Sherlock

When we first came to look at North Cadbury Court as a wedding venue, aside from loving it generally, being excited about getting married there and admiring the construction site, I was also intrigued by a loose connection to one Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Some may know that I have long had something of an interest in all things Sherlock.  The house itself is full of fabulous trinkets and pictures, and could no doubt tell many a tale of all that it had seen in the centuries gone by.

But for me, the Conan Doyle thing was a real interest.  Having grown up near Southsea and then later lived in London, and stomped across Dartmoor plenty of times, I like to be on the lookout for Holmes' and Watson's trace.

As I understand the history, North Cadbury Court was bought in 1910 into the current family ownership by Sir Archibald Langman, known as Archie to his friends, the grandfather of present day owner, Archie Montgomery.  Counted amongst those friends seems to have been the then Arthur Conan Doyle.  The Langmans and Doyle had bonded on the ski slopes of Davos, Switzerland, a place well known to Doyle, who had been published on the merits of the skiing there in 1899.  Doyle was likely put onto the region by the works of other Scottish physicians, perhaps including a certain Joseph Bell, who had recommended the quality of the air for recuperative purposes to the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson.  Doyle of course would return to the region's Alps variously, including to the terminal demise of Moriaty, no less.

In any event, when in 1899 Doyle felt the call of adventure and the plight of the Boer War was impressing, he did his best to sign up with the Middlesex Imperial Yeomanry for action.  Well trained by then as a Physician, but (understandably) somewhat dulled by life in Southsea, enlisting seemed the way forward.  He made only a shortlist.

Happily for Doyle, family friend John Langman, later Sir John, father of Archibald, proposed to send a field hospital to South Africa.   That age had seen a trend in philanthropic contribution to medical facilities in action, and John Langman, a man of very considerable stature and success, was energised to post a substantial tented hospital to the War effort.  By 1900 the situation with the Boers, the Second Boer War, had become most active, and support was much needed.  John's son Archibald, then a lieutenant in the Middlesex Yeomanry, was tasked to be the hospital's general manager and treasurer.

Langman turned to Doyle as a physician and an organiser, and the fit was an excellent one.  Doyle spent a week at the Langman's London home with Archibald organising affairs and recruiting the necessary medical team.  On the 28th February 1900 they set sail on the P&O SS Oriental from London, and via Ireland and the Cape Verde islands they made to the Cape.  The sense of adventure for them both and the rest of the hospital must have been strong.  We can be fairly sure that Doyle and Archie Langman became closer still on the voyage.  They shared a quoits competition on deck (neither won it) and in all probability a cricket match on the island of St Vincent. (Doyle opened the batting and took 3 for 7 for the tourists).  Doyle arranged and played in a concert and gave an invigorating lecture on the state of the war.

By the time they reached Cape Town on the 21 March they were put about making the Hospital's preparations together.  It must have been a busy time, but there was space enough for a spot of shooting, with Doyle apparently doing the best to bag a dove.  It was in part Archibald's love of the sports that a decade later saw him move west, where the country pursuits would be at hand.  The two of them went together on a charitable trip to a Boer POW camp, with likely heavy hearts at what they saw.  A short way up the coast in East London the two of them went ashore together to arrange the onward train, preferring to overnight in a local hotel than return to the ship.

Outside Bloemfontein they made their hospital, in the most desperate conditions.  Doyle and Langman pitched hard into the effort.  Enteric fever - typhoid - was killing more men than the Boers, the dosage of inoculation not yet mastered, but the basic and most fundamental qualities of humanity brightened a grim reality.

'Our hospital was no worse off than the others, and as there were many of them the general condition of the town was very bad. Coffins were out of the question, and the men were lowered in their brown blankets into shallow graves at the average rate of sixty a day. A sickening smell came from the stricken town. Once when I had ridden out to get an hour or two of change, and was at least six miles from the town, the wind changed and the smell was all around me. You could smell Bloemfontein long before you could see it. Even now if I felt that lowly death smell compounded of disease and disinfectants my heart would sink within me.' - Conan Doyle.

Doyle started penning texts for works to be sent home, both it seems for his later works on the Boer War, including his political critiques for which he was soon to be knighted, and for the detailed medical records that he considered so important.

In late June, Langman and Holmes left the hospital for a while and travelled together, to see something more of the war, and for supplies, including clean water.  Their travels together took Doyle to the front line he had wanted to see, and he was greatly impressed by what he saw and experienced.  Doyle had a time of real anxiety when Langman was taken prisoner by arch Boer General De Wet, but in an act of arch humanity the medical party was allowed to resupply and return to their base.  A picture of their progress was later bought by Queen Victoria and remains part of the Royal Collection, recording Langman's etched determination.  Doyle was much relieved to see him back, despite Langman's personal letter of spirited reassurance that had earlier been sent to Doyle.

