The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  In Shaw’s provocative phrase, ‘The wreck was nobody’s fault, but, on the contrary, a triumph of British navigation’.

  Conan Doyle may have lacked Shaw’s coruscating wit, or his undoubted flair for drawing attention to himself. There was no contest between the two authors when it came to creative vitriol or quotable aphorism. But Doyle had the advantage of never thinking himself special, despite all the special things he had done. He also held an innocent and unshakable belief in the essential decency of his fellow Britons, notwithstanding the case of the Staffordshire Police and one or two other notable exceptions to the rule. Doyle again showed his chivalry and sincerity when he wrote in turn:

  As to the general accusation that the occasion has been used for the glorification of British qualities, we should indeed be a lost people if we did not honour courage and discipline when we see it in the highest form … It is a pitiful sight to see a man of undoubted genius using his gifts in order to misrepresent and decry his own people.

  Doyle’s final comment in the Daily News of 20 May 1912 caught the public mood skilfully. ‘The worst I can say or think of Mr Shaw,’ he wrote, ‘is that his many brilliant gifts do not include the power of weighing evidence’, lacking as he did the quality of ‘good taste [and] humanity’.

  As we’ve seen, Doyle also had a more personal stake in the loss of the Titanic: his friend, the newspaperman William ‘W.T.’ Stead, who was 62, was among the victims. Stead was in some ways as controversial a public figure as Shaw, with a series of journalistic campaigns on the likes of female suffrage, universal healthcare and penal reform to his name. In 1885 he had served three months in prison for the ‘abduction’ of a 13-year-old girl, an offence he had committed to draw attention to the scandal of child prostitution.

  It’s arguable that Stead anticipated Hunter S. Thompson and his school by nearly a century in adopting the modern journalistic technique of creating a news event rather than just reporting it. In later years, Doyle spoke at length about this ‘fine and indomitable fellow-fighter’, whom he credited specifically for his lurid exposés of ‘life in the meanest slums of London [and] the attendant horrors of drink’, the latter always of particular concern to him. He did not mention that Stead had gone on to publish two pamphlets roundly attacking the behaviour of the British troops in the Boer War, whose appearance he privately called an ‘extraordinary outbreak of defamation’ of the fighting man. Doyle’s own 1902 broadside, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct, was the direct result.

  Although Conan Doyle crossed swords with Stead while he was alive, he enjoyed warm personal relations with him after his death. In May 1922, Doyle was in New York to give a sold-out lecture on spiritualism at Carnegie Hall. He brought the performance to a suitably dramatic climax by projecting a series of ‘spirit photographs’ which appeared to show the presence of ‘extras’, or ghostly auras, hovering in the background. There were gasps in the room when Doyle then displayed an image of Stead – well known to many in the audience – that he said was obtained by psychic means. ‘It was a very clear portrait of a man,’ the New York Times reported, ‘and around the outside was scribbled, in handwriting which Sir Arthur said was undoubtedly his friend’s, this line, “I will try to keep you posted”.’ Stead was as good as his word, because he was seemingly to return to Doyle, either in visual or written form, at regular intervals over the years.

  Doyle also briefly considered the sinking of the Titanic as an act of individual or state terrorism. Several of the victims’ friends and relatives wrote to him following the tragedy to tell him about themselves, their losses, and often their rather fanciful conspiracy theories. ‘Over 1,500 souls did not forfeit their lives on the Titanic,’ one correspondent wrote, ‘but on her sister craft Olympic.’ The two ships had been swapped, apparently, as part of a ‘Zionist-backed insurance fraud’.

  Other suspects drawn to Conan Doyle’s attention included the American financier J.P. Morgan, who cancelled his berth on the Titanic at the last moment and ‘instead … dispatched his many business rivals on board to the depths of oblivion’, and, slightly more plausibly, ‘a German (or Austrian) sub-mersible [which] fired an underwater device at the vessel’.

