Conan Doyle and Stonyhurst
Conan Doyle and Stonyhurst is an article written by Owen Dudley Edwards published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6, 1995).
This detailed scholarly study reassesses Arthur Conan Doyle's years at Stonyhurst school, examining the Jesuit influence on his intellectual, moral, and literary development. It argues that, despite his later criticisms, Stonyhurst profoundly shaped his imagination, themes, characters, and even names in his fiction.
Conan Doyle and Stonyhurst
The page from the register of admissions to Stonyhurst, showing Conan Doyle's arrival at the College (for admission to Hodder Preparatory School) on 15 September 1868. (Note the incorrect birthdate, which is given as May 25/59.)
The prospectus which Mary Doyle would have considered prior to sending ACD to Stonyhurst College in 1868.
Hodder Place, the former Preparatory School for Stonyhurst College. Hodder no longer exists as a school and has been turned into private residences.
This article first appeared in The Stonyhurst Magazine, Vol. 42 (1981-2), and is reproduced by kind permission of that magazine's editor.
I
Among the many great names in the roll of the former pupils at Stonyhurst College, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle holds an eminently unhonoured place. No word of his passing or career appeared in The Stonyhurst Magazine after his death in 1930. He insisted in his own autobiographical writings that he began to lose his faith while at school and his experience as a medical student at Edinburgh University coincided with the apparent completion of the process. His biographers — a markedly unsatisfactory body whose speed with opinion is generally in inverse proportion to their relevant research — have translated his cold but fair-minded verdict on his schooling in Memories and Adventures into a hyperbole he would have denounced with anger. He certainly thought Stonyhurst no worse than most other public schools, and in its success in repressing sexual promiscuity and practice among the boys, far better: yet Mr Charles Higham, in some ways the shrewdest of the biographers, happily writes it off as a 'Dickensian hell'. Conan Doyle's crusade for Spiritualism in the 1920s brought him into sharp conflict with Catholic writers, notably with a former schoolmate, by then the Rev Herbert Thurston, S.J., and one of the last writings of his life was a forceful attack on Roman Catholic denunciations of Spiritualism, in the course of which he denounced auricular confession for young women in particular. After his death, his son Adrian, born when his father was 50, became an increasingly brooding and explosive presence over the heads of future biographers until his own death. He was passionately insistent on their adhering to his picture of a father he had known only for his first twenty years, and his anxiety to conceal the alcoholic condition and ultimate medical incarceration of Conan Doyle's father Charles, together with attributing a grand aristocratic nature to the Irish Catholic landlady's daughter who became Conan Doyle's mother, made for a forest of mythologising on the early years. With Stonyhurst, neither Adrian's Spiritualist beliefs nor his English social ambitions had any sympathy, and biographers were expected to deduce little of the literary achievement from Stonyhurst apart from memories of bogeys, obscurantism and superstition. The biographers themselves, before and after Adrian's death, were free to range in portraiture of the Jesuits derivative of every pet adversion of their own from Wackford Squeers of Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby to Amos of the Quivering Brethren in Cold Comfort Farm. Writers who regard Jesuits as being all things to all men find it easy to employ such elasticity in describing them. The Jesuits, aware that their literary reputation in English popular writing has not erred on the side of charity since Titus Oates gave the world his version of an education in Salamanca, seem to have made no attempt to reply.
The situation does justice to nobody, least of all to the reading public, who ought to be told a version of the great writer's education as close to the truth as can be reasonably determined. Both to understand Conan Doyle's cultural development, and to see how much his literary life owed to Stonyhurst, a critical reassessment is essential. St Ignatius Loyola's famous remark about the permanent influence of a correct education is worth taking well beyond the spiritual plane. The Jesuits may have failed to make Conan Doyle a Catholic man; how far did they succeed in making him a Catholic writer, a Jesuit writer, a Stonyhurst writer? Conan Doyle for reasons we shall see shortly-spent all of his academic year at Stonyhurst, apart from six weeks each summer: are we really to assume the personalities who loomed as such overwhelming presences every day of those academic years vanished without trace? Biographers have indulged themselves in ascribing all kinds of significance to uncles met on brief visits to London, or a godfather encountered consciously for the first time during a short stay in Paris, or a doctor in Edinburgh with whom the Conan Doyle family were on friendly terms, but however attractive Dicky Doyle or Michael Conan or Dr B. C. Waller might appear in the search for mentors, I doubt if Sherlock Holmes would find them so worthy of investigation for clues as Fathers Cassidy, Splaine, Kay, Kingdon, Purbrick and Colley, and I suspect Conan Doyle found them less rewarding to psychological scrutiny, if only because in time and in intensity they meant far less in his life.
The Jesuits, I think, began the process of making a fine writer out of Conan Doyle. They did so passively, apart from anything else. Stonyhurst furnished him with locations, names and personalities which played very important roles in his later work. The last point is worthy of remark: both the Jesuits and their enemies tend to present the Society in a corporate fashion, but, however united in purpose, the masters of Stonyhurst in Conan Doyle's day represented a very striking range of contrasts. The training at Stonyhurst produced certain particular results in Conan Doyle's case, his phenomenal youthful memory being one. His intellectual development rejected much of what he was told at Stonyhurst, but it unquestionably responded to it, and it set on foot a series of debates in his own mind which lend quality to his fictional writings. Finally, the theological impact of Stonyhurst on Conan Doyle was very deep, and if he rejected its formal Catholic manifestation it made him a staunch opponent of materialism all his life. In the course of that life he would write many words on the concept of a human soul, on the existence of a Divine plan, and on the moral requisites of human relations, of which any Jesuit teacher could be justly proud. His own life, particularly in its struggles for the victims of oppression and injustice, was a similar testament. I think his countless admirers have every reason to be grateful to Stonyhurst. I believe Stonyhurst has reason to be proud of him.
When I was at Belvedere College in Dublin, I recall a master (not a Jesuit, but he had worked among the Jesuits for many years) saying that it was always the same thing, whenever a boy did well, it was a credit to his parents, and when he did badly, it was the fault of his teachers. The axiom has great relevance in Conan Doyle's case, far more than he ever knew. He probably went to his grave without realising that much for which he blamed Stonyhurst was actually the product of his own family background, and much for which he gave his family credit was more directly the achievement of Stonyhurst. The Jesuits seem to have realised that this situation was inevitable, and to have accepted their reputation in his mind with Stoicism. He was to be repelled by the coldness of most of them, but it was that coldness which was the strongest defence of his illusions about his background, and which made his awakening from them kinder and less complete than they would otherwise have been.
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in his family's residence in Picardy Place, Edinburgh, on 22 May 1859, and was baptised two days later in the adjoining Roman Catholic Cathedral. The family were clearly taking no chances: a little girl had been born and had died after a life of six months in 1858; Arthur was therefore the eldest son and second surviving child. Exceptionally, there was but one godparent: the boy's great-uncle Michael Conan of Paris. It may have been that the socially conscious Mary Doyle knew no Catholics of a class to which she was willing to concede spiritual relationship.
The name 'Ignatius' suggests a Jesuit orientation at the outset, and may well have indicated an intention to seek Jesuit education for the young Conan Doyle from the first. But it was never used again, and seems never to have been known outside the immediate family-he told his children of it. It does not appear on his birth certificate, drawn up later, nor on his form of admission to Stonyhurst, nor on his matriculation or graduation records at Edinburgh University. It may well have been that the Rev W. Downie, celebrant of the baptism, followed the old custom of insisting on a saint's name. Arthur, curiously, is not commonly accepted as one; Conan, even more curiously, is, but Father Downie may not have been aware of the cult of the patron saint of the Isle of Man, nor may any of his interlocutors at the baptism-Conan in any case was here included being the Godfather's surname. So the Doyles settled on Ignatius, and it at least was a recognition of priorities if not of first desires. The invisible name may seem symbolic of the future invisible survival of an early Jesuit commitment for a writer who had apparently put that commitment behind him in the view of himself and everyone else.
