The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  At Upton’s direction, George then wrote out several phrases such as, ‘Unless you run away I’ll murder you and your slut wife’ and ‘The grocer’s kid will cop it from the blackman’, but according to the sergeant’s report of 8 December none of these struck him as being obviously similar to the hand of the anonymous writer. It has to be said that the gruffly capable but stolid Upton is one of several authority figures in the case to have seemingly stepped direct from the pages of a Sherlock Holmes story.

  The letters continued to arrive at the Great Wyrley vicarage following his visit, and Conan Doyle would later record that some of them were strong stuff, even for a man like him, accustomed to working among the worst slums of Victorian Portsmouth, or for that matter to have practised as a surgeon in an army field hospital in the depths of a typhoid epidemic. One communication accused Reverend Edalji of ‘gross immorality with persons using Vaseline in the same way as Oscar Wilde’; while another attested that he kept a number of ladies, their physical charms explicitly stated, for the amusement of himself and his friends. No one who read this correspondence, including Sergeant Upton, was left in any doubt that the writer was personally familiar with both Reverend Edalji and his family; or that given the letters’ mixture of juvenile bravado and obsession with the female body at its most immodest, it was likely that a teenaged boy was involved.

  In time, the anonymous party or parties added physical pranks, or harassment, to a campaign that had previously existed only in written form. On 12 December, a key was discovered lying on the Great Wyrley vicarage’s back doorstep. Reverend Edalji passed it to Sergeant Upton, who in due course determined that it had been removed from Walsall Grammar School. Two days later, excreta was found daubed on the outside of the vicarage’s upstairs windows. Sergeant Upton again investigated, and decided that this was an inside job – no one could have accurately thrown the matter from outside, he reasoned, as most of the soiled windows were shielded by the branches of a large yew tree.

  Another new twist to the campaign involved a series of hoax advertisements in the local newspapers. In one, the Edaljis’ home was said to be available for rent. According to another, the family would be hosting an open house on a certain date, and the dress code for this was stated to be unusually relaxed. Soon, tradesmen began arriving at the vicarage from all parts after apparently being summoned by Reverend Edalji, only to find themselves the victims of a practical joke. Eventually, a boxed notice appeared in the Birmingham Gazette and several smaller papers. ‘We, the undersigned, G.E.T. Edalji and Fredk Brookes,’ it read, ‘do hereby declare that we were the sole authors and writers of certain offensive and anonymous letters received by various persons during the last twelve months.’ This, too, was later revealed as a fraud. Like Reverend Edalji’s decision to publish some of the hate mail in the hope that it might help identify its source, George’s faked confessions would seem to refute the idea that the family were somehow responsible for harassing themselves.

  Even so, official suspicion now increasingly fell on George Edalji, who it’s possible to speculate may have secretly enjoyed at least some of the attention. One elderly man who had known George in his seventies told me that the latter had once stunned him with an ‘outpouring about the stupidity of the police compared to himself fifty years earlier’, although this had fallen short of an admission of guilt. The individual added that, in his quiet way, the teenaged George had apparently ‘always risen to a good challenge’, and found it ‘exhilarating’ to trade wits with the forces of law and order. They were his adversaries, but they were at least halfway worthy adversaries. ‘George enjoyed jousting with the officers who came to the vicarage,’ I was told. ‘It was a chance to perform.’

  So the game was on. At one point, Sergeant Upton claimed to have seen George furtively posting a letter in a pillar box at the gate of Wyrley and Church Bridge Station, as it was then called. Not only that, but the sergeant had been able to note the colour and size of the envelope, and these had exactly matched one subsequently delivered to W.H. Brookes, the grocer, containing a prank letter.

  Referring to the incident of the grammar school key that had appeared on the vicarage doorstep, Sergeant Upton wrote to Reverend Edalji on 23 January 1893:

  Will you please ask your son George from whom the key was obtained? It was stolen, but if it can be shown that the whole thing was due to some idle freak or practical joke, I should not be inclined to allow any police proceedings to be taken in regard of it. If, however, the persons concerned in the removal of the key refuse to make any explanation of the subject, I must necessarily treat the matter in all seriousness as a theft. I must say at once that I shall not pretend to believe any protestations of ignorance which your son may make about this key. My information on the subject does not come from the police.