  During the period 1910–14 Conan Doyle was as intent as any British statesman on preparing the nation for war with Germany. In November 1912, he gave a public speech on the need for a Channel tunnel (anticipating the authorities by eighty years), which he saw as a vital supply route to the Continent in the event the United Kingdom was cut off by naval action. He went on to publish a cautionary tale called ‘Danger! A Story of England’s Peril’, a prescient account of the nation being starved into submission by only a small number of enemy U-boats. But although he had no doubt that the submarine would one day be used for commerce raiding, nor any illusions about German military intentions, Doyle discounted these factors in the case of the Titanic. There was no ‘linear connection’ he told the Crimes Club, in terms Holmes might have echoed, and the only way to adopt an alternative theory of the tragedy was to submit to ‘circuitous and hypothetical meanderings’ of the mind.

  In April 1913, Doyle played host at Windlesham to William J. Burns, the 52-year-old private detective whom the New York Times had called ‘The real Sherlock Holmes’ and ‘Our Greatest Living Detective Mind’, an enthusiasm Burns himself shared. The American brought with him a box-like ‘detectaphone’, or bugging device, along with other state-of-the-art law enforcement equipment. Doyle was sufficiently impressed to call this a ‘real stepping-stone towards [a] definite solution’ of a crime. Burns himself, he wrote, possessed ‘the easy and polished manners of a diplomat over something else which can be polished – granite’.

  Later that month, the two men consulted on a sensational murder case that began in a dank basement room smeared with waste and blood in Atlanta, Georgia. A 13-year-old girl named Mary Phagan had been found strangled and apparently raped in the cellar of a pencil factory where she worked, and the company’s manager, Leo Frank, 29, was quickly arrested, tried and given the death sentence. Since Frank was precociously intelligent, hardworking, myopic and Jewish, the case bore a certain surface resemblance, as Doyle noted, to that of George Edalji. As Holmes advises Inspectors Lestrade and Gregson in A Study in Scarlet, ‘There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.’

  Burns investigated the case, and concluded that the real culprit was one Jim Conley, a black janitor at the factory and the state’s star witness against Frank. In the Deep South of that time, the Jew typically enjoyed an even less exalted place in society than the African American. Burns based his conclusions on carefully reconstructing the crime scene, and then timing the prosecution’s version of events, which meant that Frank would have had to have finished working in his office on the morning in question, gone upstairs, checked on two co-workers, left the building, taken a ten-minute trolley ride home for lunch, returned to the factory, accosted Mary Phagan in the basement, brutally assaulted her, and then walked upstairs to calmly resume work, all within the space of half an hour.

  Thanks to Burns and other campaigners, the case became a national issue. In time, the state commuted Frank’s sentence to one of life imprisonment. Following that, a lynch mob that included former Georgia Governor Joseph Brown, future President of the State Senate Eugene Clay and several retired or current county sheriffs, removed Frank from jail, drove him for seven hours to Phagan’s hometown of Marietta and hanged him from the branch of a tree. Despite having posed at the scene for photographs that were later published and sold as postcards, none of Frank’s killers was ever arrested.

  Doyle kept a volume full of court transcripts and newspaper cuttings on the case among the files in his crime library. It may have influenced his decision to include a lengthy American flashback in the plot of The Valley of Fear, which he began writing later in 1913. Burns subsequently became director of the first national bureau of investigation, predecessor to the FBI, but resigned amidst allegations that his ag
ents had sought to intimidate newspaper editors critical of the bureau’s activities. The 29-year-old J. Edgar Hoover took over as acting director, dying in office forty-eight years later. Burns himself moved to Florida and published detective stories until his death at the age of 71.

  Conan Doyle later wrote that the idea of an acceptable form of public entertainment underwent a ‘rude shock’ in the years just before the outbreak of the First World War. By now in his fifties, he had abandoned any pretence of sympathy for modernist culture. In particular, Doyle shrank from the more proscriptive plays of Henrik Ibsen, as well as the ‘organised din’ of Gustav Mahler and the perceived decadence of conceptual painters such as Marcel Duchamp and Edvard Munch. In time, he would go on to support the Conservative Home Secretary’s proposals for greater powers of artistic censorship. Doyle’s idea of a good writer remained the likes of Thomas Hardy, Winston Churchill or Rudyard Kipling, the last of whom he called ‘England articulate’.

