March 17, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 20

Great Contemporaries – “Finest of the Empire” Winston Churchill and Arthur Conan Doyle

By Clifford Goldfarb

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Mr. Goldfarb is a director of ICS, Canada and Chairman of the Friends of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at the Toronto Reference Library. He is grateful to Sam Battle, Churchill Archives Centre, for kind assistance in research and Peter Blau, Doylean collector extraordinaire, who provided scans of the stamp and first day cover.

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill and Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle were extraordinary “Great Britons” who supported themselves handsomely with their pens. They were of a piece: big-hearted, the epitome of decency and principled behaviour, with incredible vigour and larger than life. One of Conan Doyle’s biographers once described him in language that would be equally applicable to Churchill—”the finest of the Empire.¹

Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 in Edinburgh to a middle class Catholic, Anglo-Irish family prominent in British artistic life. His grandfather was the famous political cartoonist John Doyle, aka “HB.” Arthur’s father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was an architect who at a young age became an epileptic and alcoholic, and eventually had to be institutionalized for life. His mother, Mary Foley, held the family together and imbued her children with romantic stories of family history. Arthur, raised in genteel poverty, was sent off to Jesuit schools at Hodder, Stoneyhurst and Feldkirch, Austria (sometimes not coming home for vacations because of his family situation). Eventually he enrolled at Edinburgh Medical School, where he came under the influence of Dr. Joseph Bell, the acknowledged model for Sherlock Holmes.

Much as the youthful Churchill had renounced his “High Church” religion, young Arthur renounced his Catholic faith, pursuing a lifelong search for a replacement. His renunciation cost Doyle the support of aunts and uncles who would have greatly aided him in establishing a medical practice. This was typical of Conan Doyle: once he decided to take a stand on a subject, however unpopular, he was virtually immoveable, accepting the consequences. Like Churchill,² he could be convinced to accept an opposite position, but contradicting him wasn’t easy and took a lot of doing. This can be seen in his unwavering support for spiritualism, including a naive acceptance of phony mediums and obviously faked “ghost photos.” Late in Conan Doyle’s life he took up painting, at which, like Churchill, he wasn’t bad; but the two had no correspondence on the subject.

Even before they met there were parallels in their lives. In 1896, Doyle wintered in Cairo, hoping the climate would help his wife’s tuberculosis. Learning of the coming campaign against the Dervishes at Khartoum, he wangled credentials as a correspondent for the Westminster Gazette, and travelled up the Nile to join the British forces under General Kitchener.³ Nothing was yet happening and, reluctantly, Conan Doyle returned to Cairo, having got “a whiff of real war in the little fortress but no sign of advance.” From this Egyptian winter came a short story, The Three Correspondents, and a novel, Tragedy of the Korosko.

Two years later Churchill was attached to the 21st Lancers in the Sudan campaign, and served at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898. Like Doyle he wrote about the campaign, producing The River War in 1899.

On 2 December 1896, stationed in Bangalore, India, Churchill wrote his brother Jack about a new Doyle novel:

I received two Strand Magazines and am much obliged to you for them. I think Conan Doyle’s execution of the story of Rodney Stone is much better than his plot. It is absurd to suppose that any man would practically plead guilty to murder to avoid accusing his dead brother of cheating at cards in order to save the family honour. Which would be the worst. The former obviously. But his descriptions of the Fight (and I expect later on of Trafalgar) are splendid.

This was very perceptive so soon after the Gothic novel’s publication, since it is likely that Conan Doyle at one point intended to do for Rodney Stone what he had done for The Great Shadow, which ended with the climactic battle of Waterloo; Rodney Stone was likely intended to end at Trafalgar, but for reasons not discovered by Doyle scholars, it didn’t.

Their first opportunity to cross paths was in South Africa in 1900. Though he had given up medicine in 1891, Conan Doyle went out with Langman’s Field Hospital and was in South Africa when Churchill staged his famous escape from a Boer prison camp. But if they met in South Africa, neither documented it. They returned to Britain on different ships.

Conan Doyle went on to write The Great Boer War (1900) and The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct (1902), strongly defending Britain’s conduct of the war and treatment of Boer prisoners, for which he was ultimately knighted. In the former, he briefly describes the famous armoured train incident and Churchill’s gallant actions in staying with his colleagues until his capture. Churchill, of course, wrote London to Ladysmith and Ian Hamilton’s March (both 1900).

