Arthur Conan Doyle seemed to write about everything that ever happened to him, and everything he ever thought about or imagined, so it’s a bit of a mystery why he left no written record of precisely what occurred on the evening of March 15, 1897. But he would remember that day for the rest of his life. Because that was when he first met Miss Jean Leckie, the love of his life, his second wife, his lifelong companion, and his spiritual soul mate.
He was just shy of thirty-eight; she was twenty-three and lovely, with great bolts of auburn hair, green eyes, alabaster skin, and a look of vaguely bored late-Victorian refinement. She came from a distinguished Scottish family that traced its lineage back to the thirteenth century and included the Scottish folk hero Rob Roy Macgregor. She had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and was an expert horsewoman.
Apparently, she and the urbane Dr. Doyle, the well-known author, hit it off immediately.
There was just one problem, of course.
He was still married.
Touie was the most devoted and affectionate woman a man could ask for, but Doyle’s letters and papers suggest that he did not love her in the way he quickly came to love Jean Leckie.
By comparison, Touie’s family, her interests, even her physical appearance, now seemed homely and commonplace. By now, Touie was also a semi-invalid, having been diagnosed with tuberculosis several years earlier. Doyle took her on several health trips to the Alps, in the hope of clearing her weakened lungs, but she seemed to grow ever more delicate, and dependent, as the disease progressed.
Given these circumstances, a less principled man might have lunged into a sexual affair with the comely Miss Leckie (if she were willing) or arranged some excuse to abandon poor Touie. But Conan Doyle did neither. Available written records, both public and private, are in agreement that over the next ten years, until Touie’s death in 1906, there is no evidence that he and Jean had a secret amorous affair or that he turned away from his wife. (Doyle and Jean did develop an ever-deepening platonic relationship, however, making contact by letter, telephone, and in person.) When Touie’s lungs finally succumbed to the tuberculosis infection, Doyle wrote to his mother, “I tried never to give Touie a moment’s unhappiness; to give her every attention, every comfort she could want. Did I succeed? I think so. God knows I hope so.”
A year after Touie’s death, Doyle and Jean were married, in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. It was September 18, 1907, and though the wedding was a private family affair, it was reported around the world. The Buenos Aires Standard ran the headline “Sherlock Holmes Quietly Married.” Having been knighted five years earlier (for a book he wrote in support of the British role in the Boer War), Doyle was now “Sir” Arthur Conan Doyle, and his new wife became “Lady Jean.” Together they stepped into one of the happiest periods of Sir Arthur’s life.
By now, Doyle’s literary fame had spread across the English-speaking world, courtesy of Sherlock, but also because of his historical nonfiction and medieval tales such as The White Company and Sir Nigel. The incoming fan mail turned into a deluge. Though he generally wrote forty or more letters a day, according to John Dickson Carr, an early biographer who had access to his private papers, he hired a full-time secretary to help manage his personal affairs.
Meanwhile, he now set about renovating and greatly expanding his country house, called Windlesham, in Crowborough, East Sussex. It became a stately manor house, with five gables, towering chimneys, a red tile roof, and sumptuous English gardens. Eventually, he and Jean came to employ eight servants to tend the house and grounds. The billiard room, which ran the entire length of the house, was so vast that more than a hundred couples could dance in it, once the furniture was moved back. In 1912, the British Medical Association actually held its annual meeting at Windlesham. No longer a penniless, obscure, small-town doctor who scribbled stories in his empty waiting room, now Sir Arthur was a titled, wealthy, literary aristocrat. He and Lady Jean began entertaining lavishly at Windlesham. And now the children began to arrive, first Denis, then Adrian, then Jean, a tomboy nicknamed Billy. (Including Mary and Kingsley, from his first marriage to Touie, Doyle had five children.)
Yet in his daybooks and personal papers, and sometimes in his literary work, Doyle kept obsessively returning to the fundamental questions about the nature of human life and the possibility of the personality’s survival after death. He also kept experimenting for himself, sitting with mediums, holding table séances, and continuing to read from the voluminous outpouring of books and periodicals concerned with spiritualism. At the same time, he’d become deeply engrossed in British politics, and even ran for Parliament, twice, but was defeated. (His friend William Gillette, reading about Doyle’s increasingly public presence in British political life, wrote to him, “My dear fellow, what singular tastes you have! Why all this energy? Is it not much better—like me—to care for nothing?”)
