View source for Letters (ACD Journal vol. 8)


''Letters [Vol. 8]'' is an article published in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998).

This article is a letters page collecting reader corrections, questions, and debates on [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]-related subjects, especially Spiritualism, psychical research, cricket, and archival mysteries. Its centre of gravity is the extended exchange between Peter Cannon and Thomas R. Tietze on [[The Land of Mist]], ESP (Extra-Sensory Perception), scepticism, and [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s Spiritualist beliefs.


== Letters ==
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p118-letters.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 118)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p119-letters.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 119)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p120-letters.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 120)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p121-letters.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 121)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p122-letters.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 122)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p123-letters.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 123)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p124-letters.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 124)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p125-letters.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 125)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p126-letters.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 126)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p127-letters.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 127)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p128-letters.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 128)]]

'''From Mr W. R. Trotter, Haslemere:'''

To my great regret, I discovered, when it was too late to alter, that a serious error had crept into my article '[[Conan Doyle at Hindhead, 1895-1907]]' (ACD7, pp. 8-27). 

In the two-and-a-half lines at the top of page 13, immediately following a quotation from the Surrey Advertiser for 28 January 1899, I speculated about the nature of the forthcoming international peace conference which it announced. There should have been no need for speculation, for quite recently (and much too late to ask for a correction), while doing some research about Bernard Shaw, I came across a full report of the same meeting in the newly-founded Farnham, Haslemere and Hindhead Herald for 30 January 1899 which made all clear. 

The meeting was in fact part of a nationwide 'Peace Crusade' to gain support for the proposal, by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, to hold an International Disarmament Conference at The Hague. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]][[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] was in the chair, the motion was proposed by Charles McLaren MP, and opposed from the floor by Shaw. In his opening speech, [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] made it clear that he strongly supported the Tsar's action. The motion was carried, and the Disarmament Conference duly took place in 1899. I can only offer my sincere apologies to any readers who may have been misled by my mistake. 


'''From Mr Edwin Butler'''<br />
59 Stirling Road, London N22 5BL: 

The March (1998) issue of The Book and Magazine Collector mentioned the transfer of the Psychic Bookshop and Museum to the Friendship Centre. I was present when, in early 1932, [[Jean Elizabeth Leckie|Lady Doyle]], [[Mary Louise Conan Doyle|Mary Doyle]], Sir Robert Gower, and W. R. Bradbrook finalised the transfer to Stephen Foster, proprietor of ''The Friendship Centre''. 

Later, when Estelle Stead moved from the Stead Bureau in Smith Square to Herne Bay, the Stead Library was also transferred to ''The Friendship Centre''. The books of the three libraries (''Conan Doyle Memorial'', ''W. T. Stead Memorial'', and ''Friendship Centre'') were so merged as to be indistinguishable. 

When war came in 1939, Stephen Foster moved to Balcombe in Sussex, taking some items with him. What remained of the libraries moved to the healer Ronald Beesley in Norfolk Square, W.2. 

What I have been unable to discover is what happened to the Museum? There were two large oil paintings, one a portrait of Sir Arthur; a large ewer in reddish-brown glass (an 'apport'); many smaller items including the wax gloves from the 'Margery' (Crandon) circle, the interlocked Zollner rings of different woods, and a collection of flintstones so split as to display alphabet and numerals. white on black in the stones themselves-the label read, to the best of my recollection, no claim is made as to the origin of these stones, but explanations are invited from geologists and others'. 

I have heard rumours that (a) the Museum items were stored in London and destroyed by bombs in the 'blitz' — but no precise location indicated; or (b) that items were purchased by Americans — but again unspecified. 

Can any reader throw light on the whereabouts of Museum items? 


'''From Mr Laurence Price, Weston-Super-Mare:'''

I have found the article '[[The Land of Mist: Personal Reflections on Conan Doyle's 'Failed' Novel|The Land of Mist: Personal Reflections on Conan Doyle's "Failed Novel"]]' by Thomas R. Tietze, and other items in the latest journal which relate to the Spiritualist beliefs of [[Arthur Conan Doyle]], to be most absorbing and enlightening. 