Arthur Conan Doyle was never a whiner at any stage. The austerity of his account of his early years-summed up in his word 'Spartan'-contrasts vividly with the self-pitying of, say, Charles Dickens's autobiographical early passages in David Copperfield or even George Bernard Shaw's assurance to Ellen Terry that he had had a 'devil of a childhood'. Conan Doyle's Memories and Adventures give a portrait of an impractical father: it has only been in recent years that the truth has become known. Charles Altamont Doyle, wayward if brilliant artistic son of the great caricaturist John Doyle, was an alcoholic who ultimately had to be confined to an institution during the early 1880s — indeed to a succession of hospitals and homes before his death in October 1893. In the decision to confine him and in its implementation his son Arthur, a medical student in his early twenties, would have the miserable duty to take the initiative. The discovery has resulted in something of a rush of sentimental sympathy from commentators who have balanced their charity by hostility to what they take to have been a harsh and strong-minded mother influencing a militaristic-minded son. Charles Altamont Doyle deserves sympathy, certainly, but it is ironic that his partly self-willed condition should still operate at the expense of the family it so cruelly oppressed during his lifetime. Mary Foley Doyle, born in Lismore, was a formidable lady in elder years; it is important to remember that when she met the young, well-connected English artist she was the teenage daughter of an Irish landlady in Edinburgh. The magic of that youthful romance gave way to the horrors of an alcoholic husband, the dire poverty of gentility in bad straits and the arrival of some ten children. The young Arthur grew rapidly. It was understandable that the mother should turn to him for the fulfilment of hopes so cruelly raised and then dashed in the case of his father. We know that the family moved through a series of residences in Edinburgh, from Warriston in the extreme north to Liberton equally to the south. Charles Doyle's civil service sinecure prevented them from absolute destitution, but his improvidence did little more than that. Posthumously, Charles Doyle appears to have been a gentle creature, and his popularity in convivial Edinburgh society goes to support this-his obituary in the Scotsman somewhat ominously remarked that few were the houses he had not visited. But his medical condition seems to have involved epileptic attacks, his institutional record reveals he could use violence and the recurring theme of alcoholism in his son's fiction is all too frequently associated with really ugly attempts by drunkards to injure women, frequently their wives. Mary Foley's first response seems to have been to cater for her son's voracious enthusiasm for fiction by filling his head with stories of eminent Irish ancestry, as Irish mothers of destitute families were accustomed to do: it is from this practical attempt to give escapist happiness that the notion of heraldic obsession in the lady has been built up by later biographers. Schooling had to be cheap and local at first; and Conan Doyle suffered under what he would term 'a tawse-brandishing schoolmaster of the old type. [a] pock-marked, one-eyed rascal'. Charles Doyle's condition seems to have worsened, and ultimately to shield the son from father at home and teacher abroad. Arthur was sent to Stonyhurst, arriving at Hodder preparatory school on 15 September 1868. To the end of his life he seems to have believed that the Jesuits refused to permit boys who travelled so far to go home for any vacation but the summer. But in fact he could have done. The Stonyhurst tradition (my guide here as elsewhere is Father Joseph Crehan, S.J.) was that the mother told the authorities frankly she wished her son protected from experience of his father's outbreaks. From the first, then, the Jesuits were cast by themselves as the whipping-boys. Quite rightly, they did not tell the boy that the proscription was at his mother's request. With a bad familial situation it was critical that there be as little impediment as possible in the boy's love for his one stable parent, and her necessary betrayal of him in his own interest was concealed.
Because Arthur Conan Doyle concealed his father's shame and his mother's and his own misery, we do not know how much he had seen or guessed of the effects of his father's life-style by the time he reached Hodder. It is probable that he had apprehended enough to feel frightened on his mother's behalf, to be aware of his brief limits of security and to be peculiarly vulnerable to emotional hunger in the absence of the source of most of the love he had known. Conan Doyle remained throughout his life a man with an urgent need for affection, and an intense anxiety to communicate it. It is a hen-and-egg conundrum as to whether this tendency was fully present during his Stonyhurst years and hence accounts for his dislike of the place, or whether the emotional starvation in Stonyhurst (and in the even more emotionally austere Edinburgh University Medical School) resulted in so great a subsequent demand for emotional fulfilment: there is probably a case for both hen and egg. In fact, the experience at Stonyhurst was somewhat traumatic for the exile from Edinburgh less because of the Jesuits' want of response to his emotional needs, but because his first superior fulfilled them. The problem, in fact, was that his first years really did supply him with the love he needed, and then the subsequent experience could never reach those heights again.
In making this point, I am speaking entirely in teacher-pupil terms. Conan Doyle's fellow-pupils do not seem to have played any part in fulfilling his emotional needs, nor does he seem to have wished that they do so. He made one close friend-James Ryan of Glasgow, of the year below him, and a common heritage of Scottish birth and Irish name and antecedents did much to enhance this association. It may have been that even at that age he put a higher premium on friendship than did most of his contemporaries. His own version of it in subsequent years would be that Ryan was his only friend: contemporaries seem to have assumed he was one of a considerable set of activists. Everard Digby, in particular, seems to have assumed Conan Doyle to have been a very popular boy, and his place in the making of offical and unofficial school magazines suggests someone who had the confidence of his fellows. So does his presence in the Christmas plays of 1872, albeit in minor roles (farmers' boy in The Omnibus and the captain of a West Indiaman in The Box of Mischief). What the future creator of one of the most famous friendships in literature, HolmesHolmes and Watson, meant by friendship may have been something much deeper than his contemporaries imagined. On the other hand, the friendship for which he sought and only obtained in Ryan's case was one I believe entirely without sexual content. It is probable that Conan Doyle was the less disposed to debase the currency of friendship in widely applying the term because his life had up to now been so isolated from male company. His only brother, Innes, was a dozen years his junior and Arthur's relationship with him would necessarily be somewhat paternal. (The converse applies: even though he was well over fifty when his last child was born, he had a fine capacity for being fraternal with his children.) He would have uses for his schoolmates, but these would be literary rather than emotional.
The emotional need he found fulfilled in his early years was through the agency of the Rev Francis Cassidy, S.J., a scholastic, who was his form-master. It is easy to exaggerate a matter like this, but Cassidy seems to have been a man who combined sanctity and affection in horse-doctor's doses. Conan Doyle fell into the hands of no ordinary man, but of someone whose love of his charges became legendary. Wherever he was to go in the course of his life-and although his health was bad for most of it he would live for some seventy years-the story was the same. The London children would throng around him at catechism. The little boys at Hodder adored him. He seemed to live to make others happy. wrote a colleague afterwards. He loved to discover the potential of the young students and whet them into action, especially if their talents lay on the side of creative writing. 'He', it was said by a Hodder fellow-priest, 'could lead them on to success in their studies, and could tell them stories of adventure more wonderful than any they read in books.' Conan Doyle agreed. 'How well I can remember the stories which you used to read to us', he told Father Cassidy many years later, and which I used to suck in as a sponge absorbs water until I was so saturated with them that I could still repeat them'. It is clear that Cassidy (he was to be ordained in 1873) also encouraged Conan Doyle's infant attempts at poetry, as his old pupil recalled in sending him a copy of Songs of Action, his first book of verse published in 1898. It was, he grinned, a little more mature' than his early efforts but Cassidy should not acknowledge it. You might find yourelf in the dilemma which I was in lately when a young author sent me a volume of poems and essays (both very bad) with a direct request for my opinion of its merits. I told him in reply that 'He was equally at home in prose and in verse'...' It would appear that the Jesuits in general, if not Father Cassidy in particular, had at least transmitted to their errant pupil the rudiments of that form of diplomacy traditionally ascribed to them.