  To many in pre-war Britain, however, the greatest shock to the established order wasn’t the advent of Cubism, or such eye-catching developments as the works of Mondrian and Picasso, or Stravinsky’s ballets, or the more kinetic rhythms of black dance bands accompanied by uninhibited young women in Scheherazade skirts. Nor was it the arrival on the London stage of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, with its scandalous use of the word ‘bloody’. The subject of most news comment wasn’t a public entertainment at all, though it may be argued that, over time, it became one. Rather, it was a meeting of immaculately dark-suited and apparently sober-minded men held at the Geological Society in London on 18 December 1912, when a 48-year-old lawyer and amateur palaeontologist named Charles Dawson claimed to have discovered bone fragments at a gravel pit near his home at Piltdown, East Sussex, and that these had ‘terrific significance’ for our understanding of human evolution.

  At the same meeting, Arthur Smith Woodward, curator of the geological department at the British Museum, announced that a reconstruction of the fragments had been prepared, and that a resulting ‘human-like’ skull, thought to be some 600,000 years old, was all but indistinguishable from that of a modern chimpanzee. Dawson and Woodward went on to claim that ‘Piltdown Man’ represented no less than an evolutionary missing link between apes and humans, and by extension a denial of the biblical story of creation, a thesis much of the more progressive element of the press was happy to accept.

  It was to be forty-one years before new scientific dating techniques conclusively proved that Dawson’s discovery was a hoax. The Piltdown fossils ‘could not possibly form an integral whole,’ The Times reported in November 1953. Instead, they consisted of a human skull of medieval age, the jawbone of an eighteenth-century orangutan, and several assorted modern chimpanzee teeth. There was also a bone chip determined to have come from an extinct species of elephant unique to the plains of Tunisia. Only a brief microscopic examination was required to show that several jaw fragments presented by Dawson had been filed down to give them a shape associated with that of a human. A sculpted bone found at the original site in Sussex, and thought by Woodward to be ‘a wonderfully preserved Neanderthal hunting or sporting tool’ – a sort of primitive cricket bat – had been similarly formed with an ‘implement like a Swiss army knife’. In short order, Piltdown Man was unceremoniously removed from display and consigned to a metal box in the basement of London’s Natural History Museum, where it resides today.

  As a part-time archaeologist, Charles Dawson was nothing if not prolific. In addition to what he modestly called his ‘supreme discovery’ of man’s ancestral roots, he also turned up a wealth of flints, vases, tiles, statuettes and assorted hammers and axes, and claimed both to have excavated a large supply of natural gas of ‘many inexplicable properties’ and personally observed an 80ft-long sea serpent swimming in the English Channel. Even Arthur Smith Woodward, Dawson’s champion at the British Museum, allowed that he had ‘a restless mind’. A neighbour and fellow archaeologist named Margaret Boycott said, ‘Charles was an otherwise obscure, unmarried little man who wore spectacles and a bowler hat’.

  Did Dawson lead a Walter Mitty life, which found significance in ‘discoveries’ that he quite possibly meant as a sort of academic prank, at least up to the moment Nature magazine declared the Piltdown fossils ‘the most important find of its kind ever made’? Was he perhaps flattered by his subsequent comparison to Charles Darwin? Some researchers have theorised that Dawson had expected his ruse – if only because of the prehistoric cricket bat – to be spotted straight away, but was horrified to see it take root in scientific thought. So he stayed silent. Following Dawson’s death from septicaemia in August 1916, no further finds were made at Piltdown.

  While Dawson was almost certainly the main culprit behind the twentieth century’s greatest scientific hoax, it’s long been believed that he had the help of co-conspirators. Could these conceivably have included a nearby resident who was known to be keen to ‘adjust the guardrails defining orthodox spiritual teaching’, as he put it? Did Piltdown Man provide such a man with the Archimedean point from which to challenge received Christian wisdom? Could the creator of Sherlock Holmes have taken a certain intellectual pleasure from the employment of his skill and cunning at the expense of the religious and political Establishment?

