The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  The more personal attacks infuriated the aristocratic policeman, and his anger only intensified when his family name seemed to be publicly smeared by Doyle’s allegation of racism. ‘Is he mad?’ Anson once again privately enquired.

  Although Doyle continued to see Royden Sharp and one or more of his brothers as principally responsible for the crimes Edalji was supposed to have committed, they were far from his only suspects in the case. Among several others, there was, for instance, Harry Green, the local farmer’s son who allegedly killed his own horse while it was paddocked in Benton’s field, the same area where George Edalji was said to wander abroad late at night, more than a month after Edalji himself had been taken into custody; Fred Brookes, a feeble-minded Walsall youth whose grocer father had been one of the recipients of the second wave of anonymous letters in 1892–93; and a married, middle-aged, one-eyed local pit worker named Thomas Farrington. Judged to be an inoffensive man, if of irregular habits, Farrington later testified in court that he had spent the evening of 24 March 1904 in a pub before settling for the night in a nearby pig sty, where he had slept soundly until the ‘bull’ (siren) blew to signal the start of the work day. The police alleged that he had in fact risen some hours earlier, stolen into an adjacent field, and slit the throats of two sheep pastured there. A jury subsequently took just forty minutes to find Farrington guilty, and he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Since Edalji himself was then already in custody in Lewes Jail, the police had suggested that the pair had been part of an animal-ripping ring active in the area, although no evidence was ever presented that the men actually knew each other.

  Finally, there was one Jack Hart, a young Cannock man who had at one time practised in the butchery trade. Convinced that he was part of the criminal conspiracy against Edalji, Doyle wrote to Hart on at least four occasions in June and July 1907 to encourage him to turn king’s evidence against the Sharp brothers. On 18 August, Hart travelled to London for an interview with Doyle and his own brother, Innes, a scene that presents some of the tragicomic potential of a country ruffian being confronted by Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes in the Diogenes Club. Little of substance emerged: Hart freely admitted that he knew and loathed George Edalji (whom the Doyles had secreted in the next room), but denied any direct knowledge of the maimings. Captain Anson heard about the meeting, and for once agreed that his rival had taken a useful line of inquiry. ‘I would not be a bit surprised to know that he [Hart] helped Green to kill his own horse, or anything of the sort,’ Anson wrote to Blackwell at the Home Office. ‘He is not a man to be treated as above suspicion.’

  With his impassioned commentary about Edalji being a scapegoat, and the police evidence against him ‘open to the gravest doubt, and contradicted at every point by reputable witnesses’, Conan Doyle became more than just a popular author with a social conscience. He entered the broader tides of history. In the harshly polarised environment surrounding the case, and at a time when the officially approved man of letters rarely strayed into anti-government rhetoric, Doyle’s continuing articles and speeches flaying the authorities fixed him in the public eye as something close to a radical. Doyle not only lent his name to the judicial reform camp, and thereby put it in the mainstream; he made an honest scepticism about the way Britain as a whole was governed not just respectable, but necessary and patriotic.

  Writing later on the Edalji case, Doyle likened the corruption of the ‘Staffordshire and Whitehall elite’ to the cabal of French military officers and politicians who had conspired against Alfred Dreyfus in 1894. Convicted of treason, the young (and Jewish) artillery captain had spent nearly five years imprisoned in medieval conditions on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Just as France had its ‘Dreyfusards’, so there were those whom the British press now described, sometimes mockingly, as ‘Edaljiites’. ‘The parallel is extraordinarily close,’ Doyle wrote:

  You have a Parsee, instead of a Jew, with a promising career blighted, in each case the degradation from a profession and the campaign for redress and restoration, in each case questions of forgery and handwriting arise, with [Major Ferdinand] Esterhazy in the one, and the anonymous writer in the other. Finally, I regret to say, that in the one case you have a clique of French officials going from excess to excess in order to cover an initial mistake, and that in the other you have the Staffordshire police acting in the way I have described.

