Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Physician, Sherlock Holmes Author – Pipe Smoker
-
Kevin Godbee - Jan 24, 2012
- 8 min read
By Fred Brown
The irony is palpable. Attempting to understand British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created one of literature’s most enduring characters—the great detective Sherlock Holmes—one must become something of a sleuth himself.
It is a well-known fact, of course, that Sherlock Holmes smoked. Oh, did he ever smoke. In Doyle’s stories, cigarettes were part and parcel of his character, and even though he is most often seen wearing a deerstalker hat and puffing on a calabash pipe, Doyle never put the curved gourd in the detective’s hand or between his lips.
Holmes’ foil and sidekick, Dr. Watson, was a cigar and pipe smoker, while the detective preferred "oily clay pipes" and shag tobacco, the stronger the better. Holmes was known to smoke a variety of pipes, including a cherry wood and even churchwardens.
Doyle’s tobacco favorites, however, are a little more difficult to pin down. There is no doubt that he smoked, and liked his cigar as well as his pipe. But a couple of recent biographies leave a lot to be desired when it comes to finding out just what kind of tobacco and what sort of pipe the venerable doctor and famous author enjoyed.
Some writers have posited that if you know Holmes, then you know Doyle. While that might be 90 percent accurate, it does not fill in all of the gaps about Doyle’s smoking preferences.
Doyle was knighted, not for his Holmesian stories, but for his writing about the Boer War of 1899 in which he served as both physician and war correspondent. History shows that he enjoyed both cigars and pipes, but discovering brands and shapes is not easily done.
Perhaps the good doctor wanted to leave at least one mystery unsolved.
Stage actors and filmmakers are responsible for the image most often seen of Holmes—thoughtfully deducing some crucial clue, a curl of tobacco smoke rising from gourd calabash beneath the deerstalker hat.
Basil Rathbone is the actor who brought Holmes to life on the big screen in the 1930s and ’40s. More modern versions don’t measure up, especially the latest two films from British director and screenwriter Guy Ritchie: Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, starring Robert Downey Jr., as Sherlock Holmes, and Jude Law, as Dr. John Watson.
The Ritchie/Downey production is more slam-bang/super slo-mo than super sleuthing. Rathbone is safe for the moment.
All this is to assume that Doyle the physician/author was the alter ego of Holmes the detective. This assumption, too, takes a bit of deducing.
Holmes was actually fashioned from one of Doyle’s professors at the medical college at Edinburgh, Scotland. Dr. Joseph Bell was not only an eminent surgeon and teacher, but he possessed also amazing powers of observation. He taught his students that doctors had to be great diagnosticians as well as healers. They did this by being observant and deducing results from facts.
It is also obvious that Holmes was also made up of parts of Doyle himself. They both smoked a pipe, of course. But, there are other similarities: they both boxed, were tall, energetic, strong, untidy, and collected scraps of notes. Both spoke French and German and enjoyed a good joke.
So, then, Doyle was Holmes and Holmes was Doyle. If that is the case, my Dear Watson, then it can be assumed that Dr. Doyle enjoyed strong shag cut tobacco, which he smoked in a variety of pipes.
Photos of Doyle show him with a bent billiard, perhaps, a straight billiard and many other styles that are not discernable. But it is imminently clear that he indeed smoked a pipe.
What is also clear is that Arthur Conan Doyle was a prolific writer, smart if not brilliant.
He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, May 22, 1859, although his family was Irish and Catholic. His father, Charles, like his father and brothers, was a talented artist, but with major flaws.
Charles’ father, John Doyle, had been one of the great satirical political caricaturists of a generation. His weekly cartoons became widely circulated and celebrated. John Doyle traveled in such social circles with Queen Victoria, Sir Walter Scott, William Thackeray and even Charles Dickens.
John Doyle’s sons also became famous artists, but Charles was not in the same league as his brothers, who went on to establish big reputations.
In an effort to break away from the shadow of his brothers at the age of 17, Charles Doyle moved to Edinburgh. He found work in a government post, possibly through the reputation of his father, and began to sketch. He later married Mary Foley, a fairly well educated young woman for the Victorian age.