What Conan Doyle did not know was that the charismatic and eternally warm-hearted figure was in fact fighting very unpleasant medical problems. Cassidy was not yet 25 when Conan Doyle came to Hodder — he had been born in London in 1845 — yet even then he was a prey to blood-spitting and constant weakness which would ultimately force him out of the Rectorship of Beaumont in 1884, after seven years. It sounds tubercular, although its development seems to have been arrested. At all events, it may have worked to his advantage, for after Beaumont he returned to Hodder and remained there as Superior for the forty years which constituted the rest of his life. Sadly, the pre-ordination requirements had taken him away from Hodder in 1871, at the point Conan Doyle went up the road to Stonyhurst; so that the lonely young Scot could not wander back to his old mentor in moments of emotional despondency or religious doubt. It is clear, however, that Conan Doyle's affection for Father Cassidy lasted until the end. When headlines announced that the famous author was virtually at death's door in 1909, Father Cassidy sent his love and prayers — and probably said Mass for his old pupil-and before the month was up the slowly recovering Doyle was writing from his bed to thank him. After Cassidy's death Conan Doyle wrote in Memories and Adventures of his 'warm remembrance of this man and of his gentle ways to little boys-young rascals many of us — who were committed to his care'. He added, slightly oddly, 'I remember the Franco-German War breaking out at this period, and how it made a ripple even in our secluded backwater'. It may be that this seeming non-sequitur indicates that Cassidy encouraged story-making about the war or discussed its progress with his customary vigour and capacity for fascination. At all events Conan Doyle, in 1894, would publish one of the finest of his historical short stories about the conflict — 'The Lord of Chateau Noir'. That first appeared in the Strand, then in the author's collection The Green Flag, then in Tales of the Ring and Camp, and finally in The Conan Doyle Stories. The Green Flag also included 'A Shadow Before', a hilarious account of the effects of war on the London Stock Exchange-the pièce de résistance being a telegram reading 'I am a bear of everything German and French. Sell, sell, sell, keep on selling' arising out of a horse-auction in rural Ireland — but its modest creator refused to reprint it further. Any author might be proud of it, and it does carry its own interest as the only story which Conan Doyle, son of an Irish mother and Irish paternal grandparents, set in the land of his ancestors. But 'The Lord of Chateau Noir', with its brilliant evocation of guerrilla warfare and symbolic Old-Testament reprisal, is on a far higher level of literature. If Cassidy directly inspired that, then he planted his young charge's feet on Parnassus.
But it is clear that even if his impact were more indirect, his place in the evolution of Conan Doyle as a literary artist is supreme. This shows itself on two levels, the first being the building on the enthusiasm for hearing and hence composing stories which Mary Foley Doyle had already set in motion. The other
Cassidy shared with his fellow-Jesuits, however little Conan Doyle liked them in contrast to him-the stress on memory. Jesuit education makes much of the point ('What is written on the brain', they told us at Belvedere, 'is far more important than what is written in an exercise-book', although a poor view was taken of those who took the logic of this to the extent of dispensing with the latter). Cassidy, it is clear, put the precept into practice in the most engaging and captivating way. Memory-work was introduced to the boys as something delightful in itself, and hence something followed both within and without the formal limits of education. Conan Doyle, in particular, developed a prodigious memory, much as James Joyce of Belvedere would do in the next generation. Indeed, occasionally that admirable memory played its owner false. Some of his earliest work, notably A Study in Scarlet, almost regurgitates Poe, Gaboriau and Mr and Mrs R.L. Stevenson; it was only with the 1890s that he firmly established his own style and prevented memory from disguising itself as imagination.
'Your letter is the first word of any kind that has ever reached me from any old teacher or associate in Stonyhurst', wrote Conan Doyle gloomily to Father Cassidy, probably in response to his old teacher's congratulations on his knighthood in 1902. 'It may very probably have been my own fault but I was never fortunate enough to make any friend except yourself during seven years at Stonyhurst, and I look back to no portion of my education there with any pleasure save only my two years with you in Hodder. If ever I should find myself in the north I should like above all things to see you again and to spend a day or two at Hodder. I was down shooting with Ryan in Herefordshire the other day and we had a long chat about the vanished days.' The reference to Ryan is characteristic. On the one hand, the ex-pupil having elevated Father Cassidy to an altar of unique status felt called on not to betray his other friend Ryan; on the other, he did not wish to detract from the tribute (and, one suspects, the surrounding desolation) which he was drawing. Curiously, the construction was one he had used for purposes of comedy in what always remained one of his favourites among his own writings-The White Company: 'Do not forget Sam Aylward, for his heart shall ever be thine alone-and thine, ma petite!' — this being the departing salutation of the bowman to the landlady of the 'Pied Merlin' and her maid (although it is the landlady-or the inn — whom he ultimately marries). Stonyhurst was fairly clearly in his mind when he wrote the opening chapters of The White Company, in any case, and the association of ideas, however unconscious, was natural.
But in a larger sense, Conan Doyle's lament is true. In spite — and because — of his excellent introduction to Stonyhurst through Hodder, his successive years were a great disappointment to him. It may very well have been that to a sensitive and impressionable boy, with growing awareness of shadows over the loved home he saw so little, the loss of Francis Cassidy constituted a very real shock to his emotions from which he took a great deal of time to recover. Stonyhurst's proximity to Hodder could not offset the contrast between the majestic vastness of the pile and the sudden omnipresence of great numbers of boys and masters in place of the intimacy of the preparatory establishment and the familial atmosphere of its relatively few pupils and teachers. His reference to James Ryan in the letter to Cassidy suggests that that association had already been formed in Hodder, but the difference in their forms would have played some part in initially weakening their association in that first critical year at Stonyhurst. And, like Ryan, Cassidy had been of his own ethnic group, and a 'cradle' Catholic. In Stonyhurst itself, the boys were often of convert stock when they were British. The School was highly cosmopolitan in membership, and its boys of purely Catholic origin were often from Ireland, Europe and the Americas. More to the point, the Jesuits with whom Conan Doyle would now have most to do were of English, and not Irish, stock, were often converts, and often of aristocratic antecedents. Coming from a poverty-stricken family of Irish and artistic origins, the boy might well resent the many aristocratic youths among his associates, and in fact cliques quickly emerged among the members of the old recusant English families whose alliances and confidence enabled them to dominate schoolboy society to a considerable extent. Such names as Trappes-Lomax, Maxwell, Vavasour, Vaughan, Clifford, Tempest, Weld-Blundell and Thurston were unlikely to swell the ranks of their coteries by the voluntary admission of a Doyle. One gets a remembered taste of the schoolboy Doyle's resentment of them by the mockery with which Sherlock Holmes handles aristocratic pretensions in 'The Noble Bachelor'-and even by the contempt with which in 'The Priory School', some twelve years later, he denounces the Duke of Holdernesse for the falseness of his familial standards. It is as though the refugee from his own family tragedy had brooded on the possible skeletons in far more eminent families and wondered how far their cocksure representatives at Stonyhurst really merited the confidence of the airs they gave themselves. It was true that by 1904, when Conan Doyle published 'The Priory School', he would have had further (and more congenial) experience of the aristocracy; but in 1892, the date of 'The Noble Bachelor', his acquaintance with the peerage and squircarchy hardly went beyond its offshoots at his old school.
