The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  In fact, he had only to make enquiries through the Danish press to quickly learn the truth. In July 1909, a number of Copenhagen newspapers carried notices which roughly translated as, ‘Reward offered for information on missing London man’. A second line in bold print added, ‘Idlers need not apply’. One of the non-idlers who replied was the missing party’s cousin, who filled in some of the less salubrious detail for Doyle. This again mirrored at least some of the basic plot of the 1891 Holmes story ‘A Case of Identity’ (itself inspired by the saga of the Australian butcher, Thomas Castro, who in 1866 emerged from the Wagga Wagga bush purporting to be the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, a claim that ultimately led an English court sentencing him to jail for perjury), if without the fictional tale’s more complex web of family deceit.

  Put bluntly, it seemed the man had simply used Miss Paynter for his own ends, and seeing no prospect of enrichment on the Torquay premises, had moved on. It was another case in which Doyle was able both to solve the mystery and to show his innocent young client how fortunate an escape she had had. ‘Brain fever’ might have been the rather broad term that Doyle, like many others, applied to a wide range of ‘female hysterical disorders’, as they were then called, but there were few British men of the era who listened with more sympathy while women talked about themselves, their hopes and their fears than he did.

  There was a strand to the Sherlock Holmes stories apparent as early as the detective’s appearance in The Sign of the Four: Holmes, bored and despising the world around him, chiefly the loyal Watson, exercising self-destructive skills of a high order. The deeper Holmes sinks into melancholy, the deeper his retreat into the ‘seven per-cent solution’ of cocaine. ‘Count the cost,’ Watson remonstrates with his friend:

  Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process which involves increased tissue-change and may at least leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle.

  In this particular case, Holmes finds relief in an enjoyably melodramatic adventure involving oriental treasure, revenge, romance and a blowgun-firing pygmy, a sufficiently potent mix to hold his depression at bay until the crime is solved and Watson in turn announces his engagement – eliciting only a ‘dismal groan’ from his companion. Affairs having been successfully returned to their correct state, Holmes similarly finds himself back at the starting point, his sense of tedium and futility almost morbid in its intensity and unreason. ‘For me,’ he remarks, in the story’s closing line, ‘there still remains the cocaine bottle,’ before stretching his bony white hand up for it.

  There was a broadly similar pattern to Conan Doyle’s life in 1906–1907 following the death of his wife Louisa. By then it was nearly twenty-one years since the couple had married, and thirteen from the time she had been diagnosed with a ‘hopeless’ case of tuberculosis. The family had continued to move restlessly about in search of the best possible climates to curb the disease, including a return trip to Southsea, where they found that the old surgery where they first lived together had become a corsetry shop named Doyle House. By the spring of 1906, Louisa was permanently bedridden, pitifully frail, and could speak only in a whisper. Towards the end, she is said to have summoned her 17-year-old daughter Mary and told her ‘not to be shocked or surprised if my father married again, but to know that it was with her understanding and blessing’. Louisa died peacefully at home on Wednesday, 4 July. She was 49. ‘My father sat by the bedside,’ Mary remembered later, ‘the tears coursing down his rugged face, and her small white hand enfolded in his huge grasp.’

  Unsurprisingly, Conan Doyle fell into a period of deep dejection as he struggled not only with his immediate loss, but also the prospect of single-handedly raising two teenaged children. It was an excruciating time. Among other things, Doyle was tortured by insomnia, a condition possibly exacerbated by his pangs of guilt that, to one degree or another, he had begun to enjoy the company of a mistress – Jean Leckie – while his wife lay terminally ill.

  We know that Doyle attended séances in London during August and September 1906, and that he later recalled a period of ‘long solitude’ spent wandering through the Scottish moors once the children had returned to school in the autumn. On 19 October, he wrote to his mother of having been ‘all alone for three days … One collects oneself and finds one’s soul.’ Doyle told another correspondent that day that he felt ‘paralysed’ when it came to doing any productive work, and urgently in need of some ‘driving force’ to carry him through his depression. The following morning the papers reported that the young lawyer George Edalji had been released from Pentonville Prison after serving three years of a seven-year sentence for the crime of cattle mutilation.

