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Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in the shadow of St.Mary’s Catholic cathedral on the 22nd May 1859. John Doyle his fraternal grandfather, a lithographer and political cartoonist was a Dubliner. His grandmother, Marianna Conan who was also Irish, died giving birth to her seventh child, the author’s father Charles, in 1832. By that time the family were living in London. When he was seventeen, young Charles had moved to the Scottish capital. There he met and married Mary Foley who was of Waterford stock.
Doyle and his siblings found childhood tough. Their father was a moderately successful painter who never realised his potential due to depression and accompanying problems with alcohol. Several wealthy uncles stepped in and ensured that the youngster got an education at prestigious Catholic schools in England and in Austria. Emerging from school he incorporated his godfather and great-uncle Michael Conan’s surname into his own and was known thereafter as Arthur Conan Doyle. Medical school in Edinburgh and qualification as a doctor followed along with the beginnings of his writing career.
His first attempt at fiction a short story, was rejected. But he got into print on his second attempt. This achievement marked the commencement of a writing career which brought him much fame and fortune. Conan Doyle claimed that the character of Sherlock Holmes, the mainstay of his fictional works was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell one of his medical tutors. Bell was a diagnostic genius who could deduce and draw conclusions about patients’ lives from clues that he observed in brief interviews. Bell was later to deny his responsibility for Holmes saying that the writer had unconsciously modelled the detective on his own personality.
Conan Doyle was endowed with an sense of commitment about everything he encountered. He became involved in supporting Roger Casement when the Irish nationalist was working to improve conditions for native people in the Congo. Becoming aware of possible miscarriages of justice in two court cases he developed arguments proving the innocence of the accused, who were released from prison as a result. Indeed in one instance he paid the costs of a successful appeal. Sport captured his imagination also. Whether playing in goals for an amateur soccer team, bowling for the Marylebone Cricket club, captaining a golf club or popularising skiing, enthusiasm was the key. Politics also engage him and he stood for election, unsuccessfully it has to be said, to the British parliament on two occasions. In addition he was knighted along the way.
In the 1840’s the notion that communication with the dead was possible became popular in the United States. Practitioners commonly encouraged the spirits of the deceased to communicate using rapping or tapping on tables. Whatever about the truth of this theory it was obviously left vulnerable people open to fraud and manipulation on occasion. Conan Doyle had initially become interested, as a medical scientist, in early experiments in thought transference and healing through mesmerism and hypnotism. Soon he became an unquestioning acolyte of this spiritualism.
Though he got involved in the Society for Physical Research which was founded in 1882 and which investigated paranormal occurrences, he disdained the organisation’s insistence on objective scientific proof. He felt he didn’t need laboratory experiments to prove what he knew to be true. For him it was a valid belief system. Following seances organised by himself and his second wife Jean, held with the purpose of contacting relatives killed in the great war, he publicly declared himself to be a spiritualist. Then came the Cottingley Fairies, an episode which suggested that despite his gift for fictional deduction and analysis, Conan Doyle was also an incurable romantic
In 1920, Conan Doyle received a letter from a spiritualist friend, tipping him off about the existence of photographs which proved the existence of fairies. The writer sent an associate Edward Gardner to investigate the matter. Two young girls, Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances Griffiths they claimed they had taken the shots near the village of Cottingley in Yorkshire, three years before. Gardner returned from his foray with two images of little figures with wings, which he circulated throughout the British spiritualist community. The author bought into the provenance of the pictures and gave the girls two cameras and instructions to take more. Subsequently they came up up with three more prints.
Over the next sixty-odd years many people were convinced of the soundness of this apparent evidence. However in 1983 James Randi a retired stage-magician, scientific sceptic and debunker of spoon-benders, established that the fairies came from a 1915 childrens’ book ‘Princes Mary’s Gift Book and the images were set-ups. Indeed, one of the pair admitted to camera that it had all been a hoax. Interestingly the same clip incorporates what is thought to be the only film appearance by Conan Doyle.(http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oveXCII3w30)
Though his reputation took a bit of a battering as a result of the trick, the popularity of Conan Doyle and his creation has never waned. Since ‘A Study in Scarlet’ was published in 1887 the adventures of the pipe smoking Victorian detective have held their aficionados in thrall. Academia is equally engaged and an archive collection of items deriving from the tales held at the University of Minnesota now consists of 60,000 items. One hundred and twenty-seven years later he remains the most filmed fictional creation. And Conan Doyle, though sometimes a victim of his own imagination is still a shining star in the firmament of storytellers..