II
Conan Doyle's loyalties, once given, were powerful, and were not for easy trading. Yet if there were some chance of the emotional loss following Francis Cassidy's departure being alleviated by the discovery of another recipient of his affection, the most likely candidate was his form master. The Rev Cyprian Splaine, S.J., was to hold that post until Doyle's final year. He was a very different figure from the happy Francis Cassidy. Splaine seems to have been a tortured figure who wrestled for most of his adult life with mental illness, to which he finally became a victim in 1887, when he was about 45. He died five years later. He was personally very gentle, extremely sensitive and capable of giving way to tears in public. Conan Doyle might have appreciated his hostility to harshness, but it seems probable that the lack of that confidence Doyle so badly needed from a Mentor would have led him to see in Splaine a figure as unreliable as Charles Doyle, equally gentle save in his worst moments of alcoholism. And Arthur Conan Doyle was developing into a vigorous, masculine, sports-minded youth, happiest with authors of swashbuckling romances and thunderous prose: it would be at Stonyhurst that he first fell under the spell of Macaulay, an influence to last all of his life. Splaine was of aesthetic tastes, sufficiently so for Gerard Manley Hopkins at a later date to send him at his request a manuscript of the as yet unpublished 'Wreck of the Deutschland' (from which, however, he shuddered away). Conan Doyle was growing more and more doubtful about his own beliefs in Catholicism; Cyprian Splaine was at his happiest in making detailed investigations of intricate theological points, precisely the type of religious enthusiasm least likely to answer the simple problems of the Edinburgh-born adolescent. Doyle grew more and more soured with the master's devoted enthusiasm for Greek and Latin texts and craved for grand presentations of the totality of the classical world. Splaine had little inclination to pursuing the awkward questions of Greek and Roman ethics which with his scholarly austerity he would feel it necessary to deal, and minute textual examination offered the retreat he sought. He may, indeed, have taken his enthusiasm for Hebrew into the classroom, to be greeted, in that event, with even less response from his pupil. For all that, he gave his ungrateful charge the apparatus for ready quotation, so much so that at the end of A Study in Scarlet Watson can quote Horace to Holmes and assume he will be able to understand it, for all of the literary agnosticism ascribed to him in its pages. (In all subsequent works Holmes is given very heavy cultural endowment.)
Gentle Splaine might be, but it was impossible for Conan Doyle to keep out of trouble. He avenged himself for his emotional starvation by various escapades including, according to Digby, a fairly early enthusiasm for pipe-smoking which remained with him all of his life. Inevitably this, and regular defiance of rules, brought him into unpleasant proximity with the Rev Thomas Kay, S.J. (1835-1901), Prefect of Discipline at Stonyhurst for some twenty years, beginning in 1869. Kay, exceptionally, was a local man, having been born at Preston and educated at Stonyhurst, entering the Jesuits in 1854 at the conclusion of his schooldays. It may very well have been that from the first the authorities had become concerned about Splaine, and kept a particular eye on his form with respect to disciplinary questions. At all events. Conan Doyle was to feel that few of his colleagues had more corporal punishment than he. His memoirs recalled the experience vividly enough:
- The instrument was a piece of india-rubber the size and shape of a thick boot sole. This was called a 'Tolley' — why, no one has explained, unless it is a Latin pun on what we had to bear. One blow of this instrument, delivered with intent, would cause the palm of the hand to swell up and change colour. When I say that the usual punishment of the larger boys was nine on each hand, and that nine on one hand was the absolute minimum, it will be understood that it was a severe ordeal, and that the sufferer could not, as a rule, turn the handle of the door to get out of the room in which he had suffered. To take twice nine upon a cold day was about the extremity of human endurance. I think, however, that it was good for us in the end, for it was a point of honour with many of us not to show that we were hurt, and that it is one of the best trainings for a hard life. If I was more beaten than others it was not that I was in any way vicious, but it was that I had a nature which responded eagerly to affectionate kindness (which I never received), but which rebelled against threats and took a perverted pride in showing that it would not be cowed by violence. I went out of my way to do really mischievous and outrageous things simply to show that my spirit was unbroken. An appeal to my better nature and not to my fears would have found an answer at once. I deserved all I got for what I did, but I did it because I was mishandled.
Such a passage as this accounts for the vividness in the opening chapters of The White Company and Sir Nigel which are explicitly about resistance to ecclesiastical authority endeavouring to instil discipline. On the other hand, there is no evidence that Conan Doyle proceeded to the extremes of self-defence employed by Brother John in the former work, to say nothing of the young Nigel Loring's swordsmanship in the latter: Stonyhurst would have had no hesitation in expelling pupils for such resistance, and indeed did so in Conan Doyle's time. The literary results of Conan Doyle's resentment of discipline produced one singular result: one of the few examples of British (as opposed to Irish) anti-clerical Catholic writing. Anti-Catholicism by Protestants, agnostics and ex-Catholics is plentiful enough with more or (usually) less literary quality; but racy and boisterous anti-clerical literature has been a casualty of the Reformation and subsequent centuries of persecution. From this standpoint the Conan Doyle mediaeval romances have a quality of authenticity about them lacking in defensively pious Catholic fiction or in Protestant literary attempts to bring the Reformation to births premature by several centuries.
Whether Father Kay can be adduced more directly as a literary inspiration is a nice point. He has little in common with the rapacious and barely monasticized abbot in Sir Nigel and there are, as we shall see, other candidates for the abbot in The White Company. But Kay had a very striking personality, which he used to the full as an adjunct to discipline. He favoured a particular sardonic style to 'strike terror into a guilty breast' as Sherlock Holmes puts it in 'The Three Students' (after stage-management of a kind one suspects Father Kay would have recognised and respected). He was utterly indifferent to considerations of rank among his charges, and took particular pains-again, one thinks of Holmes — to deflate miscreants who sought to trade on their illustrious parentage. My father is Prefect of the Seine', screamed a French student when told to fetch the tolley as a preliminary to its reception. 'Then I', said Kay awfully, 'must be Prefect the insane'. Conan Doyle's memoirs mention one unnamed master to whom he mentioned thoughts of being a civil engineer, receiving the reply, 'Well, Doyle, you may be an engineer, but I don't think you will ever be a civil one'. As Holmes puts it in The Valley of Fear: 'You can tell an old master by the sweep of his brush. I can tell a Moriarty when I see one.
There are touches of Kay in Holmes, blended with the drier sarcasm of Edinburgh's professors of medicine. Stonyhurst tradition, however, saw much more evidence of the Prefect of Discipline when The Final Problem' appeared in the Strand for December 1893 and the world learned for the first time of Professor James Moriarty. That event shook the British magazine-reading world, for it carried with it the terrible news of the death of Sherlock Holmes, and a new century was to dawn before the sentence was reversed. But Stonyhurst is said to have rocked with unholy mirth, not because of the mortality of Holmes but for what it took to the the immortality now given to Kay. It would seem that Kay had the capacity suddenly to materialise when least wanted before a group of students, and certainly the Holmes cycle has several striking epiphanies of awesome figures at the door of Holmes's room (although the only time a schoolmaster makes such an appearance it is, perhaps significantly, a preliminary to collapsing at the feet of the detective in a dead faint). Presumably it was Moriarty's appearance before Holmes, the first presentation of him in the story, which conjured up the identification in the minds of Father Kay's colleagues:
- My nerves are fairly proof. Watson, but I must confess to a start when
- I saw the very man who had been so much in my thought standing there on my threshold.