There was more cricket and football organised by Doyle, despite his badly bruised ribs no doubt affecting his goalkeeping prowess.  He had played between the sticks for Portsmouth whilst in Southsea, in an incarnation of the team that preceded the current shambles of a PFC.  One might suppose that Archie Langman was keen as well, given his obvious interests in outdoor pursuits generally.

By early July 1900 Doyle was ready to return to England, and via a visit to the recently relieved Pretoria he took the Union Castle liner 'Briton' back from Cape Town to Southampton.  Langman stayed on longer, but Doyle's return was adventurous and propitious.  On board he shared the journey with Bertram Fletcher Robinson, an apparently inspiring editor and journalist, and sharing a first class table for dinner they were able to find the balance in each other.  Robinson seems to have mediated Doyle out of a near international situation when Doyle refused to accept an apology from a Frenchman who had brazenly, albeit falsely, accused the Tommy's of firing dum dums.

The entwined paths of Doyle and Langman fade as they returned to blighty, though they are sure to have remained friends.  Langman wrote warmly to Doyle to congratulate him on his 1902 knighthood.  Doyle's eyes were lead westwards by now collaborator Robinson, a man well credited with introducing Doyle to the Devon legends that became perhaps his best known work, the Hound of the Baskervilles, first serialised in the Stand Magazine in 1901.  One might even wonder whether it was a complete coincidence that Archie Langman's abandonment of London and his move west to North Cadbury in 1910 mirrored Doyle's own exit from the capital to the Sussex Downs.  Nonetheless, it may be that they drifted apart, Doyle immersed in the success of his writing and Archibald in his new adventures in Somerset.

Langman's acquisition of North Cadbury Court saw significant works of the house itself.  He is considered responsible for restoring many of the finest Elizabethan features inside and out of the fascinating manor.   Whether Doyle himself visited, whether the house itself impressed upon Doyle directly may be an interesting question.  Indeed, I found myself asking, did Holmes himself ever visit?

It was against this background, given the stories of Sir Archibald Langman and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the great adventures they obviously shared, as a devotee of the Sherlock Canon I found it was a short flick of the pages to, 'The Blanched Soldier', from the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Knocking on the door of 221b Baker Street in January 1903 is Mr James M Dodd, instantly deduced to be of the Imperial Yeomany, Middlesex Corps, recently returned from the Second Boer war.  His friend and comrade, the son of leading baronet, with whom he had served outside Pretoria, had left separately from him.  Dodd feared he had lost contact with his 'closest pal', the bravest man in the regiment.  He thought his lost friend now to be installed in a wandering manor house, well out of London, inaccessible, five miles from anywhere, the circumstances mysterious.  Holmes is persuaded to pay a visit to the house.

It is a great house, large and rambling, of all sorts of ages and styles, starting on a half timbered Elizabethan foundation, and ending is a different portico.  Inside it is all panelling and tapestry and half-effaced old pictures, a house of shadows and mystery, with various outhouses.

There the old friends are reunited, eventually safe and well, the afflictions of that campaign found to be deep but not mortal.

Interestingly, The Blanched Soldier is one of the few Sherlock stories to be narrated by the great detective himself, rather than his usual biographer Watson.  It seems that the comradeship of the Boer War, the strength of the friendships there forged and indeed the power of that great house itself were all so important as to be recanted and recorded personally by Holmes.

And so it seems that my initial intrigue had taken me closer to Sherlock than I perhaps thought likely.  But it was the stories of the Langman Field Hospital that most captured my imagination.  Doyle himself wrote at surprising length of his short time there, and was moved to some of his most important historical works on his return.  The truly remarkable diaries of Charles John  Blessen, a medical dresser with Doyle and Langman on their 1900 project, are a fascinating if tragic account.  Some of the pictures and photos of the Hospital, and of Doyle at his patients bedsides are timeless.  Indeed, perhaps none are more so than those that hang on the staircase of North Cadbury Court.  A bit of Sherlock at our wedding.


Links

Diaries of John Blessen - http://www.kencoo.clara.net/Charles_John_Blasson_-_Boer_War_Diary.pdf

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Autobiography (with search terms) - http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pvE6R9IvsXUC&pg=PA131&lpg=PA131&dq=archie+langman&source=bl&ots=g3IDQ06MFh&sig=7qQA8vhVHYM0aT6Urt5xW2S6SWs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jBKZUKWEFZGChQegs4HABQ&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=archie%20langman&f=false
 
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Biography (with search terms) - http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zxzVQEMsCWwC&pg=PA266&lpg=PA266&dq=archie+langman&source=bl&ots=t5_KUot8K8&sig=Jmb8UM-A7xOx14j0_ExxAenxiCc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jBKZUKWEFZGChQegs4HABQ&ved=0CDEQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=archie%20langman&f=false

Excerpt from Christies Auction Catalogue - http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/LotDetailsPrintable.aspx?intObjectID=4290311

Background Wiki on Bertram Fletcher Robinson - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertram_Fletcher_Robinson

History of North Cadbury Court by Archie Montgomery - http://www.northcadburycourt.com/history.html