Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  In the fall of 1899, the novelist Grant Allen, who had become a good friend in Hindhead, fell fatally ill. He called Conan Doyle to his bedside to ask if he would complete his latest detective novel, Hilda Wade, which had already begun serialization in The Strand. Conan Doyle was glad to be able to relieve his friend’s anxiety, though he felt his contributions were “pretty bad.”

  Some of his activities were probably suggested by thoughts of Jean. She loved horses, but Conan Doyle had never been too adept a rider. At Undershaw, where he kept a stable of six horses, he sharpened his skills and joined a local foxhunt. Soon enough, he lost his taste for blood sports, fearing that they “blunt our better feelings.” His foray into the world of music, another of Jean’s passions, was also mercifully short-lived. As a student in Feldkirch, he had played the tuba. Now, having fallen in love with a trained opera singer, he took up the banjo.

  Stranger still, within months of meeting Jean, Conan Doyle’s thoughts drifted back toward Sherlock Holmes. It had been four years since the unfortunate incident at Reichenbach, and in that time Conan Doyle had shown no inclination to revive his famous detective. Only one year earlier, at a dinner in his honor, Conan Doyle repeated his assertion that the death of Holmes had been “justifiable homicide.”

  “For a man who has no particular natural astuteness to spend his days in inventing problems and building up chains of inductive reasoning is a trying occupation,” he told his audience. “Besides, it is better not to rely too much upon the patience of the public, and when one has written twenty-six stories about one man, one feels that it is time to put it out of one’s power to transgress any further.” In America, he had made the point even more forcefully. “The strain was something I could not endure any longer,” he told a reporter in Rochester. “Of course had I continued I could have coined money, for the stories were the most remunerative I have written; but as regards literature, they would have been mere trash.”

  Now, in his study at Undershaw, Conan Doyle edged toward a compromise. Writing a play about Sherlock Holmes, rather than a new series of stories, might bring him the rewards without the compromise to his literary principles. There are many reasons why Conan Doyle might have allowed himself this concession. The construction of Undershaw had been costlier than expected and a quick success with Sherlock Holmes would repair the damage to his bank balance. His recent books had sold respectably, but not in the huge numbers of his Holmes collections. He may also have wished, in some sense, to puff himself up a bit for Jean, who had not known him during the heady first days of The Strand.

  In any event, Conan Doyle made it clear that the play would simply be a curtain call of sorts for Sherlock Holmes, and not a return from the grave. The idea of playing Holmes soon caught the attention of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, whose fame as an actor and manager was second only to that of Henry Irving. Tree, who had recently scored a major hit as Svengali in a stage version of Trilby, came down to Undershaw to hear an early version of the play. The actor evidently liked what he heard. He not only wanted to play Holmes, but also Professor Moriarty, who had a large role in the production. With all appropriate deference, Conan Doyle pointed out that this idea, while interesting, might prove impractical, as Holmes and Moriarty shared the stage for much of the play. Undaunted, Tree declared that he had a solution—he would play Holmes in a beard. Puzzled, Conan Doyle withdrew to reconsider the matter.

  For a time, Conan Doyle decided to bury the play in a desk drawer, where it might have languished forever but for the interest of William Gillette, the distinguished American actor. Born in 1853, Gillette had achieved early fame starring in plays of his own composition, including Held by the Enemy and the wildly successful Secret Service. Accustomed to working from his own scripts, Gillette saw difficulties in staging Conan Doyle’s play as written and asked for permission to revise it. Conan Doyle assented. Eager to do justice to the character, Gillette made a study of the original stories. Holmes, the actor soon realized, was not a conventional matinee idol, and Gillette began to doubt whether the detective would work onstage. Accordingly, Gillette began to imagine the production as a more traditional melodrama, complete with a romantic interest for Holmes. He made a cautious approach to Conan Doyle, asking if he might allow his detective to get married for the sake of the play. By now Conan Doyle had grown weary of the enterprise. His reply, relayed by telegram, has become a famous piece of Sherlockian lore: “You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him.”