- 'You have less frontal development than I should have expected', said he at last. 'It is a dangerous habit to finger loaded firearms in the pocket of one's dressing-gown.'
May one conjecture an earlier meeting between author and preceptor of the kind not likely from its nature or its sequel to be forgotten, involving the use of such a line as 'It is a dangerous habit to dowse lighted pipes in the pocket of one's jacket'.
The rest of the exchanges will hardly exhibit similar origins save in the realm of fantasy, and what pearls of epigram can not fail to enter the fantasy of a gifted schoolboy thinking of what he would like to have said to the authorities? In any event, Kay was far from the only possible influence Stonyhurst might have provided in the making of Moriarty, although we have to look to schoolboy ranks to find other obvious sources.
Cyprian Splaine's successor as form master to Conan Doyle in his final year came too late on the scene to affect the disposition of the disgruntled schoolboy very much. By that time Conan Doyle seems to have articulated doubts as to the validity of transubstantiation in speaking to a confessor, whose humane reaction, says Conan Doyle family recollection, was to arrange for him to serve Mass so that his failure to receive Communion (which he felt in conscience he could no longer worthily receive) would go unnoticed. The episode was characteristic both of Doyle's invariable integrity and of his concern for not giving scandal. The latter point is significant, as it is often confused with a search for respectability. Conan Doyle never flinched at the odium which might result from an unpopular action-witness his championship of unfortunates who had fallen foul of the legal system or his much-abused crusades for Spiritualism and allied causes-but he did retain the lessons of Jesuit teaching on the Christian duty to safeguard innocence. The Jesuit who produced so thoughtful, and so diplomatic, a solution is unknown, and his name probably does not appear in the pages of the Stonyhurst Magazine. But one candidate might be this new form master, the Rev Reginald Edward Wellesley Colley (1848-1904). Certain qualities in Colley might have appealed to Doyle, had they met earlier. The young priest was a distant relative of the Iron Duke, who makes a decidedly Kay-like appearance in a Brigadier Gerard story after the Brigadier has been playing cards with British soldiers only to find himself under arrest by the General:
- 'See, my lord!' I cried; 'I played for my freedom and I won, for, as you perceive, I hold the king.'
- For the first time a slight smile softened his gaunt face. On the contrary', said he, as he mounted his horse, 'it is I who won, for, as you perceive, my King holds you.'
(Even the card-game may not have been original.)
Colley had far less resemblance than Kay to his illustrious relative, at least in the Doyle version of his dialogue. He had ridden to hounds before his novitiate, but afterwards he scorned every form of self-indulgence, worked standing at his desk with a wide open window even in winter (which ultimately killed him), and combined with his obvious asceticism a stiffness and awkwardness of manner on initial acquaintance. It must have been at its greatest when he first met Conan Doyle, for the latter's last year at Stonyhurst was Wellesley Colley's first. The fact that the master had been a pupil in the school less than a decade before did nothing to ease his difficulties in taking over Splaine's form as his first teaching assignment. And while his personal privation would have impressed Conan Doyle, it was too intimate a matter to be translated into the basis for a bond. Yet the master was of the type Conan Doyle would extol. It says much for the quality of the man, and of the breadth of vision of the authorities, that he was made Rector only ten years later, in his late thirties, winning particular renown for his selfless nursing of his charges during the terrible German measles and pneumonia epidemic of 1886 when four died. (There is an analogy with Father Cassidy, who would put a boy with toothache in his own bed and himself sleep in a chair for fear the groans of the sufferer would rouse others.) And finally Wellesley Colley was made Provincial in 1901, dying in office three years later. It is doubtful if he would have had the temperament to fill the void in Doyle's emotional world caused by the loss of Cassidy, had he become the boy's form master earlier, but this personal quality might have made for a somewhat different story. As it was, they had little more than a point of contact, of the kind Conan Doyle speculated about in his sketch of that title imagining the meeting of David and Odysseus. It was nevertheless a meeting of two remarkable men. Whether Doyle ever made a much more remarkable point of contact given the proximity of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the nearby novitiate we do not know: but unlike the potentiality of the Colley acquaintance, neither Hopkins nor Doyle would probably have made any sense to the other at all.
But the real spirit of Stonyhurst in Conan Doyle's day was unquestionably the Prefect of Lower Studies, the Rev George Renerden Kingdon, S.J. If Wellesley Colley was too immature when Conan Doyle knew him, Kingdon met him, from the boy's viewpoint, far too late. Despite the charms of engineering and its dubious civility, Conan Doyle's mind turned more and more towards medicine in his later school years, whereas George Kingdon, after a brilliant medical career, had rejected modern science so vehemently with his embrace of the religious life that he absolutely refused medical attention despite ill health and finally was discovered dead in his own chair. His antecedents were as firmly medical as the boy's were artistic: his father was a London physician, and he himself won the Wix Prize when at Bart's (where Watson served, according to A Study in Scarlet) for a paper `On the connexion between Revealed Religion and Medical Science'. But in the same year, 1846, he was received into the Catholic Church, agonized about a vocation and still more about entering the Jesuits, and finally commenced his novitiate the following year, being ordained in 1853. The published essay remained as the only tangible fruit of his rejected career. He began teaching at Stonyhurst in 1857, and having had one year as Prefect of Lower Studies in 1861-2, came back to the office in 1864 and held it for fifteen years more. His scruples, his conscientiousness and his religious devotion were legendary. He was professed of four vows in 1865, and insisted on a consecration of studies in honour of the Immaculate Conception. The boys were required to write verses to the Blessed Virgin daily throughout the month of May, and one can only blench at the thought of the literary results of this artificial stimulation of Conan Doyle's talents for versification. And it seemed as though Conan Doyle's cravings for new intellectual and scientific stimulation could hardly have found a more convinced adversary than Kingdon's views. In place of his earlier writing, he threw himself into the making of conservative manuals for Latin versification and its rules, grammar, Greek texts, and ways of assisting at Mass. He opposed anything in the nature of experiment in education. In a community hardly notable for its modernity he was singled out as resolutely old-fashioned. He learned his sermons by heart and delivered them strictly staccato. He was remorselessly punctual and rigidly insisted on it in everyone else. He was wholly hostile to all breaches of order, and evidenced as much in a crusty and brusque manner made no softer by his increasing deafness. 'The world calls rules a burden', he would snap. 'It might as well call wings a burden to the bird.' He was, in a word, anything but likely to sympathise with that scientifically-oriented opponent of Stonyhurst law and order, Arthur Conan Doyle.
Yet Kingdon had one outstanding intellectual effect on the rebellious mind at war with his prejudices. His hostility to modernism, his powerful personality, his identification with the Stonyhurst mind, all convinced Conan Doyle that the Catholic Church was indissolubly wedded to obscurantism and enmity to objective scientific enquiry. Yet through all the subsequent years of agnosticism, Kingdon's message kept tugging at Conan Doyle. Edinburgh University seemed to preach a science independent of, and indifferent to, the life of the spirit. But Conan Doyle could never fully accept the notion of science without religion, any more than he could rest content with Kingdon's prescription of religion without science. Kingdon, after all, was no ignoramus denouncing that of which he knew nothing: he had conquered his field before he abandoned it. And a Kingdon figure does seem to appear in certain of the Conan Doyle writings. The fourteenth-century Abbot of Beaulieu in The White Company is an obvious instance:
- His thin thought-worn features and sunken haggard cheeks bespoke one who had indeed beaten down that inner foe whom every man must face, but had none the less suffered sorely in the contest. In crushing his passions he had well-nigh crushed himself. Yet, frail as was his person, there gleamed out ever and anon from under his drooping brows a flash of fierce energy, which recalled to men's minds that he came of a fighting stock, and that even now his twin brother. Sir Bartholemew Berghersh, was one of the most famous of those stern warriors who had planted the Cross of St George before the gates of Paris. With lips compressed and clouded brow, he strode up and down the oaken floor, the very genius and impersonation of asceticisim, while the great bell thundered and clanged above his head.
