The latest Passengers' Log, from the Sydney Passengers, has arrived.
The second article is new, and the fourth in my series of articles providing a short biography of each person ACD mentions meeting in Australia in 'Wanderings of a Spiritualist'. The latest article is a fun one: a "Dr Watson" that Doyle met and described unironically.
The Passing Acquaintances of Arthur Conan Doyle - Part 4: Dr Watson
During his tour of Australia and New Zealand, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle interacted with many people, and spoke to tens of thousands in his audiences. Yet ACD’s book describing the tour, ’The Wanderings of a Spiritualist’, mentions relatively few people by name . This article is the fourth in a series that shines a light on those people ACD mentions by name on his visit. Why did ACD choose to mention those that he did? Who were these Australians? The biosketches presented aim to address these questions, and point to more detailed resources.
Like the previous (third) article on Mr Thomas in Adelaide , the fourth individual required a small amount of research to identify. Doyle describes a dinner with a group of doctors:
"The Adelaide doctors entertained me to dinner, and I was pleased to meet more than one who had been of my time at Edinburgh. They seemed to be a very prosperous body of men. There was much interesting conversation, especially from one elderly professor named Watson, who had known Bully Hayes and other South Sea celebrities in the semi-piratical, black-birding days. He told me one pretty story. They landed upon some outlying island in Carpentaria, peopled by real primitive blacks, who were rounded up by the ships crew on one of the peninsulas which formed the end of the island. These creatures, the lowest of the human race, huddled together in consternation while the white men trained a large camera upon them. Suddenly three males advanced and made a speech in their own tongue which, when interpreted, proved to be an offer that those three should die in exchange for the lives of the tribe. What could the very highest do more than this, and yet it came from the lowest savages. Truly, we all have something of the divine, and it is the very part which will grow and spread until it has burned out all the rest. "Be a Christ!" said brave old Stead. At the end of countless æons we may all reach that point which not only Stead but St. Paul also has foreshadowed."
Watson! And a Dr. Watson at that! Doyle resisted the temptation to comment that he had met a Dr. Watson - surely a feature that all readers of Wanderings would have immediately grasped. The reader is then struck with realization that Dr. Watson is relating to Doyle a horrifying tale of slavery ('blackbirding') in Australia and the Pacific, and that Doyle appears to relate this as a grand old tale of times past. Blackbirding is now recognized as an appalling element of Australian history, the practice of 'kidnapping, tricking, or coercing' indigenous people from various Pacific Islands to work as slaves or poorly paid laborers in the Australian colonies. Bully Hayes (~1829-1877) was an American ships' captain based in Australia who engaged in blackbirding, and was ultimately murdered by his crew .
So who was this Dr. Watson that engaged Doyle so? While it is not explicit in Wanderings, the connection to blackbirding confirms that it was Dr. Archibald Watson (1849-1940), a surgeon considered at the time to be Australia's greatest anatomist. Watson's life truly reads like an adventure story, so remarkable and rich in events that it is far beyond the word limit of this august journal, but certainly rewards investigating (and it is hoped the references provided allow adequate coverage of his varied life). Watson has received an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography , numerous academic articles describing his surgical career , a Memorial Lecture exists in his name that has included a biographical seminar and publication , and a recent book 'Painting the Islands Vermillion' examines Watson's life and his role in 'blackbirding' aboard the bright 'Carl' in 1871-2 .
Figure 1. Portrait of Archibald Watson, painted by William Beckwith McInnes (1889-1939), that hangs in the anatomy department at the University of Adelaide.
Watson was born in 1849 in Tarcutta, NSW, to a wealthy pastoralist family and educated in Sydney and then Scotch College in Melbourne. In 1871 Watson arrived in Fiji as his father's agent, and joined the brig Carl on it's 'second voyage' in 1872 to the Solomon Islands. The ship, captained by Joseph Armstrong, went on a kidnapping cruise capturing many natives and shooting at least two. On return to Fiji, the brig was seized by a Royal Navy ship and the crew charged (as this practice was illegal). Watson was among those charged with kidnapping and murder, but he was bailed at considerable expense to the family, and ordered to Australia for trial. Watson fled to England via crossing America, escaping trial and justice. The Captain of the Carl was sentenced to death - later commuted to life - primarily for atrocities on the first voyage of the Carl, during which up to ninety captured 'natives' were appallingly slaughtered.
After arriving in England, Watson studied medicine in Gottingen (graduating 1878) then again in Paris (1880), before living in London where he became a member (1882) and fellow (1884) of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1883 he went to Egypt as surgeon with Hicks Pasha's Sudan force, then in 1885 Watson returned to Australia, where he was appointed Elder professor of anatomy at the University of Adelaide where he spent the remainder of his career. Watson's notebooks of patients, surgeries and post mortems executed and observed cover the period 1883-1937, are probably unique, and are certainly of great historical importance. He travelled the globe observing leading surgeons, including the Mayo brothers in the US. Watson was a consulting-surgeon during the Boer War in South Africa (1901-1901), and at 65 when the Great War was announced joined the Australian Imperial Forces as consulting-surgeon and pathologist to No. 1 Australian Stationary Hospital at Heliopolis in Egypt (1914-16).
