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The Autowheel is great. I hope it will mean a fortune. We will see. I’ll send some prospectus soon.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, MARCH 1913
Am I not a wretched correspondent. But I am really one of the busiest men in England. However my book is now finished and I will be knocked out of the billiard championship on Saturday so things will be clearer. I have also been very full of the organisation for the Olympic games. This will soon be done. Then there are Kent Coal and the Autowheel both of which engage much of my thoughts. However it is all Life.
‘Isaw the enormous possibilities of Kent coal,’ he said of yet another disappointing investment, ‘but I did not sufficiently weigh the impossibilities.’ He lost a good deal of money over this ‘wildly financed and extravagantly handled’ attempt to make the county of Kent a coal-producing region on a par with Wales, but not his sense of humour: ‘I even descended 1,000 feet through the chalk to see with my own eyes that the coal was in situ. It seems to have had the appearance and every other quality of coal save that it was incombustible, and when a dinner was held by the shareholders, to be cooked by local coal, it was necessary to send out and buy something that would burn.’
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, MARCH 1913
I send you your beloved Cornhill, also your half yearly cheque, which if I remember right is due early in April. There is no money in the year that I pay out so gladly.
When you go back I want you, sitting in your chair, to dictate to Lizzie all you can remember about family legends &c. That one Willie told me last year about a Pack being nearly burned with an assize judge by the Whiteboys was all new to me and excellent. If Lizzie will prepare a full account of these matters I will send her five pounds in return.* So now it is up to you, as the Americans say.
We want you here much when the weather is warmer and all the flowers are out.
The autowheel company has gone through all right, and it seems to me that we have every chance of a great success. I do not see how we can miss it. I get 10/6 on every one sold—and they should sell by the thousand.
Today is the day when the Boy Scouts hunt for buried treasure on the Links. I have taken pains to puzzle them. At 2 they assemble and at 5 have high tea.
to Mary Doyle THE RIVIERA, MAY 1913
It is most beautiful here and real heaven on earth though hardly the folk one would expect to meet in heaven. We have had a delightful change and shall all be ever so much the better for it. My darling has been shaken by the journey—the heat of French trains oppresses her—but is now in splendid health. I hope we will get back still preserving it. I have neither won nor lost at the Tables as yet, but I mean to have a wee flutter on the last day, just for fun. The system is very fair with only a slight preponderance against the Bank.
Jean joins in fondest love. We have had some wonderful drives from here to Mentone, then by the high road to Nice, on to Grasse, back to Cannes and so home by Beaulieu & Monaco. We hired a motor for the day and so covered much ground.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM
Just a line of love to show that we are at home once more. I am very busy but it is all good work. It was a great pleasure to see Innes & Clara in their little homestead—very happy they seemed. The more we see of Clara the more we admire both her & Innes’ good sense. Our autowheel venture promises very well. Baby develops splendidly & the two boys are grand.
to Mary Doyle TUDOR LODGE, FRINTON, ESSEX, AUGUST 28, 1913
It is quite good to think of you with so many of your chicks around you. It is a wonderfully elastic cottage that.
I hope you are not still worrying about your Irish money. Whenever the Autowheel begins to pay—which must be soon—I will send you what you have lost over the deal.
The two boys are making such a racket outside that I can hardly write. They are wonderfully fit and the admiration of the whole beach. Adrian has struck up a flirtation with a little girl there, and pursues her and kisses her. Yesterday he told her she had better come & live with him.
Jean and I bathe every day. She says I am looking very well. Certainly she is. Indeed we have all had much benefit. We live a sort of flannels and high tea sort of life which is good & easy.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, OCTOBER 1913
Enclosed is your half year. I fear it is a little overdue. I have much to do—but that is the most essential thing of all. I told you, did I not, of Jean’s great social success at Hever & how Lady Sackville wrote to her three times in a week and then came to lunch here. It was quite funny.*
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, DECEMBER 1913
Enclosed for some little extra luxury at Xmas time. Poor dear, how you must miss Lizzie. I sit waiting for the wheels of Innes’ cab. It is overdue. 23 children are having tea downstairs in honour of Baby’s birthday. She is certainly a dear little girl.
