{"id":7813,"date":"2010-05-08T10:23:21","date_gmt":"2010-05-08T09:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=7813"},"modified":"2010-09-01T18:08:52","modified_gmt":"2010-09-01T17:08:52","slug":"cobbette-detectives-fairies-and-baseball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=7813","title":{"rendered":"Cobbette: Detectives, fairies, and baseball"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cobbette-(128x128)\"Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for creating one of crime fiction’s\u00c2\u00a0most enduring characters, Sherlock Holmes. The Scot’s accomplishments ranged from his prolific writing to the practising of medicine. Conan Doyle’s intellect was not, however,\u00c2\u00a0a sufficient safeguard against being duped to believe in the existence of fairies. In his book The Coming of the Fairies<\/em>, Conan Doyle collaborated with the spiritualist Edward Gardner<\/a> to publish photos taken by a 16-year-old schoolgirl, Elsie Wright, of her 10-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths, using cut-outs of fairies as props. Conan Doyle and Gardner vigorously defended the authenticity of the images.<\/p>\n

What he is less well-known for, though, is championing baseball in Britain (as mentioned in British Baseball and the West Ham Club<\/a><\/em>). On 28 October 1924, in a month during which the Chicago White Sox and New York Giants toured Britain, Conan Doyle was quoted in the New York Times<\/em> for his support of the game:<\/p>\n

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This game needs no expensive levelling of the field, as the outfit is within the reach of any village club. It takes only two or three hours in playing, it is independent of wet wickets and the player is on his toes<\/em> all the time and not sitting on a pavilion bench while another man makes his century. If it were taken up by our different association teams as a Summer pastime I believe it would sweep this country as it has done America. At the same time it would not more interfere with cricket than lawn tennis has done.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The visit to Britain in 1924 of two major league teams was not the first exposure to baseball for Conan Doyle. In an article<\/a> from 1993 published in Manitoba History<\/em>, Michael W Homer notes that while on a spiritualism-related\u00c2\u00a0tour of the USA and Canada in 1923, Conan Doyle’s activities were not limited to just the occult.<\/p>\n

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On the day following his arrival [in Winnipeg] he took his family to a baseball game which was played at Wesley Park between the Winnipeg Arenas and the Minneapolis All-Stars. Although he was a sports enthusiast and had excelled in cricket as a young man, [he] frankly admitted that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I have all the prejudices of an old [cricketer], and yet I cannot get away from the fact that baseball is the better game.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There is even a picture of Conan Doyle playing baseball in Jasper National Park, while on another North American tour in June 1914, which can be found here<\/a> (source: Western Canada Pictorial Index).<\/p>\n

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If you have an interesting history snippet to share with a link to Britain (tenuous or otherwise) then please send a message to Joe Gray through the <\/em>Get in contact<\/em><\/a> page.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A look at how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s interests extended beyond crime writing and little creatures at the bottom of the garden<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[130],"class_list":["post-7813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-project-cobb","tag-cobbette"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7813"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9050,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7813\/revisions\/9050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}