Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  * * *

  In June 1982, eighty-one-year-old Elsie Hill, née Wright, wrote to the managing director of Sotheby’s auction house to offer for sale her own account of the events in Cottingley. At long last, she explained, she felt ready to provide the truth behind the “practical joke” that had confounded so many people, and hoped to realize some profit from the sale of artifacts connected with the episode. By this time, her cousin Frances, now seventy-five, had already made a confession to a psychic researcher named Joe Cooper, who would shortly publish his revelations in a book entitled The Case of the Cottingley Fairies. “From where I was,” Frances had said, “I could see the hatpins holding up the figures. I’ve always marvelled that anybody ever took it seriously.”

  Elsie went on to offer further details to Geoffrey Crawley, editor of The British Journal of Photography. The entire affair, she explained, had been a schoolgirl game that got terribly out of hand when Conan Doyle and Edward Gardner became involved. As a friend of the family later declared: “The girls could hardly tell such important people they were wrong!”

  According to Elsie, the two girls agreed to keep silent because they were “feeling sad” for Conan Doyle. “He had lost his son recently in the war,” Elsie wrote in her letter to Sotheby’s, “and I think the poor man was trying to comfort himself in these things, so I said to Frances, we are a lot younger than Conan Doyle and Mr. Gardner, so we will wait till they die of old age and then we will tell.”

  Edward Gardner lived to be one hundred years old, leaving the girls to maintain their silence well into their own declining years. Gardner continued to believe in the truth of the Cottingley fairies until the end of his days, publishing a book entitled Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel in 1945. “It is not easy to convey the sense of integrity I felt at the end of the investigation,” he wrote. “To share it properly one would have to meet the parents and the children as I did.”

  “The only theory which I would not discuss was the honesty of the children,” Conan Doyle had told the readers of The Strand, “for that I considered to be well attested.”

  In this, both men were sadly, but perhaps honorably, mistaken. In a third and final article on the subject in The Strand in 1923, when a more circumspect man would have let the matter well enough alone, Conan Doyle put forward evidence he believed would establish the girls’ credibility once and for all. He had come into possession of some private correspondence between Frances and a friend, in circumstances that did nothing to advance any public deception, showing that the girl regarded the appearance of fairies as a normal and not especially interesting occurrence. For this reason, there are those who feel even now that Elsie and Frances did, in fact, see fairies at the foot of the garden, even if the photographs themselves were fake. “Unlike Frances,” Elsie wrote to Joe Cooper, “I much more prefer the role of being a solemn faced Yorkshire comedienne than being thought to be a solemn faced nut case.”

  No doubt Sherlock Holmes would have offered a curt dismissal of the entire affair: “Women are not to be trusted, Watson,” he once declared. “Not even the best of them.”

  26

  Pheneas Speaks

  Although we may misbelieve mediums and

  With doubt and suspicion our minds may be filled

  Sherlock Holmes, we must grant, reappeared in the Strand

  A number of times after being killed.

  —THE GRAPHIC

  One day in the early months of 1921, Lady Jean Conan Doyle picked up a pencil, held it poised over a blank sheet of paper, and waited for psychic inspiration to come. She had seen her friend, the late Lily Loder-Symonds, perform acts of automatic writing many times. At first, Jean had regarded these demonstrations with suspicion and no little embarrassment. Over time, however, the content of the messages, coupled with her friend’s obvious sincerity, broke down her resistance. It had been these messages, after all, which played such a large role in her husband’s public advocacy of the spiritualist movement.

  Now her husband had come under attack for his beliefs. The Cottingley episode had made him an object of derision and given fresh ammunition to the opponents of his crusade. One by one, each of the mediums he revered was being held up to damaging scrutiny by the likes of Harry Price and, in America, the magician Harry Houdini. Her husband showed no sign of any weakening of faith, but the strain of the constant struggle was beginning to tell. His broad shoulders often sagged with weary exasperation, and friends noted a deepening of the lines on his face, which could not be explained by age alone. He declared himself ready to sacrifice everything to take his message to the world. His greatest frustration lay in the resistance of those he sought to help. More than once, Jean had seen tears in her husband’s eyes when the lights came up after a séance. “My God,” he said on one occasion, “if only they could know!”