One night his brother Innes remarked offhandedly, while visiting him at Windlesham, “You know, Arthur, it would be strange if your real career should prove to be political and not literary.”
Arthur, busy writing a letter, immediately shot back without looking up, “It will be religious.”
The comment was so sudden, and so unexpected, they both burst out laughing.
* * *
ON JUNE 28, 1914, a disordered young Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip pulled out a pocket-sized pistol and shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophie, as they passed by in a motorcade in Sarajevo, Bosnia. With astonishing speed, the assassination set in motion a chain of events that was to lead to what came to be called the Great War, and later, more sadly, “the war to end all wars.” By the time it ended, in 1918, more than seventeen million people lay dead, twenty million had been wounded, and much of Europe lay in smoking ruins.
There was hardly a family on the Continent that had not lost someone, and Sir Arthur’s family was no exception. Lady Jean’s brother Malcolm, who was serving as a military doctor, was killed in the retreat from Mons in August 1914, barely three weeks after the war began. In the coming days, Sir Arthur’s nephew Oscar Hornung would be killed in the trenches. So would his sister’s husband Leslie Oldham.
It was at Mons, in those first days of the war, that the British public began to realize that defeating the German army would be far more difficult than anyone had hoped—that this confused conflict might turn into a long, bloody slog rather than a quick, glorious, decisive victory. The Battle of Mons was the first major action of the British Expeditionary Force, in which the British fought to hold the line against the advancing German First Army. Though the British fought valiantly, inflicting far more casualties than they suffered, they were ultimately forced into a hasty, humiliating retreat, which turned into a rout when the French army also retreated, exposing the British flanks to attack.
A few weeks later, in September 1914, a short story called “The Bowmen,” by the Welsh author Arthur Machen, appeared in a British newspaper. Machen imagined a soldier at the Battle of Mons calling on Saint George to dispatch bowmen from the Battle of Agincourt (a decisive British victory in the Hundred Years’ War, in 1415) to overwhelm the German army. The story was written in the first person, as if it were true, and not clearly marked as fiction. It became instantly popular and was widely reprinted. From there the tale quickly took on a life of its own. People became convinced the story was true. Reports began to circulate that German soldiers had been found at Mons with arrow wounds. That shining multitudes had been seen intervening between the two armies at the decisive moment of battle. A priest reprinted the story as a pamphlet, with supporting evidence to show that there had actually been what came to be known as the “Angels of Mons.” The angel story made its way into Sunday sermons, as proof of divine favoritism toward the British. In some versions, Joan of Arc even appeared on the battlefield.
Arthur Machen finally published a book-length version of the story, with a long preface explaining that it was
all mere fiction. But to no avail. It was emblematic of those times, when the world seemed to have descended into bloody darkness, that this story (and others, about ghosts and apparitions seen at Flanders field and elsewhere) spread like a contagion and could not be stopped.
People were simply desperate to believe.
Eventually, the Society for Psychical Research conducted a thorough study of these “angel” rumors. Regarding firsthand accounts, it reported, “we have received none at all, and of testimony at second-hand we have none that would justify us in assuming the occurrence of any supernormal phenomenon.” All of it, the SPR concluded, was little more than hopeful fantasies which “prove on investigation to be founded on mere rumour, and cannot be traced to any authoritative source.”
* * *
MEANWHILE, BY November 1916, while the war raged on and the death toll seemed to climb beyond counting, Sir Oliver Lodge published a book called Raymond; or, Life and Death.
The distinguished Sir Oliver was one of Conan Doyle’s most respected friends and colleagues. In fact, they had been knighted together in 1902 and spent much of the ceremony discussing spiritualism. Lodge’s book made an enormous impression on Doyle.
The book concerned a series of eerie events that surrounded the death of Lodge’s twenty-six-year-old son Raymond, who was killed in action in the trenches of Flanders, near Ypres, on September 14, 1915. Lodge had been knighted for his contributions to science and held several key early patents in the development of radio. He was also deeply interested in the question of life after death and was a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research. Lodge had also been a colleague of F. W. H. Myers, another founder of the SPR and the author of several important books about spiritualism, including Phantasms of the Living and Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.
