Conan Doyle, one of Britain’s most beloved public figures, could be seen to have aided the enemy, it would seem as if Sherlock Holmes himself had betrayed his country.

  However unlikely, the notion of Conan Doyle as German strategist persisted for the duration of the war. In May 1917, according to the New York Times, Conan Doyle received an unwelcome tribute in the Reichstag, Germany’s national legi
slative committee. “The only prophet of the present economic war,” declared Admiral Eduard von Capelle, the German Secretary of the Navy, “was the novelist Conan Doyle.”

  Conan Doyle’s own propaganda initiative was just beginning.

  22

  An Audible Voice

  It was nine o’clock at night upon the second of August—the most terrible August in the history of the world.

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “HIS LAST BOW”

  “I want your advice,” Conan Doyle wrote to his brother Innes in the early days of the war. “Do you think it would be a good thing for me to apply for a Captaincy (very senior) in the new army?”

  Innes Doyle, who had trained for a career in the army at Woolwich Academy, may well have wondered if his older brother was serious. At fifty-five, and with no official military background, Conan Doyle was not officer material. Still, he wanted desperately to do his bit, just as he had at the start of the Boer conflict. If he were to join up at his age, he explained to Innes, it might shame others into doing the same.

  “I think I may say that my name is well known to the younger men of this country,” he declared in a letter to the War Office, “and that if I were to take a commission at my age it would set an example which might be of help.

  “I can drill a company,” he continued, referring to a group of local volunteers. “I do so every evening. I have seen something of campaigning, having served as a surgeon in South Africa. I am fifty-five but I am very strong and hardy, and can make my voice audible at great distances, which is useful at drill.”

  The rejection of his application, despite the audibility of his voice, came as a blow. Conan Doyle watched with mounting frustration as all of the young men of the family went off to join up. Innes would rise to the rank of brigadier general. Kingsley, Conan Doyle’s son by Louisa, interrupted a course of medical training to join the First Hampshire Regiment. They were joined by two of Conan Doyle’s brothers-in-law, Malcolm Leckie and Leslie Oldham, and two of his nephews, Oscar Hornung and Alec Forbes. All of them had gone out to face the enemy in a way that Conan Doyle could not.

  Denied active service, Conan Doyle would find other ways to make his voice heard. A plumber from the village had sent a polite note: “There is a feeling in Crowborough,” it read, “that something should be done.” Conan Doyle at once set about organizing a group of 120 civilian volunteers. “Many of the men are fine shots and all are exceedingly anxious to be serviceable,” he reported to the London Times. “We have our own record of organisation, and I should be happy to send copies of our method to anyone who may desire to form other centres.” If every town mobilized its own civil defense unit, Conan Doyle reasoned, Britain’s Territorial Army would be freed for active service. The idea drew hundreds of responses, all dutifully answered by Conan Doyle and his secretary, but within weeks the War Office ordered the units to disband in favor of a centrally administered government scheme. In recognition of Conan Doyle’s initiative, the first authorization to form a volunteer battalion went to his unit, now known as the Crowborough Company of the Sixth Royal Sussex Volunteer Regiment.

  After refusing command of the new battalion, Crowborough’s most famous resident entered service as Private Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, eager to demonstrate that all men were equal in the defense of their country. He referred to himself as “Ole Bill,” after a somewhat woebegone cartoon figure, but took pride in keeping up with the younger men. He cheerfully marched fourteen miles a day in full gear, singing all the way. He patrolled the town, practiced his shooting, worked as a signaler, and pulled shifts in a machine-gun nest. On one occasion, he stood in the rain for eight hours guarding a labor detail of German prisoners as they loaded carts with manure.

  As the privations of war mounted, the family voluntarily reduced its food supply. Conan Doyle, who had summed up his Dickensian childhood as “bracing,” brought the same ironclad optimism to these new conditions. “There was a pleasing uncertainty about all meals,” he wrote. “There was always a sense of adventure and a wonder whether you would get something. It all made for appetite.”

  While her husband marched and drilled, Jean rented a house in Crowborough and established a reception center for Belgian refugees. Mary, Conan Doyle’s daughter by Louisa, spent her days making artillery shells in a factory assembly line and her evenings cooking in an army canteen. At such a time, Conan Doyle felt, one needed to keep busy. Few of Crowborough’s residents would have argued the point: on a calm day, the guns of Flanders could be heard 120 miles distant.

  When three British battle cruisers went down in a single day, at a cost of some 1,400 lives, Conan Doyle took it upon himself to suggest a number of lifesaving ideas to the War Office. “A young German lieutenant with twenty men had caused us more loss than we suffered at Trafalgar,” he wrote. “We can spare the ships. We can’t spare the men.”