‘In 1914, with little perception of how near we were to the greatest event of the world’s history, we accepted an invitation from the Canadian Government,’ Conan Doyle wrote in Memories and Adventures. ‘Our first point was New York, where we hoped to put in a week of sight-seeing, since my wife had never been to America.’
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, FEBRUARY OR MARCH 1914
I am glad to think of you at your own fireside once again for you are safer there in such weather. But your visit is a sweet memory to us.
I finished my American half of the book and am pausing before I begin the other.
I am practically sure of getting my money from [Arthur] Hardy all right, so that unpleasant episode is safely over.
Jean is reconciled to Canada now so you may take it that we shall be over there from May 20th when we start on the Olympic until about July 12th when we should be home. It is a nuisance in some ways. But it will [be] a break & rest.
My play ‘The Speckled Band’ which failed in New York, through Frohman’s mishandling, is a very great success now in America—so that is pleasing. Really a very great success.
His British theatrical agent, Arthur Hardy, had been holding back royalties from Speckled Band touring companies. On the other hand, the play, which had failed in New York in 1910 because Frohman had not opened it until too late in the year for it to succeed, was about to get a new lease of life there—though the letter above suggests more American touring than is known.* He was also writing The Valley of Fear, a fourth Sherlock Holmes novel drawing upon the Pinkerton detective agency’s campaign against the Irish-American labour agitators ‘the Molly Maguires’ in Pennsylvania’s coalfields.
The trip to Canada he saw as a mixed blessing. It would take them to places he wanted to see, including ‘Parkman Land’, the upper New York, New England, and Quebec regions, ‘which I had long wished to explore’, having absorbed their history since youth through American historian Francis Parkman’s seven-volume France and England in North America. But it would be a long, arduous trip.
Conan Doyle wrote about his trip to Canada in a four-part Strand series, Western Wanderings, that he turned again later into a chapter of Memories and Adventures. They arrived in New York May 27th, where he was hosted by the famous detective William J. Burns. He was constantly pursued by reporters, and run off his feet from one appearance or sight after another. ‘Our New York experience was incredible,’ he wrote to Jean’s best friend, Lily Loder-Symonds, who lived with them at Windlesham: ‘For some reason, which I don’t understand, I seem to have a vogue here.’
New York had changed a great deal since his last visit. ‘I am amazed, fairly paralyzed at the sight of New York,’ he said. ‘It seems as though some one 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—it is a mere pedestal. New York is a wonderful city, as America is a wonderful country, with a big future.’*
He was pleased to see Jean lionized too. ‘Jean has made a very great impression here,’ he told Loder-Symonds: ‘They just love her and she is right in the lime ligh
t where she should be.’ Jean enjoyed New York immensely, writing in her diary, ‘I am awfully impressed with New York—and I like the people very much.’ They stayed at the Plaza Hotel, and together took in the Woolworth Building (then New York’s highest), the Stock Exchange, a play starring Ethel Barrymore (‘one of the most charming and natural actresses I have seen,’ Jean recorded), the mayor, dinner at Sherry’s restaurant, a baseball game, Broadway after dark, and Coney Island, while Conan Doyle also visited The Tombs and Sing Sing prison up the Hudson River,† and spoke to various clubs and societies. ‘It was all most touching and unforgettable,’ Jean wrote towards the end. ‘Arthur is so tremendously popular—and everyone who knows him speaks with such admiration and affection for him.’
But by the time they arrived in Montreal, after passing appreciatively through Parkman Land, they were already tired. ‘We are really getting frayed at the edges,’ he told Loder-Symonds; and by the time they had crossed the Canadian prairie, their sense of exhaustion was nearly complete, judging from a letter written to Innes from Winnipeg.
Conan Doyle’s attention turned to military matters following a letter to The Times by his friend Admiral Percy Scott, who had revolutionized British naval gunnery, and now declared that ‘submarines and aeroplanes have entirely revolutionized naval warfare; no fleet can hide from the aeroplane eye, and the submarine can deliver a deadly attack even in broad daylight’. Scott called for no more battleships to be built, and more submarines instead; and for this he was attacked by senior figures in the Royal Navy, His Majesty’s Government, and the press.