  There are two possible explanations for Sergeant Upton’s suspicions, and why they should have assumed so much importance later.

  The first and official explanation was that the sergeant and his colleagues diligently followed proper procedure throughout, drawing upon truly Holmesian powers of observation and reason. Immediately on first entering the vicarage, Upton had ‘gained a sense’ of what was going on, he later said. There was a ‘strained and melancholy’ atmosphere about the place (hardly surprising, given the circumstances), and the ‘Hindoo lad’ had seemed to him to be curiously evasive. Even separating the objective facts from their automatic and intuitive subjective interpretation, as Holmes would surely have done, there was the matter of George’s motive and opportunity. It was widely acknowledged that he was a precociously intelligent but inward boy, of the kind who might conceivably have enjoyed sparring with the forces of officialdom; and he, of course, had access to the vicarage at all hours. According to this reading of events, George was a sort of functioning teenaged sociopath who had developed a bitter and contemptuous attitude towards the world under the carefully preserved façade of a mother’s boy.

  The other and more likely explanation is that the average semi-rural English police force of the 1890s all too often substituted selective experience and guesswork for true scientific deduction, and that in this case there was the powerfully aggravating factor of race, the miscegenation issue, and the family’s unorthodox domestic arrangements as a whole: all enough to trigger a provincial copper’s preconceived notions of what an imaginative ‘Hindoo lad’ like George might get up to.

  On 17 March 1893, the anonymous correspondent wrote to tell Reverend Edalji, ‘Before the end of this year your kid will be either in the graveyard or disgraced for life’. There was some more in this vein, and then in closing he added, ‘Do you think that when we want we cannot copy your kid’s writing?’ It was, in fact, ten years before the ‘kid’, George Edalji, was ruined for life, but in every other respect the letter was chillingly prescient. As Conan Doyle later noted, ‘It is difficult after this to doubt that the schemer of 1893 was identical with the [maniac] of 1903’.

  In coming to compile a list of alternative suspects who might have wished to cause harm to his family or himself, Reverend Edalji found that he was somewhat spoilt for choice. There was Elizabeth Foster, for instance, who had ‘form’ as an anonymous letter writer, then still living in the area and possibly seeking revenge for her original 1889 conviction. The reverend also expressed doubts about one Daniel Cotton, who some years earlier had left his position as the St Mark’s church organist after an ‘almighty row’ with the parish council. In time W.H. Brookes, the grocer, added the names of two local men whom he had publicly accused of theft from his shop, and who thus might have borne him – and by association, the Edaljis – a grudge.

  We’ve touched on some of the enigmatic young gang of travellers on the daily school train, who as a rule seem to have been unusually preoccupied by the female sex in general and that of the blameless young Maud Edalji in particular. In addition to these, there were at least half a dozen other individuals who were thought to be nursing a grievance of one kind or another ag
ainst the ‘Hindoos’ in their midst.

  Was it all something to do with Reverend Edalji’s sometimes outspoken politics? Did he have enemies, as he long suspected, even within his own party affiliation? One day, the former local MP Edward Holden, a Liberal, dropped by the Great Wyrley vicarage to ‘offer support and see how the Reverend was faring’. Shapurji Edalji met him at the door with a piece of paper and asked him to write the words ‘Bitch wife’ on it. This and samples from other friends were then sent off to a handwriting analyst in Birmingham, who charged Edalji £30 for his services but never conclusively identified a suspect.

  In the spring of 1893, a new name joined the list of candidates under consideration as the anonymous letter writer. This was 50-year-old James Morgan, a university-educated Birmingham man who was known to possess an imaginative and florid prose style. Were he in fact guilty, it seems likely he acted out of personal rather than narrowly political or theological motives. He was a misfit who had failed to keep a job in high finance to which he believed he was entitled, and had been reduced to working as a Walsall insurance agent and occasional newspaper stringer. As a result, he had conceived a deep hatred of authority, and, the theory went, chose to harass his local vicar as a protest against the injustice of which he believed he was the victim.

