Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  A typical example was the tale of Ida Straus, who refused to leave her husband’s side for a place in a lifeboat. The story was repeated over and over again on both sides of the Atlantic, complete with improbable commentary from the survivors. “And so she stayed,” ran one passenger’s unlikely quote, “clinging to her husband’s arm, her face a study of quiet dignity, as the mighty ship went down to the depths.”

  Other accounts focused on episodes of cowardice and treachery. Breathless articles told of officers shooting third-class passengers to prevent them from storming the lifeboats. Others decried the “cowardly dastards”—especially J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star line—who clambered to safety while women and children perished.

  Nearly all of these early emotional accounts contained high praise for the “sublime and unselfish” Captain John Smith. One account had him shooting himself on the bridge of the ship. Another found him swimming through the icy waters, depositing a helpless infant in a lifeboat, and then swimming away with a cheery cry of “Be British, boys!” Still another placed him on the deck, calm and self-possessed as the icy waters rose to engulf him. “And then,” wrote the Daily Graphic, “when all that human foresight could do and had been done unavailingly to save the Titanic, he still remembered his quiet little band of hard-working officers, and released them from duty. ‘It’s every man for himself at such a time as this,’ he said. ‘I release you. Look out for yourselves.’”

  It was this sort of hyperbole that excited the wrath of Shaw. “It is commented upon as a heroic melodrama,” he remarked in a private letter. “The whole attitude of the press is one of simple romantic insanity.”

  Shaw gave a forceful elaboration on this theme in his letter to the Daily News and Leader. “I ask, What is the use of all this ghastly, blasphemous, inhuman, braggartly lying? Here is a calamity which might well make the proudest man humble, and the wildest joker serious. It makes us vainglorious, insolent and mendacious. At all events, that is what our journalists assumed. Were they right or wrong? Did the press really represent the public? I am afraid it did. Churchmen and statesmen took much the same tone. The effect on me was one of profound disgust, almost of national dishonour. Am I mad? Possibly. At all events, that is how I felt and how I feel about it.… Our wretched consolation must be that any other nation would have behaved just as absurdly.”

  From a detached historical remove, one can only marvel at Shaw’s perspective and clarity of thought. One must also wonder, however, at his motivation. It was not the first time he had expressed a deliberately provocative opinion in order to draw attention to himself, and he would do so again—to even greater effect—during the coming war. With the Titanic, however, he had struck a particularly raw nerve. It was one of those times, Conan Doyle remarked, when Shaw’s “queer contrary impulses became perfectly brutal in their working.”

  Conan Doyle had personal grounds to recoil at Shaw’s apparent callousness: he had lost a friend aboard the Titanic. The journalist W. T. Stead, who shared Conan Doyle’s growing interest in spiritualism, had been among the casualties. Their friendship had survived Stead’s attacks on British policy during the Boer War, and Conan Doyle had sent a presentation copy of The White Company as a token of his esteem. Shaw also knew Stead, and thought him a “complete ignoramus,” though he did not say so at the time.

  As he brooded over Shaw’s insensitivity, Conan Doyle found himself “moved to write a remonstrance,” matching Shaw’s cool detachment with high emotion. His letter, headed “Mr. Shaw and the Titanic,” was apparently written in some haste. “I have just been reading the article by Mr. Bernard Shaw upon the loss of the Titanic,” Conan Doyle began. “It is written professedly in the interests of truth, and accuses everyone around him of lying. Yet I can never remember any production which contained so much that was false within the same compass. How a man could write with such looseness and levity of such an event at such a time passes all comprehension.”

  Having registered his dismay at Shaw’s unseemly tone, Conan Doyle reviewed Shaw’s charges of “outrageous romantic lying” and offered a point-by-point rebuttal. “What is the first demand of romance in a shipwreck?” Shaw had asked. “It is the cry of Women and Children first.” In Shaw’s view, however, this cry had not been heeded aboard the Titanic. As evidence, he gave the example of the notorious Lifeboat No. 1, which had a capacity of forty but was launched with only twelve people aboard—ten men and only two women.

