#absolute nerd

(May 22, 1859 Edinburgh, Scotland - Jul. 7, 1930 Crowborough, UK)

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a British writer and physician.

Perhaps one of the most interesting writers I enjoy. His Sherlock Holmes stories always entertained me as a child. He began my love of mysteries. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson, which meant I always had something to read as long as I was able to find his writings hiding among the books at our local Thrift Store.

Surprisingly, that happened quite often, I always wondered who had owned the books before I got to them when I was lucky enough to find one. I remember one time walking into the Thrift Store with my dad and the guy who owned it said, "I wondered if ya'll would be coming in!" and pulled a box of books from behind the counter. IT WAS BURSTING WITH DOYLE'S books.

He mentioned that the daughter of a man came in to donate his library after his untimely passing and that he saw several of Doyle's books and since he had no idea which ones I had or didn't, he began boxing up all of them to put behind the counter. I ended up walking away with several almost untouched books in prime condition that day for all of $5.00.

Sadly, due to a forced move at age 8, I lost almost every book; left behind on the farm I had grown up on to rot because our Landlord's Son decided after almost 10 years of gave my father a 7 day eviction notice so he could sell the 85 acres to a developer who wanted to build a bunch of houses on the land.

Now, I am in the process of trying to reclaim all my beloved books so I can pass them on to my kids one day.

Now I apologize in advance for the following Autistic Infodump, but if you want to know more about him as an author, a physician, a spiritualist, and a sports enthusiast....continue reading 😉

A Life Well Lived - Let's Meet An Amazing Man

Now, as I said earlier, he was a fascinating man of many talents and quite learned. His biography is nothing short of amazing and, at times, a bit bizarre.

Doyle is often referred to as "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" or "Conan Doyle", implying that "Conan" is part of a compound surname rather than a middle name. However, his baptism entry in the register of St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, gives "Arthur Ignatius Conan" as his given names and "Doyle" as his surname.

Steven Doyle, publisher of The Baker Street Journal, wrote: "Conan was Arthur's middle name. Shortly after he graduated from high school he began using Conan as a sort of surname. But technically his last name is simply 'Doyle'." When knighted, he was gazetted as Doyle, not under the compound Conan Doyle.

EDUCATION:

Doyle was sent to England, to the Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst in Lancashire, at the age of nine (1868–70). He went on to Stonyhurst College, which he attended until 1875. From 1875 to 1876, he was educated at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria. His family decided that he would spend a year there in order to perfect his German and broaden his academic horizons.

From 1876 to 1881, Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School; during this period he spent time working in Aston (then a town in Warwickshire, now part of Birmingham), Sheffield and Ruyton-XI-Towns, Shropshire. Also during this period, he studied practical botany at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh.

After graduating with Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery (M.B. C.M.) degrees from the University of Edinburgh in 1881, he was ship's surgeon on the SS Mayumba during a voyage to the West African coast. He completed his Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degree with a dissertation on tabes dorsalis (late consequence of neurosyphilis, characterized by the slow degeneration (specifically, demyelination) of the neural tracts primarily in the dorsal root ganglia of the spinal cord) in 1885.

Doyle was a staunch supporter of compulsory vaccination and wrote several articles advocating the practice and denouncing the views of anti-vaccinators.

SPORTS:

While living in Southsea, the seaside resort near Portsmouth, Doyle played football as a goalkeeper for Portsmouth Association Football Club, an amateur side, under the pseudonym A. C. Smith.

Authors v Artists cricket match in London, May 1903. Doyle is stood in the back row, 6th from left.

Doyle was a keen cricketer, and between 1899 and 1907 he played 10 first-class matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). He also played for the amateur cricket teams the Allahakbarries and the Authors XI, which consisted of some of the best-known British authors from the era, including Doyle, J. M. Barrie, P. G. Wodehouse and A. A. Milne.

While living in Switzerland, Doyle became interested in skiing, which was relatively unknown in Switzerland at the time. He wrote an article, "An Alpine Pass on 'Ski'" for the December 1894 issue of The Strand Magazine, in which he described his experiences with skiing and the beautiful alpine scenery that could be seen in the process. The article popularised the activity and began the long association between Switzerland and skiing.

