Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) continues to enjoy global fame through his creation, Sherlock Holmes, based, according to his own words, on Joseph Bell, a teacher at his university while studying medicine in Edinburgh in the 1880s. Doyle’s life was an extraordinary mixture. He practiced medicine, played football for Portsmouth team, was involved in spiritualism (controversially) and dabbled in architecture, politics, and justice campaigning. Born in Scotland, he was educated partially in Austria, before basing himself in Britain, and spending his final years in Crowborough.
Sherlock Holmes’s base is London, of course. In one of the most successful transfers of a fictional life to the real world. 221B Baker Street remains celebrated as the home of a person who never existed! But the place in people’s affections, from Japan to China to America, or Doyle’s creation remains secure, reinforced by films and television series.
Of the considerable output that Doyle produced (much of it not about Holmes at all) there are two pieces that are based in Kent. One, a short story from 1904, `The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez’ is set in what, at least by deduction (!) from the clues in the story, must be a place near Higham, just outside of Chatham. `Yoxley Old Place’ is the specific location of the story. It is to this place that Holmes is summoned to investigate the murder of Willoughby Smith, secretary to the elderly Professor Coram. `The gale had blown itself out next day,’ Conan writes of Holmes’s and Watson’s journey from London,
`but it was a bitter morning when we started upon our journey. We saw the cold winter sun rise over the dreary marshes of the Thames and the long, sullen reaches of the river, which I shall ever associate with our pursuit of the Andaman Islander in the early days of our career. After a long and weary journey we alighted at a small station some miles from Chatham.’ (Conan Doyle, `Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Illustrated Short Stories’, Chancellor Press, London, 1986, 610).
Beyond references later in the story to the Chatham Road, the story becomes more a chamber piece, largely confined to the room of the elderly and mysterious professor as the story unfolds. Needless to say, without offering a plot spoiler, everything is eventually solved satisfactorily. Yoxley Old Place is a produce of the imagination however.
The novel from a decade later, produced originally in the Strand Magazine, `The Valley of Fear’ is far more specific in its references to place. The first part is set in `the village of Birlstone,’ a `small and very ancient cluster of half-timbered cottages on the norther border of the county of Sussex’ (`Valley of Fear’, Jayzbee Verlag, no date, 14). The ancient Manor House of the village however, `about half a mile from the town, standing in an old park famous for its huge beech trees’ is in Kent – and is easily identified at Groombridge Place.
Groombridge Place’s appeal for Doyle, and for others, is strong. Peter Greenaway set his 1982 film, the `Draughtsman’s Contract’ in the house and the maze in its large and distinctive gardens, furnished with the huge beech trees mentioned above. Vita Sackville-West set her own novel `The Heir’ there too. What is fascinating about Doyle’s treatment of it was the stark contrast between the brutal murder of its owner by gun described in the book, and the placid quaintness and antiquity of the place. Doyle famously stated that there was nothing more terrifying than the peaceful tranquillity of the English countryside with its heavy silences and constant sense of watchfulness, even when no one is around! Cities and urban areas are where one expects trouble. But the subversive view of the empty rural spaces and their own latent capacity for evil happenings is something Doyle was to make himself master of. His description of the gardens around the moated Jacobean mansion typifies this:
`A short walk along he winding drive with such sward and oaks around it as one only sees in rural England, then a sudden turn, and the long, low Jacobean house of dingy, liver-coloured bricks lay before us, with an old fashioned garden of cut yews on each side of it. As we approached it, there was the wooden drawbridge, and the beautiful broad moat as still and luminous as quicksilver in the cold winder sunshine. Three centuries had flowed past the old Manor House, centuries of births and homecomings, of country dances and of the meetings of fox hunters. Strange that now in its old age this dark business should have cast its shadow upon the venerable walls. And yet those strange, peaked roofs and quaint, overhung gables were a fitting covering to grim and terrible intrigue.’ (Ibid, 24)
Holmes states later that he is a believer `in loci’, and he solves the puzzle of who had murdered the man found in the moated house by sitting in the study of the grand old place and seemingly acquainting himself with its history as a place of hiddenness and places of concealment.
Doyle was no doubt familiar with Groombridge due to his being a resident of Crowborough, a few miles away. Somewhat comically, one of the main characters in the story gives a description of a visit to nearby Tunbridge Wells in which they had seen their main persecutor. The sense of this town as one of looming threat is, like the work of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, though in somewhat different ways, somewhat at odds with the town’s restrained, and very proper, image.