  In May of 1899, Gillette came to England and traveled to Undershaw to read the play for Conan Doyle. No doubt this was an anxious prospect for Gillette, as his script had almost completely erased Conan Doyle’s original effort. By one account, Conan Doyle listened intently to the reading, pondered it for a moment, and then gave a genial benediction: “It’s good to see the old chap again.”

  In truth, Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes had little more than a nodding acquaintance with Conan Doyle’s creation. Though the play drew on elements of “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Final Problem,” Gillette shrewdly tailored the character to suit his own talents. His Sherlock Holmes, in keeping with the demands of melodrama, emerged as a man who would keep his head when trapped in a gas chamber but could also play romantic scenes with the imperiled heroine, Miss Alice Faulkner. To this day, Holmes purists writhe in agony at Gillette’s proclamation of love for his client: “Your powers of observation are somewhat remarkable, Miss Faulkner—and your deduction is quite correct! I suppose—indeed I know—that I love you.”

  Gillette may have taken liberties, but he created a lasting entertainment. In all, the actor would play the detective more than thirteen hundred times onstage, along with various radio adaptations and a 1916 movie. Gillette became the embodiment of Sherlock Holmes for a generation of theatergoers. This was especially true in America, where the artist Frederick Dorr Steele, who illustrated many of the later tales, drew on a likeness of the actor. Many of Gillette’s inventions and mannerisms were absorbed into the Holmes mythology. He may have been the first to utter the words “Elementary, my dear Watson,” though the line does not appear in any published version of the script—nor in any story by Conan Doyle. It was Gillette who gave a name, “Billy,” to the Baker Street page boy, a convenience later adopted by Conan Doyle himself.

  Legend holds that Gillette also introduced the familiar curved-stem calabash pipe, which was to become such a familiar totem. The actor was himself a dedicated pipe smoker and relished the opportunity to smoke onstage. According to received wisdom, Gillette settled on the calabash because its shape and balance allowed him to “talk around” the pipe. Actually, there is no evidence that Gillette ever used a calabash, and the pipe’s weight would have made it an unwieldy stage prop. Gillette seems to have favored a lighter, bent-stem briar. It has recently been suggested, in the pages of The Baker Street Journal, that the famed calabash may originally have come to light as an oversized comedy prop. In a handful of comedy shorts from the 1930s and 1940s, calabashes are found in the hands of Holmes impersonators who did not share Gillette’s reverence for the character—such as Abbott and Costello, Robert Woolsey, and the Three Stooges.

  With or without a calabash, the role of Sherlock Holmes would be a fixture of Gillette’s repertoire for thirty years. In that time, he and Conan Doyle would become firm friends, which occasionally proved useful for the American actor. During World War I, one of Gillette’s stage props for Secret Service—a map of the British embassy in Paris—led to his arrest in London as a spy. He put the police in touch with Conan Doyle to vouch for his story. Later still, when Gillette came out of semiretirement for a farewell tour of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle wrote an open letter to celebrate the occasion. “That this return should be in Sherlock Holmes is of course a source of personal gratification,” Conan Doyle wrote, “my only complaint being that you make the poor hero of the anaemic printed page a very limp object as compared with the glamour of your own personality which you infuse into his stage
presentment.”

  Gillette’s glamour was apparently lost on the early critics of the play. Sherlock Holmes did not reach Britain until September 1901, having spent more than a year touring the United States. The opening night at the Lyceum, where A Story of Waterloo had premiered six years earlier, was marred by Gillette’s failure to make himself heard in the far reaches of the house. At the conclusion, loud expressions of discontent issued from the balcony, drawing a reproachful curtain speech from the actor. The incident probably contributed to the play’s lukewarm reviews. One critic described Gillette’s performance as “a mere burlesque” of Holmes, while another dismissed the play as “nothing more than a crude and commonplace, though exciting, melodrama.” Others found the plot predictable. Professor Moriarty, wrote the critic from the Times, should have known better than to snatch up a revolver that Holmes had casually abandoned: “If he had ever seen a melodrama, he would have known that the cartridges had been withdrawn.” The boisterous element in the balcony, the writer went on to suggest, may well have been in the professor’s employ.