I wonder where we all, as members, stand on this major aspect of his life and beliefs? For certainly, it affected his creative writing and the nature of his output in his later years, most controversially with. The Land of Mist, as bad and unreadable to me as any Victorian tract. or work of propaganda, with the tragic sacrifice of the great Challenger to the cause': but, nevertheless, by reason of his confrontational nature ultimately the most understandable choice for 'conversion'. There is a great deal of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]] in him, certainly in his principled, if exaggerated explosive stands against all comers, in what he believes in or knows to be true; and [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]] liked him enough to pose as Challenger in photographs in the early editions of The Lost World. All of what we read in [[The Land of Mist]], this nadir in [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]]'s output, can be perhaps more easily digested than in his Spiritualist books and pamphlets. This overriding aspect of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]]'s life needs more study, without ridicule, if we are truly to understand more of the man himself. I have enjoyed the way the subject has been opened up in the Journal. I hope the debate will continue. 


'''From Mr Peter Cannon, London:'''

I wish to offer some personal reflections on Thomas R. Tietze's fascinating article, '[[The Land of Mist: Personal Reflections on Conan Doyle's 'Failed' Novel|The Land of Mist: Personal Reflections on Conan Doyle's "Failed" Novel]]' (ACD7). Having read [[The Land of Mist]] shortly beforehand, I found myself largely agreeing with Mr Tietze's analysis of this polemic in fictional guise. On one significant point, however, I take issue. 

Mr Tietze draws a parallel between the indifference, if not antagonism, toward Spiritualism in [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s day and the current prejudice against serious ESP research, which he feels the scientific world and the responsible media have unjustly neglected. While he does not go so far as to say he believes we can communicate with the dead, he is confident that Sir Arthur was at least on to something real. Like [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] with his opponents, he is exasperated by today's critics of the paranormal', who would seem to take parapsychology no more seriously than, say, creation science with its claim that the earth is about six thousand years old.

I admit my own bias — I am a sceptic. I have supported the ''Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal'' (or CSICOP), who have made it their business to examine and usually debunk extraordinary claims of the paranormal. Perhaps the most militant CSICOP debunker is the magician James Randi, whom Mr Tietze casts as an anti-ESP villain. Randi once secretly planted subjects trained to cheat in a major ESP experiment at an American university. Pleased by their positive results, the researchers did not detect the sabotage until it was too late. The subsequent exposé was covered at length in the [[The New York Times|New York Times]]. 

Mr Tietze asserts that his late friend Charles Honorton, in a posthumously published article in a respectable psychological journal, has proved ESP's existence. After a century of psychic investigation, a researcher has finally produced results to satisfy the sceptics, especially regarding replicability. In his annoyance over the lack of media attention to this historic event, Mr Tietze glides over the fact that the verdict is still not in. Most scientists have yet to be convinced. It would seem that Honorton's results will have to be replicated in further experiments before there is cause to celebrate. 

Some months ago in the Daily Telegraph, one of Britain's leading newspapers, I read a story on the front page of the science section reporting on this or perhaps a similar replicable ESP experiment. The article's author declared that the sceptics were at last going to have to eat crow in the face of this incontrovertible evidence. The Telegraph, by the way, runs a regular column on fringe or strange science. It has given psychic Uri Geller a cover story in its Sunday magazine, if with nary a mention of James Randi's debunking book, The Truth Behind Uri Geller. Here at least is one important mainstream publication that pays heed to such phenomena. 

Even the august New York Times, if I may digress a little further, once ran a front-page photograph of what appeared to be the body of a pleiosaur-like creature, caught in a fisherman's net in the Pacific. Shades of The Lost World! A day or two later The Times reported that scientists had determined that the thing was a badly decayed sea turtle, missing its shell. One can be sure that The Times will print no more 'dinosaur' photos without a lot of careful checking first. In contrast, the other night on tabloid TV, I saw a programme on marine monsters that showed this same creature caught in a net, complete with an 'expert' claiming it was a prehistoric survival. Nothing was said about dead sea turtles. 

Of course, ESP, the ability to transmit information by some unknown means from individual to individual, is not so easily dismissed. The modern laboratory is a far cry from the séance room. To date, though, other seemingly persuasive claims for ESP have not stood up to scrutiny. Past experience suggests that Honorton's results will turn out to be ultimately flawed. On the other hand, if they are not flawed-if indeed enough qualified researchers are able to confirm his findings then serious media attention is sure to follow and I will be the first to congratulate Mr Tietze. 

But would [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] then be vindicated? For me it is an enormous leap from demonstrating that living people can communicate psychically to proving that the dead can communciate with the living. It is one thing to show that a chicken can fly, quite another that a chicken can fly to the moon. One might at best consider [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] 'right' in the sense, for example, that Mary Baker Eddy was 'right' about the power of mind power of mind over matter. The medical establishment has since come to recognize along with Mrs Eddy that a sick person can often get better with the help of a healthy attitude. In the meantime, devout Christian Scientists still die of easily treatable diseases such as skin cancer. 

In his desire to lend legitimacy to [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s efforts to prove Spiritualism by linking them to later efforts to prove the existence of ESP, Mr Tietze ignores another part of this legacy. I am afraid the Spiritualists' heirs are also the psychic channelers, the spoon-benders, the alien abductees. Common sense tells us that these people, now as then, are either fraudulent or delusional. The only real change from early in the century is that today such things appeal to an audience well beyond the poor and uneducated. Instead of losing a fortune and ruining his health, [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|Sir Arthur]] if he were alive today could be making. a fortune on his books and lectures. No doubt, too, he would be far less taken with the honest but difficult statistical work of a Charles Honorton than with the sensational claims of, say, a Whitley Streiber, author of Communication and other 'true' stories. A man who could believe in the Cottingley fairies would have little trouble, I suspect, believing in extraterrestrial intruders. 

Why [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] 'knew' he had scientific proof of a spirit world is a deeper question than whether or not that spirit world (or ESP for that matter) objectively exists. His critics were right to attack him as naïve and gullible. He campaigned nobly on the behalf of a shady cause. He erred in treating as a science a belief system best viewed as a religion. Had he appealed to faith rather than to logic he might have made more converts. 

That said at the risk I suppose of giving the kind of offence Sherlockians tend to take when anyone dares to suggest that Holmes and Watson are fictional characters I remain an ardent admirer of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]. I used to be simply a Sherlock Holmes fan, but in recent years I have come to appreciate the great man who created the great detective and gave the world so much else besides. While [[Dame Jean Conan Doyle]] was alive, I can understand members of this Society keeping a tactful silence on the subject of her father's Spiritualism. Now that the last of his children has passed to the other side, however, I hope that his followers can face this controversial aspect of his career squarely and move beyond the type of prickly apologetics offered by Mr Tietze. 


'''Thomas R. Tietze responds:'''

I am warmly appreciative of the attention Mr Cannon pays to the intentionally provocative notions I have offered in the article under discussion and in two or three other places. I wish to state them again more clearly, and, in doing so, I hope to show that the differences. between Mr Cannon's position and my own are not so great as may at first appear. 

1. I don't know if [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]] 'was at least on to something real' in terms of survival of bodily death. I do not by any means "believe" in post-mortem survival. I am, through decades of study of the rich literature of psychical research, including several historical cases that were also available to [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]], impressed with the possibility. I'm also deeply interested by the complex philosophical difficulties that stand in the way of conceptualizing existence apart from the body. But I do know that there are as well several cases in which [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]] believed on too slender evidence that he was confronting the miraculous, when in all probability he had been imposed upon by trickery. The prevalence of fraud in the history of mediumship is discussed in my article (pp. 110-111), along with my expressed wish that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]] had represented the issue of fraud and delusion with greater emphasis in [[The Land of Mist]] (pp. 114-8). That he failed to do so, I argued, weakened the believability of the story. 