  __________

  1 The plot of ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ also mirrors some of the sad details of the ‘Merstham Tunnel Mystery’ of September 1905, when the body of a young woman, Mary Money, was found lying across a set of railway lines to the south of London. She had been the victim of an assault. In the Holmes story, published three years later, a junior government clerk, Arthur Cadogan West, is found dead next to the Underground tracks outside Aldgate Station. In both cases, it appeared that the victim had been killed elsewhere, and their body then thrown from a train.

  4

  THE CREEPING MAN

  When George Edalji walked out of the prison gates on the morning of Friday, 19 October 1906 he carried a brown paper parcel of civilian clothes, a gratuity of £2 9s 10d (representing about 7 pence, or 10 cents, for each month of his confinement) and a printed form requiring him to report to the police at regular intervals during the unexpired four years of his custodial term.

  As the authorities were at pains to point out, Edalji’s conviction had not been overturned and he was not being pardoned. This was purely ‘a degree of goodwill [and] mercy,’ The Times reported blandly, possibly the result of the ‘many letters, petitions and appeals’ addressed to the Home Office over the previous three years protesting the young man’s innocence. In particular, the satirical magazine, Truth – a sort of precursor to Private Eye – had run a series of articles between January and March 1905, which had remarked that ‘the crime against the poor victims was a relatively slight affair compared with the ordeal of a completely blameless soul hurl[ed] into the hell of slavery in a jail-cell’. According to this reading, the prosecuting authorities in the Edalji case – and more especially the Chief Constable of Staffordshire, Captain George Anson – had drawn their conclusions largely as a result of crass incompetence and blind racism, rather than the proven Holmesian formula of meticulous observation and reasoning.

  Later in 1905, a correspondent to The Times had asked whether the Edalji affair might not ‘arouse the brain [of] that great presiding genius of No. 221b Baker Street’, containing as it did a somewhat enigmatic Anglo-Indian family, a series of apparently motiveless and brutally violent crimes perpetrated at night, and an official investigation not distinguished by its forensic brilliance. No wonder, perhaps, that Doyle was soon able to report that he had overcome his depression and turned his energies towards ‘an entirely unexpected channel’.

  There is some doubt about the exact sequence of events that led Doyle to first involve himself in the Edalji affair. In his 1924 memoirs, he claimed that during ‘the days of darkness’ following Louisa’s death, and apparently thinking it to be a cricket title, ‘I chanced to pick up an obscure paper called The Umpire, and my eye caught an article which was a statement of [the] case’. But writing in 1907, Doyle recalled that Edalji, a jailhouse enthusiast of Sherlock Holmes, had contacted him direct, enclosing details of his trial and conviction. In either event, the recently bereaved author could hardly have avoided some of the widespread press coverage that followed Edalji’s conditional release in late October 1906. We know that Doyle was visited at home that Christmas by his fellow Crimes Club member, John Churton Collins, and that Collins wrote that h
e ‘had a delightful time with ACD, who is on fire with the Edalji case’.2 Similarly, Doyle’s 33-year-old brother Innes recorded in his diary on 12 January 1907, ‘Much talk of Edalji’.

  As we’ve seen, the case had its origins in a hate mail campaign of unusual stamina and variety directed at the Bombay-born vicar of St Mark’s Anglican church of Great Wyrley, Staffordshire, and his family. The Reverend Shapurji Edalji had first been appointed to the parish in January 1876, when he was 35, and would serve there continuously until his death forty-two years later.

  Despite, or because of, his outsider status, he seems to have readily understood and appreciated the cultural role faith played in Victorian Britain. The ‘more practical and less dogmatic’ men became about religion, the reverend often preached, the better lives they would lead; in turn ‘the life of the nation [would] become more virtuous’. There was ‘much good sense emanat[ing] from the pulpit at Wyrley,’ the daily Birmingham Gazette once editorialised. It would be wrong to assume that Reverend Edalji’s views, which tended to the politically Liberal, were universally popular, however, and his vicarage was the target of unappreciative graffiti, usually of the racial kind, even before the anonymous correspondence began.