  Despite the critical indifference, Gillette’s first season was a galloping success. He played eight months at the Lyceum, and by the time he came off, four touring companies were playing around the country.

  Conan Doyle was gratified by the play’s popularity, but he had little to do with the production. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, his thoughts turned to the mounting tensions in South Africa, where Britain would soon be fighting a costly war against the Boers, the Dutch settlers whom Conan Doyle regarded as “the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain.”

  “Our military history has largely consisted in our conflicts with France,” he wrote, “but Napoleon and all his veterans have never treated us so roughly as these hard-bitten farmers with their ancient theology and their inconveniently modern rifles.”

  This time, Conan Doyle would manage to get himself into the thick of it.

  16

  The Helpful Mud Bath

  If you want to write good copy you must be where the things are.

  —EDWARD MALONE IN THE LOST WORLD

  In December of 1899, Conan Doyle announced to his startled family that he wished to join the army and fight the Boers. This proved more difficult than he imagined. When three sets of enlistment forms drew no response, he went to a recruitment center in Hounslow and waited patiently to enlist in the Middlesex Yeomanry. As fate would have it, the colonel who interviewed him was perhaps the only man in Britain who had never heard of him. Running a critical eye over the beefy, forty-year-old candidate, the colonel inquired as to whether Conan Doyle had any military experience. On his forms, Conan Doyle had exaggerated slightly when describing his experiences with the army in Egypt. “Two white lies are permitted to a gentleman,” he remarked later, “to screen a woman, or to get into a fight when the fight is a rightful one. So I trust I may be forgiven.”

  The question of whether this fight was a rightful one has troubled historians for a century. The Boer War, also known as the South African War, pitted Great Britain against the allied governments of the South African Republic (also known as the Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. The Boers, European settlers of mainly Dutch extraction, occupied both republics, and though both were nominally independent, they remained under British political control.

  The growing trade in gold and diamonds had brought an influx of British colonists, prompting Boer president Paul Kruger to levy punitive taxes. Protests from Britain aggravated the situation, and soon Kruger demanded that the British leave South Africa altogether. Joseph Chamberlain, then the British secretary of state for the colonies, was equally determined that they should remain. Kruger issued an ultimatum in October 1899, and war was declared soon afterward.

  With their vastly superior numbers, the British forces did not expect much opposition, but the Boers proved to be, in Conan Doyle’s phrase, “one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon earth.” Virility aside, the Boers had the advantage of modern weaponry and highly mobile troops. The British soldiers, by contrast, were poorly equipped and had no experience of the harsh African conditions. While the Boers made use of such modern innovations as concealed trenches and barbed wire, British tactics had not changed appreciably since Waterloo.

  The disparity took an immediate toll. In mid-December, the British forces lost three major battles. As Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener were dispatched to relieve the British commander-in-chief, the call went out for volunteers. Conan Doyle had been among those urging able-bodied men to step forward. “The suggestion comes from many quarters that more colonials should be sent to the seat of war,” he wrote in a letter to the Times of London. “But how can we in honour permit our colonial fellow-citizens to fill the gap when none of our own civilians have gone to the front?”

  Having stated this position publicly, Conan Doyle felt a duty to set an example. He presented himself at Hounslow, expecting to be accepted as a private in “the greatest army which ever at any time of the world’s history has crossed an ocean.”

  His mother was not quite so swept up in the spirit of adventure. “How dare you!” she wrote upon learning of his plans. “What do you mean by it? Why, your very height and breadth would make you a simple and sure target!” She went on to remind him of his obligations at home, and spoke of the “pleasure and solace” his writings brought to his readers. “There are hundreds of thousands who can fight for one who can make a Sherlock Holmes or a Waterloo,” she continued. “For God’s sake listen to me; even at your age … I am coming down if you leave me in uncertainty. This is altogether too dreadful.”

