On Wednesday 6th February Professor Douglas Kerr (author of Conan Doyle. Writing, Profession, and Practice) gave a wide-ranging and entertaining talk on that prodigious whirlwind of contradictions, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was illustrated with a series of welcome illustrations, beginning with the Bernard Partridge Punch cartoon depicting the great man shackled to his most famous creation, but with his head meanwhile blissfully wreathed in clouds. This seemed to prefigure many of the themes discussed by his biographer. Feet on the ground, head in the clouds: someone who plunged with tremendous muscular strength and appetite into the physical world in which he found himself, yet also someone for whom the world of ‘spirit’ was constantly luring him away from what the rest of us might consider simple ‘common sense’.
The five themes dealt with by Professor Kerr were as follows.
1) SPORT. Conan Doyle was a versatile sportsman, believing passionately in the old adage mens sana in corpore sano. The range of his sporting activities is frankly breathtaking: it includes, among others, boxing (he wrote a whole novel, Rodney Stone, based on this sport, and he refereed a famous heavyweight championship contest in Nevada in 1909), rugby, soccer, cricket, golf, skiing, fencing, shooting, and fishing. He played football for Pompey (Portsmouth Football Club), and cricket for the MCC; and he once bowled out the legendary W G Grace. However, being a ‘gentleman’, he was obliged always to participate only as an amateur.
Professor Kerr suggested that Sherlock Holmes’ attitude to detection was very much that of someone who prides himself on his amateur status. For him it was in itself a sport and a pastime, The ‘straight left’ with which Holmes, the Queensberry rules pugilist, dispatches the caddish bully Mr Woodley in The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist, is, according to Professor Kerr, emblematic of his moral superiority—for Conan Doyle, as for many Edwardians, sport indisputably had a moral dimension.
2) MEDICINE. After his medical training in Edinburgh, and an arduous apprenticeship as a ship’s doctor on a whaling vessel in the Arctic, Conan Doyle began work as an impecunious doctor in general practice in the Portsmouth suburb of Southsea. He belonged to a new scientific age of doctoring, which had firmly seen off the earlier ‘sawbones’ image with which local medical practitioners had hitherto been saddled. Now medicine was regarded as a proper ‘profession’. Nevertheless a GP was right at the bottom of the hierarchy. The really important people were the specialist consultants. Interestingly a parallel was drawn between the relative status of the private ‘consultant’ detective, Sherlock Holmes, and that of his ‘foil’ and intellectual inferior, the professional policeman, Lestrade. Via the iconic character that he’d invented, Conan Doyle could imaginatively invest himself with this superior standing. (And poor old Watson, it’s worth remembering, is no more than a mere GP.)
3) Law and Order. The British police had something of an image problem during the years in which the character of Sherlock Holmes was first beginning to achieve a degree of fame. The ‘Bloody Sunday’ Trafalgar Square riots of 1887 and the signal failure of the London constabulary to find the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders (‘Jack the Ripper’) had done them no favours in the eyes of the public. Sherlock Holmes, the gentleman ‘consultant’, by contrast, was always able to unmask the villain, explain the crime, and, most importantly, to mete out justice. Oddly, while Conan Doyle’s protagonist often patronised the police, there was never any suggestion in any of these stories that they were corrupt. (The reality was very different.) Later on Conan Doyle intervened personally in both the Edaliji and Slater cases, and achieved positive results against considerable odds. It was only then that he was forced to concede that both the magistracy and the local constabulary were in actual fact very far from perfect. Justice for him was always much more than a word.
4) The Army and the British Empire. Conan Doyle was hugely in awe of the British army. Not only did he consider his Brigadier Gerard novels to be superior to the Sherlock Holmes ones, but he grabbed any opportunity to be in the thick of any military campaign that came his way. He accompanied Kitchener in the Sudan campaign of 1893; he was a volunteer field surgeon in 1900 during the Second Boer War; he joined the Home Guard, and then became a war correspondent during the Great War. As Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey, so keen was he on the idea of being kitted out with full military regalia that he actually designed his own uniform. (It’s just as well that he was never, so far as I know, voted into office as a South American dictator.)
5) Science. Conan Doyle had been brought up as a Catholic; but, thanks to Darwin and Huxley, like many other intellectually-minded members of his generation, he abjured Christianity and saw it as something that was both decadent and hostile to the spirit of his own age. However, although he approved of science, he gradually came to disapprove of ‘materialism’, an idea which to him implied three things, two of which he considered distinctly counter-productive. The first factor was ‘a scientific attitude’. This was, of course, good. The second was a hostility to the idea of ‘spirit’, and a denial that life continued after death. The third was too great a concern for material goods and commercial profit. He was, after all, among many other things, something of an ‘artist’, even an aesthete. (Oscar Wilde was a personal friend of his; and his feckless but talented father had been an artist of some distinction.) He saw that the decline of organized religion had led to certain undesirable consequences. Hence his fascination with theosophy and spiritualism. And hence his extraordinary gullibility when investigating the famous Cottingley Fairies. His scientific background led him to believe that ‘the camera (impersonal, objective, mechanical) cannot lie’. Hadn’t Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright got photos to prove their claims? His late Victorian romanticism led him to believe in the innocence and purity of these young unspoiled girls from an idyllic ‘Olde England’, who had so successfully enabled him to gain access to the pre-industrial world of folklore that we find in Shakespeare and Chaucer. This episode dealt a blow to his reputation from which he never recovered; and the last ten years of his life saw him tragically alienated from a public that had previously adored him.
This is where the talk ended, though a subsequent question-and-answer session (such intelligent questions from our members!) proved most illuminating, especially in relation to his attitude towards the opposite sex (chivalrous, but also wildly romantic, and—let’s face it—somewhat demeaning: his world was primarily the macho world of the football or cricket pitch, the newspaper office, the battleground and the gentleman’s club).
Kevin Maynard