Possibly there is a touch of Wellesley Colley here also, but even in stature and health it seems to capture Kingdon. (Conan Doyle's wicked little touch in having him confidently quote geographical evidence on the authority of Sir John Manderville may also have had its counterparts.) But there also seems a sign of Father Kingdon as the beautiful portrait of the family doctor in 'Behind the Times' (printed in Round the Red Lamp and Tales of Medical Life).
- His mind must have been open to impressions very early, but it must also have closed carly for the politics of the day have little interest for him, while he is fiercely excited about questions which are entirely prehistoric. He shakes his head when he speaks of the first Reform Bill and expresses grave doubts as to its wisdom, and I have heard him, when he was warmed by a glass of wine, say bitter things about Robert Peel and his abandoning of the Corn Laws. The death of that statesman brought the history of England to a definite close, and Dr Winter refers to everything which had happened since then as to an insignificant climax. He had learned his medicine under that obsolete and forgotten system by which a youth was apprenticed to a surgeon, in the days when the study of anatomy was often approached through a violated grave. His views upon his own profession are even more reactionary than his politics. Fifty years have brought him little and deprived him of less. Vaccination was well within the teaching of his youth, though I think he has a secret preference for inoculation. Bleeding he would practise freely but for public opinion. Chloroform he regards as a dangerous innovation, and he always clicks his tongue when it is mentioned. He has even been known to say vain things about Laennec, and to refer to the stethoscope as a new-fangled French toy'. He carries one in his hat out of deference to the expectations of his patients; but he is very hard of hearing, so that it makes little difference whether he uses it or not.
But what is much more significant than the contribution which Kingdon's memory may have made to the etching of these portraits is the tug-of-war he set up for Conan Doyle. On a simple level Conan Doyle, like the young men rejecting the monastery in his novels, condemned Kingdon as the votary of a faith losing its war against time. On a complex one, Kingdon set up a critical apparatus which led Conan Doyle to condemn scientific self-satisfaction as insufficient. It is for this reason that the scientific Holmes in 'The Naval Treaty' breaks from an investigation to deduce from a rose the existence of a benevolent God. It is for this reason that science in the person of Professor Challenger is ultimately forced to acknowledge that in matters of the spirit it cannot claim to be omniscient. It is ironic that in his ultimate support of Spiritualism Conan Doyle found himself crossing swords with his former schoolmate Father Thurston, S.J., whereas in fact that crusade for Spiritualism owed far more to old Kingdon's war against science than Thurston or Conan Doyle himself realised. In formal terms, Thurston was the one who had held to Stonyhurst tradition; but more obliquely, Conan Doyle was. It was a signal proof of the Ignatian principle of holding a boy for life, however much appearances belied it.
In Stonyhurst terms Conan Doyle was in Stonyhurst for the commencement of the Purbrick era, but we may safely doubt whether the Very Rev Edward Ignatius Purbrick, S.J. (1830-1914) made much impact on him, save as a smiling, spectacled, formidable and ultimately benevolent but always remote figure. For most of Conan Doyle's time the Rector was in any case preoccupied by a vexatious legal dispute arising out of a will and by plans for the futher building of the school. Nine years Kingdon's junior, the Rector took office when the Prefect of Lower Studies had been in harness for over half a decade. In certain respects he would have echoed Kingdon's conservative tendencies, but there was in him a further dimension: he was firmly ultramontane, and hostile to anything that looked like English particularism. The effect of this would have been to strengthen the cosmopolitan force of the education Conan Doyle was receiving-in part by encouraging so many pupils from outside Britain-and no doubt it helped account for the ease with which the patriotic Doyle could choose his heroes from Napoleonic France as well as Plantagenet England, and this in no textbook Hentyesque fashion but with deep sympathy for the cultural differences and prejudices involved. But the chief place of Purbrick in Conan Doyle's life was ceremonial. He cherished the memory of being crowded into the Rector's room when Purbrick waved the packet of the London Matriculation results aloft in 1875, announcing that Conan Doyle and twelve others had passed to make a Stonyhurst record. Not everyone in Stonyhurst would have been so enthusiastic: Splaine loathed the London Matric. But Purbrick, who had been deprived of his Oxford studentship for entering the Roman Catholic Church in 1850, had cause to rejoice in the recognition won for his school by his boys. And it was Purbrick, too, who won for Conan Doyle the next year in Feldkirch, in Austria, rightly recognising that he was hardly a candidate for the Philosophy year at Stonyhurst. It was a grand finale for the young scapegrace, even if it hardly compensated for the hunger of the heart along the road.
III
It is now impossible to assess the place of Stonyhurst in the making of Conan Doyle's literary achievement, but if the evidence has largely disappeared, we still have some clues. Emotional deprivation probably did more to stimulate his imagination than content would have done. Intellectual and religious debate set up in his own mind had most important consequences in fashioning him. The Jesuits may have believed in order, but they were also, in a sense, rebels. It was not only that they were speaking for a Higher Kingdom as against a material culture, although this was important: and Conan Doyle never forgot the case against worldly success, as Sherlock Holmes's attack on the Gold King in Thor Bridge bears witness. ('Some of you rich men have to be taught that all the world cannot be bribed into condoning your offences.') Nor was it only the message of man's duty to accept responsibility to a Higher Power under whatever temptation to end all in face of suffering, as the beautiful, very late, story The Veiled Lodger bears witness. There was also the fact that by their nature the Stonyhurst boys were educated to a denial that the existing establishment, on which Kingdon had turned his back and which had dishonoured Purbrick, was automatically entitled to the airs it gave itself. The Sherlock Holmes stories are a consistent repetition of an argument that the existing authorities are insufficient, that present status does not of itself justify administrative decisions, that humans are obliged to seek the best, and not only the safest, solution possible. The Kingdon suspicion of science shows itself in moments when, say, Holmes rejects common assumptions of heredity to put his full trust in the character of Miss Harrison in The Naval Treaty although his solution depends on the absolute selfishness of her brother. The Catholic conception of forgiveness after atonement is asserted by Holmes in story after story long before Chesterton's Father Brown practised it. If Stonyhurst did not leave Doyle with a Catholic mind, it did play an important role in leaving within him a Catholic heart.
In more particular respects the clues are also present. Unhappily, the ephemeral magazines to which he contributed have vanished, although it is good to know that one of them contained an article by him 'On the Intemperance of Our Country'. Somewhere he found the comforting information that his familiar misfortune was not unique, and that the best way of fighting his own devils was to write them out of him and use them to enlighten others. His later treatment of alcoholism in his various fictional writings was partly drawing on his own knowledge, but also was deeply valuable in forcing people to think rationally on a subject normally reserved to hyperbole or silence.