  Conan Doyle rose to the challenge: “Mr. Shaw wishes—in order to support his perverse thesis, that there was no heroism—to quote figures to show that the women were not given priority to escape. He picks out, therefore, one single boat, the smallest of all, which was launched and directed under peculiar circumstances, which are now matter for enquiry. Because there were ten men and two women in this boat, there was no heroism or chivalry; and all talk of it is affectation. Yet Mr. Shaw knows as well as I know that if he had taken the very next boat he would have been obliged to admit that there were 65 women out of 70 occupants, and that in nearly all the boats navigation was made difficult by want of men to do the rowing. Therefore, in order to give a false impression, he has deliberately singled out one boat; although he could not but be aware that it entirely misrepresented the general situation. Is this decent controversy, and has the writer any cause to accuse his contemporaries of misstatement?”

  History bears Conan Doyle out on this point. Though many of the ship’s lifeboats were launched with empty seats, women and children did receive priority. Of the women and children aboard the Titanic, three of every four survived. Of the men, four of every five were lost.

  Unfortunately, not all of Shaw’s charges could be answered so effectively. The second of his “romantic demands” centered on the conduct of Captain Smith. “Though all the men,” he had written, “must be heroes, the Captain must be a super-hero, a magnificent seaman, cool, brave, delighting in death and danger, and a living guarantee that the wreck was nobody’s fault, but, on the contrary, a triumph of British navigation.”

  Here again, Conan Doyle had a ready defense. It was wrong, Conan Doyle asserted, to suggest that the public’s sympathy for the captain had taken the shape of condoning his navigation. “Now everyone—including Mr. Bernard Shaw—knows perfectly well that no defence has ever been made of the risk which was run, and that the sympathy was at the spectacle of an old and honoured sailor who has made one terrible mistake, and who deliberately gave his life in reparation, discarding his lifebelt, working to the last for those whom he had unwillingly injured, and finally swimming with a child to a boat into which he himself refused to enter. This is the fact, and Mr. Shaw’s assertion that the wreck was hailed as a ‘triumph of British navigation’ only shows—which surely needed no showing—that a phrase stands for more than truth with Mr. Shaw.”

  As always, Conan Doyle’s sincerity and eloquence do him credit. Unhappily, he chose to bolster his arguments by embracing the “heartbreaking rubbish” that had provoked Shaw’s outburst. Conan Doyle took comfort in these tales of nobility amid the wreckage. It will never be known whether Captain Smith actually did swim through the waters to save a helpless infant. Conan Doyle chose to believe that he did. Shaw dismissed such claims as “disgusting and dishonourable nonsense.”

  This essential difference between the two men grew more pronounced as Conan Doyle turned his attention to the ship’s officers. Shaw had written, as the third of his romantic demands, that the officers “must be calm, proud, steady, unmoved in the intervals of shooting the terrified foreigners.” This was a low blow, a backhanded allusion to an unsubstantiated report that officers opened fire on third-class passengers when they threatened to storm the lifeboats. The very suggestion, Conan Doyle asserted, was a “poisonous” one, since no evidence had come to hand that anyone had been shot. Rather, a single officer was said to have discharged his revolver over the heads of a panicky crowd.

  Oddly, Shaw had not seized this opening to addr
ess the high mortality rate among third-class passengers aboard the Titanic, possibly because the full particulars were not yet known. Instead, he focused on the somewhat dubious example of an officer named Harold Lowe, who was said to have told the much-maligned J. Bruce Ismay, the White Star executive, to go to hell. Lowe’s outburst was understandable, Shaw allowed, but hardly a sterling example of heroism.

  Conan Doyle disagreed. “I could not imagine a finer example of an officer doing his duty than that a subordinate should dare to speak thus to the managing director of the Line when he thought he was impeding his life-saving work,” Conan Doyle wrote. “The sixth officer went down with the Captain, so I presume that even Mr. Shaw could not ask him to do more.” Actually, Lowe was one of only four officers to survive the sinking, but Conan Doyle’s confusion on this point is hardly surprising, as some early reports claimed that all of the officers had perished.

