Conan Doyle and Homes
Conan Doyle and Homes is an article written by Catherine Cooke published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 1, No. 1) in september 1989.
The article reconstructs Arthur Conan Doyle's residences throughout his life, tracing his movements from Edinburgh through medical practice, literary success, illness, and later spiritualist retreat. It argues that mapping these homes clarifies key phases of his career and corrects biographical gaps and errors by grounding Conan Doyle's life in documented places and buildings.
See also the errata written by Dame Jean Conan Doyle who corrected some errors spotted in the text below.
Conan Doyle and Homes
It occurred to me some years past that there was no easy way to find Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's home at any given time. Indeed, not all the biographies even mention all his houses. I therefore thought it worthwhile to conduct a sort of literature survey to pull together the information that is available, and present it together in the hope that others with more information would add to the original so that a complete picture could be built up. It seemed a useful adjunct to add what details could be discovered of each building's subsequent history and current circumstances, if it still existed.
Sir Arthur was born on 22nd May 1859 at the family home, 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, the street so named due to the past settlement of French Hugenots in the area. The rent was £30.9s. a year. In the mid-nineteenth century the building was divided into flats, eight in all, and the area seems to have been quite respectable. It stood on the south side of Picardy Place and survived until 1963. A plaque was put up on 22nd April 1949 by The Edinburgh Evening News bearing the words 'Creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle was born here on 22nd May 1859.' The spot is now a roundabout. Opposite the site of the Doyle's house stands the Abercraig Hotel which now bears a plaque commemorating Conan Doyle's birth.
Edwards talks of the family fleeing 'from flat to flat... with a declining rental and a rising number of children.' In the middle to late 1860's, they moved to 3 Sciennes Hill Place, an ugly and dark cul-de-sac, according to Edwards. The house was in Newington, and not too far from Conan Doyle's school. The rent was £19 per annum.
In 1875 the family moved again, to 2 Argyle Park Terrace, Edinburgh, which had a bow window overlooking the Edinburgh park, The Meadows. Edwards likens this to the infamous bow window in Baker Street. Here the rent was £35 per annum, and it was here that Bryan Charles Waller, apparently in final year as a medical student, joined the family.
Another move came in 1877, this time to 23 George Square, Edinburgh (Edwards: other sources give number 22). George Square was one of the finest residential squares in Edinburgh. Three of the four sides were demolished in the 1960's to provide for Edinburgh University; the side where 23 stood survived. The building, together with its neighbour, is now owned by the Dominicans and serves as the Catholic Chaplaincy under the Patronage of St. Albert the Great. The rent in 1877 to 1881 was £85 a year; it was paid by Waller. This gave the household all the building except the basement and upper floors, known as 23A and 23B respectively.
During much of this time Sir Arthur was abroad, studying at Stonyhurst Branch School, Feldkirch, in Austria. In 1876 he returned and entered Medical School at Edinburgh. While studying medicine, Conan Doyle worked as assistant to a number of doctors. in the Summer of 1878 he spent three weeks with Dr. Richardson in Sheffield, and four months with Dr. Elliott in Ruyton-XI-Towns, Shropshire. In the Summer of 1879, he worked with Dr. Ratcliffe Hoare at Clifton House. Aston Road, Birmingham now the site of a motor-car business, which bears a plaque in memory of Conan Doyle. After his short stay in Sheffield in 1878. Conan Doyle spent a while staying with relatives at 54 Clifton Gardens, Maida Vale while looking for another post. Dr. Elliott answered his advertisements. 54 Clifton Gardens was owned by James Doyle from about 1870, and he seems to have died there in 1892. It still stands, though now most probably split into flats, the third house on the north side from the corner with Randolph Avenue.
In 1880 the Doyle family moved again, this time to 15 Lonsdale Terrace, Edinburgh. Dr. Hoare again employed young Conan Doyle in 1880 and also, after his graduation, in September 1881 and from February to April 1882.
