His first step was to publish a small booklet called The Case of Oscar Slater. In it, he pointed out the holes in the prosecution's case, which were so plain that common sense and not deductive reasoning was needed to see them, and attacked the prejudice shown by the judge and prosecuting counsel. The booklet sold widely, thanks to the author's name, but the reception for it was disinterested and a few newspapers were openly hostile. Conan Doyle refused to let this deter him and his activities, along with a statement by an upstanding police inspector who stated that some of the evidence presented at trial had been altered from the original witness statements, pushed the authorities into ordering a hearing in the matter. The inquiry was held in secret in 1914 and was presided over by a Scottish attorney with no experience in criminal matters. The witnesses were never placed under oath and the resulting findings only supported the verdict in the original trial. The authorities refused to allow a retrial and the police inspector who spoke out was dismissed from the force without his pension.

Slater remained in prison for years afterward. In 1925, he managed to smuggle out a message to Conan Doyle who, when he received it, immediately began requesting an official pardon for the man. This was also refused but in 1927, from America, the chief prosecution witness revealed that she had originally give the police the name of another man who had often visited Marion Gilchrist. The police had ignored this testimony though and according to another witness, had told her exactly what to say to the prosecutor and on the witness stand at trial. After this damning statement, another witness also recanted her testimony, leaving the officials in a predicament. With no fanfare, Slater was released from prison, having served more than 18 years behind bars. There was no suggestion that he was innocent and certainly no mention of compensation.

Doyle's pen was again put to paper and he wrote a pamphlet, which was sent to all government officials, which demanded that Slater be given a new trial. Finally, after much discussion and many questions in the house of commons, an appeal was accepted. Slater had no money at all to stand a new trial, so Conan Doyle guaranteed all of his expenses. The evidence of Slater's innocence at the new trial was, or should have been, overwhelming but as Doyle found out in the Edalji case, officials refused to admit to any wrongdoing and would not blame other officials for the failures in the case. The appeal judges decided that the jury's verdict was reasonable and that the new evidence uncovered was not material. Still, they did find for Slater on the grounds that the judge's instructions for the jury "amounted to a misdirection of the law". The verdict was then set aside and Slater was found officially not guilty.

Doyle had succeeded, so why then did the case leave him with bad feelings? Those feelings came from Slater himself. Although the man expressed gratitude to Doyle for helping him, the two men did not get along at all and this was partially because of Doyle's attitude toward the German. He would have nothing to do with Slater personally and even returned the cigar-cutter that he was sent as a present. The animosity arose over the matter of Slater's compensation for his time in prison. He was given a miserable sum and Doyle pushed him to ask for more and also to make a claim for his legal expenses. He felt that Slater was bound by honor to repay those who had spent money in connection for his appeal but Slater never bothered. The amount that Doyle had paid out of his own pocket meant nothing to him but he felt that Slater had behaved dishonorably towards himself and others. Conan Doyle's feelings about the whole matter were summed up in a letter that he wrote to Slater that stated:

"If you are indeed quite responsible for your actions, then you are the most ungrateful as well as the most foolish person whom I have ever known."

THE WAR YEARS
In 1911, Conan Doyle took part in a motor car race called Prince Henry's Tour. He had long been fascinated with the automobile, having purchased his first in 1903, and looked forward to a great sporting event. Prince Henry was Prussian and the race began in Germany and ended in London, after a circular tour of England and Scotland. It also pitted 50 British drivers against 50 German drivers and Conan Doyle drove his favorite motor car and took Jean along as a passenger. The race was won by the British team and Prince Henry presented them with an ivory lady called "Peace" but from what Doyle saw and heard during the race, he feared that war with Germany was not far off. He had been accompanied by various Prussian officers as observers and several of them made the assumption that war between the two nations was inevitable.

Doyle began preparing for war in the best way that he knew how -- with his pen. He told his brother Innes that he did not like the look of things and feared that England was not ready to fight. He exaggerated the effectiveness of the airship in those days but he was almost uncannily accurate about the threat posed by the recent vessel, the submarine. He wrote a lengthy story called "Danger", in which Britain's enemy has a fleet of submarines that ignored the British Navy but made merciless attacks on merchant shipping, causing famine and forcing England to surrender. His warning of the submarine threat was laughed about at the time it was written but three years later, the German Naval Secretary would write that Conan Doyle had been "the only prophet of the present form of economic warfare" as the Germans began preying on merchant vessels.