On a more light-hearted level, his schoolfellows may not have given him friendships within his meaning of the term, but the retention of Stonyhurst and its influences — positive or negative — is at least attested to by the frequency of their names in his fiction. Thurston', it may be recalled, played billiards with Dr. Watson and dabbled in dubious shares ('The Dancing Men'). Henry Edmund Garcia was admitted to Stonyhurst in 1867: forty years later he supplied the victim's name for 'Wisteria Lodge'. Cuthbert Mary Dunn arrived in 1858: his name — so spelled, it is usually found with a final 'e' — did duty for a manager of a mine to be murdered by the Scowrers in The Valley of Fear. Norbert Louis Moran reached Hodder two weeks after Conan Doyle, going into a higher class: promoted to a Colonelcy with the comparably unusual first name of Sebastian, he was the 'second most dangerous man in England' until captured by Holmes in 'The Empty House', thus inaugurating the Return. (He seems a more likely influence than José Ramon Llames y Morán of Madrid who was six years senior to Conan Doyle.)
Alfred Aloysius Watson is a long shot, arriving five years before Conan Doyle: and there were Edinburgh medical Watsons to give the name greater freshness in the young writer's mind. But Patrick Sherlock of Co. Carlow can hardly be impeached. A year older than Conan Doyle, he came the same year to Stonyhurst, receiving the morose comment from the authorities can hardly read'. The awful thought crosses the mind that the great detective was given the name of possibly the most unpromising pupil among his creator's contemporaries, and indeed the Holmes of the first novel carried illiteracy into many fields. It is of course well known that the name 'Holmes' came from the illustrious Oliver Wendell (he of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table as opposed to his eponymous judicial offspring), but Doyle initially toyed with Sherrinford' as a first name. 'At random' was the conclusion of John Dickson Carr for the choice of Sherlock after he had examined the now legally closed family papers: Charles Higham who could not see them offered a Portsmouth bowler, and threw in a violinist as a makeweight. It is quite probable that the names slid subconsciously into Doyle's mind; but the names of fellow schoolboys hold a much more powerful place in the subconscious than do those of Portsmouth bowlers or lesser-known violinists. And it is at least a thought that young Sherlock may have won some notoriety for his incapacity: few comments on arrivals at Stonyhurst are so gloomy, and most were purely formal. But Sherlock in another respect anticipates his fictional namesake: he was of sufficient quality as an actor to win the part of Tom Moore in the play of 1870.
The gem of the collection. Kay or no Kay, is Moriarty. Two Moriartys. And both won prizes for Mathematics, J. in 1873 and M. in 1874. Michael's was the more remarkable achievement, as he obtained second prize in the entire school when a pupil in Grammar, in his first year in Stonyhurst proper. This is altogether too good to be coincidence. Conan Doyle in any case was given to making little private jokes in his stories and the famous line on the Professor-At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise on the binomial theorem, which has had a European vogue-acquires a particular charm in these circumstances. The binomial theorem was, perhaps, a rather jejune subject for a mathematician to make the keystone of his reputation and 'on the strength of it' win his chair, but it would be a memorable feat indeed for a first-year student in secondary school against overwhelming, in fact European, competition. He appeared in a minor part in the Christmas play in 1874. But it was John Moriarty who would attain considerable, and not entirely inappropriate, celebrity. It is singular that in listing his schoolfellows of distinction in his memoirs (Thurston, the cartoonist Bernard Partridge of Punch and the famous preacher Bernard Vaughan (then a novice)), Conan Doyle made no mention of Lord Justice John Francis Moriarty of the Irish Courts. One can well imagine why not.
The Sherlockologists were well and truly in action during the craze-dominated 1920s and were proving a big enough nuisance to an author decidedly embarrassed by the cult of his most famous creation without drawing further problems on his head. In any case, the consequences of any such citation could be very embarrassing to all parties.
We know little of Johnnie Moriarty's achievements at Stonyhurst, apart from his performance as Captain Middleton in the 1871 play, but if he had any resemblance to what he afterwards became, his memory gave Conan Doyle more than a name. Holmes said of his adversary that 'his face protrudes forward and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion'. When Johnnie Moriarty, K.C., rose to cross-examine a witness, 'uncoiled' was the word which sprang to the mind of the observer. Maurice Healy tells innumerable and disreputable stories about him in The Old Munster Circuit of which that most appropriate to our investigation is a case touching a hotel, whose landlady had dilated during her examination with pardonable pride on the merits of her establishment. Moriarty drew his person up to a crouching position, inserted an eyeglass, swung his head around and commenced cross examination: 'So you live in this earthly Paradise, Ma'am? A regular Garden of Eden, is it not? Tell me, ma'am, do you have any serpent there?' 'Oh, no, Serjeant, but we'd always be delighted to see you!' Collapse of court, counsel and cross-examination.
If John Moriarty's appearance suggested that of the Professor, his other qualities were more those of the individual trickster than the master-manipulator, but it is doubtful if they would have commended themselves to Conan Doyle. Moriarty was in religious attitudes a sceptic, but where Conan Doyle went to great lengths to avoid the practice of his religion, plagued by intellectual doubt. Moriarty ostentatiously paraded his. A judge of known piety could always be sure of drawing some dreadful sign from Johnnie betokening his devotion to the One. True Faith, such as standing in mid-examination in statuesque silence for the Angelus, or slamming a rosary-beads on the table if his religious credentials seemed in question, or dilating on the admirable and public enthusiasm for Catholicism of a client at the least chance, or entering into elaborate mystifications of the Court under the guise of expounding some allegedly relevant piece of theological abstruseness. Opportunism and shady tricks marked his advance, as indeed did judicious marriage and bankruptcy. Ultimately, after an Odyssey through party politics such as would have excited the ridicule of the Vicar of Bray, he reached the Bench and is said to have breathed his last with the words 'What won the two-thirty?' In retrospect he sounds amusing enough, but one can well see that the boy who openly defied authority would have had the worst opinions of the one who advanced himself by publicly conforming and crawling to a system for which he had far less regard than had Conan Doyle, the public rebel. It was not a name which can have had agreeable recollections for that rebel.
As a final touch it may be recalled that Professor Moriarty has a brother of a very confusing kind. In 'The Final Problem' he is a Colonel and is called James, but in The Empty House' it is the Professor who is James. (Conan Doyle's memory, excellent on some points, was sufficiently indifferent to leave the Sherlockologists with many hundreds of lives' work.) In The Valley of Fear the
Professor's achievements in mathematics are upgraded to The Dynamics of an Asteroid, 'a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticising it', which was presumably more than could be said for a treatise on the binomial theorem, however European in vogue: and the same work reduces the Professor's brother to the calling of station-master in the West of England. To have mystery at both ends of a case, remarked Holmes, 'is too confusing', but perhaps not when the mystery is one of a plurality of Moriartys at both ends. On the other hand, I doubt if the name emerged simply by a recollection of the most odious youth in Stonyhurst. Conan Doyle invented the professor specifically to dispose of Holmes, as the latter, in his view, was standing in the way of the further development of his author's art. So, with renewed homage to Cyprian Splaine and perhaps the textbooks of George Renerden Kingdon, it seems natural there should enter his mind an appropriate variation on an Horatian tag: Dulce et decorum est pro arte mori. Arte mori? Moriarty! — and up fly memories of infant prodigy celebrants of the binomial, and serpentine practitioners of the obnoxious, with a natural recollection of the more formidable dialogues of the Rev Thomas Kay moving in saturnine measure in their wake.
