Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters

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  That day Conan Doyle also wrote to his father-in-law, James Blyth Leckie, with some additional details.

  to James Leckie S.S. NALDERA, SEPTEMBER 17, 1920

  Well, here we are with the coast of Australia in front of us. Bar the great heat in the Mediterranean & Red Sea all has been happy & uneventful. Now my work lies ahead and I am glad to get to close grips with it. I shall at once go to the Shipping Offices & secure our retreat so as to be with you in spring. We already look forward to it. Jean & the children are on the whole the better for the voyage but we are all fed up with the long confinement. I have begun a book ‘Wanderings of a Spiritualist’ which will at least be very unconventional. It has amused me to write some of it & I hope to bring it back completed.* I’ll write again soon & let you know how we find the conditions of the new country. You can think that we are eager. We shall have a run on shore at Perth & the press await me there. Then three days in the dreaded Bight and we shall be on the 21st at Adelaide where I open on the 25th.

  Conan Doyle’s letters to his mother once he reached Australia have not survived, but some letters to his father-in-law covering the events have.

  to James Leckie GRAND CENTRAL HOTEL, ADELAIDE, S.A., SEPTEMBER 21, 1920

  Here we are—just arrived. My first act is to write to you. Jean is much the better for her long rest and the children are all well tho’ Denis is still the more fragile. I looked out just now & saw the three rascals, the boys without hats, coming down the main street as if they owned the town, with parcels under their arms, presents for their mother. They are a gang and no mistake! I have met Smythe the Agent who seems a good fellow. All promises well. I have given four interviews to papers today & that is the

  cheapest kind of advertising & the best. We lunch with the governor Sir A Weigall on Friday. He married Blundell Maple’s daughter & ducats, I understand.*

  to James Leckie GRAND CENTRAL HOTEL, ADELAIDE, S.A., SEPTEMBER 26, 1920

  We have our places in the Naldera leaving on Feb 3 & should be with you by the end of March, allowing for a break in Paris.

  My first lecture was last night & was a huge success. It was on the human & scientific side of the subject. Tomorrow I lecture on the religious side of it. Then next day I show my photos. The plan is to leave on Thursday but it looks as if I should have to do a matinee that day. The audience was splendid. A prominent Materialist, a barrister, said ‘I am profoundly impressed.’ There is no doubt that thought in Adelaide will never be the same again. On the Material side we took £214 last night which speaks for itself. With all deductions it should leave about £150 for one lecture. So I think if my health holds we will clear all our expences easily. I think the pictures will really create a furor.

  On Thursday evening we leave for Melbourne where for some days we shall stay at Menzies Hotel in the city & then move for a month or so to St Kilda.

  The children flourish. Baby has taken to writing cheques on bits of paper & then coming to us for the money.

  to James Leckie HOTEL PACIFIC, MANLY, N.S.W., DECEMBER 2, 1920

  I leave today for New Zealand, four days journey, back on Dec 27 when Jean will meet me here. The others stay here for 14 days & then go to the Hills.

  We are all very well & much spoiled by our friends, though our enemies who are more noisy than numerous try to reduce the size of our heads. Really when at our last meeting 3000 people rose & waved 3000 handkerchiefs it was a very moving picture. Then they sang ‘God be with you till we meet again’ and it was all one could do to restrain tears.

  I expect a beastly voyage, small ship, an ugly bit of sea, overcrowded &c. However all I want is to get into a bunk & talk to nobody. I care nothing for the weather if I can have rest.

  I sit among my packing. I do 8 lectures in 15 days in NZ, Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington, Dunedin. Good Lord!

  Everyone is very well & happy. They love the bathing here, and so did I. It is romping with nature. The waves knock you down & roll you over. Good old playmates!

  to James Leckie HOTEL WARNERS, CHRISTCHURCH, N.Z., DECEMBER 16, 1920

  Here I am charging like a mad bull down the length of New Zealand, only pausing to utter a prolonged bellow or to toss an occasional parson. They think (and say) that the devil has got loose and there will be a general Jubilee when I disappear either over the sea or into the sea, the latter for choice. I have to bellow now within an hour or so so excuse this scrawl. The people in the main are with me and the two islands are in an uproar as the pages of the press amply testify. I have now cleared our expences which I put at £3000 and I think I should be able to earn another £1000 which I can hand over to the Cause here and strengthen their rather weak hands. They are splendid folk & worth helping—but very poor.

