Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

This famed author needs no introduction really. Obviously best known as Sherlock Holmes' creator, this man was so much more than the creation he ended up despising.

Born this day in 1859 in Edinburgh to Irish (or sort of as his dad was born in England but was of Irish descent) parents, Doyle had a bit of a tricky childhood. It seems worth mentioning at this stage that Conan was actually a middle name along with Ignatius and his surname was Doyle so this is how we will refer to him. His father was an alcoholic and so at the age of five he and his siblings were scattered across Edinburgh to live with friends or family. Keep in mind there were 10 Doyle children but not all of them survive as per conditions at the time. Young Arthur was housed with the aunt of a friend and studied at Newington Academy for the next three years until the family was brought back together. His father died in 1893 bringing an end to the turmoil the family had faced regarding the tough financial situation his growing issues had placed them in. 

Despite this, Doyle was sent to England for schooling at the age of nine and this was financed by wealthy uncles. He wrote later that he wasn't too fond of school due to them being medievally strict, but he moved on to schooling in Austria as of 1875 for a year. Then once his stint abroad had finished he returned to Edinburgh and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School until 1881 which also saw him working in Aston, Sheffield, and Ruyton-XI-Towns. His education didn't stop there though, he also studied practical botany at the Royal Botanic Garden while in Edinburgh. It was during this period of his life that he began writing short stories, clearly not being happy with everything he'd taken on already! What a man! 

Sadly, the first story that still exists was rejected. He had submitted 'The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe' to Blackwood's Magazine but they did not publish it. His first published piece 'The Mystery of Sasassa Valley' was printed in 1879 and 14 days later he published his first academic article which the Daily Telegraph said was potentially useful in a 21st century murder investigation. This piece was on his Gelsemium could be used as a poison and was published in the British Medical Journal.

From 1880 Doyle travelled on ships as a Doctor. He was first on the Hope of Peterhead which was a Greenland Whaler and then a year later moved onto the SS Mayumba as the surgeon. By this point he'd graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery. In 1882 he was back on dry land and had partnered with an old classmate in a medical practice in Plymouth but there was a falling out and he left to set up his own practice in Southsea with less than £10 to his name which in todays money is just over a grand. While here he played football and was the goalkeeper for Portsmouth Association Football Club amateur's side under the name of A. C. Smith. Sadly this doctors surgery was not a hit and he found himself writing again while he waited for patients. Three years later he completed his Doctor of Medicine degree which was something that went beyond the basic medical qualification in the country. 

As we learn more about this man we have come to the conclusion that he was always on the quest for greatness and struggled to settle with what he had achieved. We say this because in 1891 Doyle went off to study Ophthalmology in Vienna, which to us mere mortals is to do with eyes, and he was intending to be an eye surgeon. However, he struggled with the German medical terms being used in his glasses and so quit. For the rest of his time in Vienna he used it as a sort of holiday and partook in things like ice-skating with his wife Louisa who he married in 1855. Their daughter was 2 at this stage and a year later they had a son. 

Despite quitting in Vienna, after shadowing Edmund Landolt, an expert of eye diseases, in Paris, Doyle returned to London and set up an office and consulting room as an Ophthalmologist. However, he had no patients and so this avenue of his life failed. Following this he decided to stand for Parliament, with no success. He advocated for compulsory vaccinations and justice, going so far as to personally investigate two closed cases which resulted in the accused being exonerated. This in turn resulted in influencing the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. 

While trying to find himself in his academic career during this time, Doyle was already quite the established amateur sportsman. As we've mentioned, he used to play football, but he was also a keen cricketer and played 10 first-class matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club between 1899 and 1907. In addition to this he also played for the amateur team Authors XI which included many famous authors from the era such as J. M. Barrie, P. G. Wodehouse, and even Winnie the Pooh's author A. A. Milne. Doyle was captain of this team between 1899 and 1912. 

Cricket and football wasn't his only hobby though, in 1900 he founded the Undershaw Rifle Club because he felt that after the Boer War and the poor show of the British Troops, the general population needed markmanship training. So Doyle took it upon himself to construct a 100 yard range at his home and provided shooting for local men. Strangely, as a jump from more traditional sports, a year later Doyle was one of the three judges for the world's first major bodybuilding competition at the Royal Albert Hall.

In 1902 Doyle was knighted by King Edward VII and he believed it to be due to his writing during the second Boer War.

A year later he founded the Crimes Club. This was a private social club which met and discussed aspects of crime and detection. It is actually still going to this day and is limited to 100 members. It meets four times a year and the logo is a silhouette of Doyle. Early members consisted of quite a few well known people including a coroner and a fellow crime author.