  Conan Doyle reserved his sharpest words for the fourth and final entry in Shaw’s list of romantic demands. “Everybody must face death without a tremor,” Shaw had written, “and the band … must play ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ as an accompaniment.”

  Then as now, the conduct of the Titanic’s band was seen as one of the most stirring features of the tragedy. Shortly after the collision, the band was ordered to play lively ragtime tunes to help calm the passengers and avert panic. Even when it became apparent that the ship was sinking, the musicians continued to play until they could no longer keep their footing on the sloping deck. Legend holds that their last number was “Nearer my God to Thee,” as Shaw stated, but the survivors offered no consensus on this point. Though the musicians were widely hailed for their serene bravery, Shaw saw evidence of further dishonor. The ragtime music, he insisted, created a false impression of normality, and prevented many who might have been saved from seeking the lifeboats until it was too late.

  Here, Conan Doyle felt, Shaw had scored an unforgivable foul. Whatever his motives, Shaw had made light of the very concept of chivalry, something that Conan Doyle held to be sacred. “Mr. Shaw tries to defile the beautiful incident of the band by alleging that it was the result of orders issued to avert panic,” he wrote. “But if it were, how does that detract either from the wisdom of the orders or from the heroism of the musicians? It was right to avert panic, and it was wonderful that men could be found to do it in such a way.”

  Indeed, in Conan Doyle’s view, such gallantry would have brought credit to the likes of Sir Nigel Loring and Rodney Stone. The question of whether the gentlemen of the press had exaggerated—or even fabricated—their accounts of this bravery did not concern him. An epic calamity demanded epic heroes. In summing up his response to Shaw, Conan Doyle made this clear in no uncertain terms: “As to the general accusation that the occasion has been used for the glorification of British qualities, we should indeed be a lost people if we did not honour courage and discipline when we see it in the highest form. That our sympathies extend beyond ourselves is shown by the fact that the conduct of the American male passengers, and very particularly of the much-abused millionaires, has been as warmly eulogised as any single feature of the whole wonderful epic. But surely it is a pitiful sight to see a man of undoubted genius using his gifts in order to misrepresent and decry his own people, regardless of the fact that his words must add to the grief of those who have already had more than enough to bear.”

  Not everyone would describe the sinking of the Titanic as a “wonderful epic,” but Conan Doyle’s impassioned defense of the ship’s crew caught the public mood perfectly. If Shaw had been content to let the matter rest, Conan Doyle might be seen to have held the day. Two days later, however, a withering response appeared.

  In his first article, Shaw had railed against the faceless men of the press. Now he concentrated his venom solely on Conan Doyle. “I hope,” he began, “to persuade my friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, now that he has got his romantic and warm-hearted protest off his chest, to read my article again three or four times, and give you his second thoughts on the matter; for it really is not possible for any sane man to disagree with a single word that I have written.”

  Shaw went on to reiterate the “inept romances” and “stories of sensational cowardice” circulating in the newspapers, dwelling at length on Conan Doyle’s admiration for Harold Lowe, the young officer who had told his superior to go to hell. “Sir Arthur accuses me of lying,” Shaw wrote, “and I must say he gives me no great encouragement to tell the truth. But he proceeds to tell, against himself, what I take to be the most thundering lie ever sent to a printer by a human author. He first says that ‘I quoted as if it were a crime’ the words used by the officer who told Mr. Ismay to go to hell. I did not. I said the outburst was very natural, though not in my opinion admirable or heroic. If I am wrong, then I claim to be a hero myself.”

  Conan Doyle, Shaw went on to say, had stated that he could imagine no finer example of an officer doing his duty. “Yes you could, Sir Arthur,” Shaw retorted, “and many a page of heroic romance from your hand attests that you have often imagined much finer examples. Heroism has not quite come to that yet; nor has your imagination contracted or your brain softened to the bathos of seeing sublimity in a worried officer telling even a managing director (godlike being!) to go to hell. I would not hear your enemy libel you so. But now that you have chivalrously libelled yourself, don’t lecture me for reckless mendacity; for you have captured the record in the amazing sentence I have just quoted.”