2. I don't think that The Amazing Randi, a perfectly charming and brilliant artist and a writer who has been kind enough to cite my work in his books dealing with psychical research, is a villain of any sort. The exposure of lax conditions that allowed fraud to take place in a major ESP experiment at an American university' was indeed discussed in the New York Times on 15 February 1983, under the title, 'Magician's Efforts to Debunk Scientists Raises Ethical Issues". The story in brief is that two teenaged magicians were encouraged by Randi, as part of his assault on parapsychology called 'Project Alpha', to convince Washington University physicist Dr Peter Phillips that they were able to bend spoons through psychic powers. Phillips, whose school had recently been awarded a large grant from the McDonnell Foundation, had had no parapsychology and was easily taken in during his preliminary past experience in observations. Though Randi asserted that Phillips 'proceeded to publish scientific papers that hailed their powers', in fact all that had appeared in print was a transcript of a talk Phillips gave at a meeting, not in a parapsychological journal. Prominent psi critic Dr Ray Hyman, the only one who has really tried to confront the evidence in close detail, noted in the same article, 'No major parapsychologists went on record about the kids'. Further, Dr Stanley Krippner, a prominent parapsychologist who was then the president of the official organization of workers in the field, the Parapsychological Association, expressed his concern over sloppy experimental designs by lauding Randi's hoax as a 'magnificent experiment which was much needed'. Though I still wish Randi and other CSICOP critics would focus constructively on the published data, I think he brings a lot of fun as well as annoyance to his rôle as gadfly. I brought him up in my paper because I find it amusing that so much of Randi's efforts to 'debunk' what he and his colleagues in CSICOP characterize as 'paranormal' are presented to audiences who have never even heard of the outrageous pseudo-psychic claim he is about to 'expose'. I may be completely wrong, but I don't see that the public in general has any interest (beyond idle curiosity) in the truth or falsity of the claims that CSICOP hopes to expose-and that was my point. 

3. It's been a long time since I've used the word 'proof, apart from its alternative connotation related to other sorts of spirits. I, along with Mr Cannon, do not think that, in the study of anomalous and (if existent at all) subtle phenomena, any single series of experiments could 'prove' something. Evidence is not proof, and I should be sorry to think that any other of my readers (if existent at all) thought that I was confounding these terms. I agree enthusiastically with Mr Cannon when he says that 'the verdict is still not in. Most scientists have yet to be convinced.' My annoyance with the situation as I see it is that 'most scientists' would first have to have heard that the evidence exists at all. Following that, these scientists or some of them, apparently apart from those who have done the research-would have to set aside what one hopes are productive careers to find the flaws in parapsychological evidence that Mr Cannon is confident will turn up under their scrutiny. Why should they do it? Even should such 'qualified researchers'-whoever they are and however they might be recognized discover no flaws, they would find difficulty in making their case convincing to the scientific public. They would henceforth be discounted as 'believers' and CSICOP would be eagerly on their tails, hoping to save the world from the excesses of credulity. In any case, I am unaware of any great interest the general or scientific public would take in their investigation. Perhaps I am too gloomy and pessimistic about the general interest in the topic itself. What is the combined readership of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and The Skeptical Inquirer? I don't know. 

4. It may be that the entire body of evidence accumulated in the last 50 years of laboratory-based research has been examined carefully and found to be flawed. If so, I am unaware of the existence of such a monumental work. I know that, among others, C.F.M Hansel, Paul Kurtz, and Randi have offered closely reasoned hypotheses to the possibility of ESP, but their suggestions have been dealt with and refuted in reviews published in the mainstream parapsychological journals. Usually, such reviews demonstrate, the critiques of psi research are based on a priori rejection of the possibility of ESP, developed with inaccurate alleged 'data', and presented as if the careful results of the parapsychologists' efforts ought to be classified with astrology, palmistry, or some other marginal crackpot claims. I hope Mr Cannon will take it in good part when I note that the first section of his own letter follows this pattern. He admits to being a sceptic-well, so do I, and have been scolded by the Spiritualist press for my past intransigence-but he has laid the groundwork for his purely negative stance in his previous sentence, in which he subtly connects parapsychology with creationism. Then follows the questionable data sample, in which naïve psi researchers were once upon a time duped by the agents of Randi, during an allegedly formal series of experiments at Washington University, when in fact the episode happened during a 120-hour period of preliminary data gathering by a newcomer in a study which never formally came to light. Given the complex design. of stringent modern ESP experiments, subjects, who have been restricted from having any normal contact with the targets involved, could never have been 'trained' to beat the controls without the active collaboration of the scientists themselves. Lastly, and inevitably, Mr Cannon proceeds to the thoroughly problematic performances of the Israeli illusionist Uri Geller, thought by CSICOPers to be a parapsychological star, when in fact he's never been a subject in any studies published by any major researcher in any major journal. It probably also goes without saying that alleged sea monsters do not constitute a division of parapsychological inquiry, though CSICOP wants you to think so. I lack the cynicism necessary to suppose that such critiques are anything but sincere, but, to one who has spent many years in this field, this sort of thing paints a surrealistic picture of the qualities of the person involved in this branch of inquiry. (To digress for a moment, if only to give Mr Cannon his due, there was one individual who rose in an administrative rôle in this field whose assurance that aliens had visited our planet was based on telepathic interviews he had personally conducted with dolphins. This person is no longer with us if indeed it can be said he ever entirely was... 