Before he died in 1901, Myers had promised to attempt to communicate across the dark chasm of death once he reached “the other side.” But for fourteen years, none of the mediums in England or America had received any messages from him (or any purporting to be from him). Then, on August 8, 1915—a month before Raymond’s death—Oliver Lodge received a curious message from Alta Piper, the daughter of the American medium Leonora Piper, who had been giving a sitting in New Hampshire. Not knowing quite what it all meant, but believing it had been directed at Oliver Lodge, Alta Piper sent him the text of her mother’s séance, which had been conducted at the request of a Miss Robbins. In it, Mrs. Piper channeled a personality calling itself “Richard Hodgson,” her old investigator from the 1890s.
In the text of this sitting, Hodgson is dealing with some minor matters of personal significance to Miss Robbins, when suddenly he seems to shift gears.
“Now Lodge, while we are not here as of old, i.e. not quite, we are enough to take and give messages. Myers says you take the part of the poet, and he will act as Faunus.”
Miss Robbins: “Faunus?”
Hodgson: “Yes. Myers. Protect. He will understand. What have you to say, Lodge? Good work. Ask Verrall, she will also understand. Arthur says so.”
Miss Robbins (confused): “Do you mean Arthur Tennyson?”
Hodgson: “No. Myers knows.… Myers is straight about Poet and Faunus.”
To the ordinary person, including those present at the séance, all this meant next to nothing. But Lodge, when he received the text from Alta Piper, sensed that the allusion was probably to some scene or quotation from classical literature. (Myers had been a classical scholar, as well as an accomplished poet.) Lodge also knew that “Verrall” referred to the classical scholar and spiritualist Margaret Verrall, of Newnham College, part of the Cambridge nucleus of the SPR. (Her deceased husband, Arthur, was also a renowned classicist.) Lodge contacted her to ask, “Does The Poet and Faunus mean anything to you? Did one ‘protect’ the other?”
Mrs. Verrall replied promptly, saying that “the reference is to Horace’s account of his narrow escape from death, from a falling tree, which he ascribes to the intervention of Faunus, the guardian of poets.” She added that “the passage is a very well-known one to all readers of Horace” and that a falling tree was a common symbol of death. In other words, Myers seemed to be telling Lodge to prepare himself for a great blow but that he, Myers, would do everything he could to ease the pain.
Five weeks later, on September 17, Lodge and his wife received the telegram from the War Office that every English family dreaded, informing them that Second Lieutenant Raymond Lodge, their youngest son, had been struck and killed by shell fragments while leading his company back from an expedition to one of the communication trenches at the front.
Lodge came to believe that his old friend Myers had been trying to warn him of Raymond’s impending death and to shield him from the blow by demonstrating that both he (Myers) and Raymond still lived.
On September 25, Lady Lodge arranged a séance with a different medium, in England (Mrs. Leonard), for a distraught friend who had just lost two sons in the war, within a week of each other. Mrs. Lodge was a complete stranger to the medium. But during this sitting, in which words were spelled out by means of tilts of a table, the message came through: “TELL FATHER I HAVE MET SOME FRIENDS OF HIS.”
Mrs. Lodge asked, “Can you give any name?”
The answer came back: “YES. MYERS.”
Two days later, on September 27, Lady Lodge had a sitting with a Dutch medium, Mr. A. Vout Peters (also as a complete stranger). Peters’s “control,” named Moonstone, quickly came through, giving an accurate description of Raymond. Then he described “a man, a writer of poetry, on our side, closely connected with spiritualism. He was very clever … he has communicated several times. This gentleman who wrote poetry—I see the letter M—he is helping your son to communicate.… This is so important that … I want to go slowly, for you to write clearly every word: NOT ONLY IS THE PARTITION SO THIN THAT YOU CAN HEAR THE OPERATORS ON THE OTHER SIDE, BUT A BIG HOLE HAS BEEN MADE.”