And while Conan Doyle was always an agent of reform and change when it came to politics and the military, he was not always so forward thinking with his ideas. He was a stoutly old-fashioned man and while embracing movements like Spiritualism in his later years, he was steadfastly opposed to others. He detested the suffragette movement and often spoke out against the actions of the radical members of the movement, calling them "wild women". The suffragettes responded by putting a hazardous sulfate called vitriol through the letter box of Windlesham, the home that Doyle had moved to in Crowborough in 1909. Doyle's opposition to the suffragettes was based on the belief that it was pointless for women to have the vote, but he also felt that was very unwomanly. On the other hand, he was sympathetic to the reform of the Divorce Law, by which a husband could gain a divorce on the grounds of his wife's adultery but a wife had to prove not only adultery but brutality or desertion as well. He campaigned hard to get the law changed but this all was placed on the back burner when war was declared in August 1914.

 Conan Doyle was again galvanized into action. He said after the fighting had ended that the Great War was the physical climax of his life, a remarkable statement considering that he was 55 years-old at the time it started. Within a day or two, he had organized a Crowborough civilian group called the Volunteers. He received requests for their rules and methods from over 1,200 other towns and villages, even thought eh volunteer force was disbanded by an order from the War Office a few weeks after it was founded. It was replaced by an official body that boasted more than 200,000 men, although Doyle served in it as a private during the entire War. Most of the men were Sir Arthur's age or older but thought nothing of marching as many as 14 miles each day, singing along the entire route.

He was invigorated by the war effort but it was not enough for him. He wanted to see action and volunteered for the Army. Needless to say, he was not accepted but he did send a flurry of ideas, many of them ingenious and practical, to the War Office. Since many of the military ships had few lifeboats, the sailors on board them had little chance of surviving if they lost their ship or fell into the sea. Doyle suggested the idea of inflatable rubber rafts that could be used and while this idea was turned down, he did suggest the development of inflatable rubber collars for seamen to carry with them in their pockets. He also came up with an idea for soldiers to be fitted with body armor but it too was rejected. Unfortunately, many of those who worked in the office agreed with his innovative notions but there was little they could do about it without approval from the high command. At the Ministry of Munitions, when he went there to argue for his body armor idea, he was told: "Sir Arthur, there is no use arguing here, for these is no one in this building who does not know that you are right!"

Ideas aside, his principal endeavor during the war was to rally Britain's spirits. Within a month of the war's beginning, he published a booklet called To Arms and quickly set to work on a history called of the British campaign in France. he maintained contact with many of the British commanders and chronicled their efforts extensively, sometimes posting and receiving as many as five letters each day to and from the front. But he was not content to work from home and in 1916, he accepted an assignment to write about the Italian Army and to visit the British front on the way. As a deputy-lieutenant of Surrey, he had the right to wear a uniform and his tailor "rigged me up in wondrous khaki garb which was something between that of a Colonel and a Brigadier, with silver roses instead of stars or crosses upon the shoulder straps." He looked impressive, especially wearing his medals from South Africa, and was treated with respect everywhere that he went.  He went to France on a destroyer in the company of several generals and was allowed to meet up with Innes, who was now a Colonel.

But the War and its aftermath also brought him the deepest grief that he had ever known. First, his wife's brother and Doyle's friend, Malcolm Leckie, had been killed and then two nephews and several other friends and relatives. And then Kingsley, the only son of his first marriage, and his beloved brother Innes, both died within a few weeks of one another. Kingsley had been badly wounded on the Somme and had died of pneumonia in October 1918. Not long after, Innes, now a Brigadier General, also came down with pneumonia and died. Conan Doyle said and wrote very little of these deaths but they must have hit him quite hard, perhaps even harder than the death of his mother two years later.

Although these deaths were not responsible for his belief in Spiritualism, they surely must have had a great effect on the strength of his convictions. He had long been interested in the occult but at the beginning of the war had merely been sympathetic to the movement. The wartime deaths and the suffering that he witnessed must have convinced him of the need for our spirits to live on. It was a time when the public at large felt a great urgency to turn toward spiritual things and as Spiritualism had seen a great revival following the Civil War, it would see another following World War I. The movement had just entered its modern heyday and standing at the forefront was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

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Still to Come --  Conan Doyle Embraces Spiritualism
Conan Doyle and Houdini: The Story of a Remarkable Friendship
Doyle and the Cottingley Fairies
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(C) Copyright 2003 by Troy Taylor. All Rights Reserved.