Prologue
by Dr John H. Watson
Holmes and I had sat in companionable silence for some time after we finished our excellent meal at Simpson’s in the Strand. The Beef Wellington, named in honour of our greatest ever military man, was sublime. When he did not have a case and decided to eat at all, Holmes liked to partake of the very finest cuisine. It was the early spring of 1914, just after seven in the evening and we could see the bustling hoards scurrying along the street below. Some were going home after a very long day, and others just coming out for a night’s entertainment.
‘Do you think,’ Holmes said suddenly, ‘that people in a hundred years will remember us?’
‘Probably not,’ I replied. ‘There will be all sorts of wonders, then. Like flying machines and probably devices to instantly communicate, and ships that sail underwater. People will have holiday homes on the moon. Your excellent treatises on cigar ash and bee-keeping will be small change in such a world.’
He had aged of late. I knew he was desperately concerned about the state of the Empire given the current grave situation and only that morning had advised the Prime Minister at Downing Street. He still had those incredible bright eyes each side of his hook-like nose, but his hair was tinged with silver now. My words had annoyed him – that was nothing new – but I cared so much for this man that I indulged in some sentimentality; a trait, among many others, for which I had been often soundly, and unjustly in my opinion, reprimanded. I was, after all, as he had often reminded me during the past twenty-odd years, just an ordinary man who often saw but rarely observed. So, I felt justified in trying in my crude way to add some balm to the situation.
‘Maybe, Holmes, maybe, people will pass this place and say: ‘Holmes and Watson used to eat there.’ Perhaps, even, some folk in a hundred years will walk the streets of London to get a sense of your great gifts and want to feel the atmosphere as you solved mysteries and crimes that had beaten the finest brains of Scotland Yard.’
‘Why on earth would they do that, Watson?’
‘Because, Holmes, you are … you are … indescribable. You are one of a kind. You are unique in the annals of the history of these islands.’
‘Just these islands, Watson?’ he came back quick as a flash with a cheeky grin. He was mollified.
During our many adventures together, I had noticed that he was surprisingly susceptible to flattery, and I sensed he was a happier man as we strolled the two miles back to Baker Street. I had an idea of writing a book then, of walks around our illustrious capital which his many admirers could use. I could perhaps also add details of other places in Britain which witnessed his extraordinary talents. Alas, although I have started it, demands upon my time in the present dreadful war have prevented its completion and the manuscript, such as it is, remains, among notes for many other stories such as The Giant Rat of Sumatra in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co, the Strand.
It is an idea for a future writer, maybe.
Dr John H. Watson
Undisclosed British Army base, 19 September 1917
Part I
I have had a life which, for variety and romance, could, I think, hardly be exceeded.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Crowborough, 1924
On 22 May 1859, Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. The family was reasonably prosperous but Arthur’s father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was chronically addicted to alcohol. His mother, Mary Doyle, was fond of books and remembered by her son as a wonderful storyteller.
Arthur’s boyhood, he wrote later in his life, was spartan at home and more spartan at the Edinburgh school where a tawse-brandishing schoolmaster of the old type made young lives miserable. From the age of 7 to 9 he suffered under this pock-marked, one-eyed rascal who might have stepped, he wrote, ‘from the pages of Dickens’.2
He was to later tell his firm friend, Bram Stoker, that he produced and illustrated his first book of adventures at the age of 6 and that at this time he also discovered a talent for telling a story and then sharing innumerable episodes right through a whole term if necessary. He retained this ability throughout his school life.
At the age of 9, Arthur’s family enrolled him in a Jesuit boarding school in England – Stonyhurst, where he excelled at cricket. Touching letters to his mother survive; he was to write to constantly up to her death in 1920. Conan Doyle considered the general curriculum ‘medieval but sound’, producing ‘as decent a set of young fellows as any other school would do’. Corporal punishments were the norm and he considers that no other boy endured more of it. He graduated at the age of 17, by which time his father’s mental health problems and alcohol addiction were becoming too much to deal with in the family. In 1876, Charles Doyle was dismissed from his job and in 1885 was admitted to Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum.