Between May and June 1882 Conan Doyle was employed as assistant to Dr. George Budd and lodged at his house at 6 Elliott Terrace, The Hoe, Plymouth. The Practise was at 1 Durnford Street, Stonehouse, Plymouth. In his autobiography Sir Arthur writes of this period, using the fictitious name of Cullingworth for Dr. Budd, 'a strange character' as he calls him. He gives us a description of his own room in the practise, 'a room furnished with one table and two chairs, in which I could take surgical or other cases which he did not care to handle.' Dr. Budd took exception to certain private correspondence between Conan Doyle and his mother which he read and asked his assistant to leave, though not admitting the real reason until later as part of a strange revenge for imagined wrongs.
Sir Arthur felt that conditions at Plymouth and Portsmouth must be quite similar and, since he knew the former, he determined to set himself up in his own practise in Portsmouth. For his first week or so he took lodgings the location of which is not known. He then set about locating his own future practise, with the aid of a shilling map of the town purchased from the local Post Office on which he plotted all empty houses and existing practises. He thus found his new house, No. 1 Bush Villas, Elm Grove, Southsea, previously occupied by a dentist, John E. Palmer, and his family, at a cost of £40 a year. The building was one of two narrow houses of three storeys which stood on the south side of the road between the Bush Hotel and St. Paul's Baptist Church which had been opened only the previous year. He proceeded to furnish his new house with second-hand furniture picked up in Portsea for about £4. One room in the front he fixed up for patients with a table; the room became both kitchen and dining room. Upstairs he put a 'bed of sorts' and a matress. His brass plate from Plymouth and 'a red lamp on tick' completed the practise.
Conan Doyle lived in Bush Villas for just over seven years to December 1890, during which time he established himself, married Louise Hawkins and here they had their first child, Mary. By the mid-1920's the building had been renamed Doyle House by the landlord. It was destroyed in a German fire raid on 10th January 1941 along with the church and the hotel. On 17th November 1982 a plaque was erected on the building which now stands on the spot, a low-rise block of Council flats, jointly by the City Council and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London: 'Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle M.D. practised from 1882 until 1890 at No. 1 Bush Villas which formerly stood on this site. It was here that the first Sherlock Holmes story was written.'
From 5th January to 9th March Conan Doyle and his wife travelled to Vienna where he studied the eye. On their return to London they rented a flat at 23 Montague Place, Russell Square, Bloomsbury, moving in around 24th March 1891. The building, which stood on the north side, was demolished in 1908 to make way for the approach of the British Museum. The site is now occupied by the Senate House complex of London University.
Conan Doyle again looked for rooms in which to practise opthamology and settled on 2 Devonshire Place, not far from Harley Street: 'There for £120 a year I got the use of a front room with part use of a waiting-room. I was soon to find that they were both waiting rooms...'. Conan Doyle, according to Memories and Adventures, sat in his room in Devonshire Place from 10a.m. to 3 or 4 p.m. every day, and it was here that he formed the idea of taking a character and writing a series of stories, each complete in itself, to combine the interest of the serial with the attraction of the short story: Sherlock Holmes shortly appeared in The Strand; the rest is history.
Within a couple of months, Sir Arthur contracted a severe bout of influenza, nearly dying. Surveying his life he decided to devote himself to his first love — writing. Once up and about again he began to search for his new home, finding 'a suitable house, modest but comfortable, isolated and yet one of a row' at 12 Tennison Road, South Norwood. The Conan Doyles abandoned London and moved in on 25th June 1891 (though in his autobiography Conan Doyle gives the date as August). The house still exists as a private house, externally at least, little changed. A GLC plaque commemorates Conan Doyle's time there.
In 1893 Louise developed consumption. Once the diagnosis was confirmed the family left Norwood, sometime after May, and spent the next two years travelling in Switzerland and Europe where the air was more conducive to a cure. In 1896 Conan Doyle purchased South View Lodge, Kent Road, Southsea, though there is no evidence that he or his family ever lived there. For several years a friend and colleague of Sir Arthur, a Dr. Vernon Ford, lived at the house.
