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“Sir,- As one who has sampled most British sports, may I say a word about baseball?”
There you have it: a man who was interested in - seemingly - everything, sport being no exception. He took part in various sports, wrote about them and - as in the case quoted above - engaged in controversy about them.
Sir Arthur was not exaggerating when he wrote to the Editor
of The Times that he had “sampled most British sports”;
he certainly had. In his Memories and Adventures, first published
in the Strand Magazine, he rightly, if harshly, describes
himself as an all-rounder and a second-rater. Dismissing horse
racing as not really as sport at all, and shooting animals
as barbarous (he excludes fishing, acknowledging the inconsistency),
he extols the virtues of boxing. Doyle recalls some of his
own experiences of boxing, including an end-of-the-night match
which involved boxing in his formal evening clothes.
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While praising the benefits of boxing with gloves, Sir Arthur expresses his opinion that the old prize-ring (that is, bare-knuckled boxing) was an excellent thing “from a national point of view…. Better that our sports should be a little too rough than that we should run a risk of effeminacy.”
If, Doyle suggests, boxing is the finest single-man sport, rugby is the best collective one, needing “strength, courage, speed and resource [which] are great qualities to include in a single sport.” He wasn’t so keen on the variations of rugby which were popular at some public schools - they are, he says, “freak games” and a national misfortune, for which “our youths are wasting their energies.” As usual, Sir Arthur had a ready opinion on the subject.
Doyle was a keen skier, helping to map cross-country routes in Switzerland. When skiing was curtailed by the melting of the snow, he laid out a golf course, but had trouble preventing the Swiss cows (obviously an unsporting lot) chewing the hole flags.
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Doyle popularized skiing in Switzerland *
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Doyle’s
love of cricket dated from his school days, and continued
throughout his life. He turned out for the Allah-Akabarries,
a celebrity team including JM Barrie and AEW Mason, author
of The Four Feathers. The team name, a combination of Barrie’s
name and the Arabic phrase meaning “May God help us”, might
not be considered very correct today.
Of course, Doyle had strong opinions about cricket, and expressed
them in print. Few people would have demurred from his high
praise for the recently-dead cricketing hero, WG Grace: “The
world will be the poorer to many of us for [his] passing…
a masterful personality… made an impression which could never
be forgotten.” Doyle casually drops into his article (in The
Times), the fact that “I have had the privilege of fielding
at point more than once while he made his hundred.”
Doyle bowls out WG Wells *
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Whether he counted motoring as a sport is not clear; what
is quite clear that he was one of this country’s first motorists.
He liked the idea of motoring so much that he made a journey
of more than 170 miles to buy a car, only taking his first
drive on the journey home with his new toy. As for other sporting
pursuits - you name it, he probably tried it.
Was he a dabbler, a dilettante? Yes, he was, self-confessed.
But he put his experiences to good use: in much of his fiction
his heroes (fairly) and his villains (no doubt unfairly) engage
in many of the sports Sir Arthur tested out on their behalf.
Their sporting prowess, or lack of it, was a key indicator
of their character as gentlemen or cads, and their exploits
greatly enrich his stories.
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Sport related work by Conan Doyle can be found in:
Memories & Adventures (1924)
Reference copies of this is available under category 819.3
in the Sherlock
Holmes Collection. Or you may search for lending copies
in the Westminster Libraries: Search
Catalogue
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You may also search in the Times
Digital Archives Database from the Westminster Libraries
online services page for some of Doyle's letters to the editor.
Many of these articles are about Sport.
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