A Point of Contact: Letters to ACD (ACD Journal vol. 10)
A Point of Contact: Letters to ACD [vol. 10] is an article published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 10, may 2000).
The article is a letters/correspondence section made up of several readers' letters on different Conan Doyle-related topics.
A Point of Contact
From Mr Dennis F. Collins, Dundee, Scotland:
Sunnyside Royal Hospital
Barbara Rusch, in 'The Doyle Family Obsession: A Fairy Tale' (ACD 9:143) refers to Sunnyside as '[ ACD's ] euphemism for the mental asylum in which [ Charles Doyle ] was detained'. I must point out, however, that Sunnyside was no euphemism but was actually the name of the farm just outside Montrose, Angus, purchased in 1855 on which the New Asylum of Montrose was to be built. The mental asylum was, and still is, known as Sunnyside.
There is an excellent monograph, A Sunnyside Chronicle: A History of Sunnyside Royal Hospital, produced for its bi-centenary in 1981 by Dr A. S. Presly, the Principal Psychologist.
In April 1988 my wife and I, along with other members of 'The Dancing Men of Edzell' formed at the U.S. Naval Air Force stationed at Edzell, near Montrose, and Richard Lancelyn Green, Geoffrey Stavert, and the late Archie Mitchell, visited Sunnyside and saw the accommodation where ACD's father would have lived. For the wealthy in Victorian days, the suites of rooms were of hotel standard and a patient would be accommodated along with his, or her, man-servant or lady's maid to make life more bearable. Even in the 1930s and 1940s it was relatively common for someone to be ‘put away' at Sunnyside by his family because of certain mental weaknesses, or even a propensity to over-indulge in alcohol-as in the days of Charles Doyle.
On display in the hospital Museum were some delightful cartoons and drawings by Mr Doyle which showed both artistic talent and a genuine wit. I might add that these were infinitely more pleasing than some of the instruments of 'torture' to be viewed, along with distressing details of their medical application!
From John A. Kerr, Sr., Milton, Delaware:
The Films of ACD
It may be of interest to your readers that George Eastman House has released The Lost World in DVD format. Lumivision (Denver, Co) is distributing it with product code DVD0897. This colour-tinted version is 90 minutes long, and uses the 35mm and 16mm films as source material.
The DVD also includes an original theatrical trailer, a promotional film, and a special still-frame library of rare production stills. A bonus feature is the series of excerpts from Willis O'Brien's earliest films.
[ISBN of the DVD is 1-58448-031-9, and details will likely be found at the Slingshot web site, <www.slingshotdvd.com>. The DVD is currently listed at U.S.$14.99. Ed.]
From Derek Hinrich, Epsom, Surrey:
Owen Dudley Edwards included, in his review of the Society's first ten years in the last issue of ACD, a number of criticisms of that part of my article, 'Conan Doyle's Own: The Royal Mallows' [ACD 6] which discussed The Green Flag. I would like to deal with these criticisms.
My observation that Mallow seemed a small place to give its name to a regiment seems to me a perfectly reasonable one, when such cities in Cork and Limerick did not.
I can assure Mr Edwards that I certainly intended 'no disservice to Enniskillen', or to the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, or, for that matter, to the Inniskilling Dragoons. It is some time since I wrote my article and I cannot now recollect why I omitted to mention the 'Skins' as taking their name from a town. I think it must be put down to ignorance of Irish local government. I simply did not check that Enniskillen did not also give its name to a county. I accept that this was careless and not up to the standard of accuracy I strive to attain.
But these points are essentially minor, do not affect my argument, and are no more than academic nit-picking which, though irritating, barely merit reply, were it not for Mr Edwards's other comments, in which he seems to have gone into some sort of emotional spasm, with little regard to what I actually said.
Since I read Mr Edwards's article, I have seen that Chambers' Dictionary, amongst its definitions of 'Fenian', includes the observation that this term is considered offensive by Irish Catholics. Is it its use by me that has upset him?
Robert Kee's The Green Flag, a history of Irish nationalism, was well received when published in 1972. In the three-volume paperback edition published by Quarto in 1976, the second volume, dealing with the years 1858-1916, is sub-titled 'The Bold Fenian Men'. The index to The Penguin Chronology of The Modern World 1763-1965 lists several entries under the heading 'Fenian Outrages', the last referring to an abortive attempt to blow up The Times in March 1883 (just a year before that battle of Tamai which I suggested provided the basis for the battle in Conan Doyle's 'The Green Flag'). It was a term commonly used at the time to describe Irish republicans, so I used it.