On one of his periodic visits back home Conan Doyle met the author Grant Allen, who told how his own consumption had been markedly improved by the soil and air of Hindhead in Surrey, then in its infancy as a town. Conan Doyle, who had resigned himself to the idea of an unnatural life at foreign health resorts, was delighted at the idea of living again in England and promptly rushed to Hindhead, purchased a plot, put an old friend, Mr. Bull of Southsea in charge of the architectural work, chose the builder and set the construction in motion before leaving England for Egypt in the autumn of 1895. Louise, too, brightened at the thought of returning to England.
They returned in May 1896 to find the house, to be called Undershaw, unfinished. They spent about a year (May 1896 to May 1897: Pearson talks of 'one year', Higham of 'several quiet months from May 1896') in a rented, unfurnished house, Greyswood Beeches at Haslemere, the Norwood home having been sold through friends during their time abroad. (Though Carr calls the house 'Greywood Beeches', the address given on several letters collected by Gibson and Green is 'Greyswood Beeches' and this seems more likely to be correct.)
In fact, this period is somewhat confused. According to Carr, the family moved to a guesthouse, Moorlands, in Hindhead in January 1897 to be able to supervise the works more closely. Both he and Higham date the move into Undershaw as October 1897; Nordon in both the original French and in the English translation gives the move to Undershaw as October 1896. Conan Doyle himself puts the move to Moorlands as 'the early months of 1897', and the move to Undershaw as 'about June of that year.'
Undershaw, on the south-west comer of the cross-roads of the A3 and the A287, is now a hotel and substantially unchanged, apart from a new wing added after Sir Arthur's time. The hall boasts a massive window detailing all the arms of the family tree except Conan Doyle's mother's; these have a window to themselves half-way up the staircase opposite. According to the story told by the owners, they were accidentally missed from the main window and hastily added to the stair window to avoid insult! The whole house was designed to make life easy for Louise — the stairs were built wide and shallow, the door knobs need not be turned to open doors merely pushed or pulled. Conan Doyle himself had two bed-rooms. One had an inter-connecting door with Louise's room, and here Conan Doyle started the night. Once he was sure that she was settled, he moved to the other. Louise died here in 1906 and is buried in the churchyard at nearby Grayshott (along with Mary Josephine and Kingsley Conan Doyle). The garden at Undershaw, and especially its steep curving drive, was severely hit by the great storm of October 1987 when many trees were lost.
In 1907 Conan Doyle remarried, taking Jean Leckie as his wife. They leased Undershaw and moved to Crowborough. where Jean had relatives. Conan Doyle bought Windlesham, nick-named 'Swindlesham' by his friends since he purchased it with money he had recovered after being defrauded of it! It remained the family's main home and it was here that Sir Arthur died on 7th July 1930. Both he and Lady Conan Doyle were initially buried in the garden near the garden-hut he had used as a study. When Windlesham was sold in 1955, the graves were moved to the nearby church at Minstead. It is now Windlesham Manor Residential Hotel and bears a plaque stating 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Author (1859-1930) lived here from 1907 onwards.'
According to Pearson it was about this time, 1907 or 1908, that Conan Doyle took a London flat at 15 Buckingham Palace Mansions, Buckingham Palace Road. However, the directories of the time do not list Sir Arthur until 1923; in 1922 the flat was empty; before that a Miss Stevenson is listed for number 15. The flat remained in Conan Doyle's name to 1930; from 1931 it was put in Lady Conan Doyle's name. In 1935 it was vacant and seems to have been split into two, for from 1936 a Miss B. MacAndrew has flat 15A and from 1937 a Mrs. A. M. Hall has number 15. In fact a number of plans of flats in the budding survive in the City of Westminster Archives, though unhappily not those of flat 15. The flats were extremely spacious. The available plans show two basic layouts, both with three or four bedrooms and large reception rooms, nearly 23 feet by 16 feet in some cases. Some of the plans refer to drainage alterations, not surprising since they were drawn up by the City of Westminster Public Health Department, but many detail the conversion of one original flat into two, confirming that this was what happened to number 15. Indeed, all these conversions were carried out in the early to mid-1930's. Partly because of these conversions and partly because of the lack of more than about fifteen out of a total of at least thirty-nine flats' plans, it is impossible to reconstruct the layout of the block. It does seem to have had four floors above the ground floor and a basement, the latter housing the porter's flat. It seems likely that flat 15 was on the third floor.
