by Michael Sims
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The Hope docked in Peterhead in September 1880. In early 1881 he visited family in Ireland for an extended stay. There, hundreds of miles from other family and from college, Arthur became infatuated with a succession of young women, but his flirtations seldom amounted to much, and he complained about several women in letters. He wrote to a friend that he had met a nineteen-year-old who placed first in her class in the most difficult examination open to women at Trinity College—where she was a bursar, as Scots called students on scholarship—but that she did not talk to him at the dinner table, did not like to dance, would not play accompaniment to a song, and generally showed herself “an addle-headed womanly fool.” On this same trip, however, Arthur met a young woman named Elmore “Elmo” Welden. After a week of flirting, he wrote to his mother that he would happily marry Miss Welden, but that there were also other girls he longed, at least in passing, to marry. Little came of any of these flirtations and brief romances.
In August 1881, delayed by a year largely because of the whaling voyage, Arthur was awarded his degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery at a ceremony in Edinburgh. In a letter he sketched himself waving the diploma aloft, above the caption “Licensed to Kill.” He attended the funeral of a family friend. With his wide-ranging enthusiasm for outdoor activities, he had adopted photography as a hobby, and soon he was off to the Isle of May to photograph birds among friends who were hunting, hoping to record the trip and write it up for the British Journal of Photography. They accepted it. “After Cormorants with a Camera” appeared in two October installments of the flourishing weekly, and Arthur added another periodical to his résumé. Later the same year it was reprinted in Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin in the United States—his first writing published there.
He used a folding Meagher camera, with a bellows body and a half dozen backs that would hold the plate but permit it to be fully withdrawn. He became something of an encyclopedia about every new interest. Although he already carried an ash tripod, he fashioned for himself a monopod, a walking staff with an iron spike at one end and an adjustable ball-and-socket joint for the camera base at the other. The spike enabled the one-legged camera stand to penetrate four inches into soil and thus become as steady as a tripod without the trouble and weight. In his growing enthusiasm for photography, Arthur didn’t hesitate to advise other photographers in his first article.
Charles Doyle, Arthur’s father, left almost no written traces in his first few years after retirement in 1876. Friends had long urged Mary Doyle to have her volatile, drunken husband removed from their home and placed in professional care, insisting that it was the only way to save his life—and to restore some calm and order to her own. Yet she hesitated.
Finally she relented. Perhaps she saw this advertisement:
INTEMPERANCE—Home for Gentlemen in Country House in the North of Scotland. Of very old standing. Home Comforts. Good Shooting, Trout-Fishing and Cricket. HIGHEST REFERENCES. Apply MR. D FORBES, BLAIRERNO HOUSE, DRUMLITHIE, FORDOUN, KINCARDINESHIRE.
It appeared, among many notices under the heading “Homes for the Intemperate,” in the comprehensive annual Medical Directory, which claimed to include “statistical and general information respecting the universities, colleges, schools, hospitals, dispensaries, societies, poor-law service, asylums for the insane, public services, &c, &c.” Over the years it had featured advertisements for everything from “pure and healthy leaches” to the Equilibrium Carrying Chair for transporting invalids on staircases. Such institutions as Blairerno House were one of the era’s attempts to help both alcoholics and their families, trying to rise above the abuse that previous generations had heaped upon both. Drumlithie was on the coast north of Dundee, almost to Aberdeen—roughly a hundred miles from Edinburgh.
In early 1881 at the latest, if not before, Blairerno House gained a new inmate. Although Charles Doyle had behaved with notorious disregard for others, he seems to have avoided criminal charges, and he had not been violent. Thus he must have agreed to his own incarceration. In Scotland, the Habitual Drunkards Act of 1879 defined institutions described as licensed retreats for inebriates, and required that the patient submit a signed and witnessed letter admitting to habitual drunkenness as defined by the law.