Mr Edwards has also taken exception to my partial quotation from Kipling, and thereafter completely ignored the tenor of what I was saying in favour of a diatribe on the mortal sin of suicide. He refers to the quotation as 'chairborne advice'. I suppose Kipling's life was fairly sedentary (I don't know; I have never read a biography of him), but I expect that Mr Edwards's life at Edinburgh and elsewhere has, in view of his ex cathedra pretensions, also been mainly spent sitting down. So was my working life, but in my early teens I experienced the aerial bombardment of London by the Luftwaffe, and subsequently, like most British men of my age, underwent a period of National Service-in my case in the Army-including a period of active service in the Far East. It was a very undistinguished military career, but it provided some experience of the military life. How near the sharp end has Mr Edwards been?
Since he appears ignorant of the realities of nineteenth century colonial warfare, perhaps I should spell them out for him. In warfare between the regular forces of countries that observe the Geneva Convention, desertion to the enemy may be possible but hazardous. Capitulation to such an enemy is also possible. In the nineteenth century, however, the British Army had to deal with enemies, such as the Zulus, Afghan tribesmen, and the Mahdists in the Sudan who followed no conventions and recognised no difference between combatant soldiers and the non-combatant members of the baggage train, etc.
The only course in such encounters was either to conquer or, if things went wrong, to fight to the death and sell one's life dearly. Fortunately, the second option did not often arise for us, even before the days when we had the maxim gun and they did not. But when it did, our wounded were killed, often slowly, and prisoners, though seldom taken, when they were could expect torture, usually to death. This is what happened to the 24th at Isandhlwana, and that part of the 66th which was forced to fall back on Khig at the fatal battle of Maiwand' (how lucky Dr Watson was to have been helped away by Murray to Mandabad). The Russians no doubt experienced it too in recent years, in Afghanistan. The Turkish wounded certainly did at Deraa Station on 28 September 1918 at the hands of the Arab Army-until our 10th Cavalry Brigade put a stop to it.
Safe conducts, if offered by such enemies, were worthless. Consider the fate of the surrendered garrisons of Fort William Henry (where Montcalm was unable to control his [native] Indian allies) and of Cawnpore, or of the events of the retreat from Kabul in 1842- also under a pledge of safe conduct-where only one man, Dr Brydon, out of a column originally numbering 16,000 reached Jalalabad.
For that matter, Colonel Barclay, Conolly's commanding officer, could also testify to the gentle mercies of the 'Pandies' to which he consigned his friend and rival, poor Henry Wood.
I don't suppose that many of the 'C' Company dissidents spoke Arabic-not much call for it amongst the agricultural labourers of County Cork-and so with no means of communication, and in view of the nature of warfare in the Sudan, Conolly's plan was effectively suicidal madness, hence the quotation from Kipling.
Mr Edwards, in his romantic way, goes on to say: 'The Fenians propose to join the (other) savage fanatics not out of desperation, but out of conviction. . . . The mutinous Irish are nurtured on doctrines of common fellowship with the followers of the Mahdi. . . .' Really? The regular Other Ranks of the Victorian army were, in the main, men of humble origins and poor education, whichever part of the then United Kingdom they sprang from. I do not believe that philosophic speculation on the Nature of Society would figure largely in their conversation: it certainly did not in that of the regulars with whom I did my National Service fifty years ago. And would devout Roman Catholics, as Mr Edwards believes 'C' Company to have been, really have had such fellow feeling for fanatical Muslims a hundred years ago?
He goes on: 'At close quarters they turn away from their prospective allies, and in their extremity defect not from but to Britain. That is to say that, having through ignorance and stupidity courted having their throats cut, they seek to save themselves by rejoining the British firing line. Conolly's green flag is but a device to encourage them to do so.
Mr Edwards, incidentally, writes of Conan Doyle's views on suicide as reflected in his fiction. Oddly, perhaps, he does not mention 'The Pot of Caviare', in which a situation similar in principle to that envisaged in the Kipling verse I quoted is set in the China of the Boxer Rebellion.
And no, I do not approve of suicide — which is one reason why I have no sympathy for the course contemplated by Conolly in 'The Green Flag'. He should have known better.
From Dr Roger Straughan, Compton, Newbury, Berks.:
In her article 'The Doyle Family Obsession: A Fairy Tale' (ACD9), Barbara Rusch offers us the conventional sociological line on the Cottingley saga. We are told that to 'understand' the events, we need to place them in their proper cultural, historical, and socio-economic context'. This seems to require our acceptance of sweeping generalisations about 'the Victorians' and their search for 'a spiritual touchstone'. The article assures us that 'we have become too sophisticated to believe in fairies', and of course casts Conan Doyle in the role of a gullible idiot with an 'obsession with fairies' and 'an almost total absence of deductive reasoning' — like Watson, 'perhaps a little dim'.
