Sir Arthur Conan Doyle And The Case Of George Edalji

Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, tried to help clear the name of a man who was unjustly resented by his community.

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by Bruce Heydt

Savvy Londoners know that there is no such address as 221B Baker Street to be found anywhere in the city. (At least there wasn’t until recently, when it was created specifically for use by the Sherlock Holmes Museum.) It requires less intimate knowledge of London to know that the famous lodger at this non-existent address, the Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes, is equally fictitious. Yet even today the Royal Post Office receives letters addressed to the literary detective at the imaginary address, sent by people claiming to have been wrongfully accused of some crime, and asking Holmes’ help in solving the case.

In the early years of the 20th century, however, one such desperate man penned a more practical letter, addressing it not to Sherlock Holmes, but to his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, events would prove, shared many of Holmes’ special talents.

The petitioner was George Edalji, the 27-year-old son of the vicar of Great Wyrley. Edalji’s story began even before he was born, when his father, a man of Parsee ancestry, married an Englishwoman, converted to Christianity, and ultimately became the spiritual leader of his small Staffordshire community. His parishioners, perhaps thinking that the elder Edalji’s Parsee heritage made him an unsuitable Christian preacher, had little liking for him, and at least one of them made he and his wife’s lives miserable. In 1892, when George was 16 years old, the Edaljis began receiving threatening letters in the post. At the same time, other Staffordshire clergymen received abusive letters over Edalji’s forged signature, earning him the hatred of his peers. Mocking advertisements appeared in local newspapers, also purporting to be submitted by the disliked vicar. George shared in the family’s troubles, seemingly earning someone’s special resentment by becoming a successful solicitor with a fine professional reputation.

The harassment directed against the Edalji family came to a head following several incidents of animal mutilation throughout Great Wyrley. In the wake of these incidents, the police received anonymous letters accusing George Edalji of the crimes. The local Chief Constable not only acted on the accusation, but also reasoned that George had written the mysterious correspondence himself. This all fitted in with his long-held belief that George had been the one responsible for the earlier threatening letters that had been sent to his father.

Acting on his suspicions, the Chief Constable assigned no less than six policemen to keep the Edalji house under surveillance. Despite this, a labourer heading to work in the early hours of a summer’s day stumbled upon another mutilated animal, a pony this time, whose stomach had been sliced open.

The police, already preconditioned to believe George Edalji was the culprit, investigated the scene hastily, then returned to the vicarage to arrest the preacher’s son. By this time, George had already left for work, so the investigators searched the house and confiscated a pair of muddy shoes, a pair of pants with dirt around the cuffs, and various other clothes on which they found blood and horse hair. With these items in their custody, the police then proceeded to George’s Birmingham office, where they arrested their suspect.

If the evidence collected at the vicarage looked damning superficially, the police showed a remarkable lack of interest in reasoning out the facts of the case to a logical conclusion. When studied in detail, the evidence was far from convincing. George’s whereabouts during the previous evening were corroborated by several witnesses who placed him far from the crime scene. George had then retired for the night at 9.30. He slept in the same room as his father, who locked the door to the bedroom each night. The elder Edalji swore that his son could never have left the room after 9.30.

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