They met at last while speaking separately at the annual dinner of the Pall Mall Club on 25 October 1900. (See Fred Glueckstein’s article below.) Both defended the honour of British officers in South Africa. A reviewer called Churchill’s speech “Excellent, that is, in matter, though it must be observed that in respect of his oratorical form and manner the son of Lord Randolph has still a good deal to learn….Dr. Doyle’s speech, if less controversial in tone, was assuredly not less.”⁴

By the end of 1893, twenty-three Sherlock Holmes short stories had appeared and Conan Doyle was tired of the character. He wanted to concentrate on historical novels, which he believed to be his true calling. So he “killed” Holmes off in a climactic struggle with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, chronicled in “The Final Problem,” published in The Strand Magazine for December 1893.

His public wouldn’t have it, however, and, bowing to popular demand and his publishers at The Strand, plus a very lucrative offer, he agreed to bring Holmes back in The Hound of the Baskervilles. In late April, 1901, Conan Doyle wrote to his mother from the edge of Dartmoor (a letter which dispels any suggestion that he was not the principal author of the Hound):

On Tuesday I give a dinner at the Athenaeum Club. My guests are The Langmans, Major Griffiths, Sir Francis Jeune, Winston Churchill, Barrie, Anthony Hope, Norman Hapgood, Cranston (of Edinburgh), Gosse the Critic, & Buckle (Editor of the Times)—rather a good team, I think. Adieu, my dear—Excuse this short scribble. Fletcher Robinson came here with me and we are going to do a small book together “The Hound of the Baskervilles”—a real Creeper.

From Churchill’s appointments diary, we know that this dinner took place on Tuesday, 30 April 1901.⁵ Churchill reciprocated with an invitation to dine on May 9th at the House of Commons: “Every Thursday we—that is to say Percy, Hugh Cecil myself and a few others—have dinner in a private room at the House of Commons at 8pm.” That dinner took place on May 16th.

The exchange of dinners was almost certainly not the last physical meeting between the two. On 29 August 1941, Churchill wrote to Conan Doyle’s son Adrian to thank him for the gift of The White Company, which Adrian had called “my father’s greatest book,” attaching his father’s autograph to the flyleaf. Churchill’s response, surely on a date when he had more important things to do, having just returned from the Argentia meeting with Roosevelt, was generous: “I read this book with enthusiasm many years ago, and I had the pleasure of meeting your father on many occasions.” Churchill replied in the same terms seven years later, when Adrian wrote, “I did meet you when I was a little boy in 1912, upon an occasion when you and your Wife spent the day with my dear parents at our house on Ashdown Forest.” Adrian must have had a remarkable memory, since he was two years old in 1912! There was a plaque in the study of Windlesham, Conan Doyle’s home at Crowborough, East Sussex, attesting that Churchill had been a visitor.

Politically Conan Doyle began as a Liberal Unionist through his support for the Boer War and opposition to Irish Home Rule (on which he later reversed himself ). He twice stood as a candidate for Parliament. In 1900, when Churchill won his first seat in Oldham, Doyle lost a close election to a Radical candidate in Central Edinburgh. He ran for a second time in 1906 as Liberal Unionist candidate for Hawick, Galashiels and Selkirk, but lost again. Though he had, and expressed, strong opinions on many political issues, he was not what we would today call a “political animal,” and would have bristled under the yoke of party discipline. In the end, he thanked the voters “for returning me to the bosom of my family.”

We also know of at least one visit between their respective spouses. On 28 October 1909 Clementine wrote to Churchill from the Crest Hotel, Crowborough, Sussex: “We went, Hodgy Podgy, P.K. & all to have tea with Lady Conan Doyle. The PK had exquisite company manners & looked too lovely making the little Conan Doyle child look such a fat lump.”⁷

Over the remaining years of Conan Doyle’s life, which ended in 1930, there was infrequent correspondence between the two, covering many subjects, and showing an easy familiarity and mutual respect. In 1909, Conan Doyle published The Crime of the Congo, a powerful denunciation of King Leopold’s actions in the Belgian colony. Churchill, as President of the Board of Trade, wrote (undated, but in October that year): “I am very glad that you have turned your attention to the Congo. I will certainly do what I can to help you.” In January 1911, Conan Doyle wrote to Churchill at the Home Office complaining about Chief Constable G.A. Anson of the Staffordshire Police’s letters in the Edalji case, the wrongful conviction of a young Parsee solicitor for maiming horses.