By the time Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born,Charles was already slipping mentally, relying heavily on alcohol to get through a day. The family was actually living in poverty in a city known for its dark and evil shadows for the poor.
Mary worked hard to provide for her children and made certain they acquired good educations. The brightest of the nine children was Arthur, upon whom she especially doted, since he was her first son. Throughout life, Doyle was equally devoted to his mother, and wrote volumes of letters to her almost daily.
Mary passed on her love of Celtic storytelling and reading to her son. Like his mother, Arthur devoured books and relished his mother’s stories, which bloomed and flourished in his imagination.
With the help of his mother, family and others, Doyle finished Jesuit schools and then headed off to the University of Edinburg’s Medical School, one of the best in the world then and now. He entered in 1876 and graduated in 1881.
The threat of poverty hung over the family like a black cloud. Charles Doyle was never much of a provider, drinking up most of the family’s income. Eventually, he had to be institutionalized.
After medical school, Arthur Conan Doyle hung out a shingle and began writing in earnest. By 1886, he had penned the novel A Study in Scarlet in which he introduced a detective by the name of Sherlock Holmes.
Also by this time, Doyle had been heavily influenced by the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, especially The Gold Bug and The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
In fact, Doyle once said that he owed a great deal to Poe and suggested that Poe had created the greatest detective in literature (a claim sure to be disputed by Doyle’s now global legions of fans, as well as those who consider Holmes sacrosanct).
But one point Doyle wrote is no doubt true: Poe, he said, made the detective story work as literature.
Like his famous detective, Doyle was more than the sum of his parts. He was an adventurer and world traveler. He once served aboard a whaler as the ship’s doctor. A social crusader in later life, supporting the downtrodden and women’s emancipation, he also became very wealthy. He was asked to endorse products, which he refused to do, but the image of Sherlock Holmes was found on many commercial goods, including tobacco, as today.
Doyle also tried his hand at writing plays for the theater, some of which enjoyed mild success. Some of this theatrical output was based upon his own books.
Prior to the outbreak of World War I, Doyle was also writing short fiction, some of which bordered on fantasy, horror, the supernatural and science fiction.
When war broke out between Germany and Great Britain, Doyle, then 55 years old, wrote the British war department. One of the Empire’s most famous citizens wanted to enlist.
Although he was turned down, he insisted that although he had not practiced medicine for quite some time, he could work on the battlefield, tending the wounded.
That suggestion, too, was denied. Presumably, the British Empire did not want its famous author obliterated in the trenches as soldier or surgeon.
Doyle then turned his immense imagination to helping the military department solve problems. He invented a kind of fork device to put on the front of naval warships to explode underwater mines before they hit the ship. He also invented an inflatable rubber belt that would keep sailors afloat in the sea. Inflatable life vests were created, thanks to Doyle.
When not attempting to invent some sort of military safety device, Doyle wrote propaganda for his country, in pamphlets in addition to making public speeches for the war effort and social injustices.
After the war, Doyle wrote a six-volume history of the conflict, The British Campaign in France and Flanders.
During this post-war period, he entered in earnest a phase of his life that defined him up to the end. He became a spiritualist, believing that the human personality did not end in death, that there was a being on the other side that survived death.
He also came to believe in fairies, and claimed that there was a human existence beyond death that paralleled the physical world. He also believed that that world could be reached through communication.
Doyle wrote and toured widely espousing his beliefs in spiritualism, coming to America several times to speak on the subject. Upon each occasion, American journalists penned fantastical stories about the admired author, which produced even wilder headlines.
It was Doyle’s faith in winged fairies that began to erode his enormous reputation, and even relegate him to "kook" status by many in the public.
But Holmes fans never wavered in their loyalty to the great writer, and remain faithful today. Thus, Sherlock Holmes remains the greatest detective in literary history. There are Sherlock Holmes Societies across the globe and even today, the mastermind of deduction continues to grab new converts and readers.