Arthur decided on a medical career and began studies at the University of Edinburgh where he met Joseph Bell, on whom Sherlock Holmes was subsequently based. In a letter to Bell dated 4 May 1892, Conan Doyle states that it is to him that he owes Sherlock Holmes (also in the letter he expresses interest in Bell’s idea for a story about a bacteriological criminal but is worried that the public may not be able to understand it properly). Later in life he would recall how the doctor could look at a patient and comment on features, based solely on observation and logic, that were pertinent to the individual’s medical needs (see Walk 1).
There were some fascinating teachers, Joseph Bell for one. Another proved of especial significance because Conan Doyle later used some of his peculiarities when creating the very popular and cantankerous Professor Challenger. His name was Professor Rutherford who, with his Assyrian beard, loud voice and enormous chest, awed the students. He had the habit of starting a lecture before he reached the classroom. On the whole, though, Conan Doyle found his studies between 1876 and 1881 – when he emerged as a Bachelor of Medicine – to be a weary grind, oblique and not sufficiently practical for the education of an effective medical man.
He published his first story, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley, at this time.
In 1880 he accepted an opportunity to join a whaling boat, the Hope, for a seven-month trip to the Arctic. He went as a surgeon and remarked that it was just as well that he was not called upon to demonstrate his medical talents to any great extent. He thoroughly enjoyed the splendid air and considered that he set sail as a ‘big, straggling youth’, but returned a ‘powerful, well-grown man’.
After another stint at sea – this time aboard a steamer sailing to Africa – and a terrible time joining forces with a doctor who, according to his later writings, had considerable difficulty with the concept of honesty, Dr Arthur Conan Doyle set up in Portsmouth and, after three years of scrimping and saving, found himself master of a quite reasonable medical practice.
The events of his life at this time will bring a smile of recognition to many young people struggling to make their way in the world – how he slung a pan over a gas jet, became an expert in getting many slices from a pound of bacon which, combined with bread, tea and the occasional saveloy, became his staple diet. He ‘swapped’ his medical services for whatever he could – now with the grocer, now with an aristocratic old lady who gave him china and ‘art treasures’ (including on one occasion a fine lava jug) and sometimes actually for money. One of the most remarkable items was given to him by an elderly lady patient as he was about to leave Portsmouth. It was a blue and white dish that had been brought to England by her son, who was a sailor on board the Invincible during the bombing of Alexandria, and came from the Khedive’s palace kitchen; it was her most treasured possession.
Gradually his income rose – from £154 in the first year to £800 after a few years. He tells a wonderful story of falling foul of the Income Tax authorities. In his first year he completed the form showing he was not liable for tax and this was returned to him with ‘Most unsatisfactory’, scrawled across it. He wrote ‘I entirely agree’ and returned it once more. This resulted in an appearance before the assessors, which ended in mutual laughter. He did, however, write an article ridiculing the tax system and the dreadful form-filling on different coloured sheets of paper which was designed to torment, as it appeared to him quite incomprehensible.
On 6 August 1885 he married Louisa Hawkins whom he described in The Stark Munro Letters (1894) as ‘a sweet and gentle girl’.
At around this time Conan Doyle was selling some stories for small amounts – he estimates about £4 on average – to various publications such as Temple Bar and The Boy’s Own Paper, but never more than a few each year.
March 1886 is significant as this was when he began writing A Study in Scarlet which, a little over a year later, introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes and John Watson courtesy of Beeton’s Christmas Annual. He followed this up with Micah Clarke and thereby set the scene for the rest of his life where he struggled to write what he considered worthy, even great, literature but all most of the world seemed to want was Sherlock Holmes. Some of his writing at this time also reflected his interest in the afterlife and spiritualism. This is interesting as often people assume that he ‘came’ to spiritualism as a result of his heart-breaking losses in the Great War, particularly his adored son, Kingsley, but this was not the case.