In the foothills of the Grampian Mountains, Blairerno was a house of only two stories, with thick stone walls, and surrounded by numerous outbuildings. Specializing in treating alcoholics, David Forbes, the director of Blairerno House, lived on-site, supported by an all-female ménage: wife, daughter, two sisters, and five servants. The eighteen male inmates—who included a music teacher, a medical student, two accountants, a tobacco manufacturer, a retired military officer, a “landed proprietor,” and now Mr. Doyle, “architect and artist”—were a genteel lot who apparently inspired few worries. That shooting was an option indicates a lack of fear on the part of the staff. Nonetheless, Charles tried to escape numerous times and developed a reputation as an amiable but troublesome patient.
Arthur described the event with glib euphemisms in a letter to his sister Lottie. “We have packed papa off to a health resort,” he wrote on April 9, 1881. Otherwise, he seems to have maintained a tight-lipped silence about intimate misfortunes. In letters to his family and friends, Arthur complained at times about money and magazine publishers and other topics, but he had become adept at keeping his darker worries to himself—or at least out of his written records. Later he occasionally wrote about these issues in fictional terms, but he barely alluded to the realities.
Arthur was the man of the family now. In September 1881 his sister Lottie, only fifteen and a half years old, traveled to join their older sister Annette in Portugal, to also work as a governess. Lonely, hardworking Annette had been there for years, living on as little as possible and sending the rest home. Lottie began the same kind of life. Arthur felt increasing urgency in his desire to contribute, and he daydreamed about rescuing his mother from work, his sisters from their own faraway labors. Except for rare holidays, not since his early childhood had the Doyle family all been together under the same roof.
In October 1881, Arthur was twenty-two. Wondering about his future, needing any kind of steady income, he went to sea again. He served for three months as medical man aboard the Mayumba, a decrepit steamer that creakingly purveyed cargo and passengers between Liverpool and the western coast of Africa. The voyage was fraught with danger from the first. The Mayumba barely remained afloat during a hurricane just after it departed Liverpool—the storm that sank the SS Clan Macduff, whose loss received considerable attention in the British newspapers. Later Arthur realized that during the hurricane the Mayumba must have passed near the sinking Clan Macduff. While he attended frightened and sick female passengers, Arthur’s own cabin was flooded, but his camera equipment remained dry in a tight deal box.
Not until Madeira was the weather calm enough to permit photography. The peak of Tenerife proved annoyingly fog-shrouded, but there were many other opportunities for memorable photographs during the voyage. A week of calm sea off Sierra Leone gave Arthur time to lie under an awning and admire the flying fish “as they flickered, like bars of silver, over the crests of the waves.” At Fernando Po (the island of Bioko), he photographed a horrific former slave barracoon and a shark that circled the ship just below the surface. At Old Calabar, the British colony sixty miles up the Calabar River from the coast—the region associated with the poison experiments of Robert Christison and William Fraser—he photographed a personage he described as “a native prince,” who complained that the image did not resemble him. Many men were struck down with fever, and at least one died of it, on Christmas Eve. At Lagos, Nigeria, Arthur succumbed, and he lost several days to delirium. But his remarkably tough body triumphed and he found himself back on deck, barely able to stand but feeling that he had won another battle.
Despite the misfortunes dealt to the voyage, Arthur further tempted fate. While the Mayumba was near the Cape Coast Castle, one of the f
ormer slave forts on the Gold Coast, he dived into the water and swam alongside the hull. Shortly afterward, as he sat drying himself on deck, he spied a shark’s fin cutting the surface of the water. Once again he had understood the risks and ignored them—just as he had done with gelseminum and while whaling in the Arctic. He realized that he often acted out of bravado, dismissing the likelihood of peril, but he seemed unable to predict in advance when he might again feel the urge to prove himself.