  For some time, Jean sat motionless, staring down at the blank page before her. Then, slowly at first, the pencil began to move.

  * * *

  “It is now five years since the great gift of inspired writing first came to my wife,” Conan Doyle wrote in 1926. “In her intense honesty and deep modesty, she somewhat retarded it at first by holding back her impulses in the fear lest they should come from her own subconscious self. Gradually, however, the unexpected nature of the messages, and the allusions to be found in them showed both her and me that there were forces at work which were outside herself.”

  At first, Jean’s automatic writing took the form of messages from family members and friends who had “passed beyond the border.” Jean’s brother Malcolm, who had died at Mons, was among the first to make himself known: “Dear old chap,” came the message. “It is good to be here.” Conan Doyle’s brother Innes also appeared: “I am so glad to be here. It is so grand to be in touch like this.”

  Even Conan Doyle’s sister Annette, whose death more than thirty years earlier had long been a source of regret, transmitted a comforting message: “Tell the children that I love them all so much, and it is one of my most precious duties and joys looking after them, and helping dear Jean in her training.”

  Almost every one of the spirit contacts encouraged Conan Doyle to continue his lecturing efforts. “Spread the news,” declared Malcolm Leckie. “The world needs it so.”

  Occasionally a stranger would make himself known in the family circle. “For God’s sake, Sir Arthur,” said one, “strike hard at these people—these dolts who do not believe. The world so needs this knowledge. If I had only known this on earth it would have so altered my life—the sun would have shown on my grey path had I known what lay before me.”

  Amid all these messages, which were to continue for the rest of Conan Doyle’s life, one voice remained conspicuous by its absence. Louisa Conan Doyle, who had been dead for fifteen years when the messages began coming, never said a word.

  On December 10, 1922, an influential spirit guide made himself known to Conan Doyle’s family circle. “He is a very, very high soul,” ran a message of introduction, “sent especially to work through you on the earth plane. He died thousands of years ago in the East, near Arabia. He was a leader among men. He wants me to say, dear one, that there is much work before you.”

  A moment later, the new presence announced himself: “Pheneas speaking.”

  From that point forward, Pheneas would act as the intermediary between Conan Doyle and the spirit world. In time, Pheneas revealed that he had been an Arab scribe of the city of Ur, the ancient Sumerian capital, and that he had lived some three thousand years before the time of Christ. Pheneas, too, encouraged Conan Doyle to continue with his work: “Go on as you are doing,” Pheneas insisted. “Their unbelief will fall as a dark garment from them.”

  The reader must draw his or her own conclusions as to the value of such messages. It is curious, however, that nearly every communication told Conan Doyle precisely what he most wanted to hear. His friends and relatives were happily reunited in an idyllic afterlife. Contact between the dead and the l
iving was not only possible, but would one day be a commonplace occurrence. Most gratifying of all, Conan Doyle’s psychic crusade had met with enthusiasm on the spirit plane, and its value would soon be universally acknowledged among the living.

  If one sets aside, for the moment, the possibility that these messages were genuine, several intriguing questions arise. Was this a conscious deception on Jean’s part, a calculated effort to bolster her husband’s flagging resolve? It is possible, of course, though the effort of sustaining such a deceit, over a period of nearly ten years, would be enormous. Moreover, she had regarded such messages with distaste when Lily Loder-Symonds first produced them. It seems improbable that she herself would have taken up the practice without some foundation of belief.

  In discussing Lily’s trance writing, Conan Doyle spoke of the “subtle and dangerous” power of the subconscious to deceive the conscious mind. His own wife, he freely admitted, had initially resisted the idea of automatic writing, for fear of falling victim to some form of self-delusion. These fears were assuaged to a great extent when Lily herself came through and chided Jean for ever having doubted her own psychic gifts. “Jean,” ran the message, “you are awful at not believing. It is really wrong, old girl. It is not your subconscious self.” Perhaps or perhaps not, but one is loath to accept the assurances of a spirit.