  As with his submarine warnings and his Channel tunnel agitations, Conan Doyle made canny use of his own celebrity. Each suggestion to the War Office corresponded with a letter to the press, in the hope that a public “ventilation” would spur the government to speedier action. A letter to the Daily Mail urged the development of an “inflatable rubber belt” to give sailors a chance of survival if their ships went down. For his trouble, Conan Doyle received a public “rap over the knuckles” from a retired commander named Jane, who resented the intrusion of an apparently ignorant landlubber. Within days, however, the government placed an order for a quarter of a million inflatable rubber collars, a forerunner of today’s life-jacket. It is impossible to say whether Conan Doyle’s proposal had any decisive influence, but newspaper reporters were quick to hand him the credit. “The Navy has to thank Sir Conan Doyle for the new life-saving apparatus,” wrote the Hampshire Telegraph, mangling his title. “There is little doubt that this swimming collar will result in the saving of many lives, and the Admiralty are to be congratulated upon the promptitude with which they have adopted the suggestion of Sir Conan Doyle.”

  Delighted by the development, Conan Doyle could not resist thumbing his nose at Commander Jane. “Your naval correspondent,” he wrote in the Evening Standard and St. James’s Gazette, “took me to task in your columns recently for so unreasonable a demand as that our sailors should be provided with some means of escape from certain death when their ships founder. I had suggested an inflatable rubber belt. He will be interested to hear that an inflatable rubber collar has actually been adopted, and is, as I understand, being served out to every sailor.”

  He readily acknowledged, however, that the collars would be of little use in rough weather or frigid seas, and soon put forward a plan for inflatable lifeboats. “In the merchant service there must be boat provision for every passenger,” he told the Daily Chronicle. “Is it not simple common sense, therefore, that in a warship, which is so much more likely to sink, and where the men are so invaluable to the country, the same law should hold good?” The navy objected on the grounds that battleships, unlike civilian craft, had more rigid standards of speed and function, and could not afford to be hampered by excess material. Nevertheless, a flotation platform soon came into use, which could be detached from a sinking ship to give the sailors a better chance of survival.

  Conan Doyle also threw his weight behind a plan to issue body armor to frontline soldiers. He often receives credit for having originated this idea, which is perhaps natural enough given his well-documented interest in medieval knights. In truth, the notion was already in play at the start of the war, though none of its proponents were as outspoken or relentless as Conan Doyle. “It has always seemed to me extraordinary,” he wrote in the Times, “that the innumerable cases where a Bible, a cigarette case, a watch, or some other chance article has saved a man’s life have not set us scheming so as to do systematically what has so often been the result of a happy chance.”

  Given the fact that the British had not even worn helmets for nearly two hundred years, body armor proved to be a tough sell. Army officials objected
on the grounds of excess weight and lack of mobility, despite Conan Doyle’s insistence that only vital body centers needed protection. Conan Doyle went so far as to have a Crowborough blacksmith make up some examples of armor plating, which he duly tested in his own garden. He came away more convinced than ever, though no one had been wearing the metal shields when he fired upon them. David Lloyd George, who would become prime minister in 1916, assured him that the question was receiving “very special attention,” but no action was ever taken. “Sir Arthur,” he was told at the Ministry of Munitions, “there is no use your arguing here, for there is no one in the building who does not know you are right.”

  Some government officials came to regard Conan Doyle’s endless flow of suggestions as meddlesome, but he had many supporters in high places. Not least of these was Winston Churchill, who wrote in October 1916 to thank Conan Doyle for his thoughts on attaching armor plating to military vehicles. “There are plenty of good ideas,” Churchill wrote, “if only they can be backed with power and brought into relief.”

  Captain Willie Loder Symonds, the brother of Jean’s bridesmaid Lily, fell into enemy hands in the first months of the war. Conan Doyle learned that he was being held at a prison camp in Magdeburg and resolved to thwart the German censors with a “secret correspondence.” He had heard that British prisoners had to rely solely on German newspapers for information about the war. Poring over the pages of one of his own books, Conan Doyle used a needle to punch holes beneath letters so as to spell out the latest British news. He enclosed a letter apologizing for the book’s slow beginning, but advised the captain that things picked up in chapter three—which was where the needle pricks began. A return message assured him that his meaning had been understood, and Conan Doyle continued the laborious cipher with several more books. After months of this effort, he learned that his subterfuge had been unnecessary. The Red Cross had been bringing British newspapers into German prison camps since the beginning of the war.