Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters
Page 62
Yes, I am overworked but will take it easy now. I have done very well. I have promised to address spiritual meetings in Leeds, Nottingham and Brighton, but that will be in October.
When his Spiritualist lectures brought him back to old haunts in Southsea, Conan Doyle tried without much success to turn it into a brief holiday.
to Mary Doyle 6 CLARENCE PARADE, SOUTHSEA, AUGUST 30, 1918
I have been a dumb dog but indeed my work has followed me here and I have always been busy. But I have had a good change all the same and have bathed nearly every day, one day in a full gale when I was the only bather, so I feel virtuous. They ran me in for two lectures, Portsmouth & Bournemouth, Sept 6 & 12, but as I am under vow to do every town in Great Britain, and wear an invisible patch over my eye until that is done, it is always good to polish off the ones I chance to be in. I am doing a series for the Strand also (psychic studies) to keep the pot boiling, and that also fills my time. But I have never had a better change.
Well, dear one, we shall look forward to your coming after our return and before the cold weather comes. Jean goes with me to the Midlands from Oct 13 onwards, six lectures in seven days. So that is one fixed point. Another is Nov 12 when I am due in Aberdeen, Dundee &c. I do Wimbledon on Oct 5 but that need not affect you. On the whole our longest chance at home lies between Sept 25, we will say, and Oct 10 or 11—and between Oct 22 and Nov 9 or 10. That is roughly how it stands. So you can think it over & see what suits you best. Dear Jean is very well & we all five bathed yesterday.
I was charmed with Willie’s book and I only hope that an undiscerning public will realise that it is on a different plane to most war books. Some of the public always do judge right but they take such a time to get their views adopted by the rest. However this is not too precious & cant fail to hit the mark.
Hornung had also tried to do his bit for the war effort, serving as an airraid warden and accepting a post with the YMCA in France, where in March and April 1918 he witnessed the last great German offensive of the war, and then wrote Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front, published in 1919. (Previously, in 1915, he had written Trusty and Well Beloved, a privately-printed tribute to his dead son Oscar.)
to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA, SEPTEMBER 2, 1918
I am having a good rest—the best I can remember. We have a lovely view of the Solent, and as we own two floors we can keep the nursery on the lower one and so get a little more quiet. I needed a rest badly—the more so as I have a very active October in front of me, meetings at Brighton, Leeds & two at Nottingham besides my history &c.
Father Barry-Doyle has been shell-shocked so I am going up to town on Thursday to see him. He has been bad. He is really a fine fellow is Father Dick.
What a wonderful war year we have had! I think it will take two of my volumes. I have nearly enough to make one, and am only at April 12th. It really is a huge task.
I am reading the life of D D Home.* I was much interested to hear from you that you had known him—or known of him. He seems to have been a very remarkable character & in some ways a very noble one. I think he will live in history. The Roman conquerors & leaders little thought that the fame of Paul, Peter, John &c would be more permanent than their own, but so it proved. It will be so again for the things of the spirit alone are permanent.
to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA, SEPTEMBER 15, 1918
I do hope that you are good & eating nothing but the very lightest things. Lottie tells me that it makes all the difference to you. Now don’t be led into any indiscretion, I implore you.
We have had a restful time in my old haunts. On Saturday I return home. I have been asked to visit the Australian front and will do so if I can get dates after Sept 24th. Mr Hughes, the Premier, invited me. I should like to go out again and it would be useful. I may see Innes.
I have a hard winter before me, but so, I fear, as all the world. The children & Jean are well. I have done another child sketch for the Strand Xmas number. They seem popular. But my ‘New Revelation’ is the surprise, as it has sold 11000 copies & the demand is still large. It shows how this subject is in the air. I ‘preached’ in their local church on Sunday.
‘I had not expected to see any more actual operations of the war,’ he said in Memories and Adventures, ‘but early in September 1918 I had an intimation from the Australian Government that I might visit their section of the line. Little did I think that this would lead to my seeing the crowning battle of the war.’
