Happy Birthday, Sir Arthur!

Happy 147th Birthday,
Old Bean!
Sure, we know him best for giving birth to that infuriatingly brilliant detective Holmes (and for inadvertently providing us with the colorful and satisfying phrase "No sh#*, Sherlock"), but there are many other facets to this complicated literary man-about-town.

For example, did you know that Doyle initially studied to be a doctor? He wrote his thesis on the effects of syphilis! Arty also once served as Ship's Surgeon aboard an Arctic whaling boat! According to most sources, he didn't really practice much medicine, but rather broke up fights between members of the crew.

Though raised as a Jesuit, Coney became a self-avowed "Spritualist" and preached about the existence of fairies, the usefulness of family seances, and other such silly tenets for most of his life. (Be sure to read about the Cottingley Fairy Hoax at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies, or just rent the movie Fairy Tale: A True Story or Photographing Fairies if you're lazy and you love Peter O'Toole or Ben Kingsley.)

Art Doyle was also good buddies with Harry Houdini for a while, and they even held a couple of seances together (the first to contact Doyle's dead son and the second to reach Houdini's dead mother), but Houdini ultimately could not believe in such cheesy, lame quackery and the friendship dissolved in a series of nasty letters published in 1923 in the New York Times.

I learned an even more interesting tidbit today: ol' Doyley once co-wrote a comedic, Gilbert-&-Sullivan style operetta with none other than Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie! The show was entitled Jane Annie, and it was universally declared to be a horrific, boorish flop!

Barrie had written himself into a corner early on in production and was having breakdown after breakdown, so he called on his good pal Art to save his butt before it was too late. Unfortunately for them both, it was too late for any butt-saving. The show very nearly ruined D'Oyly Carte's season at the Savoy; Arthur Sullivan himself decided to pass on collaborating with Barrie on the project. Now there was a man who could smell a stinker!

The synopsis is listed below, and if you want more info on this strange little play, be sure to visit
math.boisestate.edu/gas/other_savoy/jane_annie/jane_annie_home.html

{Set in a girls' boarding school and the golf green attached to it. Bab, described by the authors as a "bad girl," plans to elope, but cannot decide whether to marry Jack the lancer or Tom the press student. Jane Annie, the school's "good girl," schemes to take one of them (Jack) off her hands, and calls on her powers of hypnotism to accomplish it.}

Who knew Coney was such an interesting chap? Here's to obscure information about people long since dead! Huzzahs all around!