Buckingham Palace Mansions stood on the north-west side of Buckingham Palace Road between Lower Belgrave Street (or in our time to be more exact, between the passage to Eccleston Place) and Eccleston Street; it ran back as far as Eccleston Place, then Eccleston Street East. It seems to have been vacated by 1974, though 15 and 15A seem to have been vacated by 1971. Belgrave House, which now occupies the site, is listed from 1980.
Conan Doyle also purchased another house, this one around 1926, certainly by November of that year, to provide the total seclusion required for writing and for spiritualism: Bignell House, Bignell Wood, Wittensford Bridge, Hampshire. It was an extremely historic site, habitation dating back thirteen centuries. A small two storey cottage dating to 1700 was attached to the greenhouse: parts of the building were Saxon, these were incorporated into the living-room. Conan Doyle rebuilt the house in red brick, faced with wood beams and white plaster. Ivy and Virginia Creeper were grown up the walls. Locally the house gained a somewhat undesirable reputation due to Conan Doyle's spiritualist activities. Higham even reports that Conan Doyle was felt to haunt the house, producing 'extremely disquieting experiences' for Dr. McAll, his family and the patients of the new private psychiatric clinic opened in the 1950's. An exorcism was performed in 1961 which seems to have ended the manifestations. Bignell Wood is still a convalescent home.
These, then, are the flats and houses which have been linked with the name of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the available literature. Where sources disagree, and it is not an uncommon occurrence, I have taken the word of the one who seems most likely to know the detail. For example, Rodin and Key refer to Argyle Terrace, Edwards to Argyle Park Terrace; Edwards, himself from Edinburgh, seems more likely to be correct. I await confirmation or refutation.
FOOTNOTE:
The Observer newspaper recently reported the sale of a very impressive-sounding ground floor flat at The Grange, 10 Grange Hill, London SE25. The agent's description claimed 'The flat is part of a beautiful, historic listed mansion (once owned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle).....' I have been unable to corroborate this — the agents admit to having no documentation, nor any idea of the dates when Sir Arthur was in possession or if he ever lived there himself; they were merely repeating details given by a previous employee who has now left the firm. The Conan Doyle connection is also news to the Local History section of Croydon Public Libraries. Can anyone supply further details to confirm or deny this claim?
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
- DOYLE, Sir Arthur Conan. Memories and Adventures. 1924. All unattributed quotations are from this work.
- EDWARDS, Owen Dudley. The Quest for Sherlock Homes. 1983.
- GIBSON, John Michael and GREEN, Richard Lancelyn (eds). Letters to the Press. 1986.
- HIGHAM, Charles. The Adventures of Conan Doyle. 1976.
- LAMOND, John. Arthur Conan Doyle: a memoir. 1931.
- NORDON, Pierre Weil. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: L'homme et l'oeuvre. 1964.
- OWEN, Tim and Heather. The Shingle of Southsea and the glades of the New Forest. Sherlock Holmes Journal, 16(1), 1982.
- PEARSALL, Ronald. Conan Doyle: a biographical solution. 1977.
- PEARSON. Hesketh. Conan Doyle: his life and art. 1943.
- RODIN, Alvin E. and KEY, Jack D. The Medical Casebook of Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle. 1984.
- STAVERT, Geoffrey. A Study in Southsea. 1987.
- SYMONS, Julian. Conan Doyle: Portrait of an artist. 1979.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