In a chapter entitled ‘Breaking the Hindenburg Line’, Conan Doyle described the brutal fighting: ‘None of us will forget what we saw. There was a tangle of mutilated horses, their necks rising and sinking. Beside them a man with his hand blown off was staggering away, the blood gushing from his upturned sleeve. He was moving round and holding the arm raised and hanging, as a dog holds an injured foot. Beside the horses lay a shattered man, drenched crimson from head to foot, with two great glazed eyes looking upwards through a mask of blood. Two comrades were at hand to help, and we could only go upon our way with the ghastly picture stamped forever upon our memory.’
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, OCTOBER 1918
I had a remarkable letter from a stranger in Glasgow today. He was at a séance when a message came through which he was asked to convey to me. The name of the spirit, repeated several times, was ‘Oscar Honourin’. He claimed to be my nephew. He wanted to say that he would be with me & help me in my lectures on Spiritualism. This is very remarkable is it not? How could anyone know his name & relationship. It is only one of several wonderful results of that medium.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM
All well here. I did 15 hours in the rain yesterday at the great Redhill Volunteer review, leaving here at 7 & returning at 10 PM. It never stopped raining for a moment. 8000 men turned up & it was a fine sight when one could see it.
Father Barry-Doyle is with us. He is a fine fellow, much beloved in the army. I am taking him to Brighton on Wednesday when I lecture upon ‘Death and the Hereafter’.
Speaking of that I have had another long message from Glasgow about Oscar. They seem quite humble unliterary people thru’ whom they have come, who are very unlikely to have ever heard of Willie, so it seems impossible to explain them save that they are true. It is indeed strange. I have written for further information if possible. His message was simply a promise of help in my efforts in that cause.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, OCTOBER 1918
I fear Mrs Hamilton’s letter is lost. It is never safe to send me enclosures. My desk is so heaped that in self defence I have to destroy them.
Father Barry-Doyle left us today after a weeks visit. He had shell shock but is better. He is a really very fine fellow and has greatly won our hearts. He came to Brighton to my lecture. Several hundred people could not get in. It was very successful.
[P.S.] Both Mary & Kingsley have Flu.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, OCTOBER 1918
I am off to Leeds. I will call at St Thomas’ Hospital and see K on the way. I fear he has a very bad attack.
What you say about Oscar is very sensible. But there are points untouched. One is why they had the name wrong—Hornoine. Cunning, perhaps. The other is the statement that the name came through again while the medium was speaking, independently of him. A mistake perhaps. I have applied for more information and I never accept a supernatural if a natural explanation will suffice. But I don’t jump to conclusions on the other side either, as many of our critics do.
I have had most undoubted messages from beyond both from paid & from unpaid mediums, so of that I cannot doubt, and I speak from 32 years experience. Mediums are occasionally rogues, as you say, and I would test their results very severely—and do.
Late that month, as Conan Doyle prepared to lecture in Nottingham, he received a telegram from his daughter Mary in London, where she was working. It told him that Kingsley’s influenza had taken a turn for the worst; he was dying.
Conan Doyle faltered momentarily, but carried on with hi
s lecture, believing that he had a duty to other sufferers. Soon came the dreadful news that Kingsley had died, on October 28th, barely two weeks short of his twenty-sixth birthday. ‘Had I not been a Spiritualist,’ Conan Doyle wrote afterwards, ‘I could not have spoken that night. As it was, I was able to go straight on the platform and tell the meeting that I knew my son had survived the grave, and that there was no need to worry.’
to Mary Doyle GROSVENOR HOTEL, LONDON, OCTOBER 1918
I fear this will be a bad blow to you. He leaves a big gap in every life. I saw him today, looking his brave steadfast self, in the mortuary. He will be buried on Friday at Hindhead. No flowers. Poor Mary has been splendid.
He was a very perfect man—I have never met a more perfect one.
from James Ryan OCTOBER 29, 1918
My dear Arthur,
It was a great shock to me when Lyn read out the curt notice of poor Kingsley’s death at the railway station this morning, and it is hardly necessary for me to say how deeply we sympathize with you in your sorrow.
I loved Kingsley like a son and had a very keen appreciation of his many fine qualities. He had, I think two standout characteristics—a transparent candour and clean-mindedness and a very high sense of duty. Of all the young men I have known he impressed me more than any, quite apart from considerations based on our friendship from boyhood. In addition he was full of loveable and likeable qualities—a very preux chevalier. I could never picture him as capable of anything mean or underhand in deed, nor of any ignoble thought. I was full of hope that, safe from the danger zone, he would live for many years as the simple, cleansouled Englishman he was, and had looked to see him with boys and girls of his own about him. Fate, inexorable, has ruled otherwise.