Rejected for service in World War I because he was then 55, Conan Doyle formed a civilian volunteer regiment. He took a great interest in the war, writing letters to the press and to various members of the government, urging defense against submarine warfare and supporting the use of body armour and life jackets. In April 1917 he had a private audience with Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

Another exchange of correspondence between Conan Doyle and Churchill occurred in late autumn 1916, when Conan Doyle proposed the armour plating of military vehicles. Churchill thanked him “for your kindness in writing to me about the caterpillars [an early term for tanks]….There are plenty of good ideas if only they can be backed with power and brought into relief.” Churchill added that the caterpillar was “the beginning of the bullet proof army,” prompting a further letter from Conan Doyle in reply on 4 October, urging Churchill to do what he could to hasten the dissemination of body armour.

Conan Doyle wrote a six-volume history of the Great War, The British Campaigns in Europe 1914-1918, not a particularly distinguished example of his work.⁸ There are about a dozen references to Churchill, mostly approving and mostly referring to Churchill’s foresight as First Lord of the Admiralty. Even by that relatively early date, Conan Doyle well understood Churchill’s seeming need to be at the heart of the action, regardless of the danger:

On the night of the 5th the two other brigades of the [Marine Brigade of the Naval Division under General Paris], numbering some 5000 amateur sailors, arrived in Antwerp, and the whole force assembled on the new lines of defence. Mr. Winston Churchill showed his gallantry as a man, and his indiscretion as a high official, whose life was of great value to his country, by accompanying the force from England.

On 14 December 1923, Conan Doyle wrote to Churchill, to congratulate him on his success in a criminal libel case against Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s “Bosie,” for having said that Churchill’s reassuring statement about the Battle of Jutland in June 1916 had been a corrupt effort to manipulate the stock exchange in the interests of a Jewish syndicate headed by Sir Ernest Cassel, who had given him a reward of £40,000. It was nonsense, Churchill was vindicated, and Lord Alfred was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. “May I say,” Conan Doyle wrote, “how much I sympathise with the monstrous persecution you have endured. The sentence was far too light—a rest cure in a quiet retreat without a bill to pay. This fellow Douglas wrote me an abusive letter once over my psychic work. I answered, ‘It is only your approval which would shock me.’ I have heard no more.” Conan Doyle then bowed to his spiritualist preoccupation: “I wish you would yourself look into this psychic question. It is far the most important thing upon earth & we want leaders of energy.”⁹

The last-known correspondence is a letter from Churchill to Conan Doyle dated 1 July, probably 1929, expressing his pleasure in accepting a copy of The British Campaign in Europe, 1914-1918 and meekly accepting criticisms of his own pronouncements about the Battles of Mons and Le Cateau, admitting, “my phrase about Haig was too sweeping.”

Conan Doyle was an almost daily writer of letters to the press, covering a very wide range of topics. Although his correspondence was heavily skewed towards spiritualism after 1915, there were a number of letters in which he praised or criticised Churchill. To The Times on 25 October 1923, he described “Mr. Churchill’s wonderfully lucid and powerful statement about the Dardanelles expedition which should be noted….In all Mr. Churchill’s closely-reasoned argument which led up to the expedition, the one flaw seems to me to have been that in grasping at an immediate advantage there was not sufficient appreciation of the dangers prepared for our posterity.”

Again to The Times on 15 February 1927, as Churchill published his third volume of The World Crisis on the 1916- 18 period, Conan Doyle wrote: “Personally, I have long recognised that Winston Churchill had the finest prose style of any contemporary, and it is indeed a splendid thing that he should use it to do that which seemed impossible— namely, to give an adequate appreciation of that glorious Army of patriotic volunteers who gave themselves so ungrudgingly to their country’s service.”

On the day of his death, 7 July 1930, the Daily Telegraph published another Conan Doyle observation about the Dardanelles: “Mr. Churchill writes with such power—he is, in my opinion, the greatest living master of English prose—that he may produce a greater effect than the facts warrant. For consider the situation if we had then taken Constantinople and driven Turkey out of the war.”

As we have seen, Adrian Conan Doyle continued the relationship. In the spring of 1946, Adrian sent Churchill his hagiographic pamphlet, The True Conan Doyle, which he’d written to refute the views in Hesketh Pearson’s biography of his father— which, until Adrian decided he didn’t like it, had actually been an authorized biography.

