Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of über-rationalist Sherlock Holmes, was a man who combined cool logic, medicine and detection with unswerving faith in the existence of fairies and the reality of the spirit world.
His interest in other dimensions began in the 1880's. He attended séances, investigated supposed hauntings, experimented with table tipping and automatic writing for around 30 years. Doyle's faith in spiritualism was cemented by a medium who told him not to read a book by Leigh Hunt he'd been contemplating. What turned him from believer to crusader was "the war to end all wars".
The first world war hit Europe with an unprecedented wave of bereavement. Doyle, who visited the front lines and saw the carnage for himself, lost his brothers-in-law, his nephew and countless friends. His son Kingsley and his brother Innes both died from post-war influenza.
Conan Doyle wasn't the only prominent person to be convinced of a spirit world. The Society for Psychical Research, which he joined in 1893, counted scientists, philosophers and MPs, including future prime minister Stanley Baldwin amongst its members. But he was unique in his role as crusader. He felt an obligation to visit the good news on other bereaved families. The attraction of his message is obvious: your dead sons survive, they're happy and you can talk to them.
Doyle mustered all the zeal that had characterised his earlier campaigns for justice for the wrongly convicted, and poured it into his spiritualist mission. Ultimately he embarked on a world tour, speaking to massive audiences, many of whom had come to see the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle didn't lose the use of the fine mind which had enabled him to pay his own way through university and become a doctor of medicine. He knew that many mediums were frauds. But in his opinion the existence of frauds didn't disprove the real deal. He also had an Achilles heel. While Sherlock Holmes was cynical about women, declaring in The Sign of the Four that "the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money", Conan Doyle thought them virtuous, pure and almost incapable of lying. It was a belief which had been instrumental in his support for the cause of the Cottingley fairies, an innocent photographic fraud created by two young girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. Perhaps Doyle's chivalry was a means to unconsciously avoiding interrogating his own beliefs. Despite portraying spiritualism as a scientific faith he placed certain women on pedestals, casting them as the founts of faith and miracles, rather in the way his old religion did.
Inevitably Conan Doyle's campaign attracted ridicule from the press, public and churches. It also lost him the friendship of Harry Houdini. The conjurer was open minded about the possibility of life after death, but he was knowledgeable about the methods employed by fraudulent mediums and lacked Conan Doyle's idealised view of women. The breach came after the writer's wife Jean (who had developed the gift of mediumship) contacted Houdini's dead mother. Houdini regarded the fact that his Hungarian speaking mother supposedly communicated in perfect English as part proof that the séance was nonsense. Conan Doyle was incandescent at the perceived slur on his wife's honour.
Essentially Doyle was caught between two viewpoints, neither of which he could fully accept. His medical training told him the dead were dead, while his Christian upbringing insisted on the real possibility of hell. Spiritualism offered a solution.
Conan Doyle's grueling world tours brought on angina. As a doctor, he knew he didn't have long to live, but persisted spreading his message. He died of a heart attack on 7 July 1930. His family and spiritualist friends rejected mourning clothes as a symbol of their belief that Sir Arthur would survive death. Indeed earthly death was considered an opportunity for the author, a climactic finale to his crusade. The Albert Hall was hired and 6,000 people crowded in to see if Conan Doyle would make contact from the other side. Some of those present, including his wife, believed that he did.
Despite my own lack of faith, the more I read about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the more I respect him. He was a healer, an adventurer, a fine sportsman, committed family man and campaigner against injustice. I can't believe in the spirit world, but Conan Doyle did, and I salute him. He lost friends, attracted ridicule and eventually died for his cause, not chasing money, or glory, but in an effort to comfort his fellow human beings, and I have to admire that. And after all, Doyle's faith is no more ridiculous than any other religion I've come across.
Louise Welsh will be presenting a BBC Radio Scotland programme on Conan Doyle and the paranormal at 11:30am on 29 May as part of a series marking the 150th anniversary of his birth. It will available online at BBC iPlayer following the broadcast