  Not surprisingly, Conan Doyle needed no further urging to believe. He spoke often of the “purity” of his wife’s mediumship and pointed out many “unknowable” details that could not have come from Jean’s subconscious. “I cannot see how one can avoid all the snags of subconscious action,” he wrote, “and the possible dramatisation of latent personalities, which would account for the writing itself. It is only by the information conveyed, its accuracy, and its remoteness from the normal mind of the medium that we can gain assurance.” The appearance of Pheneas, to Conan Doyle’s way of thinking, offered all the assurance he could have wished. “I am going this afternoon to the Euphrates,” Pheneas declared in one session. “We did not call it that of old. We had an Arab word for that land which meant ‘The Garden of Flowers.’” It is open to debate whether such facts were as unknowable as Conan Doyle supposed. A British Museum excavation of the city of Ur was under way at the time, under the leadership of Sir Leonard Woolley, and had uncovered a great deal about the culture of Early Mesopotamia. These findings were widely discussed in the popular press, even in the pages of The Strand. It is not impossible, therefore, that Jean might have gained insight into the background of Pheneas through earthly channels.

  In some cases, researchers believe, a medium may appear genuinely ignorant of a particular fact or memory because the information has long since been banished from the active memory. In such cases, it is thought, the medium is motivated by such a powerful desire to succeed that it overwhelms the conscious processes. Jean, certainly, had a powerful motivation to provide such evidence. Whether this explains the pronouncements of Pheneas is a matter for conjecture.

  If a willingness to believe lay behind the appearance of Pheneas, one must wonder over the fact that Conan Doyle himself demonstrated no particular mediumistic power. On only one occasion, during the war, did he claim any significant psychic experience. This occurred on the morning of April 4, 1917, when he awoke with the word “Piave”—the name of a river in Italy—ringing in his head. Some seven months later, convinced that this word represented a premonition of some kind, he wrote a brief statement and sent it in a sealed envelope to the secretary of the Society for Psychical Research, asking that it be opened only at his specific request. One year later, when the Piave River had become well known as the site of a decisive battle, the letter was opened and his premonition confirmed. “I claim that the only possible explanation,” Conan Doyle wrote in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, “is that my friends on the other side, knowing how much I worried over the situation, were giving me comfort and knowledge.”

  Not everyone agreed with this interpretation. In the debate at Queen’s Hall, Joseph McCabe ridiculed Conan Doyle’s assertion that he could have imagined “few more unlikely things than that the war would be transferred to the Piave.” Far from being unlikely, McCabe argued, the London Times of April 3—the day before Conan Doyle had his revelation—published a long article anticipating just such an event. Conan Doyle insisted that he had not read the Times article. That may be so, but at the time he was well immersed in writing his history of the war, so his claims of ignorance are not wholly convincing.

  If the Piave revelation left room for doubt, Conan Doyle allowed no shadow of suspicion to fall on his wife. Jean’s mediumship became the final plank of his psychic platform. Any skepticism of his beliefs now represented a slight on her integrity. This can hardly be seen as surprising, as he had taken the word of Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths without ever having met them. Where his own wife was concerned, he would sooner have denied his own existence than allow contradiction of her testimony.

  Conan Doyle, Jean, Mary, and the three younger children held regular séances at Windlesham beginning in 1921, in the room that had once been the children’s nursery. In time, Pheneas began to deliver his messages through a form of “semi-trance inspirational talking.” In these sessions, Conan Doyle reported, his wife “never completely lost consciousness, but her hold upon her own organism was slight. The eyes were tightly closed, and never opened until the power had left her.” Later, Conan Doyle would collect the many examples of this mediumship together under the title of Pheneas Speaks.