  Taken as a whole, the Edaljis were a model case of early Asian assimilation into the English Midlands – idealistic and hardworking, and as good-hearted (or naïve) as some of Sherlock Holmes’s more credulous clients. One of the most affecting parts of the whole case is how the Edaljis themselves somehow retained their essential faith in the British system even in the face of appalling personal hardship.

  Although sometimes portrayed as of peasant origins, they were an impressively literate family. While in his early twenties, Reverend Edalji had published a series of scholarly dictionaries and grammars enquiring into the Indo-Aryan language Gujarati, and had used the proceeds from these to pay for his passage to England. On arrival there, he wrote a commentary on St Paul’s Epistles to the Galatians that was widely accepted as the definitive work on the subject. Its success made it possible for Edalji to find a living within the Church, and in June 1874 he married 31-year-old Charlotte Elizabeth Stuart, herself the daughter of an Anglican vicar and the niece of three others. She, too, privately published several theological papers, making almost intelligible the fantastic complexity of the Book of Leviticus, which she summarised as ‘God’s true and perfect contract with mankind’. The couple had three children: George Ernest Thompson, born in 1876, Horace, born in 1879, and Maud, in 1882.

  George Edalji was a shy, academically gifted boy who stared up at the world through bulging brown eyes. When he was 8 years old he volunteered to share a bedroom with his father, who was suffering a variety of health problems, in order to be able to help in the event of a medical emergency. At the same time, Charlotte Edalji moved in to her infant daughter’s nursery. These same sleeping arrangements continued for the next twenty years, and in time led to the rumour that the family indulged in unnatural practices.

  Meanwhile, Reverend Edalji would find himself embroiled in several long-running disputes with members of his church council (then as now, something of an occupational hazard), largely over his insistence on personally supervising the religious education of his school-age parishioners. The reverend’s Bible readings apparently only strengthened his belief in the scripturally sanctioned bond he felt existed, in descending order, between God, himself, and his congregation. It was said that when local people sometimes spoke of the ‘zeal of the convert’, they had him in mind.

  In August 1888, the first of the poison letters arrived at the Great Wyrley vicarage. Rather oddly, it asked that Reverend Edalji order a particular local newspaper, and suggested that his windows would be smashed if he failed to comply. A second letter contained the specific threat to shoot the reverend, and resulted in the first appearance of the police in the case.

  On New Year’s Day 1889, 12-year-old George Edalji reported finding a letter on the table of the hall in the vicarage, the gum on the envelope still wet. Three more such letters appeared in the same week, all of them written on paper apparently torn from George’s school exercise book. As noted, the police eventually arrested the Edaljis’ 17-year-old servant girl Elizabeth Foster, who pled guilty to a reduced charge of using threats and was given probation. By all accounts, the young offender showed no contrition in the dock, and subsequently claimed she was innocent of a crime to which she had confessed only on her lawyer’s advice. A renewed outbreak of anonymous letters from 1892–95 actively championed Foster’s cause. She was said to have moved around the Birmingham area in the meantime, eventually settling with a maiden aunt, using ‘cunning, corruption and seductiveness’ to advance her way in life, which was reportedly distinguished by ‘a sexual need as blatant as her perfume’.

  George Edalji, meanwhile, enjoyed a conventional middle-class education at Rugeley Grammar School, about 8 miles to the north of Great Wyrley. Again, he seems to have been quietly independent and self-willed. Perhaps he had to be. He was on his own. George was a Christian, an Asian and a bit of a swot. One of his contemporaries remembered him as ‘eager and deep, inclined to be a tad smug, [his] hand always up first in class’. He was an avid reader. When he turned 13, George’s great-uncle Compson, vicar of Hillesley in Gloucestershire, gave him a leather-bound copy of Thomas à Kempis’s 60,000-word biblical treatise Of the Imitation of Christ, and the next morning George came downstairs announcing he had read it from cover to cover.

