Sherlock Holmes fans will be delighted to know that there is a new play featuring the great man. In it Holmes, 72, bored silly by retirement and bee-keeping in the Sussex Downs, is back living at his old haunt of 221B Baker Street and reunited with the widowed Watson. The case that lands in Holmes’s lap concerns a reported outbreak of fairies in the Bradford area. Thus we are plunged into the Cottingley saga, a mystery that fascinated the public in the 1920s.
The play is by Fiona Maher, a fairy-lore expert, organiser of the Legendary Llangollen Faery Festival (she’s known as Tink) and author of a very well-researched book on the Cottingley affair that sheds much new light on the hoax. In the play, the great detective’s sleuthing mirrors her own detective work.
Holmes represented exactly the kind of person who condemned Doyle for his belief in fairies and spiritualism
But before we get on to Holmes, the fairy-photograph story goes like this. In 1917 nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and her cousin Elsie Wright, 16, were living in a house their families shared in Cottingley, West Yorkshire. One day Frances’s shoes were soaked from playing in the stream at the bottom of the garden and when her angry mother demanded to know why, she replied, ‘I go to see the fairies’, thinking it would save her from the usual smack.
Elsie convinced her father Arthur Wright – an amateur photographer with a darkroom under the stairs – to lend her his Midg quarter-plate camera, saying she would bring back proof of the fairies. When the girls returned, he developed the plate and voilà!, it showed Frances surrounded by four sprites. They took a second photo of Elsie shaking hands with a prancing, winged gnome.
After the novelty of this miracle wore off, the photographs were shoved in a drawer, until in 1919 Elsie’s mother took them to a local talk about fairies by the Theosophical Society. They were eventually passed on to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Coincidentally, he was researching an article about fairies for the Strand Magazine where his Holmes stories had appeared. He included the pictures in the piece in 1920 and two years later reproduced them in a book he wrote in defence of spirits called The Coming of the Fairies. It was Doyle’s belief that made the photos such a sensation. The press mostly scoffed but were careful to keep the story alive as it sold papers.
Maher’s play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Doyle’s home city) is the first to get Holmes onto the Cottingley case. It’s also the first to put Doyle and Sherlock Holmes on stage together, a Stoppardian set-up, steaming with the mutual loathing of author and his detective. It was a hatred born of success. Doyle, like his mother, had a passion for historical fiction. He wrote several historical novels such as The White Company and Micah Clarke, and rather hoped to become the next Walter Scott. Instead, the damn detective he had invented derailed his more literary ambitions. His pal Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to him, declaring Holmes ‘the class of literature that I like when I have the toothache’.
Festering with resentment for his hero, Sir Arthur’s thoughts turned to murder. He complained about the tiresome detective and his wish to ‘find a suitable place to kill him’. A friend suggested the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Doyle went there to case the joint. Holmes and ‘the Napoleon of crime’ Moriarty were duly shoved into the white waters of oblivion in the ‘The Final Problem’, published in the December 1893 edition of the Strand, utterly ruining Christmas for his fans. Subscriptions to the magazine were cancelled by the thousand. One lady wrote to the author starting her letter: ‘You brute!’ After a long hiatus, he brought Holmes back from the dead by popular demand.
It is such a strange paradox that Doyle, an eye doctor trained in science, logic and deduction (by the laser mind of his Edinburgh mentor Joseph Bell, the inspiration for Holmes and his methods) should have been so keen on spirits, emanations, ectoplasm and the rest. Socially, he was a great one for séances and table-rapping; his second wife, Jean, was a medium and both were well-known on the psychics’ tea circuit. It is often assumed that Doyle was driven to spiritualism by grief at the death of his oldest son, Kingsley, who succumbed to the 1918 flu pandemic, weakened by his war wounds. But in fact he had taken up an interest in ‘the other side’ before the war.
Maher would like to have met Doyle, who was not the gullible dolt that Holmes makes out: ‘I think he sounds great fun, with his Mr Toad love of motor cars.’ She believes that the key to his bizarre promotion of fairies was his hopelessly alcoholic father Charles Altamont Doyle, a civil servant and artist who drew the illustrations for the first Holmes and Watson story, A Study in Scarlet. The poor man ended up in the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum – grimly renamed Sunnyside in the 1960s – where he drew, rather beautifully, faery folk, elves and the little people. Far from disowning his mad, dipsomaniac parent, Arthur wanted to redeem the father he adored. If there was photographic proof of a parallel world – one with fairies and spirits in it – then his father’s visions might not have been so mad after all.
Fairies, at this time, were a serious business, intimately tied up with the Celtic revival – which may have inspired Doyle Sr, whose family had its roots in Ireland. Some have suggested a belief in fairies was ‘a political and cultural necessity’ for Irish nationalists. W.B. Yeats, for example, earnestly berated himself for not being able to talk to Sidhe, the Irish fairy people. Sir Arthur reasoned that, though ubiquitous, the many varieties of fairies and goblins were hard to spot as they were made of gaseous matter and beyond the human colour spectrum.
‘Holmes represented exactly the kind of person Doyle was up against, and who condemned him for his belief in fairies and spiritualism,’ says Maher. ‘It was that kind of intellectual snobbery that he utterly despised.’ In his autobiography, published six years before he died in 1930, the Cottingley affair gets not a single mention. By then, perhaps Doyle knew he’d been had. Those sweet, innocent girls had pulled his leg almost clean off – and all with a camera, magazine cut-outs and a few hat pins.
Maher believes the whole family was in on the hoax and that it was the father, not the girls, who took the pictures. Doyle’s death put a stop to a highly profitable cottage industry selling postcards of the photographs. Far from being grateful for his endorsement and his generous payments, the family turned on him, fearful of being exposed for fraud in the glare of the publicity.
Though they drifted apart, both girls grew to old age. In 1983 they finally confessed the photos had been faked. ‘I never even thought of it being a fraud,’ Frances Griffiths told the BBC. ‘It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun. I can’t understand to this day why people were taken in. They wanted to be taken in.’
In the play, the pensionable Holmes – his mind undimmed – will be played by a spry Harry Meacher (his second crack at the part, having starred in a theatre adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles). It’s good to have Holmes back on stage, a long tradition that has sadly all but petered out. The character is still grist for crass Hollywood capers and clever if impertinent telly updates, but as a stage role he was once a close cousin of Prospero and Professor Higgins.
You have to wonder what Doyle would have thought of the detective he despised so utterly eclipsing him. It has also occurred to Maher. ‘If you go to Doyle’s grave in Minstead [in the New Forest], you’ll find people leave pipes and magnifying glasses. When I went, I stood there waiting for his arm to pop out of the grave and sweep the lot away with a huge groan.’
Sherlock Holmes and The Man Who Believed in Fairies is at C aquila, Venue 21, Roman Eagle Lodge, 2 Johnston Terrace, Edinburgh, from 31 July to 25 August.
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