Writing the Sherlock Holmes stories
In his autobiography Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle talks of his mental process when writing Holmes stories. The first question people apparently asked him is whether or not he knows the ending of a story before writing it, to which he replied that of course, it is necessary to know where you are going before setting off. Then the task is to disguise the outcome by what we today would call various plot devices and red herrings. Finally, it is vital to arrive at the ending using clear and logical steps, not by some freak accident or previously untold piece of information.
It always annoyed me how, in the old-fashioned detective story, the detective always seemed to get at his results by some sort of lucky chance or fluke or else it was quite unexplained how he got there.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle talking about Holmes
on camera in a unique interview.3
He very quickly became famous in America and in 1889 agreed to write stories for Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine of Philadelphia, which was also organising a British edition. In this context, as discussed in Walk 5, he met and famously got along with Oscar Wilde. The result of this meeting was The Sign of Four. He also carried on with his quest for serious literary recognition as he saw it by writing The White Company which, reputedly, he considered magnificent, throwing his pen across the room in triumph when he had written the last words, where it left a black smudge upon the duck-egg wallpaper. The manuscript was accepted by Cornhill which gave him great satisfaction as he had always dreamed of being accepted by a literary magazine which he regarded as serious.
Conan Doyle subsequently wrote to Joseph M. Stoddart, the editor of Lippincott’s Magazine, saying how delighted he was with the book. He says that he had Chaucer and Froissart as his guide to the Middle Ages and had additionally read 115 books as research.
In the midst of both literary fame and success as a now thriving doctor came a daughter, Mary. Conan Doyle decided henceforth to specialise in Ophthalmology and after a trip overseas he moved to London and began a practice with no patients – as described in Walk 1. To while away the time, he began to write short stories featuring Holmes.
He also agreed that Sidney Paget should become his illustrator, a decision that resulted in Sherlock Holmes becoming based not on Doyle’s original conception of him, but a much more handsome man as he was drawn to resemble Paget’s brother, Walter. This image has, by and large, lasted to the present day, although there are other ‘new’ versions of Holmes that bear little relation to this one, for instance in the CBS version Elementary with Jonny Lee Miller, or the 2019 Japanese series Sherlock: Untold Stories, directed by Hiroshi Nishitani and starring Dean Fujioka as Holmes and Takonori Iwata as his, at first very unwilling, accomplice; they live in a block of flats called ‘Baker Heights’. He also nowadays regularly changes sex; for example, a co-production between HBO Asia and Hulu Japan was responsible for Miss Sherlock, premiering in 2018, where both Holmes and Watson are based in Tokyo and played by women (Yuko Takeuchi and Shihori Kanjiya) and which received overwhelming approval on ratings site Rotten Tomatoes. He also exists in other forms, one being a manga adaptation of Kyoto Teramachi Sanjo no Homuzu, roughly translated as Holmes of Tokyo and based on novels written by Mai Mochizuki, which was produced as an anime series to great acclaim from 2018 on TV Tokyo.
‘…and Watson, his rather stupid friend.’
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1927
Watson has transformed considerably also and is now seen as an able and skilled accomplice as, for example, in the films with Robert Downey Jr as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson; it is similar in the BBC production of Sherlock where Martin Freeman often saves Holmes, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, from his inability to relate to ordinary human beings. To begin with he was undoubtedly a duffer, even Conan Doyle himself remarking (unfairly most readers would probably claim) in Memories and Adventures, that in seven volumes he never shows one gleam of humour or makes a single joke. That this was a common view is attested by a feature, author not given, in the satirical magazine Punch of 21 October 1903, shortly after Holmes had ‘returned from the dead’; it is titled ‘Justifiable Homicide’ and, while welcoming Holmes back, suggests he might gain ‘double merit’ if he would also strangle Watson. By and large, this take on Watson survived until recent times.
‘Watson. I’m afraid you’re an incorrigible bungler.’