The name Ryan does not feature in the stories, but Ryan himself plainly does. James Paul Emmeline Ryan came of parents of Glasgow origin who became involved in planting in Ceylon, whither James Ryan ultimately went. He died in 1920, having in his final months bequeathed a fine library of Cingalese material to Stonyhurst. It was from his daughter that Dame Jean Conan Doyle learned of her father's arrangement with the unknown Jesuit about serving Mass. Whether Ryan provided the intellectual basis for the Holmes-Watson relationship must be problematic, but there is another friendship of Holmes's, his first of which we have knowledge, where we can speak with confidence. Holmes makes quite a point in 'The Gloria Scott' of his friendlessness at college', of never having been very sociable', and of Trevor being the only friend I made during the two years I was at college'. (This in itself may be a clue to the discrepancy between Conan Doyle, the magazine activist, sports personality and communal pipe-smoker of Everard Digby's manuscript notes preserved at Stonyhurst, and the friendless figure of his own memoirs and his letters to Father Cassidy: Ryan might indeed have been his only friend, of his own age, amidst all those Sherlocks and Morans during his two years at Hodder. The figure is suggestive, and is confusing in the context of the story — in its successor narrative 'The Musgrave Ritual' the college career is mentioned with reference to my last years' which clearly means more than two. Such a theory does not gainsay our earlier argument that Ryan was still his only close friend, during the entire Stonyhurst period.) Victor Trevor's other qualities of heartiness, spirits and energy militate against Holmes's insistence that what drew them together was discovering that he was as friendless as I'. It is much more likely that the young Glaswegian of Cingalese background found Hodder alien — apart from the wonders of Father Francis Cassidy — than that Trevor would have been a solitary figure. But if Ryan were in mind, Conan Doyle might have allowed the sentiment of his own memories to do some violence to the logic of his narrative. Naturally there is no question as to Ryan senior having been transported as a convict, being involved in a piratical revolt or being blackmailed by a sinister sailor: but it is interesting that young Trevor ultimately went out to the Terai tea planting, where I hear he is doing very well'. Trevor's character is not important to the story — it demands little more than that he react under the pressure of the extraordinary events-but as a testament of friendship his origin seems definite and touching.
By the same illustration, some case could be made for Holmes's other college acquaintance, Sir Reginald Musgrave. as having a Stonyhurst origin. The description suggests a definite figure: 'He was not generally popular among the undergraduates, though it always seemed to me that what was set down as pride was really an attempt to cover extreme natural diffidence'. It rings curiously akin to our account of that other Reginald, Wellesley Colley, especially taken into consideration with Holmes's unduly elaborate explanation that Reginald's branch 'was a cadet one which had separated' from the more famous family. On the other hand what we learn of Reginald Musgrave's character in the story-and like that of Victor Trevor it is somewhat at odds with its initial presentation by Holmes-says little for either his humanity or his intelligence, what with his dismissal of the butler on trivial grounds and his obtuseness about the family ritual. In both cases one has a sense of a portrait from memory being sketched to form a prelude to narratives which force different identities on the protagonists in question once the events have begun to move.
On the strength of the official legends, Stonyhurst and Conan Doyle should have gone their separate ways after that final year in Germany. He went on to medical school in Edinburgh, thence to voyage as a doctor to a whaler and subsequently to medical practice in the south of England. The first published storirs commence in 1879. Yet he retained his links at Stonyhurst for several years, and we find that on 12th and 13th August 1885, he travelled with an old boys' team to play Dublin University's Long Vacation Club. This implies closer links with his contemporaries than he recalled, and it was not the doing of his friend Ryan, now returned to Ceylon (although Ryan's bequest to Stonyhurst certainly suggests a happier carcer there than his friend's, however much they may have been restricted to Father Cassidy and to one another during the Hodder years). The Stonyhurst Magazine commemorated the event in a poem, noting
- And Trinity, oh, but we walloped them well,
- To George and the Doctor the honours there fell.
- And Hatt's fast expresses dismissed them pell-mell,
- And the heat was as great as in-Coromandel.
The Doctor — he gained his M.D. from Edinburgh that year-scored 34, although his performance against the Leinster Club the following day was less distinguished-a duck and 10.
But even without this. it is evident that the School remained in his memory, whether as a reservoir of names, character-quirks, or relationships. And beyond that there remained the location itself. Stonyhurst was really made for romantic fiction, with its mysterious local traditions of witchcraft at Pendle, its eerie mists and clumps of ground rising over half-hidden gulches. There is some evidence that he was using the location in some of his carliest work. In his early twenties he was trying his 'prentice hand on stories set in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The remoteness of the settings gave him a somewhat ill-based boldness (he would later ruefully acknowledge how one of his alleged New Zealand journeys would have landed the protagonists in mid-ocean), and while his descriptive powers followed appropriately in the wake of the artistic eye he had inherited from his forebears, he needed at least some hint from his own experience. Hillocks where he may well have smoked a pipe concealed from the eye of authority would seem to have offered him inspiration for antipodean locale-e.g., the terrain described in 'The Gully of Bluemansdyke'.
But the most famous case of his use of the Stonyhurst setting happened much later, in 1901, when Sherlock Holmes was revived (though not yet resurrected) for The Hound of the Baskervilles. A journey to Dartmoor gave Conan Doyle his first authentic experience of the moor itself (though his imagination had already taken him there for 'Silver Blaze' and 'How the King held the Brigadier' in the previous decade). But he needed a Baskerville Hall, and with the freedom of a modern film producer he chose the towers from the Stonyhurst of his day, as Charles Higham has noted. However, once his thoughts had gone back to Stonyhurst, it offered more. There was the Yew Alley, known to the boys as the 'Dark Walk' down which hardy spirits would race after nightfall braving imagined terrors from ghostly survivors of Pendle witchcraft. The near end came close to the College, and security or at least the more mundane threat to it presented by Father Kay. A little way down was an opening giving on to the valley and its mists, from which a lonely watcher might gaze and see — what?
- 'It is very bewildering.'
- 'It certainly has a character of its own. There are points of distinction about it. That change in the footprints, for example. What do you make of that?'
- 'Mortimer said that the man had walked on tiptoe down that portion of the alley.'
- 'He only repeated what some fool had said at the inquest. Why should a man walk on tiptoe down the alley?'
- 'What then?'
- 'He was running, Watson-running desperately, running for his life, running until he burst his heart and fell dead upon his face.'
- 'Running from what?'
- 'There lies our problem. There are the indications that the man was crazed with fear before ever he began to run.'
- 'How can you say that?'
- 'I am presuming that the cause of his fears came to him across the moor. If that were so, and it seems most probable, only a man who had lost his wits would have run from the house instead of towards it. If the gipsy's evidence may be taken as true, he ran with cries for help in the direction where help was least likely to be....'
And so an old man lay dead at the end of the alley, and near him—
- ....some little distance off, but fresh and clear.'
- 'Footprints?'
- 'Footprints.'
- 'A man's or a womans's?'
- Dr Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered:
- 'Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!'
And, thanks to the bogeys and dares of Stonyhurst thirty years earlier, we are off. Nor do our sources for the story stop there. The introduction of Mr Frankland of Lafter Hall, eternal litigant and unfeeling father of Mrs Laura Lyons of equivocal reputation', results in one of the most memorable of Conan Doyle's minor characters. He is an admirable blend of the comic and the grotesque (one recalls Holmes's dictum that it is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible), and he supplies the means for the dramatic discovery by Watson that Holmes is the mysterious man on the tor. He is enabled to do so by his hobby of searching the moor for the escaped convict by means of his telescope. It is to Stonyhurst's observatory, hence, that we owe Frankland's hobby and with it another of the most dramatic moments in Conan Doyle's greatest detective novel-perhaps the greatest novel he wrote.
It is fitting, after all, that Stonyhurst for all of its unhappiness in Conan Doyle's memory possibly because of it — should have supplied so much of the ethics, accidents and thrust of his writing. It educated him in far more ways than he knew or it knew. In literary terms, it brought him closer to immortality. And in the conflicts it set up in his mind, it did so also in another sense. He was a great and good man; he was the product of a great and good school.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