  Mary Doyle’s reaction is not surprising. Her younger son Innes was already in the army, and would go to South Africa if called. Moreover, she did not share her older son’s confidence in the justice of the cause. In her view, the war was nothing more than a scramble for gold.

  The Ma’am had all but threatened to box Conan Doyle’s ears, but he would not be swayed. He informed his mother that he “rather felt it was his duty” to volunteer. “I learned patriotism from my mother,” he told her, “so you must not blame me.” Whatever his value as a soldier, he went on to say, he felt sure he could serve his country as a role model. “What I feel is that I have perhaps the strongest influence over young men, especially young athletic sporting men, of any one in England, (bar Kipling). That being so, it is really important that I should give them a lead.”

  Certainly Conan Doyle believed every word of what he told his mother, but his motives were not entirely geared toward Britain’s young men. At forty, he knew that this would be his last chance to see action on a battlefield. Much of his career had been spent praising the spirit of fighting men, and he drew his own sense of honor from Britain’s knights of old. The Boer War would give him a chance to test his steel in combat.

  None of this made any impression at the Hounslow recruitment center. Conan Doyle was promptly dismissed amid unkind remarks about his age and weight. Crestfallen, he returned to Undershaw. Soon, however, a fresh opportunity presented itself. A friend named John Langman had arranged to send a fifty-bed hospital unit to South Africa at his own expense. Langman’s son Archie, whom Conan Doyle had known in Davos, would go along to manage the outfit. Conan Doyle was offered a spot on the medical staff. He would help to select the personnel and then ship out to South Africa as an army doctor.

  Conan Doyle gratefully accepted the post, and offered to pay all expenses for himself and his butler, Cleeve, whom he soon drafted into the expedition. In all, the unit would require a staff of some fifty men, and Conan Doyle spent a week helping to sort through the list of candidates. Langman had chosen his friend Dr. Robert O’Callaghan as chief surgeon for the team. The appointment made Conan Doyle uneasy: O’Callaghan, he remarked, was “in truth an excellent gynaecologist, which is a branch of the profession for which there seemed to be no immediate demand.” A pair of “really splendid younger surgeons” nam
ed Scharlieb and Gibbs helped to compensate. Army regulations mandated that a military officer also be assigned to the unit. “[T]his proved to be one Major Drury, a most amusing Irishman,” Conan Doyle reported. “To leave the service and to ‘marry a rich widow with a cough’ was, he said, the height of his ambition.”

  Conan Doyle sailed for Africa on February 28, 1900, aboard the P & O liner Oriental. Louisa and the children, meanwhile, had set off for Naples in the interests of her health. The Ma’am, though still angry with her “very naughty son,” traveled down to Tilbury to see him off. Jean was also there, having sent flowers to Conan Doyle’s cabin, but she remained hidden in the crowds on the dock. It has been suggested that she couldn’t bear to say good-bye, but her low profile implies that matters between them may not have been entirely open at this stage.

  The transport reached Cape Town three weeks later, on March 21. The new arrivals soon learned that the tide of the fighting had turned: British forces under the command of Roberts had advanced and captured Bloemfontein, the Boer capital of the Orange Free State. Within two weeks, Conan Doyle and the Langman hospital unit were on the scene.

  Bloemfontein was a dusty hodgepodge of military tents, tin-roofed houses, and imposing government buildings when Conan Doyle reached it on April 2. Many black Africans, who had for the most part held themselves separate from the fighting, remained in the town, as did a number of Boer civilians who continued in various municipal posts under the British administration. Food and supplies grew scarce as the population swelled; the single-track railway line that served the town strained to cope with the sudden influx of soldiers and the forty tons of hospital supplies that accompanied the Langham unit.