Louisa died in 1906 from Tuberculosis, however it didn't take Doyle long to remarry. He married his second wife Jean in 1907 and the truth is that he had fallen for her in 1897 but remained faithful to his wife while she was alive despite all members of the family aside from Louisa knowing how he felt about Jean. He had another three children with Jean, but none of his five children bore any of their own so Doyle doesn't have any direct descendants!

Trouble came for Doyle after 1909 as he became associated with Roger Casement. He supported the reform of the Congo Free State and wrote 'The Crime of the Congo' to denounce the horrors of the colony. Unfortunately, Casement was later found guilty of treason and sentence to death, Doyle comes into it as he tried to save Casement from the penalty, pleading insanity, but he was ignored and Casement was put to death. 

Quite underwhelmingly, during the same year he was invited to referee the James Jeffries-Jack Johnson heavyweight championship fight in Nevada, after all he was also an amateur boxer. He turned down the offer despite wanting to go stating the distance was too much for him due to his other engagements. At this stage we haven't yet found a sport that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't play. The man also enjoyed golf and was elected captain of the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club for Sussex in 1910 after moving there with his new wife and all his children in 1907. He remained in Little Windlesham House until his death in 1930. Three years later he entered the English Amateur Billiards Championship which further shows how, like his flitting between careers, Doyle did the same with his sport based hobbies and could not quite settle. He was also responsible for the association between Switzerland and Skiing due to his article in 1894 'An Alpine Pass on Ski'.

As everyone already knows, 1914 brought WWI and Doyle along with 53 other leading British authors threw their 2 pence in and signed the 'Authors' Declaration' which justified Britain's involvement in the war.

Now we want to move onto to an aspect of Doyle's life that interests us most, aside from Sherlock Holmes of course. Now Doyle was raised a Catholic as both his parents were Irish Catholic, but at some point he shifted to become an Agnostic and it was believed to be after his stint in Austria. Despite this, Doyle had at some point started an interest in the mythical and that included Spiritualism. He became fascinated by the idea of the paranormal and began a series of investigations in order to prove the existence of it. It was actually while in Southsea in 1887 that his investigations began, he'd attended at least 20 seances, experimented with telepathy, and had sittings with several self proclaimed Mediums. It was after this that he declared himself to be a Spiritualist after one of these events convinced him that it was all real. In the same year he was initiated as a Freemason  but he left in 1889, returned in 1902, and then left again in 1911.

In 1889 his interest in the paranormal had grown and he became one of the founding members of the Hampshire Society for Psychical Research. Four years later he joined the London based society and the year after collaborated with Sir Sidney Scott and Frank Podmore to look for Poltergeists in Devon.

Doyle was also then associated with William Thomas Stead, who later died on the Titanic, when they were shown up as a little foolish after publicly stating that the Zancigs (Julius and Agnes) had genuine psychic powers. Unfortunately the Zancigs confessed in 1924 of making it up and it had been a trick. This happened to Doyle again when he had praised Eusapia Palladino and Mina Crandon for producing spirits but they turned out to be frauds too.

Naturally his faith would have taken a little knocked at this point, but the war was the event to strengthen his belief as in 1916 he convinced himself that his children's nanny had psychic abilities. From there, along with the constant wartime deaths the country witnesses, Doyle was inspired by the idea that Spiritualism was actually a new revelation sent by God to bring peace to the bereaved. From then onward he began lecturing on Spiritualism and he wrote a piece on his faith. He then published his first work on the subject in 1918 calling it 'The New Revelation'.

It seems that Doyle himself found solace in Spiritualism during the war as he lost his Eldest son, Kingsley (his second child with Louisa), in 1918 and then his brother a year later. Both contracted pneumonia. He then lost two of his brother in laws as well as his two nephews just after the war ended. With so many deaths close to him it was no wonder he was finding some form of peace in his faith. This drove him to become a Spiritualist missionary in 1920 and he travelled to Australia and New Zealand with his mission and continued to give talks about it right up until his death despite having been part of numerous debates where he was portrayed as a man who had been conned.

Not only did he believe in contact with the other side, Doyle also believed in the existence of Fairies and believed that the Cottingley Fairies photographs were real. It was revealed decades later that they were faked, but it seems that although we do share some of his views with mild bouts of scepticism, Doyle was easily duped by con artists seeking him out.

He was even friends with Houdini and believed that he harboured some form of magic even though Houdini explained the illusions and tricks. On an occasion he had even performed a trick in the hopes to dissuade Doyle from endorsing the supernatural simply because he had no other explanation. Doyle refused to believe it was a trick and from then onward Houdini became a strong opponent of the Spiritualist movement, more prominent after the death of his mother. This is what led to a very public falling out between the two famous men. 

