The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  Doyle’s eventual conclusion was that the Sharp brothers had written the letters as a team, each of them bringing his own uniquely warped skill-set to the exercise. ‘These guilty [parties], three young adults and a boy, undoubtedly lived under the same roof,’ he later reasoned:

  Their epistles are continually on the same paper, and in the same envelopes. In some cases the rude scrawl of the boy comes in upon the very page taken up by the educated writing of the adult. A sheet may exhibit on one side an elaborate forgery of the signatures of the Edaljis, while on the other is a rude drawing (rude in every sense), which could only have been done by a lad. The adults appeared to pride themselves upon forgery, and the results, so far as I have been able to test them, show that they had remarkable powers in that direction. ‘Do you think that we could not imitate your kid’s writing?’ they say exultantly in one of the 1892 letters. They most certainly could – and did.

  As a rule, Doyle believed that siblings could often display a wide and sometimes mutually complementary range of genetic skills, as was the case in his own family. But Anson, less scientifically minded, thought the Sharp brothers ‘decidedly dim’, even in their collective mental candlepower, and ‘quite incapable’ of the conspiracy Doyle imagined.

  On 5 September 1907, the Wolverhampton Police arrested a 22-year-old butcher’s mate named Francis Hollis Morgan on a charge of maiming two mares in a field. It was alleged that his cap and a fragment of his pipe had been found at the crime scene. Captain Anson was quick to distance himself from the case, writing to the Home Office on 8 September that the evidence against Morgan was ‘very much less than [needed] for a conviction’.

  Meanwhile, the arrest seems to have been the spur for yet another outbreak of anonymous cards and letters, posted from different locations around the Midlands but broadly unified in their theme of vowing revenge should Morgan be sent to jail. It was established that George Edalji was then 150 miles away at a holiday resort in Great Yarmouth, which satisfied even the police of his innocence. Just six days later, a magistrate ordered that Morgan had no case to answer and that he be released. It was not a decision to inspire further confidence in the Wolverhampton force, or in the Edalji investigation as a whole. The London Evening News saw a ‘healthy average of stupidity’ among the ranks of Staffordshire law enforcement, and wondered how much longer ‘a yokel who is none the less a yokel for being a numbered and lettered official’ might continue to command public confidence.

  Later that year, George Edalji moved out of his parents’ house and left Great Wyrley for good. He was 31. He spent some time in London before settling 20 miles to the north in the new town of Welwyn Garden City. Conan Doyle continued to fight on his behalf, and over the next few years there was a lively correspondence on the case in everything from the British Medical Journal to the human-interest weekly, Tit-Bits. Doyle particularly ridiculed the idea that the accused man could still be indicted by certain individuals largely because of his ‘vacant, bulge-eyed staring appearance [and] dark skin … in other words, that he looks guilty’. His crusading journalism tailed off only with the outbreak of the war and his own re-emergence as a spokesman and missionary for a new religion.

  Roger Yelverton remained perhaps Edalji’s most outspoken supporter, although it’s possible he may have had the larger agenda of attacking the judicial establishment in general. ‘The whole thing is grossly unjust, a terrible stain … involving such grave consequences that a gentleman was sent to seven years’ penal servitude,’ he wrote, in the course of a lengthy open letter blasting Home Office officials. Yelverton was undoubtedly motivated in his campaign by a high-minded search for truth and justice. But he was also a masterly self-publicist. In time, he became almost as famous as Doyle himself for his articles and interviews on Edalji’s behalf, and was soon leading a glamorous social life, which he later claimed not to have enjoyed. When he rose to speak at one rally, the chairman introduced him as ‘the Great Defender’, a phrase that stuck because he made such a strong impression, and not one Yelverton himself actively discouraged.

  Edalji led a more retiring life, keeping house with his sister Maud until his death in 1953. Maud carried on the fight to clear her brother’s name until her own death in 1961. Having begun in an era of hansom cabs and gaslit streets, the Edalji affair had lasted long enough to see a time when human beings were shot into space, and governments possessed weapons that could effectively destroy civilisation in less than sixty minutes.