5. I agree absolutely with Mr Cannon when he points to the vast gulf that looms between the evidence for ESP and the hypothesis of post-mortem survival. What I intended to do (and clearly failed to do) was to suggest that the data for ESP and the psychological, physiological, and pharmacological variables that appear to attend upon it, could reasonably have been predicted to have been more thoroughly understood within a few years of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s lifetime. had we continued to find psi intriguing as a viable proposition. (J.B. Rhine, the famous inventor of the term ESP and the principal figure in the scientific investigation of the topic, told me that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] held him in such loathing for his rejection of the Margery mediumship that in 1927 [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] bought an announcement in a Boston newspaper saying 'J.B. Rhine is an Ass'. I have not seen this. notice, but I think it a significant expression of the impatience our author felt with the type of caution and care present in the scientific investigation of psi.) In my paper on The Land of Mist I tried to show that the Spiritualists themselves must carry some of the blame for the tardy progress of our knowledge of these elusive data, particularly for their inability to see that the tightening of conditions in the study of the anomalous could only be beneficial. A further complication entered when ESP began to seem a likelihood. Henceforth, as J.B. Rhine himself argued, any or all material recovered from a mediumistic session might be attributed to the medium's possible access to the sitter's thoughts through 'ordinary' ESP. As a consequence of a number of factors, in the decades following [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]]'s life, survival research was intentionally placed on a back burner. Apart from the work that analyzes cases of alleged reincarnation collected by Dr Ian Stevenson and his colleagues, almost all of the evidence that suggests the possibility of survival is 75 to 100 years old, and the topic itself has not been addressed by most scientists working in the field today. This is what I mean when I say that we have fumbled the ball tossed us by such optimistic Spiritualists as [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]]. I do not know that some part of the consciousness of some humans may survive death for some time while communicating imperfectly with the living. Neither does Mr Cannon. We have not tried to find out. Again, this does not seem to be anything to [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s discredit. 

6. I agree with Mr Cannon when he connects [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]]'s 1920s enthusiasm for the fairies as little different from our contemporary X-Files style interest in alien abduction. He recalls the sensational spoon-benders and channelers of the mid-1970s, none of whom appear (so far as I know) in the mainstream, cautious, (perhaps) dull literature. Mr Cannon points out quite rightly that our modern crackpots and frauds are linked thematically and historically to those endorsed in some cases by [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]]. (I thought, in fact, that I had overstressed the issue of fraud in the article. I was wrong.) I regret to agree also with Mr Cannon when he suggests that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] might also be likely to have fallen victim to today's hucksters, and that the reality or unreality of the phenomena themselves is a very different question from [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]]'s apparent need to believe in them. (Though I am not a mathematician, and my school grades will support this claim, I have to say I 'believe in' mathematics without fully understanding it. Is this evidence of a 'need' on my part?) Further, I must agree with Mr Cannon when he suggests that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]] treated as a science a belief system best viewed as a religion'. In fact, I concluded precisely the same argument with these words: 'It is ironically possible... that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] could have written a more successful novel, if only he had not been so deeply committed to rationality' (p. 109). 