May I suggest that this type of 'analysis', apart from exemplifying the 'tone of snickering condescension' which Thomas R. Tietze refers to in his letter to ACD 9, totally misses the point in assuming that the Cottingley incident reveals Conan Doyle at his weakest, whereas, in fact, it illustrates some of his greatest strengths.
It requires no intellectual prowess or daring to take for granted that we are 'too sophisticated to believe in fairies', but Conan Doyle was tough-minded enough never to accept blindly the consensus view on anything just because it was the consensus view. Part of his creative genius lay in his ability and willingness to think the unthinkable, whether it be in terms of military tactics, ski-touring, or the possible 'objective existence of a sub-human form of life'-let alone his science fiction conceptions of the earth as a living organism, or of stratospheric monsters terrorising aviators.
There is nothing irrational in formulating bold hypotheses. Indeed, Karl Popper, the greatest modern philosopher of science, argued that the riskier the hypothesis the more likely was it to advance scientific understanding, as it was more easily falsifiable. What is irrational is to rule out a priori such an hypothesis as obvious nonsense, regardless of any possible empirical evidence.
In view of the evidence available to Conan Doyle at the time, including that of photographic experts and not merely 'so-called experts in spirit photography' as Barbara Rusch states, it was entirely rational for him to continue to hold his risky and exciting hypothesis until any counter-evidence appeared. In fact, a careful reading of The Coming of the Fairies demonstrates his caution and open- mindedness: he concludes, for example, that the evidence is not 'as over-whelming as in the case of spiritualistic phenomena', that he has 'given the reader the opportunity of judging the evidence for a considerable number of alleged cases, collected before and after the Cottingley incident', and that 'criticism, so long as it is earnest and honest, must be welcome to those whose only aim is the fearless search for truth'. He is also at pains to emphasise that the possible existence of fairies 'has nothing to do with the larger and more vital question of spiritualism', a distinction which is frequently blurred by critics.
Conan Doyle's position, then, was a much more balanced and rational one than is usually assumed. But have the final chapters of the Cottingley saga, in particular Frances's confession of trickery, bold now provided conclusive counter-evidence against his hypothesis? Actually, no. Barbara Rush is incorrect in stating that Frances in 1981 finally admitted that the entire episode had been something of a practical joke'. The verbatim account of Frances's confession in Joe Cooper's book The Case of the Cottingley Fairies contains the following thought-provoking exchange:
- Cooper: What about the other four? Are they fakes? Frances: Three of them. The last one's genuine. Elsie didn't have anything ready, so we had to take one of them building up in the bushes.
- Cooper: So that's the first photo ever of real fairies? Frances: Yes.
(It is perhaps worth noting that Conan Doyle judged this photograph as 'the most astonishing and interesting' one, partly because it would be particularly difficult to fake.)
So how are we to explain Frances's odd reservation? Again, Conan Doyle would no doubt be happy to leave the reader to judge the evidence, but one suspects that Sherlock Holmes's cerebral tentacle would be set quivering by this unexpected comment from an elderly lady apparently wishing to set the record straight about her childhood pranks.
From Keith Pybus, Pell Wall House, Market Drayton, Shropshire TF9 2AB
'The Bravoes of Market Drayton'
Chambers's Journal, 24 August 1889
As you know doubt know, it is assumed that Conan Doyle first became aware of this 1827 crime whilst working at Ruyton- XI-Towns in 1878.
A town councillor, Nigel Wood, and I, local historian, have spent part of the last two years researching the real life crime. It was so dramatic and chilling, so perfect an example of when thieves fall out, that it is extremely well documented in the local press. By a strange irony, the last report of the Bravoes appears back-to-back in the same newspaper as the first mention of Maria Marten she of The Murder of the Red Barn fame. It is not mere local patriotism which leads me to say that the Bravoes could have been the stuff of a similarly celebrated Victorian melodrama.
Our aim was to investigate whether we could identify the key locations of the crimes, establish whether sufficient of them had survived to justify the publication of a town trail. I had been inspired to a degree by the success of the Jack the Ripper Trail in the East End. Things change very slowly in Shropshire, so we have been able to accomplish our objectives with relative ease. We are about to launch the resulting Murder and Mayhem Trail (the mayhem refers to a town riot over the then new water-closets which had to be suppressed by the military). The material proved so rich that we have even devised a two-handed reading, which we perform for local clubs and societies.
Councillor Woods was wondering whether the Trail would be of interest to your Society. We would be proud to welcome your members to Market Drayton (population 10,000 and celebrated for its historic and reputedly aphrodisiac gingerbread) and provide them with a conducted tour.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