Conan Doyle already saw the strategic situation as Percy Scott did, and before leaving for Canada he had written a story for July’s Strand Magazine entitled ‘Danger! A Story of England’s Peril’, about a handful of enemy submarines bringing Britain to its knees in a future war.*
to Innes Doyle WINNIPEG, JUNE 21-22, 1914
I have just been reading Percy Scott’s letter in the Times upon submarines. That man is the brain of the navy. It is remarkable, is it not, coming just after my story on the subject. Everyone will think that his letter inspired the story. It seems to me that this nation, postpone it as it will, has to face an entirely new situation and that unless it faces it boldly and logically it will be in a sad tangle. This situation entails several propositions of a revolutionary character.
1. That the fleet can be scrapped, bar submarines & fast cruisers.
2. That nothing more shall be built save these and airships.
3. That this will give us much more money for military & social objects.
4. That invasion is impossible.
5. That oversea conditions are impossible, save against savages or rebels.
6. That we must grow our own food or be at the mercy of any naval enemy.
These seem pretty extensive propositions but I see no getting away from them. The only thing I see on the other side is whether the violet rays of this Italian [Marconi] can get at Mr Submarine and blow him up. I see that there has been a successful demonstration of them. But if they really come in then we are back at bows & arrows once more.
This was the same old Conan Doyle, with his customary energy for a matter he cared about, but the rest of his letter showed how tired he actually was:
We are sagging back on the old trail, the trail that is anything but new. I don’t want to see Canada again. Their clubs & papers bore me, everything is raw, there is no history (save in the East) and Nature is not kind. There are good openings. I could imagine a pair of young English chaps newly married starting a horse farm out near the Rockies, and bringing up large families & living a free healthy patriarchal life that they could get nowhere else. But if you live in town or village why quit England. The Rockies is the place. The prairie would drive me mad.*
I am writing some impressions for print but don’t know what may come of them. We go from here either across or round the lakes and so to Algonquin Park, a national preserve, where we hope for two days fishing. I address Ottawa on July 2 and get aboard at Montreal on July 3. Jean has stood it all bravely, and it has been a rather exhausting experience. She was known in the New York papers as ‘my lady Sunshine’ which was pretty and true.
On June 28th, the week before Conan Doyle sailed for home, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated in Sarajevo by a young Serb named Gavrilo Princip.
Conan Doyle arrived home on July 19th, when he learned that a new review of the Oscar Slater case had recommended that no action be taken. ‘The wicked Oscar Slater decision will compel me to reopen that campaign,’ he wrote to Innes, saying ‘the case will live in history as the classical example of official absurdity.’ He wrote a lengthy denunciation of the decision for The Spectator of July 25th.
By then, though, time was running out for such concerns. Alliances long in the making—Britain, France, and Russia on one side, Germany,
Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire on the other—had begun to mobilize after Sarajevo in response to an ultimatum that Berlin issued to Serbia. ‘If war does break out and Clara gets caught in Denmark, apart from the chances of invasion there it may well be years before she gets back,’ Conan Doyle warned Innes: ‘The English caught in France in 1804 got back in 1814. You never know.’
On August 2nd, Germany declared war on Russia; on the 3rd, on France as well; and on the 4th of August—‘the most terrible August in the history of the world’, said the wartime Sherlock Holmes story ‘His Last Bow’—Germany invaded Belgium, whose neutrality Britain had guaranteed. Britain was at war now too.
* * *
*It ‘really had great possibilities, but we could not get the orders,’ he mourned in Memories and Adventures. ‘I was chairman of the company, and it cost me two years of hard work and anxiety, ending up by my paying the balance out of my own pocket, so that we might wind up in an honourable way. It was a dismal experience with many side adventures attached to it, which would make a sensational novel.’
*Not the only time Conan Doyle misremembered a character’s name.
*Referring apparently to Jean.