  Thanks to Conan Doyle, the unfolding Edalji scandal became a daily news staple for millions of ordinary Britons, and, in Doyle’s hands, a highly dramatic and strongly moral one.

  On 12 May 1907, Conan Doyle spoke on the Edalji affair at a specially convened meeting of the Crimes Club in London. He told his fellow members that the ‘eyesight evidence’ alone made it ‘inexpressibly absurd’ to agree with the verdict of the original trial jury. ‘Any impartial man,’ he added, ‘must do violence to his reason to think otherwise.’

  Whether later speaking of occult matters like spirits and fairies, or as he did here of a more material miscarriage of justice, it was the obvious conviction Doyle brought to his remarks that generally won his audience. In the hands of a lesser speaker, the message might have been ineffective, absurd even. Time and again, Doyle’s indignation captured exactly the sense of bitterness, resentment, and pent-up anger of the ‘Edaljiites’ as a whole.

  Doyle was particularly scathing about his rival, Captain Anson, who had again made the most ‘vile of insinuations about the Edalji family’: namely that the father and his elder son slept together for the purpose of sodomy, and that the relationship between the mother and her daughter had also been ‘unconventional, in some moral sense of the word’. Anson himself denied making any such allegation, or having ever suggested the least sexual impropriety about the sleeping arrangements at the vicarage. But Doyle told his Crimes Club audience that this was ‘quite disingenuous’ – that the captain had allowed himself these ‘base aspersions [was] quite certain, and there was no room for doubt whatever’. He proceeded to give some account of his recent discussions with Herbert Gladstone at the Home Office. There was some cause for cautious optimism, Doyle noted, following the committee of inquiry’s report. It had been announced that a formal ministerial statement would be made in the near future. Regrettably, he added, there was also some lingering official misapprehension about the identity of the anonymous letter writer involved. ‘The balance of proof is enormously against George Edalji having ever put his pen to the paper,’ Doyle concluded, although who knew what ‘blinkered politicians’ might make of the matter?

  Just three days later, the Home Secretary did indeed pardon Edalji, but, as we’ve seen, fell short of offering him either a public apology or financial redress. Not one to relinquish a fight, Doyle waited less than a week to reply. He wrote:

  Let me … consider the theory which I believe still obtains at the Home Office that the bad boy of 1892–95 was actually George Edalji reviling his own people, and writing furious letters to those who had never offended him … At that date Edalji was 19 years of age, an excellent scholar, who had finished his grammar-school education, and had already started that course of legal study at which he was to win such distinction. Can anyone believe that he is responsible for this barbarous writing and more barbarous spelling and grammar? It is impossible to suppose such a thing.

  This was perhaps an instance where Doyle’s need to see the ultimate moral truth of the story blinded him to some of its contradictory detail. Might Edalji have deliberately roughened his language and disguised his handwriting, for instance, or, as the police believed, had he dictated at least some of the vitriol to an accomplice? Sherlock Holmes would have been more incisive on the subject, as he shows in 1891’s ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ when analysing a letter sent to the wife of a missing businessman:

  ‘Coarse writing!’ murmured Holmes. ‘Surely this is not your husband’s writing, madam.’

  ‘No, but the enclosure is.’

  ‘I perceive also that whoever addressed the envel
ope had to go to inquire as to the address.’

  ‘How can you tell that?’

  ‘The name, you see, is in perfectly black ink, which has dried itself. The rest is of the greyish colour which shows that blotting-paper has been used. If it had been written straight off, and then blotted, none would be of a deep black shade. This man has written the name, and there has then been a pause before he wrote the address, which can only mean that he was not familiar with it. It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.’

  The difference between Holmes and his author in this case is that one operated as a forensic detective, and the other as an idealised campaigner for justice who, once having formed an opinion of a man’s good character, never allowed for the possibility that there might be many facets, some pure, others murkier, struggling for pre-eminence in the same individual.