7. In other words, if [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]] had composed a novel about an agnostic bishop and a young vicar with a crisis of faith, he'd probably be read today with greater appreciation and sympathy than having told a tale of ectoplasm and vague spirit messages. But whatever the critical reception, I wish I had been able to make clear my main point: If it is undoubtedly true that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] let himself believe more than the evidence warranted, he at least kept an open mind about the possibilities of our human nature that we have since. replaced with what we call 'common sense'-but which we might just as well term 'uninvestigated alternative assumptions'. Today, any child can tell that the fairy photographs are faked. (At least every child I've asked has been able to.) It's obvious — and I thought thoroughly discussed in my review — that fraud and delusion were manifest in [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]]'s time. They are, as Mr Cannon rightly points out, still with us. I wanted to try another approach, to try to see it as [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]] might have seen it. My major point is that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] was working with the evidence he had at hand-a far different body of material, collected in far other circumstances than our own. The difference lies. in the context of the many great intellectuals of the beginning of this century who turned their energies to this question. Under the supposition that the earlier data were actually true, [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s speculations give evidence of a reasonably creative though casually daring set of contributions to what he assumed would be a field of inquiry continually and more thoroughly investigated in subsequent generations. But it wasn't. 

8. Finally, Mr Cannon makes another point that concerns my motives for opening up this most embarrassing and problematic of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s many interests. I want to say that his concluding implication that I have in some way represented the [[The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003)|ACD Society]]'s below-the-surface corporate wish to toady to the [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] family's religious tradition is utterly without foundation. At no time. have the editors of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]] even suggested that I soften my discussions of frequent fraud in the history of mediumship, nor have I ever felt the need to gloss over the obvious weaknesses in Spiritualistic claims. My many past publications in other venues on the history of psychical research have often centred on the exposure and discussion. of fraud. What I have tried to do most recently in this journal is to offer another way to interpret [[Arthur Conan Doyle|ACD]]'s flights of imagination from the tiresome tradition of imputed gullibility, blindness, or even feeble-mindedness so often attributed to him. 

It is in his charming and invigorating and frustrating complexity that the real character of [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]] will be most fruitfully revealed. And it is through such challenging, thoughtful, and sincere responses as Mr Peter Cannon offers that we all will be compelled to consider our subject more thoroughly. 


'''From Mr Richard Streeton'''<br />
'''President, The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians:'''

[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s innovative mind was seldom still, and even his hobbies and pursuits were not spared. The informative article by Clifford Jiggens on [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] and his cricket in the 1994 Journal reminded me that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] once advocated that left-handed batsmen should be barred from the game.'''

In an article entitled '[[Some Recollections of Sport]]', which appeared in [[The Strand Magazine]] for September 1909, [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] wrote: 'One reform is badly needed in order to improve cricket as a spectator game. It is the abolition of left-handed batting. The left-handed bowler hurts no one, but the batsman is undeniably a perfect nuisance, delaying the game and giving the field an immense amount of extra trouble. Why should he be permitted to do this when he is in so immense a minority? ... In most cases a lad who shows. an inclination to be left-handed can be easily trained into using his right hand, and so, by encouraging him in the beginning the matter can be set right at the source. ...'

The article goes on to describe left-handed batting as 'the perpetuation of a nuisance which a little foresight and firm legislation could easily remove." 

It is probably fair to claim that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s suggestion is not widely known in present-day cricket circles. Those familiar with it usually regard his view as heretical. Cricket enthusiasts have always enjoyed the grace and style many left-handers often possess. In different eras players such as Woolley, Sobers, Gower, and Lara have even impinged on the consciousness of many non-enthusiasts. In current English cricket about one in seven players bats left-handed, but roughly one third of these bat low in the order, and fail to stay at the crease for long. 

''Letters for inclusion in [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society|ACD]] should be sent to the Editors at P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia, Canada VOK 140, or by Fax to (250) 453-2075, or by e-mail to ashtree@ash-tree.bc.ca''











{{footer_acd_society_article}}
{{footer_periodicals}}