  On 13 July 1930, George Edalji was among the 6,000 spectators who packed the Royal Albert Hall to pay their respects to a man described in the event’s programme as ‘Our Very Present Friend’ – Arthur Conan Doyle, who had died six days earlier. It was a singular scene, part theatrical production, part spiritualist rally, and thus not one Edalji would have recognised from his childhood as a Victorian clergyman’s son. A vacant chair was set up on the Albert Hall stage alongside those reserved for the widow and her family. A cardboard sign propped up in front of it read, ’Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’. ‘There were many gaudy costumes on display,’ the Empire News reported, although Edalji himself was ‘more formally attired in black, immensely pale in the face, peering distractedly through the thick lenses of his glasses, and answering successive well-wishers with a simple and soft-throated “Thank you”’.

  A Reverend George Craze of the Spiritualist Association gave the opening remarks, and then asked the audience to rise for two minutes’ silence. Following that, a petite, middle-aged medium named Estelle Roberts was invited up on the stage, where she stood for some time, her eyes closed, swaying back and forth in front of a microphone. From time to time, she punctuated the routine by a sudden, birdlike twitch of her head. After what one report called an ‘interminably suspenseful’ pause, Mrs Roberts then looked up towards the ceiling of the hall and announced, ‘There are vast numbers of spirits here with us. They are pushing me like anything.’ Working the crowd like a seasoned vaudeville mentalist, she went on to describe the personal characteristics of several apparitions seemingly hovering above the heads of the audience: ‘You, sir – I see by you the spirit of a young soldier … There is a gentleman on the Other Side, named John, looking for his daughter … He has got your mother Jane or Mary with him …’

  After some three-quarters of an hour of this, there was a sudden peal of music on the Albert Hall’s pipe organ that seemed to galvanise Mrs Roberts’s efforts. ‘He is here!’ she exclaimed, pointing to the empty chair on the stage. ‘He is here!’ At that, she went across to where Lady Doyle was sitting, told her, ‘I have a message for you from Arthur’, and leaned forward to speak in her ear. Just then, a second thunderous chord issued from the organ, making it impossible for the audience to hear what was said. Mrs Roberts later told the press that she had first seen Doyle during the two minutes’ silence. ‘He gave me a message, which I gave to Lady Doyle, but am unable to repeat publicly. I saw him distinctly. He was wearing evening dress.’

  According to Mrs Roberts, even beyond the grave Conan Doyle never wavered in his belief in George Edalji’s innocence. He was said to have given her this assurance in the course of a 1931 séance also attended by Doyle’s widow and two surviving sons. ‘Sir Arthur, vigorous, powerful, full of force, very earnest and very grave, came back [and] spoke,’ Psychic News reported:

  Mrs Constance Treloar, President of the Marylebone Spiritualist Association, was present, as was George Craze, Lady Carey, and her great friend Lady Hardinge, Maurice Barbanell and Dr Rust, the brave medical man from Newport … Later Conan Doyle was heard to say, ‘Craze, they [the sceptics] can never stem the tide. We are going to deluge the world. Truth is here at last!’

  Some twenty years after he first made it, Conan Doyle was then said to have posthumously repeated his remark to the effect that the Edalji case stood ‘to the deep disgrace of British administration’.

  A Yorkshire medium named Charles Tweedale proved to be the most persistent of those later communing with Doyle’s spirit, which onc
e told him:

  Well, my dear man, I have arrived here in Paradise. That is not heaven. Oh no! But what we should call a dumping place, for we all come here to rest. Paradise means not heaven, but ‘a park’ – Persian word.

  According to Tweedale, ‘Sir Arthur often came through [in] undoubted and direct messages’ protesting Edalji’s innocence of the animal maiming, though in the course of a lengthy review of the case he apparently declined to finally name the guilty party. Privately, some friends admitted that Doyle’s occult remarks over the years had not impressed them. ‘Now the late Sir Arthur was an admirable writer of English,’ one critic noted. ‘If the post-death messages are exact copies of those messages, his knowledge of even the elementary rules of grammar must have suffered woefully since his death.’