  Doyle’s crusading instincts were by no means satisfied by the government’s compromise in the Edalji case. He fired off increasingly incendiary letters to the Home Office at regular intervals for the next twenty years. At one point, he found himself engaged in a three-way correspondence involving Captain Anson and their mutual friend the new Home Secretary Winston Churchill, each man attempting to convince the others of his deep and lifelong sympathy with the oppressed. Doyle wasn’t quite the first world-famous writer to take issue with the police. But he brought the intellectual versus authority figure friction to radioactive levels. More practically, he also helped to raise over £300 (£20,000 today), by public subscription, for a George Edalji compensation fund. A Court of Criminal Appeal became part of the English legal system in August 1907, partially as a result of the case. Edalji himself was re-enrolled as a solicitor that November, although, perhaps understandably, he chose not to practise in the greater Birmingham area.

  Doyle never lost his sense of indignation at the way the authorities seemed to have colluded against Edalji. ‘After many years,’ he wrote in his 1924 autobiography, ‘I can hardly think with patience of the handling of the case.’ For all that, when considering the long record of professional misconduct and procedural shortcomings that characterised the story as a whole, it’s worth remembering that in late 1905 Gladstone’s predecessor as Home Secretary, Aretas Akers-Douglas, had acted on his own initiative to reduce Edalji’s sentence to one of three years’ imprisonment, not seven, and that he did so well before Conan Doyle entered the fray. There were several subsequent parliamentary debates on the issue, notably in July 1907, not distinguished by their restraint in criticising the original conviction. This led in turn to Captain Anson arranging for his friend and local MP, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Staveley-Hill (Conservative), to ask the Home Secretary on the floor of the Commons ‘to say that there is no ground for the very grave charges made against the Staffordshire police in the Edalji case’. The minister was ‘delighted’ to give the assurance asked of him.

  Determining whether George Edalji was a scapegoat, a superficially innocuous young man with a psychotic streak, or perhaps a bit of both, is no easy task. Yet we have clues. They include the opinion not only of the Home Office and the Staffordshire Police, but of Edalji’s own brother and counsel, that the Crown’s case was essentially sound in its conclusions about the authorship of at least some of the anonymous letters. Even Conan Doyle appeared to concede the possibility that the authorities had managed to successfully separate the issue of the hate mail from that of the animal attacks when he wrote in May 1907:

  I have purposely said nothing of the outrages themselves and confined my remarks to the letters, since these are the only things for which Edalji is now held responsible, and it is on account of that alleged responsibility that compensation is refused him.

  Of course, for the most part the writing of such letters, or the placing of hoax advertisements, however misguided, falls short of a serious criminal offence. Even in the climate of 1903, it’s not a matter that would normally have merited a sentence of seven years’ hard labour. Edalji may have pondered in his cell the bitter irony of his being convicted of a crime of which he was innocent, but of having sown the seeds of his downfall by a protracted, and singularly ill-advised, campaign of adolescent mischief.

  The most striking thing about Conan Doyle outside of his printed works is his lifelong sympathy with the vulnerable or minority members of society, coupled with his zeal for total immersion in whatever cause happened to capture his attention. His diatribes in The Daily Telegraph and elsewhere remain models of controlled literary aggression – as even Captain Anson was later to admit, ‘You could delight in his sheer energy, and find yourself applauding every so often as the sweet arrow of one of his sentences hit its mark’. But a social crusader doesn’t usually succeed merely by being colourful. Setting aside his obvious narrative gifts, Doyle’s claim is forensic – it’s as a detective that he asks to be judged.

  The corkscrew plot of the Great Wyrley outrages, as it unfolded over the years, could certainly have done service as a sixty-first and final Sherlock Holmes tale. It includes a number of ingredients from the existing Holmes canon: the graphology that plays a part not only in ‘The Twisted Lip’ but in cases as varied and far-flung as ‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk’ (1893), ‘The Missing Three-Quarter’ (1904) and the detective’s fourth and last novel-length appearance in 1914’s The Valley of Fear, which opens with the arrival of a mysterious cipher message from a man who writes under the alias ‘Fred Porlock’, an agent to Professor Moriarty.