Aboard the ship Arthur met the renowned U.S. minister and orator Henry Highland Garnet. Born a slave in Maryland in 1815, Garnet had been a powerful force in the abolitionist movement, but eventually founded the African Civilization Society in the hope of repatriating former slaves and their descendants back to Africa. After the Civil War, he became the first black minister to preach to the U.S. House of Representatives. Recently President James A. Garfield had appointed Garnet as Minister and Consul-General to Liberia. On the western coast of Africa, the Republic of Liberia had been founded in 1847 by people of African ancestry fleeing oppression in the United States. Although he arrived successfully in Liberia, Garnet died a few weeks after this voyage.
Arthur greatly enjoyed conversing with Garnet aboard ship. He had become desperate for literate conversation, and he and Garnet discussed writers such as George Bancroft, author of History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the American Continent and other works, and John Lothrop Motley, author of Causes of the Civil War in America and many other volumes of history. At one point, conversing learnedly with an accomplished black man, Arthur realized that Garnet himself must once have been a slave. “This negro gentleman did me good,” wrote Arthur later, “for a man’s brain is an organ for the formation of his own thoughts and also for the digestion of other people’s, and it needs fresh fodder.”
The Mayumba returned to Liverpool in mid-January 1882. Arthur wasted no time in quickly turning experience into writing. In March and April the British Journal of Photography published his two-part article, “On the Slave Coast with a Camera.” While describing photographic experiences, he fleshed out his account with vivid glimpses, literary snapshots of action, and snippets of witty dialogue. Mostly he played his discomforts and fears for comedy, but he closed by saying, “Better a week in the Welsh mountains with a light camera and a good companion than all the lights and shades of fever-haunted gorilla-land.” And he had opened the article by saying that to anyone considering travel to the west coast of Africa, he offered Punch’s memorable advice regarding marriage: “Don’t.” To his mother he said flatly that he did not intend to continue as a shipboard medico, that he could make more money in the same amount of time with his pen.
CHAPTER 10
Dr. Conan Doyle, Surgeon
I had everything to gain and nothing in the whole wide world to lose. And I had youth and strength and energy, and the whole science of medicine packed in between my two ears. I felt as exultant as though I were going to take over some practice which lay ready for me.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS
Whatever tensions in the Doyle family may have swirled earlier around Bryan Waller, the former tenant who had grown into Mary’s financial helper and possibly more, they came to a head in early 1882. Surviving letters reveal no other details, but in April Arthur wrote to his sister Lottie that he “nearly frightened the immortal soul” out of Waller and that the other man “utterly refused to fight.” Arthur liked to brag to his family, and often exaggerated in letters (at times comically), which explains his claim to Lottie that when he was finished with Waller the fellow did not leave his house for twenty-three days. He told his sister that although he and Waller had since managed a “nominal reconciliation”—which seems unlikely had they actually stooped to fisticuffs—Waller had left Edinburgh.
Meanwhile, also in early 1882, Arthur applied for every sort of medical position he found listed and was rejected each time. Desperate, he accepted an unrealistically promising offer from a former fellow student. Capricious and volatile Dr. George Budd—who had been only a year ahead of Arthur in medical school—had harried his schoolmate into accepting a position with him in Plymouth, on the coast of Devon. Yet six weeks later Budd withdrew it. Later Arthur learned that Budd had read his letters to and from his mother and learned of his complaints about Budd’s presumptuousness and volatility; and Arthur had to admit that Budd’s own complaints about Arthur’s bohemian disarray were justified. His promised job ended as suddenly as it had begun.
With hardly a spare shilling in the pocket of his tweeds, Arthur decided he needed to regain momentum. His research indicated that Portsmouth, a shipping and military port between Plymouth and Brighton, across the Channel from Normandy, offered a range of potential patients and no surplus of doctors. Barely twenty-three years old, already a veteran of medical school, of Arctic and African voyages, and of apprenticeship work, Arthur was eager to launch an independent career as a medical man. Unable to buy into an established practice, he would have to build his own from scratch.
