It is a feature of our tours around London that we like to encourage our walkers to get to know something about the topic before they join us on a London walk.
To that end we like to provide you with as much information in advance so you can learn the basics of your chosen subject and in this way your enjoyment of our London walks will be greatly enhanced.
This has proved extremely successful on our Jack the Ripper London walk and so we have now decided to apply that successful criteria to our Sherlock Holmes London walks.
In this installment we explain the last years of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s life and reveal how, having previously killing him in The Final Problem he decided in 1927 to simply allow Sherlock Holmes to retire gracefully from London.
Walks in the countryside and beekeeping on the Sussex Down’s would become the pursuits of Holmes’s later years, whilst Conan Doyle continued to devote himself to the espousal of the Spiritualist cause.
The Retirement of Mr Sherlock Holmes and the Death of Conan Doyle.
By 1927, Conan Doyle had decided that it was time for his creation to hang up his deerstalker, set down his magnifying glass and retire. As he penned the last lines of The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place he confided that “Sherlock, like his author, grows a little stiff in the joints.”
When the final stories were published in book form as The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle added his own farewell to his creation: “I fear that Mr Sherlock Holmes may have become like one of those popular tenors who, having outlived their time, are still tempted to make repeated farewell bows to their indulgent audiences. This must cease and he must go the way of all flesh, material or imaginary.”
In the late 1920’s Conan Doyle’s health began to deteriorate and he was forced to spend prolonged periods in bed.
One cold March morning in 1930, he struggled from his sick bed and, unseen by anyone in the house, made his way in to the garden. Moments later, the butler heard a loud crash in the hallway and, racing to investigate, found Conan Doyle gasping for breath on the floor. One hand was clutched to his chest, whilst in the other he held a single white snowdrop.
His health continued to deteriorate over the next few months and, as the end drew near, Conan Doyle insisted he did not want to die in his bed. His family therefore helped him into a chair in which the ailing author could sit and gaze out at the Sussex countryside.
Here on the morning of Monday July 7th 1930, attended by his family, he died at the age of seventy-one. His last words were spoken to his wife: “you are wonderful” he told her.
He was buried in the rose garden at his house, Windlesham, on July 11th 1930. The mood at the graveside was, according to The Daily News Chronicle, “unlike any other; there were no tears, no anguish, and hardly anything that savoured death.” Fellow Spiritualists turned up in brightly colored clothing and summery frocks. Colourful floral displays lined the grave. “Sir Arthur will continue his work for the spreading of the great cause which soothes the anguished heart,” the Reverend C. Drayton Thomas, a Spiritualist minister, told the assembled congregation. “There is no mourning at Windlesham,” his son Adrian told a reporter.
Tributes to him were plentiful. “A very great man has left us,” wrote William Gillette. “I have always thought him one of the best men I have ever known,” wrote J.M Barrie. “I am very sorry to lose him,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, adding, “but, after all, he has made good his escape from this miserable world.”
H. Greenborough Smith, the editor of The Strand paid tribute to him in the pages of the magazine: “Doyle’s work is done,” he wrote “and, in whatever sphere, it was well done.” A New York Newspaper devoted its front page to him and treated its readers to the unintentionally humorous headline “Conan Doyle Dies of Sherlock Holmes Fame.”
But perhaps the tribute that best summed up the longest-lasting legacy of Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was the one which appeared in the Daily Herald. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is dead! Long Live Sherlock Holmes! “
