Tag: Arthur Conan Doyle

We have no Canonical happening for today, but we celebrate a rather important event!

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born May 22, 1859 at Picardy Place, Edinburgh, to Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary Doyle (née Foley).

In honor of Dr Doyle’s 158th birthday, we’d like to share some fascinating facts from A Curious Collection of Dates: Through the Year with Sherlock Holmes by Leah Guinn (JHWS “Amber”) and Jaime N Mahoney (JHWS “Tressa”). We rely on this excellent volume for inspiration for many of our non-chronology entries. As a rule, we avoid posting such long extracts from published works; we hope that this small taste will inspire you to grab a copy of the book from Wessex Press for yourself!

Ten Facts about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle You Might not Know

from A Curious Collection of Dates: Through the Year with Sherlock Holmes by Leah Guinn and Jaime N Mahoney

1. He was six years old when he wrote his first story. An adventure story about a hunting party’s encounter with a Bengal tiger, it was, as is typical for little boys’ tales, realistic about its protagonist’s fate: the tiger went away filled.
2. He had a miniature monorail train built at Undershaw for his children and their friends.
3. He could be musical. In the early spring of 1898, he wrote to his mother that he was learning the banjo: “To hunt and to play a musical instrument would 2 years ago have been picked out as the two things in the world that I was least likely to do.” (We cannot tell if he stuck with it.)
4. He did not like corn on the cob. During his 1894 tour of the States, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that he “does not seem to be infatuated with ear corn.” Sweet potatoes and eggplant were apparently more palatable.
5. He seems to have been asked to join The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose alleged members included William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen, and Sax Rohmer. He declined the invitation, from a “Dr. Brown,” claiming that he simply did not have the time. A month later, he encountered “Dr. Brown” again at a social gathering, and heard him and a friend discussing their experiences with astral projection. “…I remain under the impression that I brushed against something strange,” he wrote later, “and something which I am not sorry that I avoided.”
6. He could be a bit of a thrill seeker. In 1901, he excitedly reported to his mother that he had taken a ride in a hot air balloon, flying 25 miles from the Crystal Palace to Sevenoaks, “We went 1½ miles high,” he exulted, “It was a most extraordinary sensation and experience… […] I have always wanted to do this & am glad I have done it.”
7. If he were shipwrecked on a deserted island and could choose only one book to have with him, it would be Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This is, in fact, a multi-volume work, which might be considered cheating.
8. He showed remarkably poor judgment… when, on Christmas morning in 1892, he decided to dress as a monster and jump out to scare his family. Four year-old Mary was traumatized, and biographer Daniel Stashower tells us that Arthur was give nighttime comfort duty, a just and fitting punishment.
9. His name was valuable. In October of 1895, Conan Doyle felt obligated to write to a New York paper, The Critic, to alert readers that someone was publishing an anthology of stories under his name. He had only one story in Strange Secrets, he wrote, “a short one in the middle of the book.”
10. He owned property in Canada. During his trip to Canada with Jean in 1914, he bought land in Fort William, Ontario, as an investment, paying $15,000. In 1965, his heirs sold the lot at a loss for $14,000.

On February 28, 1880, Arthur Conan Doyle, still a medical student, set sail from Peterhead on the Hope, a whaling ship bound for seven months in the Arctic. He was to be the ship’s surgeon  taking the place of a friend who could not make at the last moment.

He published an account of his journey in The Strand magazine in January, 1897, under the title “Life on a Greenland Whaler”.

It is brutal work, though not more brutal than that which goes onto supply every dinner-table in the country. And yet those glaring crimson pools upon the dazzling white of the ice-fields, under the peaceful silence of a blue Arctic sky, did seem a horrible intrusion. But an inexorable demand creates an inexorable supply, and the seals, by their death, help to give a living to the long line of seamen, dockers, tanners, curers, triers, chandlers, leather merchants, and oil-sellers, who stand between this annual butchery on the one hand, and the exquisite, with his soft leather boots, or the savant using a delicate oil for his philosophical instruments, upon the other.

He kept a journal of his experiences. That handwritten journal, complete with illustration sketches, can be seen in Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure (2012), edited by Jon Lellenberg (JHWS “Towser”) and Daniel Stashower. It’s a fascinating glimpse into Arthur Conan Doyle’s personality as well as his adventures. In an interview for NPR, Lellenberg says:

I remember there’s one entry where he says, ‘We had nothing to do, and we did it.’ And another entry, he talks about spending the night with the crew, which is basically an evening of music, song, drinking — he says, ‘gin and tobacco in the crew’s berths.’ And the next entry starts, ‘Suffered for the gin and tobacco.’ … He’s a young man reporting what he’s seeing and hearing and experiencing in quite a remarkable way.

Two years later, on February 28, 1900, Arthur Conan Doyle boarded the troop transport Oriental for the 3 week voyage to South Africa. He had been waiting for his orders to come he asked by a friend to go to the South African town of Bloemfontein. He was to help set up a hospital. He was help pick personnel, work as a physician and be unofficial supervisor.

Source
Information for this post comes from the excellent A Curious Collection of Dates by Leah Guinn (JHWS “Amber”) and Jaime N Mahoney (JHWS “Tressa”)

Posted by Chips and Selena