He arrived in June. Old fortified Portsmouth struck him as gray and drear, but he liked the holiday atmosphere, the piers and hotels and promenades, in the prosperous neighborhood of Southsea. Portsmouth was guarded by the Isle of Wight and was in fact an island itself, with the city containing all of low-lying Portsea Island, which stood between Langstone Channel to the east and Portsmouth Harbor to the west. Southsea faced southward into Spithead, the western end of the Solent, the strait that separated the Isle of Wight from the Hampshire coast and which bustled with yachts and men-of-war parading before its three round forts.
Arthur bought a map and strolled to his hotel through unfamiliar streets. He carried only his ulster, probably a tin box for the top hat that was de rigueur for a young professional man, and a bulky leather portmanteau. The bag was heavy with photographic equipment and glass plates, clothing, books, and a large brass sign that he had had made in Plymouth—DR. CONAN DOYLE, SURGEON.
Filthy urchins scuttled by on bare feet. Frequently Arthur stepped over tracks for the horse-drawn tram system whose bustling terminus was at Clarence Pier, where his steamer had docked at the jetty with its view of Victoria Barracks and the broad green parade ground. Around him dozens of boxy tram cars clattered on miles of track, with passengers comfortable behind windows but the driver exposed to rain on a chariot-like platform behind the two horses. Bath chairs, like baby perambulators for adults, were also available to push tourists in rickety comfort.
Arthur needed at once to make sense of the city’s labyrinthine streets. He must rent a house, ideally some distance from other doctors’ establishments. Like most cities in England, Portsmouth needed more doctors. Over the last three decades, the town had cleaned itself up a bit, but it was still dirty and unhealthy. Robert Rawlinson, one of the first health inspectors appointed under England’s urgently needed Public Health Act in 1848, had visited Portsmouth and written at length about its sad state. Tiny houses were packed with too many occupants. Behind each ran an open sewer, which helped create ideal conditions for the cholera epidemic that killed a thousand people the next year. Inspecting the barracks area that Arthur later walked past upon his arrival, Rawlinson wrote, “At present the soldiers’ wives and families inhabit one of the most wretched, crowded and unhealthy quarters of the town; and the usual haunts of the sailor, when on shore, are dens so vile and degraded that language cannot describe them.” Conditions had improved by the time Arthur arrived, but even basic sanitation was little known among the lower classes.
Arthur spent his first week locating and examining unoccupied houses that fit his needs. Then he chose one and moved into his new headquarters: number 1, Bush Villas, on a bustling tree-lined street named Elm Grove. The rent was £40 per annum. Living on desperate optimism, Arthur worried that the estate agent would demand a deposit, but nothing further was required once he invoked the name of his famous uncle Dickie, the cartoonist.
A wrought-iron railing help
ed distinguish his building from the Elm Grove Baptist Church on the left and the Bush Hotel on the right. The church had been renovated during the last few years, its face opened up with more windows to compensate for the shading block of villas across the street. By the time Arthur arrived, its grand brick façade and arched windows dominated the neighborhood, with the weathervane atop its spire obeying the winds from more than a hundred feet above Elm Grove. Nearby were bustling shops. The trees for which the street was named offered inviting shade and softened the boulevard’s commercial air.
At a sale in Portsea, Arthur bought a tired old bed and trickled away a few precious pounds on basic furniture for the sitting room—a table, three chairs, and a small rug. On tick (credit, from “on ticket”) he bought a red lamp, England’s universal symbol of a physician, and placed it in a front window. Arthur slept several nights wrapped in his ulster before his reliable mother sent blankets. The portmanteau, in the back room with nothing but a stool beside it, became his pantry and table. With no other furniture in his bedroom upstairs, he sat on the bed and ate from a tin of corned beef. Gradually he improved the furnishings—hanging white curtains in the downstairs front room, for example, to improve his office’s appearance from the street. He asked his mother to send knickknacks, as well as Poe’s poems and Bret Harte’s stories.