In all, Doyle wrote 60 stories about Sherlock Holmes. That is not anywhere close to his total output of short stories, essays, histories, novels, journalism, volumes of letters and other documents, in addition to stacks of notebooks and diaries.
The Holmes stories have been translated into every written language on the planet. In fact, some Holmes societies view the great detective as real flesh and blood.
Doyle could write anywhere, and often did, breaking off in mid-sentence to enter conversation going on around him, and then return as if he had been concentrating all the while on pen and paper.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an extraordinary man, just as his detective Sherlock Holmes was an amazing literary figure who bloomed larger than life, even to the point of overshadowing his creator.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died July 7, 1930. He was 71 years old.
Related Article: The Great Detective and His Pipes: By Russ Ouellette
 Fred Brown is a Retired Senior writer for the Knoxville News Sentinel and was a working journalist for 46 years before retiring in 2008. He lives in Knoxville, TN., where he continues to freelance. |
Written by Kevin Godbee
More Pipes and Tobaccos Articles
8 Responses
Smokingpipes.com Updates
6 Fresh Savinelli Autograph Pipes |
8 Fresh Claudio Cavicchi Pipes |
132 Fresh Peterson Pipes |
2 Fresh Tine Balleby Pipes |
17 Fresh Brebbia Pipes |
Recent Posts
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 636. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Barry Kane. Barry started smoking a pipe in 1961 when he was 14-years old. Back then it seemed like everybody smoked, and you could buy pipes and tobacco just about anywhere. Barry is a true old-school pipe smoker, sticking to just one blend. See if you can guess which one before listening. At the top of the show Brian will give his take on Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s purchase of Mac Baren and Sutliff Tobacco and their announcement that they will be shut down.
There’s a pipe in my collection that I cannot bring myself to smoke, though I’ve had it for more years than I care to recall. It’s old, or shall I say, well experienced; that experience, that oldness came to it long before it was in my possession. The pipe is an old Comoy’s Grand Slam from the 1940s. The shape (#93), a slightly canted, stack billiard (sometimes referred to as a Belgian) is right up my alley, and it’s a beautiful example of it. It came to me with some wear and tear; nothing unusual for an old pipe, but more the signs of one that has been well loved, smoked a lot, treated as a favorite tool, cherished, in a sense, by frequent use. It’s the pipe equivalent of a vintage car that’s been driven a lot, enjoyed fully and maintained adequately, rather than one kept in a spotless garage, dusted and detailed weekly, brought out only for leisurely Sunday drives, or to be ogled behind the ropes at the next Concours d’Elegance. When it arrived, those uncounted years ago, it wanted a little restoration. Nothing dramatic needed to be done to it, but the stem was oxidized, the finish a little dingy. The cake was even and fairly thin, and the airway was relatively clean, both signs that its previous owner cared for it, but the bowl’s surface was a little drab and dull. It took little effort to reveal its beauty, to show the lovely contrasted stain and interesting grain beneath the old wax. I often think I should do before and after photos of pipes that I work on, but those thoughts always come after the work’s been done. This one would have been a great illustration of how years of handling that can sometimes make a pipe more beautiful, can other times make it just look grungy. Once I’d cleaned up the externals, it was time to address the inside bits. I approach this a little bassackwards, I realize. It would be more sensible to take care of the inside before addressing the outside, but it’s how I roll. If an old pipe isn’t pretty to look at, it’s unlikely that I’ll care much about it, and cleaning is usually the hardest part, or at least the most boring part of any restoration for me. Alcohol and pipe cleaners. Lots of pipe cleaners. That’s why I leave it for last. Sometimes, I’ll even give a pipe a test smoke before a deep cleaning, just for a point of reference. I gave it a sniff to get an idea of what I was up against, and it stopped me cold. There in that bowl was an aroma that I had not smelled in decades. My head was instantly filled with memories of being in the back room of a fabled Berkeley tobacconist’s shop where I stumbled upon a few