On 4 February 1948, Adrian wrote a lengthy, flattering letter to Churchill, enclosing the galleys of a new Conan Doyle biography by John Dickson Carr: “You knew my father. You are, and he was, a man of giant mental calibre and for such a book as this might I venture to ask that you would agree to write the Introduction? Be it long, be it short, I would ask the Introduction from you and from no other. If you will do this for the memory of my father, I will always be your debtor.¹⁰

Churchill’s secretary, Jo Sturdee, politely replied that WSC, owing to “the pressure of his commitments,” felt “he could not give his attention to this subject which he feels it deserves.” This drew a petulant reply: “…my father would have considered it not only an honour but his devoir to have contributed some word to the memory of one whom he had known and liked and entertained in the past.” That led to a letter from Clementine Churchill to Adrian (27 May 1948), explaining that Churchill’s own writing work and duties as Leader of the Opposition simply did not allow him time to write the introduction.¹¹ The book was published with Dickson Carr’s own foreword and Adrian sent a copy to Churchill, who responded generously on 9 March 1949:

I well remember his taking the Chair for me at my lecture in the Exeter Hall in 1900. I was already one of his fascinated readers. Of course I have read every Sherlock Holmes story, and I think “The Speckled Band” thrilled me most. But the works I like even more than the detective stories are the great historical novels which, like Sherlock Holmes, have certainly found a permanent place in English literature.

Adrian sent Churchill further gifts: Heaven Has Claws and the 1951 British Exhibition Centenary Book.¹²

What was the true relationship between Churchill and Conan Doyle? Perhaps inevitably in view of the age difference, they knew each other socially and politically but met infrequently. Yet they had great respect and admiration for each other, and each man, in his time, was the most famous Briton. Each certainly must rank among the best-loved and best-paid of British writers of his day, and of many other days. It is in the com- pleteness of their character, their contributions to this world, that we must assess them.

They both had a great interest in Napoleon. Doyle said he was “unable to determine whether I was dealing with a great hero or with a great scoundrel. Of the adjective only could I be sure.”

Conan Doyle did not live to see how Churchill conducted himself during World War II. Had he been there, I am certain he would know which noun to use.

ENDNOTES

1. Michael Coren, speech to The Bootmakers of Toronto, Sherlock Holmes Society of Canada, 22 June 1991.
2. Churchill “always had second and third thoughts,” as Manchester, wrote, “and they usually improved as he went along. It was part of his pattern of response to any political issue that while his early reactions were often emotional, and even unworthy of him, they were usually succeeded by reason and generosity.” William Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory (Boston: Little Brown, 1983), 843-44.
3. Kitchener was promoted from Brigadier-General to Major-General in 1896 and was ennobled in 1898. See http://xrl.us/bnbybg.
4. The Westminster Gazette, 26 October 1900. The Pall Mall Club had been a home of the Marlboroughs, where Lord Randolph was born.
5. Conan Doyle was notorious for not dating letters and other correspondence, imposing major inconvenience on scholars.
6. Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales (New York: Henry Holt,1999), 322-23. Catherine Wynne, The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic (Greenwich, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002), passim. Andrew Lycett, Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), 261- 62, 278-79, 291.
7. PK (“Puppy Kitten”) was the Churchills’ eldest child, Diana. Hodgy Podgy was Diana’s Nurse Hodgson. The Conan Doyle child was Denis, eldest of three children from Conan Doyle’s second marriage.
8. His critics have suggested that Conan Doyle was used by the military hierarchy to put their case before the public and that his “open access” to the staff in the field allowed them to manipulate and control the information that he was given. Conan Doyle was also among a group of British writers who wrote war propaganda. See: http://xrl.us/bnbybn. ACD wrote “To Arms” for the War Propaganda Bureau.
9. Conan Doyle to WSC, 14 December 1923. Churchill Archives Centre, CHAR 1/165. The exchange of letters between Lord Alfred Douglas and Conan Doyle was acquired by the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at the Toronto Reference Library in 2010.
10. Churchill Archives Centre, CHUR 2/148/179.
11. As David Reynolds and others have written, Churchill was heavily engaged in the writing of his memoirs of the Second World War, working anxiously against deadlines which had to be met for financial and tax reasons. Perhaps under different circumstances Churchill would have accepted the request.
12. In April 2004 Chartwell house manager Neil Walters advised that Heaven Has Claws was still at Chartwell. The White Company, The True Conan Doyle and the John Dickson Carr life of Conan Doyle, at Chartwell when Churchill died in 1965, were inherited by Churchill’s son Randolph. Mr. Walters had no knowledge of their current where abouts, nor could he trace the Arthur Conan Doyle Centenary edition presented to Churchill by Adrian.