Poor Toots will feel his loss terribly.* Please tell her how I feel for her. I havent the heart to write to her direct as I had at first meant to.
from Mary Conan Doyle 9 ST MARY’S HOUSE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1918
Dear, dear Daddy,
My thoughts go out to you in one stream of love dearest, for this sorrow is so identical for both of us.
You were fine yesterday—for your control kept me calm, and I could not have done it without you. And now it eases me a little to think of you at home—with those three great comforts—Jean, the children—and your work. Yet I know all the same how every familiar thing that your eyes rest on hurts. Its the same here. And it will be long, long ere that ceases to be.
I was so touched by Willie’s letter to you—one felt his own poor broken heart behind his sympathy for us. After all, he lost not only his son, but his only child, the whole purpose and meaning of his life has gone. You have still two splendid sons, who will assuredly be one day what Kingsley was—and so the banner of life is carried onwards.
To respond to the many letters of condolence he received, Conan Doyle printed a card that read: ‘Thank you very much for your kind sympathy. He was, and is, a most gentle, brave and noble spirit.’ On one of the cards, he penned a heartfelt postscript: ‘So closes a sad and yet beautiful chapter. Arthur Conan Doyle.’
On November 1st, Kingsley was buried next to Touie in St Luke’s Churchyard at Grayshott, in Hindhead. Ten days later, the war ended.
* * *
*After the war a local citizen named R. Guy Ash wrote an epic if amateurish poem about what became known as the Volunteer Training Corps—‘Conan’s Rifles, or the Crowborough Reserves’, whose opening stanza went: ‘I love to think of the days gone awee / When I was a smart little V.T.C. / To see us drill was a sight to see / Such raw recruits were we! / Sir Arthur started it all one night, / Twas August the Fourth, if my mem’ry’s right / That the Crowborough Rifles first saw the light / The first of the V.T.C.’
*The British Campaigns in Europe (originally titled ‘in France and Flanders’), published serially in The Strand Magazine and then in six volumes between 1916 and 1920. While his sources included diaries, letters, and interviews with many senior figures, problems with military censors during the war drove him nearly to despair at times.
*Lily Loder-Symonds, the close friend of Jean’s who had been her bridesmaid, ‘lived with us and was a beloved member of the family. Three of her brothers were killed and a fourth wounded,’ Conan Doyle wrote in Memories and Adventures. Lily herself died in January of 1916.
†Jean had taken in some of the many Belgian refugees who had reached England after the German invasion of their country.
*In November 1916, as one of a number of public figures polled by the magazine Quiver on ‘The Main Thing After the War’, Conan Doyle responded, ‘the liquor question’, recommending that Britons only drink beer and light wines in the future.
*Oscar Hornung was killed July 6th while a second lieutenant in the 3rd Essex Regiment. Alec Forbes, a lieutenant in the Seaforth Highlanders and the son of Jean’s sister, and Lottie’s husband, Leslie Oldham, were both killed the last week of July.
*Innes’s full name was John Francis Innes Hay Doyle.
*Field Marshal French commanded the first British Expeditionary Force, destroyed finally in the battles of Neuve Chapelle and Ypres. Soon he lost his enthusiasm for Conan Doyle’s history of the war. ‘No satisfaction from the W.O. I can make nothing of the decision of the censors over there,’ Conan Doyle told Greenhough Smith. ‘It seems to me that French is beginning to be a very difficult man to handle—vide Kitchener, Smith-Dorrien—Rawlinson—and now my own experience. I imagine he thinks I have not praised him enough.’
*This suggests that his example and perhaps his arguments had influenced Innes and other members of the family to leave the Roman Catholic Church.
*‘The stray shell or the lurking sniper exacted a continual toll,’ said the second volume of The British Campaigns. ‘General Maude of the 14th Brigade, Major Leslie Oldham, one of the heroes of Chitral, and other valuable officers being killed or wounded in this manner.’