Wealthy and a bachelor, Watson travelled the globe after his retirement in 1919, but not before being present in Adelaide for dinner with Conan Doyle on Thursday, 23 September 1920. While Doyle describes the dinner in Wanderings, there is no contemporary account of the dinner in newspapers. The location of the dinner is not certain, but research by Francesca Zilio of the Museum of South Australia showed that Conan Doyle was proposed as a Honorary Member of the Adelaide Club the day before he arrived (and Watson was a member there), nominated by surgeon Henry Simpson Newland (1873-1969) . Zilio's research also showed that Watson's personal diary (more of which below) affirms he attended "Newland's dinner to Conan Doyle" on Thursday 23rd. That diary page also reveals that exactly one week later on Thursday 30th September, Watson "Went with Dodwell to Conan Doyle's lecture. Raining and cold" - this was Doyle's fourth and final lecture in Adelaide.
Watson's life was one of of intrigue, and as eventful as Conan Doyle's. He was described as an 'erratic, histrionic genius', spoke six languages, visited every corner of the globe from Iceland to China to Russia to the Falkland Islands. He spent time as a seafarer, rode motorcycles, and kept a daily diary that he ordered burnt on his death. Despite this, personal diaries survived and show that 'He recorded details of his paramours... he entered the names in Greek, his sexual experiences in Fijian and his actions often in variations of a coloured Maltese cross’ . A notorious story from his surgical days exemplifies his reputation as a bodysnatcher. Watson was following the treatment of a patient 'J.W.A.' who died after suffering for years with the rare disease myositis ossificans progesiva that results in the crippling fusion of bones in the body. During the autopsy, Watson secretly removed the entire torso, arms, and thighs of this rare skeletal example, leaving only the skin which he stuffed with padding and an opened umbrella. When the body was cremated the umbrella was discovered - and scandal only just prevented. That skeleton is still on display at the Adelaide Medical School.
Watson spent his final years living on Thursday Island (the northernmost point in Australia), where he died on 30 July 1940 aged 91. He was buried there and his headstone reads "In Memory of Professor A. Watson MD FRCS LSA, late of Adelaide University” (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Photograph of the headstone of Archibald Watson, located at Thursday Island Cemetery, Queensland .
And so to the irresistible Sherlockian aspect. The Dr. Watson who is the subject of this article first met Dr. Conan Doyle in 1920 - Doyle certainly does not suggest they had met previously. However, Archibald was living in London for several years prior to the formulation of the first Sherlock Holmes story. Let us focus for a moment on Archibald Watson's time in London. In late 1880 Watson was listed as passing the Royal College of Surgeons exam , and in January 1882 he was noted as being admitted as a member of the RCS . Watson first appeared in the medical register in 1883, address 154 Euston Rd, having been registered 31 January 1882, with the qualifications 'Lic. Soc. Apoth. Lond. 1880 ; Mem. R. Coll. Surg. Eng. 1882’ . The entry for 1884 is identical, and for 1885 onwards Watson is listed living in Adelaide. In December 1884 it was announced that Watson was a Fellow of the RCS .
In 1992, the Adelaide pathologist Dr. Philip W. Allen spoke at the Historical Society of South Australia on the topic of 'A Sherlock Holmes Approach to Dr. Watson’ . The presentation was not Sherlockian in nature, but actually an investigation into the life of Archibald Watson, though Allen did speculate that ACD and Archibald Watson could have intersected in London.
Watson moved in London circles with men who studied with Conan Doyle. While in London, Watson was demonstrator of anatomy at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School. Watson's surgical diaries reveal that he observed surgeries conducted by Joseph Lister . Lister revolutionized surgery with his implementation of sterile technique, and had arrived in London from Edinburgh in early 1877 (where Doyle was six months into medical school), where he had been a colleague of Joseph Bell. Did word reach ACD of an eccentric Australian surgeon named Dr. Watson? Did ACD perhaps meet Archibald Watson on a visit to London, or hear of his tales of "the side of a hill near Ballarat, where the prospectors had been at work"? Perhaps it is a not a coincidence that in the Hound of the Baskervilles, James Mortimer, M.R.C.S. had been 'house-surgeon, from 1882 to 1884, at Charing Cross Hospital' - exactly when Archibald Watson had studied there! Opportunities for Archibald Watson to have influenced Doyle's creation of his own Dr. John Watson abound.
When Archibald Watson was appointed Elder Professor of Anatomy at the University of Adelaide in 1885, the time and distance of his self-exile had cleaned away the legacy of his involvement in blackbirding, and his avoidance of a criminal trial fourteen years earlier. It was simple stated in newspapers that "London, Jan 7. Dr. Archibald Watson, Senior Demonstrator of Anatomy at the Charing Cross Hospital, leaves for Australia on January 29” . Archibald Watson is not the only intersection between the Doylean world and blackbirding. Ken Methold's Australian pastiche "Sherlock Holmes in Australia: The Adventure of the Kidnapped Kanakas" brings Holmes to Australia and to the experience of a blackbirding raid where natives were "rounded up by the ships crew" - Archibald Watson knew only too well the horrors perpetrated in those raids .
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