  Despite Conan Doyle’s immortal assurances, we can reasonably ask whether his long crusade for justice in the Edalji affair had led him to overlook or disregard certain inconvenient facts that might conceivably have led to a different interpretation of events. Was it all a case of his having first reached a conclusion, and then found the evidence to support it? Did Doyle’s unshakable faith in Edalji’s good character blind him to the messy truth? As a 1907 editorial in the New York Times noted, ‘Sir Arthur may have been misled by the literary artist’s natural desire to round out his story perfectly. Fact may be stranger than fiction, but in most cases it lacks what is known as “construction”.’

  The edges of what was real and what was imagined may have started to blur in the Edalji case, but Doyle continued to pursue the authorities on the victim’s behalf long after another man might have honourably left the field. ‘I have written to the new Home Secretary [Reginald] McKenna about Edalji,’ Doyle reported to his mother in November 1911, five years after he first took up the case. ‘I’ll win that fight yet.’ It was the same, in one degree or another, right up to the end of his life, if not beyond it.

  A Boston medium called Mina Crandon, who went by the nom-de-séance of Margery, later insisted that she, too, like Charles Tweedale, had received posthumous messages from Doyle, and that these frequently reaffirmed his belief in Edalji’s innocence. At various times, she reported Doyle as having appeared to her ‘brandish[ing] a flaming sword of righteousness’, and ‘promising eternal damnation for all those who continue to pervert the course of earthly justice’. In assessing these claims, it’s perhaps only fair to add that Margery was known for her habit of holding séances in what were called ‘garments of severely spare cut’, if not entirely in the nude, and that her most singular achievement while seated around the darkened table was to speak in a ‘loud, gruff, masculine’ voice said to be that of her late brother. In time, she claimed that Doyle’s spirit had even returned in order to name her his literary executor. ‘You carry my mantle forward,’ he apparently remarked, before encouraging her to write a book with the title Sherlock Holmes in Heaven.

  The Great Wyrley outrages reveal a society obsessed, like our own, with instant celebrity, but where in general there was little public sympathy for those who existed outside the commonly agreed idea of what a professional man such as a Church of England vicar should look or act like. In a world where mental illness was untreatable and forensic science in its infancy, seemingly irrational crimes against minorities were bound to happen, and as often as not to go unsolved. Whatever else emerges in the Edalji case, it’s clear that the semi-rural English Midlands at around the turn of the twentieth century was not the ideal place for a precocious brown-skinned boy of mixed parentage to grow up.

  Was George Edalji, for all that, guilty as charged?

  Psychologically speaking, we know that Edalji broadly fits the pattern of the inward child who sees himself adrift in a hostile world, a category responsible for a disproportionate number of history’s worst villains. A reading of his available school reports and other testimony of around the early 1890s depicts an adolescent who was by turns gifted, furtive, shy, sensitive to perceived slights and insults, prone to jealousy, charming, yet at times deceitful – in short, who displayed the odd mixture of ego and insecurity often associated with those who grow up feeling themselves to be both more intelligent and more unlucky than everybody else.

  As a rule, such individuals consider themselves different from other people, which to a degree they are. Frequently, they judge themselves harshly. And as young adults some of them become adept at learning to deal with what is happening right in front of them while simultaneously maintaining an elaborate fantasy world in their heads. This disconnect between subjective imagination and objective reality should not have come as a surprise to Conan Doyle, who as a medical student had been trained to recognise that there are certain individuals who manage to compartmentalise their thinking to an unusual degree, and that this set of circumstances, allied to the nagging sense of being subject to an isolating, separating and lonely condition such as being a myopic, half-caste teenager in late Victorian Staffordshire, might conceivably produce what we would now call a functioning psychopath.

  Of course, these generalisations should be applied with caution to any individual, including George Edalji. Nothing suggests that there was anything untoward about his behaviour until about the age of 13 – as any parent will recognise, traditionally a time when certain strains can emerge between a child’s dependency on his elders and a marked aversion to authority figures in general. It was at this delicate transitional point in George’s early adolescence that the anonymous letters first descended on the Great Wyrley vicarage.