  As a teenager, he was known to write long and warmly affectionate letters to his family members, even when they were living together under the same roof. He was also soft-spoken and scrupulously polite, always tipping his school cap when he passed a lady in the street. And he was a meticulous dresser. Despite all these attractive qualities, George had few close friends and no known girlfriends. His mother later observed that her elder son was ‘never one to travel in crowds’. In later life, George neither drank nor smoked (although he was known to gamble), and for many years chose to share a home with his adult sister. He was an odd bird, and in the final analysis, it seems, probably a lonely one.

  Beginning in July 1892, when George was 16, the Edaljis were subjected to a second and even more virulent anonymous mail campaign. It has never been successfully established why their persecution should have resumed after some three and a half years’ silence, although Conan Doyle later theorised that Reverend Edalji’s role in the 1892 British general election, and his outspoken views on more narrowly parochial affairs, may have played a part.

  Much of the abuse was addressed to the Great Wyrley vicarage, although some was sent to a W.H. Brookes, a local grocer and church warden, and showed a distinct turn to the psychotic. One of the Brookes letters, for instance, included a vivid account of his adult daughter sexually molesting her 10-year-old sister. The writer went on to allege other practices in the Brookes household less refined than this. Often written in two distinct hands, one seemingly educated, the other bovine or childish, the letters increasingly came to focus on the Edalji family, and on George in particular. ‘The blackman will die … I swear by God that I will murder George Edalji soon. The only thing I care about in this world is revenge, revenge, revenge, sweet revenge,’ read an early example:

  Every day, every hour, my hatred is growing against George Edalji … And your horrid little girl … That damn cunt … Bloody blasted dam bloody currst buger bleeding blasting kid … I will descend into the infernal regions showering curses upon you all.

  … and so on.

  Seeming to refute the idea that he was somehow responsible for the threats to his own family, Reverend Edalji went to the trouble of arranging to reproduce some of the letters in the Staffordshire press in the hope that a reader might help to identify their writer or writers, but to no avail.

  By late 1892, the correspondence had come to loosely revolve around a group of Walsall youths including Fred Brookes, son of W.H. Brookes, and the impressively feckless 12-year-old Royden Sharp. Sharp w
as later expelled from the local grammar school for ‘fighting, lying, cheating, forging his end-of-term report’ and, climactically, ‘knocking down the Head of House with a clout to the jaw’. Another figure mentioned in the letters was 14-year-old Fred Wynne, a local tough and intimate of the Walsall-based gang that often travelled to and from school in the same railway carriage. George Edalji sometimes shared part of their journey, although, as usual, seems to have kept his distance from the other boys.

  An unsigned letter in December 1892 boasted that the author and his friends had ‘reely wrecked’ their train compartment on a recent journey, while ‘the blackman Edalji’ had merely looked on at the vandalism. A second note later that month contained the threat to break the legs of a named railway porter if he failed to leave money for the writer, before suggesting both that Fred Brookes was enjoying sexual relations with the 10-year-old Maud Edalji, and that George was engaged in similar practices with Brookes’s sister. Although the English secondary school system was not then troubled, as it was later, by counsellors, if it had been they surely would have found the young passengers regularly embarking on the Stafford to Wolverhampton branch line that winter to be suitable cases for concern.

  Meanwhile, the police again intervened. On or about 7 December, a Sergeant Upton of the Cannock station called at the Great Wyrley vicarage to take statements from Reverend Edalji and his family. After 16-year-old George had finished his story he turned to go back upstairs to his room, at which point Sergeant Upton put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, ‘I have been given orders to ask for your assistance in order to eliminate you from our enquiries’. His orders were to obtain by whatever means necessary a sample of George’s handwriting, to see if it matched the letters. The teenager, who seems not to have realised what was happening, said, ‘I will be glad to help’.