Holmes (Basil Rathbone) to Watson (Nigel Bruce)
in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1939
Another take on Watson as an idiot going the rounds in Edwardian times was in the parody Picklock Holes and Potson where we find Potson miserable during the period when Picklock Holes is presumed to be dead at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls and yearns to once more hear Holes calling him ‘a numskull’.4
In 1891, following recovery from an intense illness, Conan Doyle decided with a great rush of joy to dedicate all his efforts to writing and to leave the doctoring behind. In 1892 came the ‘chief event’ of his life, the birth of his son, Kingsley. He also made the decision that henceforth all his literary efforts would be towards his finer work and Holmes was therefore killed off at Reichenbach Falls. He was concerned that not killing Holmes would mean that he would be identified for ever with what he called ‘a lower stratum of literary achievement’. He had this in mind when he visited Reichenbach with his wife for a short holiday and decided that the awesome falls would make a perfect tomb for his ‘most notorious character’, even if it meant that his bank balance also took a terrifying fall.
On killing Holmes off, Conan Doyle said that he believed in giving the public less than they wanted and, besides, many novelists had been ruined by being driven into a groove. He wrote that he did not wish to be ungrateful to Holmes as he had been a good friend in many ways. One thing he considered was that reading great literature should leave the reader a better person for having read it and no one can say that, in the higher sense that he means it, having read a Holmes story. At best they will have passed a pleasant half hour or so. Henceforward, he also wanted to write of characters that represented his own views, which Holmes never did. Conan Doyle admitted, though, that he had no idea people would take Holmes’ death so much to heart.
Thus Holmes ‘died’. Thousands cancelled their Strand subscriptions and folklore has it that some people wore black armbands in the street; even his mother, to whom Conan Doyle remained devoted, was appalled. Conan Doyle said that another lady came up to him in the street and said ‘You beast!’ and there are many other stories, some of which are fantastic but some probably having at least a grain of truth, of similar instances.
A terrible double blow at this time saw Louisa diagnosed with Tuberculosis and the death of his father. His interest in spiritualism intensified as he threw himself into his work and embarked upon a spectacularly successful speaking tour of the United States. Upon returning home, his first Brigadier Gerard story was published in The Strand Magazine and was warmly received.
Louisa had originally been given only a few months to live but her husband’s care saw them both take a trip to Egypt in 1896 where they hoped the warm climate would do her good. In 1897 he saw and fell in love with Jean Leckie, a woman of great beauty and sporting and musical accomplishments. You can make of the relationship what you will, and many people have, but Conan Doyle was to devotedly care for his wife until she died in his arms on 4 July 1906. There is one of a series of parallels here with the life of Charles Dickens, discussed as this study progresses, who also became very attracted to a young woman – Ellen Ternan – while still married; some people believe that this relationship was much more than friendship.
Meanwhile a very busy and complex life saw the four-act play Sherlock Holmes starring William Gillette open to critical panning but huge box office success at the Lyceum Theatre in London. When the star asked Conan Doyle if he could take a few liberties with the character he was told: ‘You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him.’5
Gillette wrote the play himself, principally utilising A Scandal in Bohemia, The Final Problem and A Study in Scarlet, but lifted complete passages of dialogue from the canon; he and Conan Doyle were credited as being co-authors. It premiered in 1899 at the Garrick Theatre in New York (260 performances), went on a tour of the US and opened, as mentioned above, at the Lyceum in London in 1901 (200 performances). Thereafter Gillette revived it a number of times. Conan Doyle thought Holmes was ‘wonderfully acted’ and was more than satisfied with the contribution the play made to his finances.
A previously lost silent film of Gillette’s Holmes, dated 1916, was rediscovered in 2014.
Despite the phenomenal success of his writing at this time, Conan Doyle wrote that his soul was often troubled, that he had another role in life but was unable to see what this might be.
Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sport
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an avid sportsman; Holmes certainly was not, regarding such activity as a waste of precious effort. Holmes was, however, a remarkably strong man able to go for considerable lengths of time without food when on the scent in a case and even taking himself close to death in The Adventure of the Dying Detective. At the end of the story, Watson remarks upon Holmes’ ‘ghastly face’ when previously laid up in bed, to which Holmes replies: ‘Three days of absolute fast does not improve one’s beauty, Watson.’ That he was a fit runner is clear from The Hound of the Baskervilles and that he had great strength is evidenced in The Adventure of the Speckled Band when he straightens up a steel poker which had been twisted out of shape by Dr Grimesby Roylott.
Elsewhere we hear of his other physical prowess, extensive where he bothered to develop it but limited in scope. In The Sign of Four we are told that he had gone three rounds with the prize fighter, McMurdo, who says that Holmes could have aimed high had he taken up the sport. His boxing skills are also referred to elsewhere in the canon, for example in The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist and The Naval Treaty. Conan Doyle regarded boxing as ‘the finest single man sport’, (rugby football being ‘the best collective one, needing strength, courage, speed and resource’). When he needed to bring him back from the dead, Conan Doyle wrote that Holmes had developed a proficiency in bartitsu, the Japanese system of wrestling, and it was this that had proved critical in his fight with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Although he usually left it to Watson to bring a revolver when needed on cases, we know that he could shoot, too, maybe most memorably by decorating Mrs Hudson’s wall with ‘V.R.’ in bullet holes in The Musgrave Ritual.
Conan Doyle makes it clear in his writing that he has no time for hunting with guns as a sport, remarking that a brave man and a coward, a strong man or a weak one, can all do it and that no ultimate good comes from killing a creature solely for human amusement.
His great love was cricket, a game which he said had, on the whole, given him more pleasure during his life than any other branch of sport. He is legendary for taking the wicket of the greatest cricketer of the age – W.G. Grace. This was part of a match in August 1900 and he describes his triumph in a poem, A Reminiscence of Cricket (1922). He writes of the moment that ‘W.G.’ as he was known is caught behind the wicket by the keeper, a player called Storer. Conan Doyle bowls the ball, it clips ‘W.G.’s bat and:
I stood with my two eyes fixed on it,
Paralysed, helpless, inert;
There was ‘plunk’ as the gloves shut upon it,
And he cuddled it up to his shirt.
Conan Doyle does not mention that at the time Grace was 52 years old and had already made a hundred but Sherlockians would regard that as nit-picking.6
‘W.G.’ had his revenge in a subsequent match, bowling Conan Doyle when he went in to bat with a great big looping ball which pitched short, and skidded through to the wicket keeper who quickly whipped off the bails, leaving the startled author wondering for the rest of his days how on earth such a ball could have been played. On another spectacularly memorable occasion – at Lord’s, north London, when both ‘W.G.’ and Conan Doyle were batting alongside each other – a ball from the England bowler Bradley smacked into a small tin vesta box in Conan Doyle’s trouser pocket, setting the matches ablaze. ‘W.G.’ was greatly amused, saying ‘Couldn’t get you out – had to set you on fire!’
Conan Doyle also had a great deal to do with Olympic matters – firstly as a star reporter on the 1908 Olympic games and then, in 1912, in response to a personal telegram from Lord Northcliffe to the effect that Great Britain must regain her place in the medals table. This resulted in a fair deal of frustration for Conan Doyle as he laboured to bring opposing rancorous factions together and he remarked that he never received one word of thanks from anyone. His efforts included an impassioned letter to the Evening Standard, published 22 July 1912, in which he argued that if any of the Empire’s 300,000,000 people of all races and colours could fight for Britain in a war, then surely they could represent them at sports during peacetime. Thereafter he vowed to be wary of any telegrams from Lord Northcliffe.
