Yes, my father WAS Sherlock Holmes
Yes, my father WAS Sherlock Holmes is an article written by Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Arthur Conan Doyle, published in the Sunday Dispatch on 10 may 1959.
Yes, my father WAS Sherlock Holmes
THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN SETS SAIL
The perfect English Gentleman sets out with his family for America. And on Liverpool's quayside he poses for the family album. Left to right : Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, daughter Jean, later to be Group Officer in the wartime W.A.A.F., the second Lady Conan Doyle, and sons Denis and Adrian, author of this article.
THE MAN WHO CREATED THE GREATEST OF ALL DETECTIVES WAS BORN 100 YEARS AGO... NOW HIS SON REVEALS
Yes, my father WAS Sherlock Holmes
THREE GOLDEN RULES GOVERNED EVERYTHING HE DID
The only time my father ever hit me is an incident eloquent of his character and almost medieval sense of chivalry. We were travelling on a night train from Cairo to Port Said.
I was already a great hulking six-footer in my teens and I made a casual remark to my father about some woman we had met in Cairo. She was very ugly and I said so.
My father rose to his feet and quite quietly, deliberately, hit me. Then he remarked in a mild voice: "There is no such thing as an ugly woman. Some women are more beautiful than others. That is all."
TESTS OF A GENTLEMAN
This attitude towards women was typical of him and of his whole Outlook on life. The influence, perhaps, of his own remarkable mother. Once, when I was a youth, he sent for me and gave me the following brief lecture which I have never forgotten.
"You are becoming a man,"
he said.
"And I want you to remember these guiding principles, always. There are three tests, and three tests only, of a gentleman, and they have nothing to do with wealth, position, or show.
"What alone counts is:
"First, a man's chivalry to-wards women.
"Secondly, his rectitude in matters of finance.
"Thirdly, his courtesy towards those born in a lower social position, and therefore dependent."
On another occasion, a little later, he carefully reached across to take from my mouth the pipe I was smoking — in a public restaurant where women were present — and deliberately broke it in three pieces. I never smoked a pipe under such conditions again.
Many literary men have stated, and I think rightly, that in Sherlock Holmes my father, born 100 years ago this month, created the most outstanding figure in literature. And yet that thought, sufficiently arresting as it is, falls abort of the truth.
When my father created Holmes he laid the groundwork of modern criminology, but he did something more.
He gave to the farthest corners of the earth, to various races and tribes who had never read any other English author, the mental picture of an English gentleman, with his sense of justice, of honour, and fair play.
A staggering amount of non-sense has been written about Holmes, in some cases through ignorance, in others through jealousy of my father's genius.
CONFUSED
Writing not only as his son, but as curator of his extraordinary archives. I may state at once that, as far as anyone was Sherlock Holmes, then it was Conan Doyle himself.
But it was my father who largely confused the issue.
First, he was much too great an artist to identify himself openly with his own character of fiction; second, he considered that Holmes obscured his more important writings — a fact that in itself had a definite psychological effect against himself too personally with Holmes.
Any serious scholar of Sherlock Holmes would experience not the slightest difficulty in solving the mystery, for the facts stick out a mile.
The Slater case [in which Oscar Slater was convicted of Murder, reprieved, served 18 1/2 years, and was then pardoned], the Edalji case, the introduction of the Court of Criminal Appeal that followed my father's work, the tributes of police forces throughout the world, the naming of the police laboratories at Lyons in his honour.
Let us go right up to these two gigantic figures, Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, the real and the fictional, and examine them, as it were, under the latter's own magnifying glass, to discover what they had in common.
Background? Both were the descendants of country squires. Both had French blood in their Veins.
Habits? Both worked in old dressing-gowns, were monstrously untidy with their papers, kept loaded pistols on or in their desks, smoked clay pipes, shut themselves off from the whole world when investigating criminal cases. Both were first-rate boxers.
Opinions and tastes? Holmes was his creator's mouthpiece, save for drugs and violin playing.
For instance, while Holmes was preaching the importance of Anglo-American relationship Conan Doyle was founding, with Winston Churchill and a few other influential men, the Pilgrims Society for that very purpose.