  On or around 28 April Morgan went, by invitation, to the Great Wyrley vicarage, an appointment he described rather tartly as ‘a commandment from his Holiness the Pope of Wyrley to attend his chateau’. The subsequent interview was not a success. Reverend Edalji promptly accused Morgan of composing the hate letters and Morgan denied this, but then added the curious flourish of boasting that he could have done so by sitting down to demonstrate various handwriting styles in an essay which included a number of sexually charged insults of the Edaljis. From then on, the two men conducted their exchanges through a spirited correspondence in the pages of the Cannock Advertiser.

  Morgan seems to have been one of those plausible lunatics who enjoy a public controversy. At one point, he sent the paper a detailed account of a recent confrontation between himself and the Edalji and Brookes families, a report embellished with lively passages of direct speech and a frustrated novelist’s descriptive touches. Alas, no such meeting ever occurred. It’s possible Morgan had convinced himself intellectually that he was a criminal mastermind, but both Reverend Edalji and the police came to discount his claims. Successive charges and counter-charges in the pages of the Advertiser continued during 1893, though these often wandered off from the specific point and into lengthy biblical digression on the one side and wholesale denunciations of the local community on the other. Morgan wrote in one letter that he had ‘powerful nemeses’ in the area, and it was they who wished to demean him in:

  … the eyes of these vile, lazy, pettifogging, ignorant collier folk of which there are a sight too many in Wyrley Bonk [sic] for my liking … Even the dirty, defiled, unwanted children of these vulgar, ignorant fools, the miners, make fun of me.

  The full truth about the hate letter campaign may never be known. But as in the case of another mystery – Conan Doyle’s 1892 ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’ – what matters most is not so much the beginning of the story but its escalation into the realm of animal maiming and the mindset of the criminal behind it.

  In the meantime, the abuse, whether appearing in epistolary or more tangible form, continued to rain down on the Edaljis’ home at regular intervals until December 1895. The letters arrived roughly once a month, often couched in apocalyptical language, typically composed in red ink and apparently written in short bursts of manic energy around the edges of the paper, so that one had to turn the page through 360 degrees to read all of it. Much of the correspondence had a sexual component. A number of striking combinations were suggested: one letter addressed to the Edaljis’ new maid, Nora, dwelt on her employer’s penchant for seducing young girls and initiating them into bondage, flagellation, bestiality and other, less easily classified debauches. Another letter invited Nora to flush the family cat down the toilet. The same young woman was later instructed to ‘put shit with anything you may cook for the [Edaljis] and save all your piss and put it to boil potatoes’.

  Perhaps just as striking a characteristic of the 1892–95 correspondence was its untiring acclaim for the heroic figure of Sergeant Upton. He was eulogised this way in one letter, ‘Ha, ha, hurrah for Upton! Good old Upton! Blessed Upton. Good old Upton! Upton is blessed! Dear old Upton!’ The author increasingly focused on the universal knowledge, peerless wisdom, and exquisite professional subtlety of the Cannock Police in general, which was not entirely the impression Conan Doyle came to form of that force. ‘Cretinous’ was his private assessment. Such was the praise consistently heaped on these same guardians of public order in the anonymous letters, quite apart from their other obsessions, that it is hard not to believe there was a vein of real derangement in the writer.

  At this point it seems fair to introduce Captain the Honourable George Anson, the imposing new Chief Constable of Staffordshire. The second son of the Earl of Lichfield, Anson had served twelve years as an army officer before retiring to join the police. It was said that he had beaten sixty-seven other candidates to become chief constable at the early age of 31, although against this precocious record of achievement it’s only fair to note that his family, based at the nearby 900-acre Shugborough Hall, enjoyed a certain prestige in the area.