  There seems to be little doubt that they were the work of the maid Elizabeth Foster, and that she wrote them from a mixture of ignorance, malice and disenchantment with her basic terms of employment. In one of the letters she threatened to shoot Charlotte Edalji. Another referred to the reverend as the ‘bloody black man’, among other unappreciative remarks. At any rate, it seems reasonable enough to conclude that Foster and the Edaljis were not on convivial terms. As we’ve seen, she pled guilty before magistrates to a reduced charge of making threats, got probation, and retired to live with a mentally ill maiden aunt in the greater Birmingham area.

  It’s quite true that, as she was at pains to point out, Foster had also received anonymous letters while working at the vicarage. The Edaljis believed that she had simply harassed herself in this manner to deceive the police. Foster later volunteered to appear for the prosecution at George Edalji’s trial, although as she proposed to speak primarily of the reverend and his wife’s sexual activities her services as an expert witness weren’t, in the end, required. There seems little reason to dispute the findings of Cannock Police Court in January 1889 that Foster had sent ‘unsigned [and] minatory correspondence to her employers’, and it remains within the realms of possibility that she or members of her immediate family may have played some part in the campaign of malicious hoaxes against the Edaljis that began in 1892.

  Could George Edalji have taken a leaf from Foster’s book and himself written at least some of the letters that tormented his family up to and beyond his imprisonment? Did he smear excrement on his own window, or place a stolen key on his doorstep? If so, might it have been as a way of amusing himself at the expense of a few rather slow country policemen? It’s not unknown for a superficially innocuous but neurotic 17-year-old to taunt authority. Thomas Gurrin was far from alone in believing that certain of the anonymous letters of 1892–95 were in the same handwriting as letters admittedly written by George Edalji, with some attempt made at disguise. The jury at Edalji’s trial reached the same conclusion, and in time the official committee of inquiry, while not uncritical of the prosecution case, announced that they too were ‘not prepared to dissent from that finding’. Horace Edalji similarly believed that his brother had written a number of the second wave of letters as a kind of impish prank. Horace wrote to a friend called Chris Hatton in December 1903:

  Have contacted the mater telling her what I know about George and the [correspondence]. I have asked her to have this agitation agains
t the chief constable [Anson] stopped, and pointed out how serious it is. I don’t know what my people will think, but I believe I have done my duty in telling them.

  Horace did not have to wait long to learn his family’s reaction. Two days later, Mrs Edalji in turn sent her younger son a ‘wild’ twenty-two-page letter. She ‘very warmly’ refuted his allegations. In time, Horace came to believe that the key to the second phase of the case, the assaults themselves, lay in George’s financial problems as a struggling young solicitor. He wrote:

  If he did the outrages, I think he must have done it for the money, considering what desperate straits he was in. There was a bankruptcy petition against him at the end of last January [1903], but he got over it. It is quite possible someone got a hold over him which might explain subsequent proceedings. He paid a mysterious visit to London around the end of February & was away about a week.

  Did George Edalji then carry out the slashings because of making some wager in order to clear his debts? The physical evidence strongly suggests he didn’t. It will be remembered that he was sleeping in the same locked room as his father on the night of 17 August, and that the surrounding neighbourhood, if not the vicarage itself, was under continuous police watch. Even accepting that Edalji may have written some of the prank letters, quite possibly in league with one or more of those travelling around the area on the same train, isn’t to make the case that he also took to stealing out into darkened fields to brutally molest farm animals. ‘The value of the letters as evidence that the accused committed the [assault] is quite another question,’ even the Home Office concluded. In other words, Edalji may well have been complicit in a sustained juvenile prank, as both the handwriting analysis and the sheer volume of intimate detail contained in the letters about the affairs of the Great Wyrley vicarage strongly suggest he was. It’s possible that the animal attacks in some way evolved out of that same ill-judged campaign. But it defies belief that Edalji could have carried out the specific assault with which he was charged, or, for that matter, that his fiercely moralistic father would have willingly participated in a lifelong crusade to clear his son’s name had he known him to be guilty.