  Pheneas strongly urged Conan Doyle to continue traveling the world to spread the psychic message. In this, Conan Doyle needed little encouragement. His tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1920, though reckoned a success by its promoters, convinced him that much work remained to be done overseas. He drew large audiences and received a warm welcome from the spiritualist community, but dissenters made themselves known at every stop. This did not trouble him greatly. “If Spiritualism had been a popular cult in Australia,” he wrote, “there would have been no object in my visit.”

  A “tragic intermezzo” had interrupted the return trip from Australia in early 1921. Word reached Conan Doyle in Paris that Willie Hornung had been stricken with influenza while visiting the Pyrenees. He started off immediately, but Hornung died on March 22, before Conan Doyle reached his bedside. It was the second family tragedy to strike during the Australian tour. Weeks earlier, in Melbourne, he had learned of his mother’s death. There is reason to suppose that Conan Doyle’s relationship with the Ma’am had been strained by his spiritualist efforts. Two or three years earlier, as her eyesight failed, Mary Doyle decided to leave Masongill. Conan Doyle offered to bring her to Crowborough, but she chose instead to move into a cottage near the Hornungs. Conan Doyle attempted to come to grips with this in The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, a book detailing his travels through Australia. “For my own psychic work she had, I fear, neither sympathy nor understanding,” he wrote, “but she had an innate faith and spirituality which were so natural to her that she could not conceive the needs of others in that direction.” This was artfully done, but it would perhaps be closer to the truth to say that the Ma’am regarded spiritualism as a load of rubbish.

  Not surprisingly, the Ma’am and Willie Hornung soon returned to the family circle under the auspices of Jean’s automatic writing, and both offered abject apologies for any doubts they expressed in life. “I am so glad to be here,” came a message from Hornung. “Arthur, this is wonderful. If only I had known this on earth, how much I could have helped others.”

  The Ma’am took much the same tone: “I ought to have trusted your judgment, my own son.”

  By this time Conan Doyle had laid plans to continue the spiritualist crusade with a tour of America, and both Hornung and the Ma’am gave strong encouragement. “Dear ones,” read a message from the Ma’am, “your tour in America will be a very great success. Strength, enormous strength, will be given to you, dear.”

  “Yes, rat
her,” agreed Hornung. “The seed needs sowing in many places.”

  Conan Doyle had not been in America since before the war. On his previous two trips, the American lecture audiences had shown a warmth and enthusiasm that he hoped would make them amenable to the spirit message. “The ground is fertile there,” he wrote to Oliver Lodge.

  As with his tour of Australia, Conan Doyle brought Jean and the three younger children with him on the trip, along with the children’s maid. On this and all future lecture tours, he paid the party’s expenses out of his earnings, then handed over the surplus to spiritualist organizations. “I take not one shilling of the proceeds of my lectures,” he insisted, “so that I have no material interest.”

  The family arrived in New York on April 9, 1922, aboard the White Star liner Baltic. At their hotel, Conan Doyle faced a crowd of reporters whose questions demonstrated no great sympathy for the purpose of the visit. “They perched themselves round our sitting-room as best they might,” he recalled, “and I, seated in an arm-chair in the centre, was subjected to a fine raking fire which would have shot me to pieces had I been vulnerable.” The press soon found a chink in his armor. Like his friend Oliver Lodge, Conan Doyle ran aground over his insistence that the spirit world offered many earthly delights—such as whiskey, cigars, and marital relations. The next day’s headlines betrayed a certain irreverence: “High Jinks in the Beyond,” read one. “Doyle Says They Play Golf in Heaven,” announced another. In fact he had said no such thing, but the newspapers had elected to have some fun at his expense.

  These gibes were not limited to the press. While Conan Doyle readied to deliver his lectures, the mayor of New York, John F. Hylan, publicly ridiculed him at a political event. According to the mayor, Conan Doyle had found “a new line of business, and from all reports the shekels are rolling in to him as fast as when he told how easy it was for the famous detective of fiction to get out of tight places.” His Honor added that “Sir Arthur has told us nothing that has not long since been dismissed as ‘wool gathering,’ but the lure of the unknown is always fascinating and there will always be a large audience to listen to airy nothings. Mr. Doyle intends to spread them at so much per spread.”