  Conan Doyle’s defense of Captain Smith drew an even sharper response: “The Captain of the Titanic did not, as Sir Arthur thinks, make ‘a terrible mistake.’ He made no mistake. He knew perfectly well that ice is the only risk that is considered really deadly in his line of work, and, knowing it, he chanced it and lost the hazard. Sentimental idiots, with a break in the voice, tell me that ‘he went down to the depths’; I tell them, with the impatient contempt that they deserve, that so did the cat.”

  Shaw acknowledged that his harsh words might cause pain to some, but circumstances, he felt, left him no choice. “I should not have run the risk of adding to the distress of Captain Smith’s family by adding one word to facts that speak only too plainly for themselves if others had been equally considerate,” Shaw insisted. “But if vociferous journalists will persist in glorifying the barrister whose clients are hanged, the physician whose patients die, the general who loses battles, and the captain whose ship goes to the bottom, such false coin must be nailed to the counter at any cost.”

  Wisely, Conan Doyle decided to end the matter there. No doubt he wished to respond to some of Shaw’s more pointed barbs, but he must have understood that there was no point in going another round with so intractable a foe. He made a brief and dignified statement to bring the exchange to a close. “Without continuing a controversy which must be sterile,” he wrote, “I would touch on only one point in Mr. Shaw’s reply to my letter. He says that I accused him of lying. I have been guilty of no such breach of the amenities of the discussion. The worst I say or think of Mr. Shaw is that his many brilliant gifts do not include the power of weighing evidence; nor has he that quality—call it good taste, humanity, or what you will—which prevents a man from needlessly hurting the feelings of others.”

  In the end, the exchange said little about the Titanic, but revealed a great deal about Shaw and Conan Doyle. For Shaw, the word “romance” could only apply in a pejorative sense. Again and again, he used phrases such as “romantic lying,” “inept romances,” and “romantic insanity” to describe the actions of the press. Conan Doyle’s entire point of view had been dismissed as “romantic and warm-hearted.” For Conan Doyle, no other response was possible. He saw the tragedy as a “wonderful epic,” like one of his own historical romances, and in this way was able to confer a solemn dignity on the victims. “The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in,” he had declared wistfully in The Lost World, “and there’s no room for romance anywhere.”

  For all the strength of
their convictions, each man had used the facts selectively to bolster his argument, and neither was above engaging in a bit of rhetorical fan-dancing. Conan Doyle appeared wounded by the very suggestion that he had called Shaw a liar, perhaps forgetting his earlier statement that he could recall no “production which contained so much that was false within the same compass.” Shaw, for his part, attacked the press for glorifying the Titanic crew with half-truths, but his own winking allusion to “shooting the terrified foreigners” had brought him down to their level.

  Conan Doyle never forgot the bitterness of the exchange, but it pleased him to report that it did nothing to modify the “kindly personal relations” he and Shaw enjoyed. Later that year they would share a platform to address the topic of religious persecution in Ireland. “[W]ith it all,” Conan Doyle wrote, “Shaw is a genial creature to meet, and I am prepared to believe that there is a human kindly side to his nature though it has not been presented to the public. It took a good man to write ‘Saint Joan.’”

  * * *

  In the whole of the tragedy, no single incident touched Conan Doyle more deeply than the drama of the ship’s musicians, not one of whom survived. Conan Doyle, the veteran tuba player, decided to commemorate their sacrifice with a poem called “Ragtime,” probably inspired by “The Birken’ead Drill,” Rudyard Kipling’s tribute to the British troopship that sank off South Africa in 1852. Like the Titanic, the Birkenhead’s lifeboats could not hold all her passengers. The soldiers and sailors gallantly saw to the safety of the women and children onboard, then stood in silent formation on the decks as the ship went down.