In 1900, Doyle founded the Undershaw Rifle Club at his home, constructing a 100-yard range and providing shooting for local men, as the poor showing of British troops in the Boer War had led him to believe that the general population needed training in marksmanship. He was a champion of "miniature" rifle clubs, whose members shot small-calibre firearms on local ranges. Doyle went on to sit on the Rifle Clubs Committee of the National Rifle Association.

Doyle was an amateur boxer. In 1909, he was invited to referee the James Jeffries–Jack Johnson heavyweight championship fight in Reno, Nevada. Also, a keen golfer, Doyle was elected captain of the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club in Sussex for 1910. He entered the English Amateur billiards championship in 1913. By this time, he had moved to Little Windlesham house in Crowborough with Jean Leckie, his second wife, and resided there with his family from 1907 until his death in July 1930.

POLITICS:

Doyle served as a volunteer physician in the Langman Field Hospital at Bloemfontein between March and June 1900, during the Second Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902). Later that year, he wrote a book on the war, The Great Boer War, as well as a short work titled The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, in which he responded to critics of the United Kingdom's role in that war, and argued that its role was justified. The latter work was widely translated, and Doyle believed it was the reason he was knighted (given the rank of Knight Bachelor) by King Edward VII in the 1902 Coronation Honours. He received the accolade from the King in person at Buckingham Palace on 24 October of that year.

He stood for Parliament twice as a Liberal Unionist: in 1900 in Edinburgh Central, and in 1906 in the Hawick Burghs, but was not elected. He served as a Deputy-Lieutenant of Surrey beginning in 1902, and was appointed a Knight of Grace of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem in 1903.

Doyle was a supporter of the campaign for the reform of the Congo Free State that was led by the journalist E. D. Morel and diplomat Roger Casement. In 1909 he wrote The Crime of the Congo, a long pamphlet in which he denounced the horrors of that colony. He became acquainted with Morel and Casement, and it is possible that, together with Bertram Fletcher Robinson, they inspired several characters that appear in his 1912 novel The Lost World. Later, after the Irish Easter Rising, Casement was found guilty of treason against the Crown, and was sentenced to death. Doyle tried, unsuccessfully, to save him, arguing that Casement had been driven mad, and therefore should not be held responsible for his actions.

As the First World War loomed, and having been caught up in a growing public swell of Germanophobia, Doyle gave a public donation of 10 shillings to the anti-immigration British Brothers' League. In 1914, Doyle was one of fifty-three leading British authors—including H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy—who signed their names to the "Authors' Declaration", justifying Britain's involvement in the First World War. This manifesto declared that the German invasion of Belgium had been a brutal crime, and that Britain "could not without dishonour have refused to take part in the present war".

Doyle was also a fervent advocate of justice and personally investigated two closed cases, which led to two men being exonerated of the crimes of which they were accused.

The first case, in 1906, involved a shy half-British, half-Indian lawyer named George Edalji, who had allegedly penned threatening letters and mutilated animals in Great Wyrley. Police were set on Edalji's conviction, even though the mutilations continued after their suspect was jailed. Apart from helping George Edalji, Doyle's work helped establish a way to correct other miscarriages of justice, as it was partially as a result of this case that the Court of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907.

The second case, that of Oscar Slater—a Jew of German origin who operated a gambling den and was convicted of bludgeoning an 82-year-old woman in Glasgow in 1908—excited Doyle's curiosity because of inconsistencies in the prosecution's case and a general sense that Slater was not guilty. He ended up paying most of the costs for Slater's successful 1928 appeal.

A FREEMASON AND SPIRITUALIST?:

Doyle had a longstanding interest in mystical subjects and remained fascinated by the idea of paranormal phenomena, even though the strength of his belief in their reality waxed and waned periodically over the years.