  These are the known facts. In 1912, Doyle lived only 7 miles from the scene of Dawson’s apparent triumph. He played golf at Piltdown most weekends. A study of his commonplace book, or diary, shows him frequently dwelling on the topic of man’s evolution, and describing a whole series of skulls and relics brought to his attention over the years. Doyle also had pretensions as an archaeologist, and one of the characters in his 1912 novel The Lost World says, ‘If you are clever and know your business, you can fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph’. He knew and apparently admired Charles Dawson, and wrote him an enthusiastic letter in the month Piltdown Man was discovered. Dawson in turn wrote to Smith Woodward to tell him that Doyle, that ‘omnivorous reader’ on anthropology, seemed ‘excited about the skull’ and had ‘kindly offered to drive me in his motor next week anywhere’.

  While it conjures up a vivid image of a caped author in a deerstalker cap paying nocturnal visits to the Piltdown site to scatter assorted bone fragments by the light of a lantern, Doyle’s candidacy as Dawson’s accomplice should be treated with caution. Although sometimes credulous when it came to the more obvious charlatans of the psychic world, there’s little evidence that he ever personally resorted to fabricating data to discredit orthodox religious thought. None of Doyle’s own archaeological finds or direct supernatural encounters over the years have turned out to be deliberate frauds on his part. It may well be that, as the Guardian writes, ‘Sir Arthur’s Spiritualism had brought him into conflict with organised Christianity, and he wanted to humiliate its practitioners’. That still leaves the question of timing: Piltdown Man was discovered in 1912, while Doyle underwent his final conversion to the paranormal only in 1916. As in the case of the middle period of anonymous letters in Great Wyrley, we may never know for sure who was responsible and whether, in the end, both offences were nothing more than the activity of an able but emotionally stunted individual who wanted to show off his superior intelligence.

  Perhaps the ultimate lesson of Piltdown Man is that, as Harry Houdini once said of Doyle, ‘As a rule, I have found the greater brain a man has, and the better he is educated, the easier it has been to deceive him’. Not only did many of the best, and certainly most self-regarding, minds of the early twentieth century rush to embrace the findings of a weekend archaeologist like Charles Dawson; more than a century later, it remains a widespread but lazy assumption that the biblical story of creation and the evolution of the physical universe might not be twin manifestations of a divine act of self-revelation. Doyle himself, for all his aversion to traditional Christian pieties, saw no such contradiction.

  The annals of criminology reveal that even in the English Home Counties of the early twentieth century, many
respectable, middle-class citizens often saw the occult at work. As we’ve seen, when Conan Doyle moved to the pleasantly leafy village of Hindhead, Surrey, he did so primarily for its presumed benefits to his wife Louisa’s health. The house he built, Undershaw, craned out over the spectacular gorge known as the Devil’s Punchbowl, the ‘loveliest spot in England’, Doyle believed, even if one allegedly haunted by the ghosts of highwaymen who had once been hung from a gibbet there. In 1851, a Celtic cross was erected on the site of the executions in response to public unease about it. To one visitor, the view from Undershaw was ‘like a scene from a Wagnerian tale’, while the house itself offered distinct gothic touches such as ‘baronial fires, stained glass [and] a secret chamber built behind a bookcase in the library’, and would be steadily enlarged over the years into a ‘grandiose manor, suitable for state visits of great artists and other dignitaries’.

  As we’ve seen, by 1913 Doyle and his new family had moved 60 miles away to Crowborough, which at around 800ft above sea level also enjoyed something of a reputation as a health resort. But he returned to his earlier home at least once that year in response to requests that he investigate ‘strange phenomena’ seen in the area. These included the discovery of a dead cat strung from a tree close to the scene of the judicial hangings, several instances of curious ‘stick-like ciphers’, similar to those in Sherlock Holmes’s ‘Adventure of the Dancing Men’, daubed on residents’ doors, and an anonymous note delivered to the Devil’s Punchbowl Hotel which instructed ‘Mr H. of Baker Street’ to search the nearby woods for a ‘sacred chest’ containing the meaning of life.

  Doyle soon located the ‘chest’, a badly decayed biscuit tin that was found to hold only a used London bus pass and some ladies’ underclothes. He apparently went to the trouble to enquire at Scotland Yard if any women had been reported missing at around the date shown on the ticket, but to no avail. A local lawyer named James Lanyon later thought it: