Hon. Capt. A. A. K. Conan Doyle

From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia

Hon. Capt. A. A. K. Conan Doyle is an article published in the Eton College Chronicle on 27 february 1919.

Arthur Alleyne Kingsley Conan Doyle was the first son of Arthur Conan Doyle.


Hon. Capt. A. A. K. Conan Doyle

Eton College Chronicle (27 february 1919, p. 572)

No boy has ever passed through his years at school with a more persistent or finer purpose than Kingsley Conan Doyle. Soon after he came to Eton, where he was in Mr. Vaughan's House, in 1906, he determined to devote his life, though no one here probably except his tutor knew it, to medical research. Nothing disturbed this resolve, or his equanimity. "He seemed," as a companion expressed it, "so utterly removed above the many petty things of life"; and he shewed in his character a delightful combination of strength and gentleness, independence and loyalty, and anyone who won his friendship never lost it.

On leaving Eton in 1910, he spent a year at Lausanne, and then was a medical student at St. Mary's Hospital till the outbreak of war, when he went out with the 1st City of London Medical Transport to Malta as private and driver. Recalled in 1915 to train with the O.T.C. at Cambridge, he was gazetted in due course to the 1st Hants, and served with them in France, where he was wounded in July, 1916. Returning to the front in 1917, after a bombing course in England ("he could infuse energy," said an onlooker, "into the laziest man "), he took part in much lighting, including the third battle of Ypres, and was made Brigade observation officer on the staff. Soon afterwards he was released to finish his medical studies, and went to St. Thomas's Hospital where he died of pneumonia last autumn, just as he was reaching the ideal of his life — the relief of human suffering.

"There is one adjective," wrote the commander of bis company in the Hants Regiment, "more applicable to Doyle than to any other officer whom I met soldiering in France; and that adjective is 'thorough.'"