Conan Doyle's Own: The Royal Mallow Fusiliers
Conan Doyle's Own: The Royal Mallow Fusiliers is an article written by Derek Hinrich published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6, 1995).
This article investigates the fictional Royal Mallow Fusiliers in Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, arguing, through detailed military-historical analysis, that it corresponds to the Royal Irish Fusiliers. Drawing on campaign history, uniforms, and regimental structure, it reconstructs the real-world model behind Conan Doyle's invention.
Conan Doyle's Own: The Royal Mallow Fusiliers
When I first leafed through the volumes of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes I felt my chest swell with modest pride as I saw in the notes to 'The Adventure of the Crooked Man' that it was said that the regiment therein called the Royal Mallows was 'thought by some to be the second battalion, the Royal Irish Fusiliers'. I do not know how many disciples I may have, but, in the small world of Holmesian studies, I am the originator of this identification.
I joined the Sherlock Holmes Society of London in 1960 and soon afterwards began to wonder if there was any original research which I might contribute to the study of this second 'Matter of Britain'. As military history is another among my interests, I presently considered the case of the Royal Mallows. This regiment, which I came to think of as Conan Doyle's Own, since it is his own invention amongst fictional regiments of the British Army, figures to a greater or lesser degree in three of his short stories. It is that in which the protagonists of 'The Adventure of the Crooked Man' served, it is integral to 'The Green Flag', a tale of Fenianism and the Sudan, and it is mentioned in passing in 'The Debut of Bimbashi Joyce'. I wondered if there was any way by which I might identify (or confuse) the Royal Mallows with an authentic regiment of the army by studying the three stories.
'The Debut of Bimbashi Joyce' is a slight humorous story (I believe it was the first short story to appear in Punch) about the anxieties and tribulations of a young British officer, Captain Hilary Joyce of the Royal Mallow Fusiliers, seconded to the Ninth Soudanese [sic] of the Egyptian Army on the eve of the reconquest of the Sudan. Bimbashi' is the Egyptian for major: it was commonly the case that a British officer thus seconded took a rank one step higher than his British commission (perhaps in similar vein to the entitlement of a Guards officer in the days of purchase to exchange into the Line at a rank two steps higher than his in the Brigade). The story tells how Bimbashi Joyce has a frustrating encounter with a mysterious Arab prisoner, who is in reality the disguised Sirdar (that is, the Commander in Chief, General Kitchener) and how they dealt with each other.
The other two stories, 'The Adventure of the Crooked Man' in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and 'The Green Flag', are much more substantial, and it was by use of the details from both of these that I was able to arrive at my identification, since only one Irish regiment in the British Army fulfilled the conditions required by the two tales: that of having served in the Crimea, The Indian Mutiny, and the eastern Sudan in the early '80s-while the battle in 'The Green Flag' closely resembled that of Tamai. (I always think that one of the most tantalising sentences in Conan Doyle's stories is Scott's interrupted reminiscence in 'The Three Correspondents'. 'When I was in the broken square at Tamai——')
My whole argument was set out in full in my article 'The Royal Mallows 1854-1888' in the Winter 1962 issue of The Sherlock Holmes Journal. I remember that as I wrote it, I was struck again and again by the extraordinary way in which the results of my research fitted into place. What a piece of serendipity!
Later, I received via Lord Donegall, who at that time was the editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, a letter from an American gentleman resident in Japan questioning my article on the grounds that the regiment in 'The Crooked Man' was called the Royal Munsters in the American editions. I had not known this when I wrote my piece. I explained, however, that Sir Arthur could not have used the name of an actual British regiment in the British edition, and that in any case the regiment in the stories could not have been the Munsters since they were formed from two of the white regiments of the Honourable East India Company's army, which were transferred to the British Army proper in 1861 when the Crown took over the Company's troops and other functions following the Indian Mutiny. They could not, therefore, as 'The Crooked Man' requires, have served in the Crimea.
'John Company's' army, by the way, had six white infantry regiments, recruited mainly in Ireland, which were all transferred to the Irish establishment of the British Army. One of these, however, had originally been raised in Charles II's time as the garrison of Bombay-with Tangier, his dowry on marrying Catherine of Braganza-and would have been one of the oldest regiments of the Army (comparable to the former Royal West Surrey Regiment, originally raised as the Tangier Regiment and once infamous as Kirke's Lambs (see Lorna Doone and Micah Clarke)), had they not been transferred, with Bombay, to the Company.
The Royal Munsters may have been used in the original draft of 'The Adventure of the Crooked Man' for the Strand and been changed just before publication, which was very close to that of the American version. The Green Flag' had been published shortly before, according to the Notes to the Oxford edition of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and so it would have been simple work to effect the change for the Strand.
Mallow is perhaps a strange name for Conan Doyle to have chosen. It retained the initial 'M' of Munster of course, and was set in the same southern part of Ireland, but Mallow is a very small town to lend its name to a regiment in the British Army. It is not as small, admittedly, as Coldstream, but there are special reasons stemming from the Restoration why the Guards regiment bears the name of a small village in the north-east of England. When territorial designations were allotted to infantry regiments in place of numbers in 1881, the only Irish city or town to have a regiment named after it was Dublin (the Royal Dublin Fusiliers). All other Irish regiments bore county or provincial names-Leinster, Connaught, Ulster, and so on.
'The Green Flag' is almost certainly not as well known now as 'The Crooked Man'. It is a very fine example of Conan Doyle's gifts for narration, graphic description, atmosphere and dialogue. In some respects it might be considered old-fashioned now, in a Boys' Own Paper sort of way, but it is of its time-and it is a hundred years old. The spirit of the disaffected Fenian other ranks is wonderfully conveyed-and the Services used to be a common hiding place for ne'er-do-wells. 'The Queen's Own Hard Bargains'. But I have always found it hard to credit that even the most determined Fenian, no matter how desperate. could contemplate deserting to a horde of savage fanatics in the middle of a battle like Tamai, where Kipling's advice to the young British soldier 'wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains' would be just as apposite to anyone cut off-roll to your rifle and blow out your brains'.
By the Army Regulations, 1881 (when numbers went out and names came in). Irish regiments were to wear green facings to their scarlet tunics, but 'Royal' regiments, such as the Mallows, were to wear blue facings. (In the Granada television version of 'The Crooked Man', if memory serves, the Royal Mallow Fusiliers, one of the most famous Irish regiments in the British Army', are shown wearing schapskas and tunics with plastrons, which suggests that Granada had turned them into lancers-but that's another story!)
At the time of 'The Green Flag' the Royal Mallows would probably not have had their new uniforms. Conolly, the Fenian ring-leader, and his fellow recruits on draft to the regiment, would have found themselves in any case issued with khaki in Suakin. But khaki did not become standard issue until 1885 and regiments where it was worn — hitherto principally in India whence, if my identification is accepted. the main body of the Royal Mallows came-made their own by dyeing their white drill summer uniforms with whatever came to hand: tea, coffee, curry powder, tobacco juice. Anything but uniform issue, except within the individual regiment, and then only if the same dye stuff was used throughout at the same strength!
However, if the Royal Mallow Fusiliers had existed beyond the covers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's works, they would no longer all the regiments raised in Southern Ireland were disbanded on the creation of the Irish Free State, now Eire.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