The deceit Doyle was accidentally endorsing didn't stop there. In 1922 Harry Price exposed William Hope, the spirit photographer, of being a fraud. Doyle weighed in and defended Hope and went as far as threatening to have Price evicted from the National Laboratory of Psychical Research. Both were members of the Society for Psychical Research and both believed, only Doyle seemed to blindly accept what he saw while Price disproved illusions until the truth bore through. On several occasions he confirmed what he saw was real, but this was overshone by the amount of fraudulent mediums he exposed. As a result of Price refusing to give in to the dogging Doyle and his friends rained down upon him, Doyle instead led 84 members of the SPR to resign on grounds that the society was opposed to Spiritualism. 

It is thought that in revenge for scientists debunking the spiritual work of his favourite psychic, Doyle was responsible for the Piltdown Man hoax of 1912 but in 2016 a review established this was actually done by Charles Dawson. Richard Milner was responsible for suggesting that it was Doyle on the grounds that 'The Lost World' contained several clues to him having been involved. He knew Dawson though, and Dawson was originally ruled out of being involved in the hoax as it seemed to elaborate for him, so therefore someone 'cleverer' must have devised the plan. It is thought that Doyle couldn't have been involved as he was too busy, but having seen how he attempted to smear Harry Price, we don't think that it was too much for Doyle to think up, especially as he had fingers in lots of pies already.

Speaking of fingers in many pies, not only was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a Spiritualist, ambidextrous when it came to sports professions, an overqualified doctor, and the subject of our longest blog post to date, but he was also dabbling in architectural design. Now our Ren jumps from project to project because of her ADHD, so she respects Doyle's ambition and interests as she shares quite a few herself, especially this particular area. He played an active role in the design of a home in Surrey he had commissioned and had built by Joseph Henry Ball in 1895, but it was in 1912 that his ambition in this area really shined through. While he was staying at the Lyndhurst Grand Hotel he sketched designs for a third storey extension and a front façade for the building. Work took place later that year and ended up almost an exact copy of Doyle's designs. He also designed both a golf course and ancillary buildings for a hotel in Canada which were built but have not survived time and he laid the foundation stone for a Spiritualist Temple in Camden in 1926.

We promise that we are almost at the part that everyone is waiting for...

Many years before Doyle had threatened Harry Price with meeting the same fate as Houdini for opposing his views. As it was Doyle himself died 18 years before Price, but both men died of a heart attack (Houdini didn't). He died on the 7th of July 1930 at his home in Sussex and his last words were to his wife, Jean, 'you are wonderful'. Now his death caused a bit of an issue when it came to his burial. As he was very vocal about not being a Christian, it seemed wrong to bury him in a church and obviously views at the time was that it wouldnt happen anyway. So as a Spiritualist he was buried in his garden. Fans will be pleased to note that he is no longer there, as obviously you can't turn up at his old house and demand to visit the grave in the rode garden. When Jean died ten years later he was buried alongside her at Minestead.

If you've stuck with us this long, we know you've been itching to hear about Doyle's most famous character, Sherlock Holmes. We won't go into it too much as our next post will be dedicated to arguably one of the most famous historic fictional characters to come out of the UK. 

The first story to feature Holmes and Watson was 'A Study in Scarlet' and it was published in 1886. A second was then commissioned, 'The Sign of Four' in 1890 before Doyle left the Ward Lock Company as he felt exploited by them. From then onward short stories following the adventures of Holmes and Watson were published in the Strand Magazine. By 1891 he had grown bored of Sherlock Holmes and bounced the idea of killing him off to his mother who was horrified. Holmes trapped Doyle and based on what we know of him he was always restless for other things. He felt Sherlock Holmes took his mind from other things and being forced to focus on him drained him, so in an effort to stop the stories being commissioned he raised prices for them. The plan backfired as publishers were happy to pay whatever for Holmes and so Doyle soon became one of the best paid authors of all time. Eventually he decided it was time to kill off Holmes to allow him to dedicate more time to his historical novels, so in 1893 he had 'The Final Problem' kill off his hero and villain.

Naturally this didn't go down well and public outcry forced him to bring back Holmes in 1901 and then permanently two years later where it was explained that Holmes wasn't dead after all. Holmes continued until 1927, three years before the authors death. 

Naturally, Doyle is more, and always has been, than Sherlock Holmes. He even collaborated with J. M. Barrie. He was responsible for many other well loved and known books, but this post is long enough already!