*Earlier he had asked Greenhough Smith for the return of manuscripts The Strand was holding. Accompanying this letter was the bound manuscript of the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez’, inscribed as a gift to Greenhough Smith on February 8, 1916.
*Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond, or Life and Death, with Examples of the Evidence for Survival of Memory and Affection After Death (London: Methuen, 1916), about his son who died in the war in 1915.
*Major Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard, Conan Doyle’s friend known as ‘Hex’, was a biggame hunter reputed to be the best shot in England, and he revamped British sniper training and doctrine during the war.
*Perhaps unconsciously mimicking Martin Luther’s ‘Here I stand. I can no other.’
†Edward Shortt became Home Secretary for three years after the war.
*This argument was one he often made in letters to the press, telling readers of the Daily Mail, for instance, that ‘English divorce laws are the most conservative and, from a reformer’s point of view, reactionary in Europe.’
*Field Marshal Douglas Haig now commanded the British Army in France.
†Innes’s older son, John, fought in World War II, made the army a career, and retired as a brigadier like his father. His younger son, Francis, died in action as an RAF pilot in 1942.
*‘A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children; she wouldn’t be comforted, because they are no more.’ (Matthew 2:18)
*Harry Lauder, the Scottish entertainer, was devastated by the loss of his son in France, and wrote his famous song, ‘Keep Right On to the End of the Road’, as a tribute.
*‘Wooden Crosses,’ one of several war poems by E. W. Hornung, appeared in The Times on July 20, 1917. It ends: ‘The brightest gems of Valour in the Army’s diadem / Are the V.C. and the D.S.O., M.C. and D.C.M. / But those who live to wear them will tell you they are dross / Beside the Final Honour of a simple Wooden Cross.’
†Conan Doyle’s light sketches about a trio of children called Laddie, Dimples, and Baby—clearly based on his t
hree youngest—had been running in The Strand since April. ‘They amuse me to do,’ he told Greenhough Smith. ‘Real reports of child talk, which is a fresh and beautiful thing.’ (Not to all, perhaps, but the author of Sherlock Holmes could get away with more than most contributors to The Strand.) The stories were expanded into a volume called Three of Them.
*Daniel Douglas Home was a notorious, if celebrated, early Spiritualist born near Edinburgh in 1833. He spent much of his early life in the United States, however (often mistaken for an American), so it is unlikely that Mary Doyle knew him personally. Conan Doyle was fascinated by Home, and after the war he edited the memoir into a ‘cheap and handy’ form in hopes that it would reach a wider audience.
*‘Toots’: Mary’s family nickname.
13
His Last Crusade
(1918-1920)
I write and think a good deal about Spiritualism—to use that
rotten title so dirtied by rogues. I feel more and more that the
revelation in our day is supplementary to that of Christ, and
far the most important thing since that date.
—CONAN DOYLE TO HIS BROTHER INNES, JANUARY 1919
Conan Doyle was still stunned by Kingsley’s death when the Armistice with Germany was signed two weeks later. Memories and Adventures recalled the day:
I was in a staid London hotel at eleven o’clock in the morning, most prim of all hours of the day, when a lady, well-dressed and conventional, came through the turning doors, waltzed slowly round the hall with a flag in either hand, and departed without saying a word. It was the first sign that things were happening. I rushed out into the streets, and of course the news was everywhere at once. I walked down to Buckingham Palace and saw the crowds assembling there, singing and cheering. A slim, young girl had got elevated on to some high vehicle, and was leading and conducting the singing as if she was some angel in tweeds just dropped from a cloud. In the dense crowd I saw an open motor stop with four middle-aged men, one of them a hard-faced civilian, the others officers. I saw this civilian hack at the neck of a whisky bottle and drink it raw. I wish the crowd had lynched him. It was the moment for prayer, and this beast was a blot on the landscape. On the whole the people were very good and orderly. Later more exuberant elements got loose. They say that it was when the Australian wounded met the War Office flappers that the foundations of solid old London got loosened. But we have little to be ashamed of, and if ever folk rejoiced we surely had the right to do so. We did not see the new troubles ahead of us, but at least these old ones were behind. And we had gained an immense reassurance. Britain had not weakened. She was still the Britain of old.