  Anson has been widely portrayed as a prime representative of the late Victorian English landed Establishment, imperialistic, vain, personally bigoted in his attitude to ‘foreigners’ like the Edaljis, and displaying some of the less attractive qualities of an Inspector Lestrade in his unimaginative police work. It’s a caricature, if one with a grain of truth. At the time, Anson, a small, dark-haired man habitually dressed in a long white raincoat and a trilby, was generally seen as a hardworking, conscientious administrator who preferred to keep his name out of the papers. Although his family had a stake in several local news organisations, Anson himself never bothered to meet with the press or establish any relationships with the opinion-making elite. He genially assured his officers that he had the confidence of ‘Matthew’ (Viscount Ridley, the Home Secretary), which was all that mattered, and thus pandering to the likes of the Walsall Gazette was silly. When criticisms of him or his force were raised, Anson could almost invariably reckon with his minister’s backing. ‘The captain was a man who chose to serve in the police instead of lounging around on his estate and was not looking for ways to stir a controversy,’ I was told by one of his descendants.

  On the other hand, Anson was quite capable of delivering a blunt and critical assessment of a situation or individual if minded to do so. He seems to have taken an instant dislike to the ‘Hindoo vicar’, Reverend Edalji, and to have quickly determined that there was a case to be made against the reverend’s son George. In time, Conan Doyle wrote that he personally met with ‘nothing but frankness and courtesy’ when coming to interview Anson, who happened to be a fan of Sherlock Holmes. But even this relationship eventually broke down under the strain of their differing interpretation of the strange events at Great Wyrley. In 1911, Doyle wrote to Anson, ‘Your letter is a series of innuendos mixed up with a good deal of rudeness.’ Anson in turn jotted a note in his police book, ‘Is Conan Doyle mad?’ ‘The matter is a personal one between Sir Arthur and myself,’ he remarked later.

  In a startling 1920 appendix to his official report on the Edaljis, marked ‘confidential’, Anson would admit to fabricating evidence for Conan Doyle to chase, apparently designed to distract and discredit him. Among other things, he had created an elaborate ruse to suggest that the young Walsall thug Royden Sharp had travelled to London to deliver a poison pen letter to Doyle’s door. In fact, Sharp never made such a journey. The whole thing was a ‘practical merriment’ on Captain Anson’s part (not entirely different to the sort of pranks once visited on the Edaljis) although, to be clear, it was one meant to confound what Anson saw as a meddling a
mateur detective rather than directly pervert the course of justice. As Harry Houdini and several other leading anti-spiritualists would attest, Doyle in his later years could be querulous and dogmatic, working himself up into a nervous state which found expression in outbursts of rage, blame and apparent derangement, resulting in dire predictions brought to him through a 7,000-year-old spirit agency called ‘Pheneas’ that a named individual would suffer eternal damnation after death. Such was the fate he would come to promise Captain Anson.

  In December 1895, the second wave of anonymous correspondence to the Edaljis ceased as abruptly as it had begun. The last two letters in the sequence were posted at Stafford Station, which later suggested to Doyle that the writer had been travelling to or from the area by rail. Like Holmes, he was a great enthusiast for all manner of train timetables. It was thought highly significant that Royden Sharp had reported for duty that week on a ship leaving Liverpool, which could be reached by a direct service from Stafford. Captain Anson was not impressed by the coincidence of these events. He had come to believe that George Edalji was at least complicit in his family’s harassment, and that the reason for this was that he had been mistreated, if not sexually abused, by his father. ‘The boy was possessed with a blind fury,’ Anson wrote confidentially. ‘He had no friends and associates, and no doubt would suffer chaff at school for being a semi-oriental and I imagine could not forgive his father.’

  It’s easy to dismiss this as the pseudo-psychological babblings of an aristocratic policeman, but there were others, too, who broadly endorsed Anson’s theory. George Edalji’s own solicitor believed that his client had been involved in some of the anonymous letter writing. George’s younger brother Horace, later to leave the area and change his name, gave the police a statement saying the same thing. Other speculation included a story about the consumption of mind-altering drugs on the Great Wyrley vicarage premises, turning it into a sort of prototype 1960s commune with sinister Manson family-like undertones.