*On March 1, 1909, Conan Doyle gave the Edgar Allan Poe Centenary address at London’s Hotel Metropole, lavishing praise upon the American author as always. Poe was ‘one of the great landmarks and starting points in the literature of the past century,’ he told the audience, ‘for those tales have been so pregnant with suggestion, so stimulating to the minds of others, that it may be said of many of them that each is a root from which a whole literature has developed.’
†Referring to Ida and Nelson Foley.
*Jean was expecting their first child. Thirty-four was late for a first pregnancy, and Conan Doyle was concerned about her health and the baby’s, and also, in a subsequent letter, what today is known as postpartum depression.
*Meredith died just four months later.
*In December 1912, the amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson announced the discovery of fragments of a skull and jawbone of a prehistoric human ancestor, found in a gravel pit near Crowborough. Dubbed Piltdown Man, it appeared to be the ‘missing link’ in evolution from ape to man. It was exposed as a hoax in 1953, however, which Dawson and others, including Conan Doyle, on poor evidence, have been accused of perpetrating.
*Some might have called it a contraption rather than an invention, but the Autowheel worked, without ever becoming the sensation Conan Doyle hoped. In 1913, in an advertisement in the November 11th issue of Cycling, he claimed it would ‘give a boom to the cycle trade’ without interfering with motorcycle business, for ‘the young fellow who loves power and speed will still prefer the motorcyle and the Autowheel will be a kindergarten device’ for the rest of the family.
*Edward’s funeral brought more royalty and heads of state than had ever been assembled before; Conan Doyle covered it for the Daily Mail and New York Times of May 21st, saying ‘the senses were stunned by its majesty, its colour, its variety’. Edward was succeeded by his son, George V.
*The previously
mentioned ‘Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’, set in Cornwall.
*Jean was now expecting their second child.
†The opening, October 18, 1910, of the trial of the notorious Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen for murdering and dismembering his wife.
*Conan Doyle benefited from the extensive knowledge of Roman times and customs of his Stonyhurst friend James Ryan, who had returned to Edinburgh after managing the family’s tea plantation in Ceylon.
†Adrian Conan Doyle was born on November 19, 1910.
*It had not (unlike the London production, which would also be revived in 1911, and again in 1921): the New York run, opening November 21st, lasted only thirty-two performances.
†Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard, a famous cricket player and travel writer.
‡To a young Dane, Clara Schwensen, whom he married in Copenhagen on August 2, 1911.
*Clara was studying music there.
*While advance British criticism resulted in Germany sending mainly junior officers, Britain, ‘out of compliment to Prince Henry, had appointed the very best men available as observers’.
*Conan Doyle was now driving a sixteen-horsepower Dietrich-Lorraine. Its Alsace-Lorraine origin made it a German car in 1911, though his was probably manufactured at a plant in Birmingham.
*‘It was the apparent enmity of Ireland to the Empire which held me from Home Rule for many years,’ he remarked in April 1912, explaining: ‘I am an Imperialist because I believe the whole to be greater than the part, and I would always be willing to sacrifice any part if I thought it to the advantage of the whole.’ In an interview two years later, however, he qualified this: ‘I am for home rule in Ireland and home rule in Ulster.…I am convinced that the men of Ulster will never submit to an Irish home Parliament. I tell you those men are not bluffing. They are in earnest. The outcome will be so serious as to amount practically to a civil war.…’ (‘Conan Doyle Fears Drastic Uprising against Militants’, New York Times, May 31, 1914). The lead topic was his opposition to women’s suffrage, a subject that seems to have gone unmentioned in his correspondence with his mother. He put forward the view that giving women the vote would make politics a disruptive influence within marriages, but privately his reasons were more complicated. Conan Doyle strongly disapproved of the civil disobedience practised by some suffragettes, especially when it crossed over into occasional violence—as when sulphuric acid was poured through his front door’s letter-slot in retaliation for his opposition. In 1917’s ‘His Last Bow’, he alluded to suffragettes as ‘window-breaking Furies’, suggesting that German agents were behind some of their prewar activity.