That same day, Oliver Lodge had his first séance with Mrs. Leonard (who did not know or recognize him), and when a voice came through, apparently that of Raymond, he said, “I have met hundreds of friends. I don’t know them all. I have met many who tell me that, a little later, they will explain why they are helping me. I feel I have got two fathers now. I don’t feel I have lost one and got another; I have got both. I have got my old one, and another too—a pro tem father.”
Later sittings indicated that the father figure was F. W. H. Myers and, Lodge came to believe, that Myers was honoring his promise to protect Raymond on the other side.
The Dutch medium Vout Peters also told Lady Lodge that a group photograph had been taken of Raymond and several other officers, at the front, shortly before Raymond’s death. “Moonstone” said that Raymond “is particular that I should tell you this. In one you see his walking-stick” (here the medium tucked an imaginary walking stick under his arm).
At the time of this séance, Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge did not know of the existence of such a photograph. Lodge made inquiries to see if he could locate such a picture, or even confirm that one had been taken, but came up with nothing. Then, two months later, on November 29, 1915, the mother of one of Raymond’s fellow officers (whom the Lodges did not know) sent Mrs. Lodge a short note:
DEAR LADY LODGE—My son, who is an M.O. to the 2nd South Lancs [Raymond’s unit] has sent us a group of officers taken in August, and I wondered whether you knew of this photo and had had a copy. If not may we send you one, as we have half a dozen? I hope you will forgive my writing to ask this, but I have often thought of you and felt so much for you in yr. great sorrow.
B. P. CHEVES
Oliver Lodge eagerly replied that he would love to have a copy and then attended a series of séances, asking detailed questions about the photograph before it arrived in the mail.
In séance, “Raymond” said that in the photograph he was sitting down, that somebody was leaning on him and he was rather annoyed by this, and that there were a dozen or more men
in the picture. He added that in the background there were “lines” pointing down.
The photograph arrived in Oliver Lodge’s mailbox on December 7. It showed twenty-one officers arranged in three rows. Behind the group was a low building, with conspicuous vertical, downward-pointing lines, from external trusses on the roof. Raymond was seated in the front row, with a walking stick laid across his lap. Another officer, seated behind him, had his hand on Raymond’s left shoulder and appeared to be leaning against him. He was the only officer in the photograph who was in this position, and Raymond appeared to be slightly annoyed, with his face a little screwed up, his body leaning away.
* * *
OLIVER LODGE’S book about Raymond was only one of many experiences and influences that seemed to push Sir Arthur closer to committing to the claims of spiritualism. But when, precisely, did Sir Arthur “convert” to this new revelation, stepping over the line that separated his previous life as an interested but guarded dilettante into a new, much more precarious public life as a zealous, fully committed missionary for the cause?
It appears to have been sometime between the fall of 1915 and the following January. At the time, one of Lady Jean’s dear friends, Lily Loder-Symonds, who had been a bridesmaid at the Doyles’ wedding, had been quite ill and came to live in the Doyle household at Windlesham. Loder-Symonds had become a devoted spiritualist after three of her brothers were killed at the Battle of Ypres. She appeared to have the gift of automatic writing, in which (either in trance or in a fully conscious state) she appeared to “channel” the spirits of the dead, scribbling down messages from them in longhand on paper. When she began receiving messages from her deceased brothers, describing the circumstances of their deaths in detail, Conan Doyle was initially skeptical. He pointed out that all or most of the particulars of the battle at Ypres could have been culled from newspaper reports.
But his attitude changed one day when, apparently as a test, he asked Loder-Symonds to give him details about an extremely personal conversation he had had with Lady Jean’s brother Malcolm (now deceased) many years earlier. To his astonishment, she was able to replay this private, long-ago conversation with remarkable accuracy. There was no possible way she could have known about this conversation, Doyle believed; any rational explanation seemed more far-fetched than one presuming psychic abilities unknown or unacknowledged by science. Even if the details had been conveyed by means of telepathy, that, too, was a form of mysterious psychic ability. According to at least one Doyle biographer, Charles Higham, “at that instant, he decided that Spiritualism was genuine.” According to another biographer, Martin Booth, this most likely occurred after September 1915, when Doyle wrote to The International Psychic Gazette, in response to someone seeking solace from grief, “I fear I can say nothing worth saying. Time is the only healer.” But it had to have occurred before January 1916, when Loder-Symonds died.
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