The Boer War and knighthood
Upon the outbreak of the Boer War Conan Doyle startled his friends and family by announcing that he was to sign up as a volunteer doctor and he set sail for South Africa in February 1900. Having treated thousands of soldiers and watched swathes of them die of typhoid, he produced a 500-page report, The Great Boer War, in October 1900, in which he made suggestions as to the remedy for serious organisational shortcomings. In two years, this book went through sixteen editions, each modified and updated by the author. This was to lead to his knighthood in 1902 bestowed by Edward VII, who was also reported to be a big Sherlock Holmes fan.
The war experiences and the wish to do something practical may have had a bearing on his decision upon return to enter politics and contest a seat in central Edinburgh; he lost very narrowly, as he did again in a further contest in 1906. He hated what he had to do in the election process as he later made clear, calling it ‘a vile business’, but chastening, much, he said, like a mud bath.
In 1901 he published, as usual in The Strand Magazine, the first part of one of, if not the, most famous of Sherlock Holmes tales, The Hound of the Baskervilles. The year before he had spent an extended holiday in Cromer, Norfolk, recovering from enteric fever; Cromer being famed for its invigorating bathing and healthy air ever since Jane Austen declared it the ‘best of all bathing places’ in Emma (1815).7 Although disputed, many locals still believe Cromer to have been the inspiration for the tale as it is suggested that while here he heard of the local legend regarding the Black Shuk, a giant hound with glowing eyes which had been searching for its master since the 1700s and was prone to roam the clifftops at night feeding on the throats of any locals foolish enough to venture out.
And a dreadful thing from the cliffs did spring,
And its wild bark thrilled around.
His eyes had the glow of the fires below,
‘Twas the form of the Spectre Hound.
Old Norfolk verse
Conan Doyle’s ‘serious’ work, such as his report into the state of the British army and his incredible fictional creations, especially Holmes and his adventures, to say nothing of his indefatigable energy and interest in everything from psychic matters to rifles, did not always sit easily together in the minds of the public. Punch’s Almanack 1904, for example, produced a humorous piece about his army report, love of dogs, slouch hats, Mauser pistols and the by-now famous hound. It states that by his invention of a ‘phosphorescent hound’ he has established the right to be considered alongside Edison as an inventor and has immensely strengthened the capabilities of the British Army as at present just a few men with suitable equipment and ‘one well-trained phosphorescent dog’ are capable of resisting a whole army corps.
In 1903, to the delight (and relief) of his fans, royal and otherwise, around the world, The Strand Magazine began serialisation of the stories contained in The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes had returned from the dead. Among many poems and articles celebrating his return was one with the refrain: ‘Oh Sherlock, Sherlock, he’s in town again’, and which contained the memorable lines: ‘The world of crime has got the blues, / For Sherlock’s out and after clues.’
On 18 September 1907, over a year after the death of Louisa, Conan Doyle married Jean Leckie and they moved to a new home – ‘Windlesham’ in Sussex.
Following his very happy new marriage, Conan Doyle’s literary output dwindled, content as he seemed to share activities with his wife. He did, however, write a few plays, mostly unsuccessful but including the money-maker The Speckled Band, discussed in Walk 2. His family grew: Denis was born in 1909, followed by Adrian in 1910 and finally Jean in 1912.
In 1912 he gave the world the incredibly entertaining, if impossible, Professor Challenger in The Lost World. There followed four more Challenger novels which were very popular, breaking literary ground with aspects of a new genre which was rare at the time – H.G. Wells was already a famous writer in the ‘new’ genre – but which later came to be popular and known as science fiction.
Sherlock Holmes fans were pleased to see The Valley of Fear appear in 1914 but were far from satisfied as the legendary detective is absent from the novel for much of it. He made up for this with the thrilling collection His Last Bow in 1917.
In 1914 Sir Arthur and his wife went on a trip to New York, which they didn’t like, and then to Canada, which they loved. Upon the outbreak of war, Conan Doyle again offered his services to the military, although he was 55 years of age. This proposal was refused but he kept very active and sent many suggestions on military matters to the War Office, sometimes much to their annoyance as he came to be seen as a nuisance; this included some suggestions for the development and uses of submarines and airships. In 1916 he was given permission to visit the British, French and Australian soldiers on the front, scenes of death and horror that he would never be able to forget. He was to lose his son, Kingsley, and brother, Innes, due to the war.
