by Arunabha Sengupta
In Sign of Four, Toby the dog leads Holmes and Watson to Kennington Lane to the east of The Oval, but the characters don’t venture inside the historical ground.
There is the cricket cap in The Adventure of the Priory School, and in The Adventure of the Three Students one of the three young men plays for his college. Apart from these minor instances, the noble game does not merit a mention in the many delightful adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
However, two of the light-hearted Holmes pastiches created by Conan Doyle himself did feature the game.
In 1896, Doyle was requested by the Edinburgh University to contribute a short piece of for a charity magazine during a fundraiser. He responded with his own Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The Field Bazaar. In the story Watson receives a similar request from the same University. Whilst he reads the letter during the ‘traditional breakfast scene’, Holmes correctly deduces the sender of the letter and Watson’s thoughts. A story running to barely one and a half pages, it shares many similarities to the canonical stories. In it we learn that Watson had been in the University first XI as a cricketer. A fair number of the clues are also linked to cricket.
In 1922, Conan Doyle was one of several authors, alongside J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham, commissioned to provide books for the library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House. He was provided with a book approximately 1.5″ x 1.25″ to inscribe a story by hand. He wrote a 503-word tale titled How Watson Learned the Trick. Another Holmes pastiche, another breakfast scene, in which Watson tries to use the deductive skills of Holmes to determine what the great detective was up to. He ultimately fails, and Holmes informs him that he was not, as deduced by Watson, looking at the financial pages in the newspaper, but “I turned to it to find if Surrey was holding its own against Kent.
Conan Doyle was fascinated by the game.
Yes, he did capture the wicket of WG and penned an epic ballad on it. He did play 10 First-Class matches. He was even set on fire during an innings when the ball struck a matchbox in his pocket. However, while many devotees—and research-agnostic writers—do tend to jump to the conclusion that he was a talented cricketer, the truth is that he was nothing of the sort. If anything his cricketing skills were quite some notches less than ordinary.
But there is no denying that he was incredibly fond of the noble game
In 1885, Conan Doyle was married to Louise Hawkins at Thornton in Lonsdale. Three days prior to the wedding, he had played cricket at Stonyhurst against his former school. Immediately after the wedding ceremony, he ran off to Ireland on a cricket tour with Stonyhurst Wanderers. Some say it was a honeymoon trip, but it seems hard to believe.
He played cricket through most of his youth and middle age.
He once fell out with his brother-in-law EW Hornung (creator of Raffles) for being seen with his future second wife Jean Leckie while Louise was ailing but still alive. The altercation took place at Lord’s.
During the last days of the First World War Conan Doyle started documenting his dreams. In one of them he saw himself opening the batting in an important cricket match between the Catholics and Protestants. He seemed to be playing for the Catholics and was doing well. But suddenly he found that while going for a run, he had to climb a hill slowly and with great difficulty. There was no umpire and the wicket had been marked bizarrely on a screen at right angles to the pitch.
It speaks of confusion, of dilemma, of sorrow and reveals many facets of Conan Doyle’s mind including spiritualism, not least of which is the important role that cricket played in his life.
Cricket did feature in quite a few of his non-Holmes works. Late in life, he also penned a short story based on the game itself. It featured in his last great work, published a year before his death — The Maracot Deep and Other Stories. While mostly tales of exploration and science, the one odd man out was Spedegue’s Dropper— a quaint story of a lob bowler, a delight for cricket connoisseurs.
Curious and from a cricketing point of view rather unrealistic, it tells of Spedegue, the hero, who develops an underhand delivery, a lob flung high enough in the air to come down vertically at the pace of a fast bowler. When he achieves accuracy, Spedegue wins a famous Test match for England against Australia. Supposedly, it was based on his own experience when AP Lucas had dismissed him using a similar lob.
The striking part of the story is that it was written in 1928, about two decades after lob bowling had disappeared from cricket. It hints at several things. Firstly, Conan Doyle used to think a lot about cricket and had his own curious ideas. That must be evident from many cricketing associations of the man. And not all of his ideas were sound. For example, he once voiced that left-handers should be banned since they slowed the game down.
However, there is another more poignant chord struck by the tale. It was probably the desperate attempt of an ageing man, the colossus of the Edwardian days, to hark back to the familiar times which made sense to him, away from a world between Wars and increasingly professional cricket that did not.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859
Illustration Maha