  In 11 days I’ll see my family once more, and then after two last rushes, one into Queensland & one into Tasmania, we shall board the old Naldera once more. By Jove, it will be good to see you all again. But it has been a thousand times worthwhile to come here.

  to James Leckie S.S. PALOMA, DECEMBER 27, 1920

  Here I am halfway across the Sea of Tasman, and looking forward greatly to seeing my folk once more. It is both rolling & pitching so excuse irregularity. I had a very narrow escape of getting caught in N Zealand by strikes but by good luck—or I prefer to think special Providence—I just escaped two of them, one of which cut the ferry service between S & N Island, while the second cut Australian traffic. I got this little 1500 tonner, and it was uncertain to the last if she could get away. However here we are! It lands me at Melbourne so I shall have to train to Sydney (18 hours), there Jean will meet me or else I shall go on to the Blue Mountains where they are.

  My mission has been extraordinarily successful in New Zealand as it was in Australia. The people were most earnest and eager to hear what I had to tell them. I never had a house that was not full. Our finances begin to pan out and we have already a small balance. Our expences are about £3000 and our profits £3500 roughly up to date. I hope to leave about £1000 for the Cause.

  I feel I should tell you a psychic experience in Dunedin as it concerns you. I had a sitting with one Mrs Roberts, who has a name as a medium. She said ‘I see an elderly lady with you who is now a very high spirit. She gives the name Seline. Does that mean anything to you?’ I said ‘Yes, it does’ She said ‘she will give a message through me.’ She became slightly convulsed & unconscious. Then a voice spoke through her with considerable emotion. It said ‘Thank God! Thank God to be in touch once more. Jean! Jean! Give my love to Jean!’ I said ‘Dear mother, it is good to hear you. We never forget you. Have you a message for pater?’ The power was waning and I only got disjointed words like ‘Eternal—love—remembrance.’ It was very convincing. I feel you are not in sympathy with these things but I am bound to tell you as Mother may wish it.

  Well, we should reach Marseilles by March 15. Wood (by present plans) will go on with the heavy stuff to London, and we make for Paris. I am doubtful what I should do about a hotel but no doubt we can manage. I expect we shall have a week there. I shall bring my book back finished so that will, I hope, give us a little for ourselves out of all this work.

  On December 30, 1920, as Conan Doyle was returning to Australia from New Zealand, Mary Doyle died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Bowshott Cottage. Conan Doyle recorded his feelings in The Wanderings of a Spiritualist:

  The end of my journey was uneventful, but my joy at being reunited with my family was clouded by the news of the death of my mother. She was eighty-three years of age, and had for some years been almost totally blind, so that her change was altogether a release, but it was sad to think that we should never see the kind face and gracious presence again in its old material form. Denis summed up our feelings when he cried, ‘What a reception Grannie must have had!’ There was never anyone who had so broad and sympathetic a heart, a world-mother mourning over everything which was weak or oppressed, and thinking nothing of her own time and comfort in her efforts to help the sufferers. Even when blind and in
firm she would plot and plan for the benefit of others, thinking out their needs, and bringing about surprising results by her intervention. For my own psychic work she had, I fear, neither sympathy nor understanding, but she had an innate faith and spirituality which were so natural to her that she could not conceive the needs of others in that direction. She understands now.

  * * *

  *In appreciation of Barry-Doyle, Conan Doyle left him an annuity of fifty pounds a year. The only other person remembered that way in his will was his longtime secretary, Alfred Wood.

  *On three consecutive Sundays beginning June 15th, Conan Doyle lectured there on ‘Death and the Hereafter’.

  *From St Mary’s Hospital Gazette: Colonel Earle praised Kingsley lavishly, concluding: ‘His enthusiasm was literally infectious; his loyalty to his superiors, his sympathy with the men, his intense patriotism and his keen sense of duty made him a natural soldier. He did not live his life in vain.’

  *Mary Jakeman was Jean’s personal maid.

  †‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as I Knew Him’, Light, August 2, 1930.