In 1916 Conan Doyle came to the defence of Sir Roger Casement, accused of being a traitor and, critically perhaps, given the attitudes of the times, a homosexual. He had always found the man likeable and was instrumental in organising a huge petition on his behalf. You can inspect this today in the National Archives at Kew; it is headed: ‘TREASON. Sir Roger Casement. Petition for reprieve from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and other literary persons.’ It was unable, however, to save Casement from the gallows at Pentonville prison on 3 August 1916. Conan Doyle maintained that he had never heard Roger Casement say anything to the detriment of Britain, and that any dubious, treasonable actions of which he was accused must have been the result of mental stress.
After the war, Conan Doyle became increasingly involved in promoting spiritualism and the occult, being widely ridiculed, especially over his belief in the veracity of the ‘Cottingham Fairies’, a series of pictures supposedly taken by two teenage girls in Cottingham, Yorkshire, and which Conan Doyle pronounced genuine. His wife also took up the spiritual crusades, as they were to think of them, and the whole family, including the three children, went on speaking tours of Australia, America and Africa. In all, he spent over a quarter of a million pounds on these activities and in 1926 was forced to shore up his bank balance by writing three more Professor Challenger novels and in 1927, to the joy of Holmes aficionados, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. In the autumn of 1929, with his health deteriorating and sometimes in considerable pain, he went on a final psychic tour to Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
‘ Why should we fear a death which we know for certain is the doorway to unutterable happiness?’
‘ Why should we fear our dear ones’ death if we can be so near to them afterwards?’
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
In the spring of 1930 Sir Arthur was found collapsed in his garden, holding a single white snowdrop. On 7 July 1930 he died, convinced that he was going on the greatest journey of all. His last words were to his wife: ‘You are wonderful’.
He was buried, following a simple spiritualist ceremony, upright, in his garden at Crowborough, Sussex beside the hut in which he used to write sometimes. He and Lady Doyle had prepared for this moment; you can read, in the National Archives at Kew, the document, ‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Lady Doyle, ‘Windlesham’, Crowborough. Proposed burial in Private Grounds. Sanction. 1930-40’. This will not have helped when the house was sold in 1955, and he, with Lady Doyle, were re-interred in the churchyard at All Saints, Minstead in the New Forest, Hampshire. Reputedly, senior clergy in the Church of England were not very happy, and he was only allowed to rest on the far boundary of the churchyard. ‘Steel True, Blade Straight’ is inscribed on his tombstone.
Conan Doyle’s beliefs about life and death
‘The Press only unfortunately usually only notices spiritualism when fraud or folly is in question’
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1927
Conan Doyle, in an interview with Strand Magazine in March 1919, said he was convinced that our human body has an exact spiritual counterpart and that we were exactly the same five minutes after death as five minutes before, except that any illness or pain had vanished. We were then in a kind of holding place, just like our old life but raised to a ‘higher octave’ – more pleasant, homely, brighter and more intellectual. Those who had committed evil would need to go on a different route but this was designed to be restorative, not primarily to punish. Then we would go on.
A seance was held at the Royal Albert Hall six days after Conan Doyle’s death, attended by thousands and Lady Conan Doyle. He had apparently said that he would return to speak if he could. There was an empty chair on the stage for him. The clairvoyant announced that he was indeed present, in evening dress. She said that he was saying that someone had visited his grave in Crowborough that morning and Lady Doyle said that this was so. Lady Doyle said that she had no doubt whatsoever that he would come back and speak to her when he was ready. That was about it on this occasion, but subsequently some recordings were made at seances of, it is believed, Conan Doyle speaking. The British Library has material, both written and audio-based, on this and it can be accessed by appointment.