  As we’ve seen, there’s also an episode in 1892’s ‘Silver Blaze’ that hinges on an attempted night-time mutilation of a racehorse in an open field. Footprints and bloodstains are both staple components of Doyle’s fictional stories and his real-life investigation. There was even the question, seriously raised by the local police, of whether George Edalji had made use of a trap door or secret passage of some sort in order to make his way to and from his locked bedroom on the night of 17 August 1903, a plot device similar to that in the Holmes tales ‘The Norwood Builder’ and ‘The Golden Pince-Nez’. The verdict of admiring Doyle biographers is that a mind capable of such sustained imaginative feats, and the creator of an alter ego endowed with the ability to perceive and interpret clues baffling to the official flatfoot, would likely not have found himself at a disadvantage in any battle of wits with the rural Staffordshire Police.

  It’s possible, however, that in the particular case of George Edalji it was Captain Anson whose stubborn concern with matters such as motive and opportunity aligns him with Holmes’s rationalist approach to detection, and Doyle whose own rush to judgement, based on a mixture of subjective impressions and strong moral instincts, more obviously suggests a Dr Watson. Anson, it’s true, doesn’t always make an immediately sympathetic figure. When contemporaries came to reminisce about the titled army officer-turned-detective, the word ‘humility’ would often colour their accounts. They say he was extremely sparing with it. We know that Anson was well bred, irrepressibly proud of his family, responsible and honest, but also that he was gruff, high-handed, and imperious in his judgements (a ‘clenched fist’, Doyle thought), and thus not one of today’s natural community policemen. While competitive to a fault, he was also cautious and realistic.

  Although Anson was supremely self-confident, he had no illusions that every criminal offence lent itself to a neat solution. In this case, he made the eminently sane observation that, like most crimes, the horse slashing of August 1903 had taken place without witnesses, ‘so we are left with the need to balance the facts and draw the most likely conclusion’. From then on, the captain had reminded Doyle, ‘It [was] up to not you or me, but to twelve English jurors to reach the ultimate verdict’. Again, Anson may have had his personal prejudices and limitations as an investigator. But there is still no compelling evidence that he was engaged in a twenty-year long private vendetta against the Edalji family, let alone that he tampered with or planted any evidence. What’s more, he delegated freely, which gave him a tactical advantage in his struggle
s with the fiercely independent Doyle. For all his swagger, Anson valued results too much to be a one-man band.

  It remained Doyle’s unshakable belief right to the end of his life that one or more of the Sharp brothers of Hednesford, a village 5 miles north of Great Wyrley, were behind both the letters and the assaults that followed. We can only speculate whether Sherlock Holmes would have been similarly persuaded. It’s true that the local reputation of Royden Sharp, in particular, stood low: a congenital liar, a cheat and a bully, at one time a butcher’s apprentice, described by a contemporary as ‘low-browed, crafty, and incapable of truthfully answering an inquiry such as “What did you have for breakfast today?”’, he clearly fitted the profile of someone who might casually harm an innocent animal just for the thrill of it.

  Whether Sharp had either the wit or even the basic literacy to conceive and carry off a project that involved sending literally scores of letters, in a variety of hands and prose styles, and from dozens of different locations, over a period of some fifteen years, all the while evading the attention of Captain Anson and his men, is another question. Is it possible that the writer of a note accusing Reverend Edalji of ‘hypocrisy and humbug’ and asking ‘How can you preach as you do? I was hungry and you fed me not, naked and you clothed me not, in prison and you visited me not … God help all the poor souls whom you have accused’, was one and the same as the author of another message that advised the Edaljis’ maid Nora to save her piss in order to boil potatoes? Such diversity bears the hallmark of a creatively minded misfit more than a monosyllabically imbecilic school dropout.