MAN FRIDAY
Just as Holmes is summoned to Odessa to investigate a murder, so is his creator asked to Warsaw for the same purpose.
And so it goes on.
The impact of Holmes on the police world was immediate in its results. While dilettantes — including my father with his tongue in his cheek — talked about Bell. Edgar Allan Poe, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, the criminologists were closely studying the new methods invented by Holmes's creator.
These included the use of plaster of Paris for preserving delicate traces, the differentiation of tobacco ashes, the examination of dust from a man's clothing to establish his profession or locality.
In my father's private archives, the testimonies abound.
"Conan Doyle was an absolutely astonishing scientific investigator." (Chief of the Sûreté Police Laboratories.)
"Many of the methods invented by Conan Doyle are today in use in scientific laboratories." (An English criminologist.)
"It was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who pointed the way to the use of scientific methods in the solution of crime." (A C.I.D. official.)
"The two great qualities necessary in successful sleuthing are imagination and resourcefulness, added to an expert knowledge of human nature, and exactly those three qualities characterise Sir Arthur Conan Doyle." (An American criminologist.)
AND WHAT OF WATSON?
He existed. Moustache, burly shoulders, and all the rest of it. But, apart from the name. It was not Dr. James Watson of Southtea.
"Watson" was my father's Good Man Friday for 40 years and, as a boy, I was many a time sternly rebuked by him for disturbing "Sherlock Holmes" when engaged on the consideration of some problem.
MEMORIES
Though my father possessed the Holmes power of observation and deduction to an extraordinary degree. It was apparent only in certain moods.
At other times, the all artists, he could be very distrait.
It was this which led to the blatant misrepresentations of, to quote the words of a certain learned scholar, "puny men in literary walks who wished they possessed a tenth of Conan Doyle's intellectual gifts, a grain of his honesty and courage, a spark of his generosity."
My boyhood memories are a hotchpotch of visitations to our country home of detectives, ex-convicts, famous sportsmen, and explorers, so much more satisfying to the Conan Doyle progeny than the more stately visits of the Prime Minister, Churchill, Kipling, or Barrie.
As I look back on those years, I ran recall many small incidents, some merely amusing, some full of colour and atmosphere, which made Sherlock Holmes a living part of our everyday lives.
For Instance the convict, just out of prison, arriving some evening, to seek an interview with Conan Doyle.
After he left, my father showed me a tiny moist pellet of which had been concealed in the convict's hollow tooth. It was a secret message from Slater.
THE 'OUND
One moonlight night when I was out for a ramble in Ashdown Forest with our enormous Great Dane, we were overtaken by two labourers on bicycles. At that moment the dog suddenly appeared against the skyline.
"Look there, Bill!" screeched a voice. "My God, the 'ound of the Baskervilles!" and the men were gone like a flash.
On another occasion my father called me to his study and looking very grave, proceeded to recount to me all the details of his work in a world-famous murder case in which he had rescued a wrongly condemned man.
His object was to tell me the name of the real murderer who had not been and never has been arrested by the police, despite the testimony that my father had placed at their disposal.
He wanted his son to know the name "just in case," though he bound me to keep silent unless a third party was threatened.
I actually accompanied him on his investigations of the Thorne murder case and, as the late Sir Bernard Spilsbury has recorded, my father was far from satisfied with the verdict which sent Thorne to the gallows.
When in the mood he would often entertain us in public places by identifying the profession and background of complete strangers.
Such deductions were rather nerve-racking. As a schoolboy you felt you could be found out by thoroughly unfair methods. But he always played the game scrupulously.
The influence of Holmes's creator as a patriot, a military prophet, and a wise counsellor in the service of England, was felt behind the scenes in every, major crisis between 1890 and the end of the first great war.
Even to the day of his passing this great Englishman preserved the high sense of adventure, the calm courage and manliness that runs like an ever-green sap through teh saga of his tales of Sherlock Holmes.
"I have had many adventures,"
he wrote shortly before his death. "The greatest and most glorious of all awaits me now."