  *James Edward Cowell Welldon was a prominent clergyman. Headmaster of Harrow School before accepting an appointment as bishop of Calcutta in 1898, he had returned to Britain in 1906, and eventually became dean of Durham. His invitation to Conan Doyle, though typical of his vigorous intellectual curiosity, could not have been pleasing to all within the church.

  †In 1920 £250 would be worth some £7,000 today.

  *During 1919 and 1920, before departing for Australia that autumn, Conan Doyle published well over fifty letters in the British press on Spiritualist questions, not counting ones in committed organs such as Light, and articles on related subjects in The Strand Magazine.

  *Robert Chambers of Chambers’ Journal, where Conan Doyle had scored an early success with ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley’. An unconventional thinker, Chambers’s anonymously published 1844 treatise on ‘transmutation’ was an early theory of evolution.

  *Their friendship, though close at first, turned sour in 1922 over disagreements about Spiritualism. Both later wrote about it, Houdini in A Magician Among the Spirits (1924) and Conan Doyle in The Edge of the Unknown (1930).

  †Fairies and similar folkloric sprites had been among the favourite artistic subject matter of his father and uncle Richard Doyle, and Conan Doyle championed the girls’ claims in The Coming of the Fairies (1922). Though the evidence was not terribly convincing, and the matter was later exposed as a hoax, Conan Doyle could not bring himself to believe that the two young girls had perpetrated such an elaborate deception.

  *The explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson had made a renowned exploration of the Canadian Arctic and lived among the Inuits for many years.

  *James Ryan, Conan Doyle’s lifelong friend, had spent many years in Ceylon.

  *Published in 1921.

  *Sir William Archibald Weigall had become governor of South Australia three months earlier. His marriage to the only child of furniture stores magnate Blundell Maple did bring ducats, but The Wanderings of a Spiritualist praised the couple’s moral courage in having ‘no hesitation in coming to support me with their presence’ at one of his lectures.

  Epilogue: Conan Doyle’s Final Decade

  Arthur Conan Doyle survived his mother by only nine years, but those years were as active as any of his life. He went on writing, championing the oppressed and the unjustly accused, and carrying the Spiritualist message to huge audiences in America, Europe, and Africa. For this he experienced a great deal of ridicule but never allowed himself to be deflected. ‘We who believe in the psychic revelation,’ he wrote, ‘and who appreciate that a perception of these things is of the utmost importance, certainly have hurled ourselves against the obstinacy of our time. Possibly we have allowed some of our lives to be gnawed away in what for the moment seemed a vain and thankless quest. Only the future can show whether it was worth it.’

  The Spiritualist campaign brought him many new friends, and more than a few enemies—and some who fell into both camps. Harry Houdini, the famous American magician and escape artist, became a close friend after their initial meeting in 1920, but soon turned into an outspoken opponent in the public debate over Spiritualism. Many of Conan Doyle’s oldest friends also became critics of his views. Jerome K. Jerome, his old companion from Idler days, published a sceptical critique in the journal Common Sense, while James Barrie mounted a play mocking the rituals of the séance table. ‘Is Conan Doyle Mad?’ asked the Daily Express at one point, answering its own question with the somewhat smug statement: ‘One does not trouble to analyze the ravings of a madman. One shrugs one’s shoulders, laughs, and forgets.’

  For the most part Conan Doyle shrugged off his detractors and carried on, saying ‘I have learned never to ridicule any man’s opinion, however strange it may seem.’ He also continued to find time for the causes and crusades of his younger days. He renewed his efforts on behalf of Oscar Slater, imprisoned years earlier for the murder of a woman in Glasgow. As with the case of George Edalji years before, Conan Doyle lent his voice and influence to the campaign to win Slater’s release, even travelling to Scotland to attend an appeal proceeding. Slater was finally freed in 1927.

  Conan Doyle’s pen was seldom out of his hand in these later years. Though his writings for the most part addressed Spiritualism, he also found time for some inventive science fiction, including the 1927 undersea adventure The Maracot Deep, subtitled The Lost World Under the Sea, that found a band of explorers travelling to Atlantis. Conan Doyle also took an active part in the making of a motion picture of his novel The Lost World, groundbreaking for Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion special effects that presaged his work in King Kong a few years later. Conan Doyle delighted in showing astounding footage of dinosaurs fighting each other to a gathering of famous magicians in New York in 1922, some of whom had mocked his faith in séances. ‘These pictures are not occult, but they are psychic,’ he told them before screening the film, ‘because everything that emanates from the human spirit or human brain is psychic… It is the effect of the joining on the one hand of imagination, and on the other hand of some power of materialization. The imagination, I may say, comes from me—the materializing power from elsewhere.’

