No Better Place

Alistair Duncan

Description

Following his second marriage in 1907 Arthur Conan Doyle was looking to the future. The years ahead would see the birth of three children, fresh literary success and the discovery of his new faith. Those same years would also see the First World War, the final adventures of Sherlock Holmes and ridicule from the religious and scientific communities for his beliefs.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique
• Escocia
• Scotland

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 04 janvier 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780927985
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Title page
No Better Place
Arthur Conan Doyle, Windlesham and Communication with the Other Side
(1907–1930)
Alistair Duncan



Publisher information
2015 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
First edition published in 2015
© Copyright 2015 Alistair Duncan
Foreword © Copyright 2015 David Stuart Davies
The right of Alistair Duncan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
Although every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this book, as of the date of publication, nothing herein should be construed as giving advice. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of MX Publishing.
MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive, London, N11 3GX



Dedication
This book is dedicated to my wife Kate whose support for all my endeavours, both sane and not so, is unwavering.
I also dedicate this book to Paddy, Archie and Bailey.
Three faithful friends, sadly missed.



Praise for ‘No Better Place’
“Arthur Conan Doyle was an incredibly interesting and complex person and packed an awful lot into his time on Earth. In this book, as in others before it, Alistair Duncan has given us a careful, considerate and informative look at a distinct period in Doyle’s life. This book is a good read and may inform you of a few things you didn’t know about Doyle during his “Windlesham” years. Duncan writes well and has turned out, what could have been in the hands of another writer simply a dry recounting of Doyle’s activities, a definitive and entertaining account of the last 23 years of Doyle’s life.”
Bill Barnes
President of The Sydney Passengers
“No Better Place” completes the cycle of Alistair Duncan’s writings on the specifics of Arthur Conan Doyle’s life. This book gives an overview of his last twenty-three years - the happy years at Windlesham with his second wife and family. These years were dominated by Conan Doyle’s obsessive interest in spiritualism, and Alistair Duncan deals fairly and dispassionately with this, and also gives a balanced account of the unfortunate affair of the Cottingley fairies. This whole cycle of books is a triumph of research and is a worthy contribution to the biographical material on Conan Doyle’s complex character.
Georgina Doyle
Author of Out of the Shadows



Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Mrs Georgina Doyle who was generous with her time and permitted me to reproduce extracts from the papers of Mary Conan Doyle as well as photographs from her private collection.
Further thanks are due to Brian Pugh of the Conan Doyle (Crowborough) Establishment for his unrivalled knowledge of Conan Doyle’s life and access to his enviable collection of photographs. Thanks are also due to him for his excellent Conan Doyle Chronology without which this book would have been much harder to write.
Others meriting thanks include: Bill Barnes; David Stuart Davies; Roger Johnson; Oscar Ross; Tom Ruffles of the Society for Psychical Research; Dr. Richard Sveum; Jean Upton and Doug Wrigglesworth.
The photographs and other images used within this book have come from many collections, including that of the author. None are to be used without the permission of the owner of the relevant collection.



About the author
Alistair Duncan has been a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast since 1982 and has spoken on radio, television and at live events about both Sherlock Holmes and his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
He is a member of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London, The Conan Doyle (Crowborough) Establishment and The Sydney Passengers.
He lives with his wife in Surrey.



Epigraph
‘...Saturday will bring us to Windlesham, where I shall live and die, I expect. No better place.’ [1]


1 Excerpt from a letter written by Arthur Conan Doyle to his mother in November 1907. Lellenberg, Jon et al. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Harper Press. 2007.



Foreword
To the man in the street, Arthur Conan Doyle is known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes - if he is known at all. But he is much more than that, as this volume clearly demonstrates. For many years Doyle was regarded as an unimportant author. When I was at university in the 1970s I wanted to write my final dissertation on Doyle. However, I was told that he was not significant enough to warrant such a study. For many years, the Sherlockian community referred to ACD, in rather dismissive terms, as ‘the Literary Agent’, denying him his role as the creator of the great Sherlock Holmes. Happily, things are very different today. There has been a seismic shift since the 1980s and now Arthur Conan Doyle is appreciated as a fascinating and important character in his own right. As he should be. There is now a thirst for knowledge about the man, his writings and his life.
Those eager to learn more about the real Conan Doyle must have been very disappointed when they got their hands on his autobiography, Memories and Adventures published in 1924. It reveals little of his private life, granting the reader no real insight into what made the great man tick. And make no bones about it, Conan Doyle was a great man. It is not just the creation of one of literature’s major characters or his other writings alone that make him deserving of this accolade. His brilliance shines through his involvement in many diverse public activities from campaigning to reform the divorce laws, fighting legal injustices, and sitting on the 1916 Olympic Games committee to supporting new inventions, to mention just a few of his passions. His vitality and persistence were remarkable. But there was also a dark side to him which he was at great pains to conceal in his autobiography, such as his rather shabby treatment of his daughter Mary. He was also economical with the truth concerning his relationship with Jean Leckie, who became his second wife. Although he had been having an unconsummated love affair with Jean for many years, while his invalid first wife was still alive, he does not mention this in his autobiography and passes off their union with one brief misleading, some might say down right deceptive, sentence: ‘On September 18, 1907, I married Miss Jean Leckie, the younger daughter of a Blackheath family whom I had known for years, and who was a dear friend of my mother and sister.’ Smoke and mirrors, Sir Arthur, smoke and mirrors!
In No Better Place , Alistair Duncan helps to open that secret door to Conan Doyle’s personal life through his admirable and exhaustive research into both the author’s public and private activities. We are given a detailed blow by blow, virtually day by day, account of the doings of Arthur.
Apart from his varied literary efforts, Doyle had his fingers in many pies, from large important ones such as the promotion of the building of a Channel tunnel, the Edalji affair, the Oscar Slater case and his support of the French Red Cross to minor personal ones involving his skills in playing cricket and billiards competitively. One cannot help but be amazed at Doyle’s energy in involving himself in so many eclectic activities and causes, which are detailed in this book through the aid of various reports, letters, biographical writings and newspaper articles. However, it is Duncan’s perceptive interpretations of the facts and incidents that enhance the newly revealed story of this complex man. At one point Duncan uses the phrase, ‘it is tempting to consider’ and indeed he does ‘consider’ the facts, helping, through his encyclopaedic knowledge of ACD’s life, to interpret them with a keen insight. As a result we get to see Doyle unmasked, warts and all. Placed under Duncan’s magnifying glass, it is a revealing and many faceted portrait.
This volume allows us to become privy to all Doyle did for the last twenty-three years of his life, a time when he found himself newly married to the real love of his life and settled in the last home he would know. At this time he was a famous figure, beloved because of his creation of Sherlock Holmes, respected because of his public activities and yet still compelled to survive financially. As Duncan notes: ‘[Doyle was] a man whose decisions were often driven by his desire for fiscal security.’ It was also a period of his life in which gradually he gave most of his energies to the promotion of Spiritualism, an activity which brought him a great deal of criticism and ridicule. His unquestioning acceptance of Spiritualism and the backlash he received as a result makes fascinating reading. The debate concerning whether spirits in the afterlife wear clothes, for example, is as intriguing as it is risible. However, we can see that despite the naiveté of Doyle’s stance, he retained remarkable courage and steadfastness in sticking to his beliefs.
It is clear that in the final stage of the author’s life, he had only one use for Sherlock Holmes: as a means to secure finances. It is revealing that in his last interview regarding the character he admitted to the journalist that, ‘I was tired of Sherlock Holmes from the beginning... but it was an excellent way for a struggling