On March 9th… A Loss


On March 9, 1955, Denis Percy Stewart Conan Doyle (born 1909), son of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, died in India. He was the first child of Arthur Conan Doyle’s marriage to Jean Leckie, and the eldest surviving son after the death of his half-brother, Kingsley, in 1918.

From information provided by the volume A Curious Collection of Dates by by Leah Guinn (JHWS “Amber”) and Jaime N Mahoney (JHWS “Tressa”), we find this note in E W Smith’s “From the Editor’s Commonplace Book” in the July 1955 issue of the Baker Street Journal:

[Denis was n]ever too sympathetic with the doings of the Baker Street Irregulars — he found the profound pseudo-scholarship angle a little baffling — [but] Denis was nevertheless an interested and sometimes charming observer.

Denis Conan Doyle attended the 1949 BSI Dinner and was perhaps somewhat miffed that Holmes and Watson, rather than his father, were getting all the attention. Smith goes to recall:

And then, a few minutes later, he got to his feet, at Chris Morley’s invitation, and gave a simple and very moving little talk on ‘My Father’s Friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes’.

 

Posted by The Dynamic Duo (JHWS Chips) aka Ron and (JHWS Selena) aka Beth