  Professor Challenger, the iconoclastic hero of The Lost World, was revived for a new novel in 1926, The Land of Mist, in which the intrepid scientist and explorer embraced the author’s spirit beliefs. ‘It is incredible, inconceivable, grotesquely wonderful,’ Challenger declares at the novel’s climax, ‘but it would seem to be true.’

  Sherlock Holmes also saw new service during these years, but Conan Doyle refrained from employing him in the Spiritualist cause. ‘This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain,’ declared the permanently sceptical detective in ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’ in 1924: ‘No ghosts need apply.’ The story went into a final collection, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, shortly before Conan Doyle watched his friend William Gillette—now seventy-six years old—revive their play for a farewell tour lasting four years. ‘You make the poor hero of the anemic printed page a very limp object as compared with the glamour of your own personality,’ Conan Doyle told him. He had already seen John Barrymore play Holmes in a movie inspired by the play, in 1922, and he took delight in a lengthy series of Holmes films produced by the Stoll Film Company, featuring Eille Norwood. By the time Conan Doyle saw the first Sherlock Holmes talkie, 1929’s Return of Sherlock Holmes with Clive Brook, he had already gone before the talkie cameras himself, for a Movietone newsreel in which he discussed both Sherlock Holmes and Spiritualism.

  Inevitably, the hectic pace took its toll. Conan Doyle began to suffer frequent bouts of angina, which called for more rest than he was willing to allow himself. Even as his health failed, he refused to slow down. Days before his death, he insisted on keeping an appointment at the Home Office to argue a Spiritualist issue—the prosecution of mediums under the Witchcraft Act of 1735—while dru
mming his fingers against his chest, as if to keep his heart beating long enough to finish what he had to say.

  Arthur Conan Doyle died at home at Windlesham on July 7, 1930, surrounded by his family. He was exhausted, but faced death without fear. ‘The reader will judge that I have had many adventures,’ he had written a few days before. ‘The greatest and most glorious of all awaits me now.’ On July 13th, some six thousand people attended a Spiritualist memorial service for him at the Royal Albert Hall.

  Lady Conan Doyle, the former Jean Leckie, died ten years later, in 1940. Their sons Denis and Adrian died in 1955 and 1970 respectively, after devoting their lives to being their father’s sons. Their sister Jean, Conan Doyle’s youngest child, joined the Royal Air Force in 1938, did intelligence work in World War II, stayed in after the war, and finally retired from the RAF in 1968 as its highest-ranking woman, an aide-de-camp to the Queen, and a Dame of the British Empire. After retirement she married retired Air Vice Marshal Sir Geoffrey Bromet. She died in 1997. Her half-sister Mary Conan Doyle had already predeceased her, in 1976. None of Arthur Conan Doyle’s five children had children of their own, and the direct line came to an end with Jean. His memory and his literary work, like the sleuth of Baker Street, promise to go on forever.

  Acknowledgments

  Arthur Conan Doyle’s letters to his mother, plus others in this book, are among his papers that are now at the British Library, and we are very grateful to Jamie Andrews, curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts, and Christopher Wright, former Keeper of Manuscripts, for their support and facilitation of our work. We are similarly grateful to Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, and George Fletcher, director of Special Collections there; to David Kotin, recently retired director of Special Collections at the Toronto Library, and curators past and present of its Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, especially Peggy Perdue and the late Cameron Hollyer; to Fred and Ann Kittle and the C. Frederick Kittle Collection of Doyleana at Chicago’s Newberry Library; to Timothy Johnson, director of Special Collections at the University of Minnesota Library, and Julie McKuras of its Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections; and to Drs Constantine Rossakis and Richard Sveum. We also appreciate the cooperation of the Library of Congress, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, the Royal Medical Society, Nancy Johnson, archivist of the Lotos Club, New York, and Tom Lamb of Christie’s, London.