jars of long discontinued blends. One of them, a blend called Forty and Eight, had the most engaging and unusual scent of any tobacco I’d stuck my schnoz into. It was sweet, but not in a candy store way. There were none of the usual vanilla, cherry, berry or anise notes of typical aromatics, nothing that could be compared to aftershave or deodorant soap, but something almost musky, a little earthy, something exotic. The shop’s owner couldn’t tell me what was in it, how, or where it had been produced. The old blend had been retired before he’d bought the place. The printed catalogue gave no clues, either, other than being overprinted with the word “DISCONTINUED” in bold, rubber-stamp type. (And, I don’t recall it as being “highly aromatic” as the description indicates.) There was still quite a bit in the jar. Being, at that point, an intrepid explorer of all kinds of tobaccos, whether I thought I’d like them or not, I had to give it a try. It was burly based, but also comprised a good measure of virginia leaf, and maybe some other varieties; I didn’t have enough experience at the time to really pick it apart. But, that aroma was unlike anything I’d experienced before or since. It was something now completely lost to time. Until it wasn’t. Memories are powerful things, and there is no sense more tightly bound to memory than our sense of smell. One whiff was all it took to carry me back in time, conjuring a vivid recollection of something long submerged in the inky depths of a subconscious mind. Look, I know as well as anyone that pipes are meant to be smoked, and that many feel it almost sacrilegious to have a pipe and not set it to its intended task. In this case, I simply can’t. I won’t. Ever. Rationally, I am fairly certain this pipe would probably be a great smoke. It was too well loved by its previous caretaker to be anything less than that. My choice not to smoke it is an emotional one, not something rational. Of the thousands of pipes that have passed through my hands over the years, this is the only one to create such a singular and vivid, almost Proustian recollection of temps perdu, of lost time. It revivified a long dormant memory that is mine, and mine alone, and that’s enough. I keep it in a drawer with other old English pipes. In some ways, it’s nothing special, just a nice old pipe. I don’t lavish it with any particular care that arguably befits the hidden treasure that it holds. It’s not in a special box, or displayed preciously in a glass cabinet. Every once in a while, I take it out, point my nose bowlwards, and every time, those memories return just as powerfully as they did the first time. I have no idea how long it’s been since its last owner smoked it, but in the years I’ve had it, there seems to have been very little degradation of the aroma, and that’s […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 635. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with James Ravenwood. James is the boutique tobacco blender of Ravenwood Blends. His blending started out as a fun hobby, and he now has professionally packaged commercially available products with some great tin art. Part of his interest in pipe smoking goes back to fond memories of a retired Navy Veteran that lived on his street while he was growing up that would sit in his driveway smoking a pipe all day. Later, in 2011 he began smoking pipes and soon after started experimenting with mixing different tobaccos. His other hobby, that he has been doing for 30 years, is photography. He takes wonderful photos of outdoor spaces, and still life pictures of pipes and tobacco. You can see them on his Instagram @thebriarfellowship. At the top of the show we’ll have an Ask the Pipemaker segment with renowned pipe artisan Jeff Gracik.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 634! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Warren Ertle. Warren is an extremely accomplished musician with a PhD in music. He started early as a percussionist in sixth grade. Later his grandmother got him a cheap Casio keyboard which he taught himself to play. He started playing in blues bands in high school, and has been a pianist with jazz big bands for years. Even though he was already a professional musician, he took his first real piano lesson when he enrolled in college with his studies in classical music. He is of course a pipe smoker. At the top of the show we will have an Ask the Tobacco Blender segment with Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy is the Head Blender at Cornell & Diehl, which is one of the most popular boutique pipe tobacco companies in the USA.
Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. Or the wild turkeys gobbling in the backwoods or all the fuss and feathers over the big one—Christmas. No, it is that we might need to take note of all the little things that mean so much to us. Like a good sunrise (seriously, Pundit has not gone all Pollyanna.) Mayhaps we need to appreciate more of what we have than what we have not. Or something like that. Like, a good pipe in the morning with coffee as the dawn brings us coolish weather now that we have flipped the calendar to autumn. But it also brings beautiful leaves that have become a spectacle of technicolor in the wind. It is the little things. The rereading of an enjoyable book and finding something you did not see or learn in the first go-round. Or a stunning phrase you commit to memory with the re-read, while smoking that favorite pipe. And you notice a superior puff that just seems to be different. It’s in the air and the seasons of meaningful little things. It’s aromatic! Or perhaps it is that sense of satisfaction knowing and appreciating you made it to another day. With the world in a kind of rinse-and-repeat history, reminiscent of a Shakespearean play, it is perhaps a good moment to remember some of Pipedom’s philosophers whose cogent thoughts brought light to clear a path in the mists of confusion and confounding opinions. Ok. No gloom and doom. Just some down-home thoughts. Think of times in the past when history was running off the rails. It took our pipe-smoking thinkers (the mind workers of the world) to speak of better pathways to more light. Think for a moment, with a pipe in hand, these wizards of the world and word: Albert Einstein, J. R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edwin Hubble, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis, and Jean-Paul Sartre. All learned and enlightened. They offered wisdom instead of storms of meaningless roads to nowhere. All while smoking their pipes! Maybe especially with the help of their pipes in the art of thinking and philosophy. Recall the words of Mr. E=MC2 when he said, “I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” Amen and amen! Dealing with world-rattling events takes a calm and objective view of things, to the Pundit’s way of summing it up. You just don’t go messing around with quantum physics without a calm and objective approach, methinks. Or as the extraordinary physicist Robert Oppenheimer said after he and a team in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Labs developed a way to split atoms into bombs during World War II. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said Oppenheimer referring to the development of the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. It must be pointed out that Oppenheimer was more of a cigarette smoker than a pipe smoker. Nonetheless, pipes were part of his personality. Now, if you have read some of the great authors of the past and present, their pipes were always nearby. Reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be a three-pipe problem at times. S. Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre require time with your pipes to reflect on the existential problems and solutions these authors provide in learned novels and other narratives. Or take Edwin Hubble and Bertrand Russell, philosophers of another world. Pipes are required for reading. The quantum lode of ideas Pundit is attempting to sort out is that our pipes are relaxing and stimulate our thoughts and creativity. Especially in these last months of the year. Many times Pundit has had that light bulb flick on while smoking my beloved pipes. And friends in Pipedom, it ain’t easy to turn on the lights in Pundit’s rock pit head. Now it’s time for a quote from a Pipe Smoker of the Past. Shelby Foote was born Nov. 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., and died June 27, 2005, in Memphis, Tenn. A fact is not a truth until you love it—Shelby Foote. A parting thought: It is said that famed Southern author William Faulkner carried a packed pipe in a coat pocket wherever he went. That’s one effective way to deal with workday conflicts and confusion. A calm and objective judgment in our everyday human affairs, as the quantum man said.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
Great read, Fred! It’s nice to learn more about the man who created our favorite detective!
Doyle’s reputation suffered most from his dedication to spiritualism. He devoted most of his efforts after the war to this topic, attending seances and speaking tours around the world. He wrote several books on the topic. I think he was influenced by his Irish ancestry and his father’s illustrations of fairies.
Very informative. I had a history professor that did research on Doyle and his idea of Holmes, and said most likely Holmes would have smoked either a church warden or a strait pipe. My prof said its because of the characters upfront and direct point of view, not to mention he tended to be quite brash when it came to talking to people. I miss my old prof he was a pipe smoker also, but passed a few years after I took his coarse. next bowl is for you Prof. Teech.
Thanks for an excellent and informative article. I had no idea that Doyle was influenced by Poe; and I think it will be interesting to explore that connection further. Also worth further investigation is the body of nonfiction he produced. Thanks for raising more questions than I had coming into this article.
Oops! Forgot to compliment the great historic pix that accompany the piece.
Good article and pictures!
I will offer this comment. The Jeremy Brett series offer even better attention to the Canon as the Basil Rathbone series dealt more with WWII subjects in many cases.
We were in the room with the tiger skin at Windlesham in 1997 when we visited. The house is now a nursing home.
Surely it was Sidney Paget, who illustrated the original Stories, who was responsible for Holmes’s Image…
http://www.bestofsherlock.com/sidney-paget-original-art.htm