In 1887, in Southsea, influenced by Major-General Alfred Wilks Drayson, a member of the Portsmouth Literary and Philosophical Society, Doyle began a series of investigations into the possibility of psychic phenomena and attended about 20 seances, experiments in telepathy, and sittings with mediums. Writing to spiritualist journal Light that year, he declared himself to be a spiritualist, describing one particular event that had convinced him psychic phenomena were real. Also in 1887 (on 26 January), he was initiated as a Freemason at the Phoenix Lodge No. 257 in Southsea. (He resigned from the Lodge in 1889, returned to it in 1902, and resigned again in 1911.)

In 1889, he became a founding member of the Hampshire Society for Psychical Research; in 1893, he joined the London-based Society for Psychical Research; and in 1894, he collaborated with Sir Sidney Scott and Frank Podmore in a search for poltergeists in Devon. Doyle was also a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He was also a member of the supernaturalist organisation The Ghost Club (a paranormal investigation and research organization, founded in London in 1862. It is believed to be the oldest such organisation in the world, though its history has not been continuous. The club still investigates mainly ghosts and hauntings).

Frank Podmore (5 February 1856 – 14 August 1910) was an English author and founding member of the Fabian Society as well as an influential member of the Society for Psychical Research.

***Unable to find corresponding picture of Sir Sidney Scott

In 1920, Doyle and the noted skeptic Joseph McCabe held a public debate at Queen's Hall in London, with Doyle taking the position that the claims of spiritualism were true. After the debate, McCabe published a booklet "Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?", in which he laid out evidence refuting Doyle's arguments and claimed that Doyle had been duped into believing in spiritualism through deliberate mediumship trickery.

Doyle also debated the psychiatrist Harold Dearden (date unknown), who vehemently disagreed with Doyle's belief that many cases of diagnosed mental illness were the result of spirit possession.

Also In 1920, Doyle travelled to Australia and New Zealand on spiritualist missionary work, and over the next several years, until his death, he continued his mission, giving talks about his spiritualist conviction in Britain, Europe, and the United States.

He wrote a piece in Light magazine about his faith and began lecturing frequently on spiritualism. In 1918, he published his first spiritualist work, The New Revelation. His second book on spiritualism, The Vital Message, appeared in 1919. Doyle also wrote a novel, The Land of Mist, centred on spiritualist themes and featuring the character Professor Challenger.

He also wrote many non-fiction spiritualist works. Perhaps his most famous of these was The Coming of the Fairies (1922), in which Doyle described his beliefs about the nature and existence of fairies and spirits, reproduced the five Cottingley Fairies photographs, asserted that those who suspected them being faked were wrong, and expressed his conviction that they were authentic. Decades later, the photos—taken by cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright—were definitively shown to have been faked, and their creators admitted to the fakery, although both maintained that they really had seen fairies.

The first of the five photographs, taken by Elsie Wright in 1917, shows Frances Griffiths with the alleged fairies.

Doyle's two-volume book, The History of Spiritualism, was published in 1926. W. Leslie Curnow, a spiritualist, contributed much research to the book.

Doyle was friends for a time with the American magician Harry Houdini. Even though Houdini explained that his feats were based on illusion and trickery, Doyle was convinced that Houdini had supernatural powers and said as much in his work, The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini became a prominent opponent of the spiritualist movement in the 1920s, after the death of his beloved mother. He insisted that spiritualist mediums employed trickery and consistently exposed them as frauds. These differences between Houdini and Doyle eventually led to a bitter, public falling-out between them.

In 1927, Doyle gave a filmed interview, in which he spoke about Sherlock Holmes and spiritualism.

HONORS AND AWARDS:

Knight Bachelor (1902)

Knight of Grace of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem (1903)

Queen's South Africa Medal (1901)

Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy (1895)

Order of the Medjidie – 2nd Class (Ottoman Empire) (1907)

Doyle has been commemorated with statues and plaques since his death. In 2009, he was among the ten people selected by the Royal Mail for their "Eminent Britons" commemorative postage stamp issue.

Doyle's grave at Minstead in Hampshire, England; located under a large tree at the back of the 13th-century All Saints Church. (Which, if I ever get to England I plan to go see).

********NOTE********

It’s kinda embarrassing that I wanted stickers of this show cause I love it but eh 🙈

I have a lot of room for stickers now with a new case so I ordered stuff off Etsy 😋