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| Illustration by Orison MacPherson for the Saturday Evening Post (USA) |
This episode, we look at one of Conan Doyle’s last short
stories, ‘The End of Devil Hawker’ (1930) which he completed shortly before his
death.
You can read the story here.
And listen to the podcast below.
The episode will shortly be posted to our Youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@doingsofdoyle.
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Synopsis
It seems like just another night
at Tom Cribb’s London establishment, the Union Arms at the corner of Panton
Street, in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The bar is crowded with
aristocratic men about town, members of the boxing fraternity and all their
assorted followers, hangers-on and hearty rowdies. Cribb himself, still
nominally the champion of all England, is there, as is the nascent young poet
Lord Byron. Amidst the uproar and chaff, the sinister figure of Sir John Hawker
- ‘Devil Hawker’ – holds quiet converse with Sir Charles Trevor over a debt of
three thousand pounds. They decide to settle the issue by the turn of a card, a
transaction that is witnessed surreptitiously by the sharp bookmaker Billy
Jakes, who notices a slight of hand and makes a decision that will cost both
him and Hawker dearly…
Writing and Publication
History
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| Title page of the script of Temperley |
Ten years later, around 1907, Conan Doyle went back to this project
for The House of Temperley, his regency play which was first performed
in September 1909. It has often been said that Temperley is an
adaptation of Rodney Stone, but the script, which survives in the Lord
Chamberlain’s Office records in the British Library, reveals it shares far more
with ‘Devil Hawker,’ which is essential Temperley without the boxing!
ACD wrote ‘Devil
Hawker’ in the last few months of his life. It was one of an eclectic mix of stories
that included ‘The Death Voyage’, a counter factual about an alternative
version of the Great War, and ‘The Last Resource’, a strange Dashiell Hammett
hard boiled crime story. It’s possible that ‘Devil Hawker’ was the last story Conan
Doyle worked on as the galley proofs are believed to have been on his desk when
he died on 7 July 1930.
The story was first published in The Saturday Evening
Post, in the USA, in August 1930; and in The Strand Magazine in the
UK in November of the same year. It was rediscovered by John Michael Gibson and
Richard Lancelyn Green for The Unknown Conan Doyle in 1982.
In 2024, an artwork inspired by ‘Devil Hawker’ was created by Megan Oldhues for the Toronto Public Library’s Conan Doyle Mural Project.
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| Megan Oldhue's illustration for 'Devil Hawker' |
‘Devil Hawker’ and House of
Temperley
House of Temperley (1909) concerns Sir Charles
Temperley, an inveterate gambler who has squandered his family fortune at the
card table, with most of his money going into the pockets of the violent and
ruthless Sir John Hawker. To recover his fortune, Sir Charles bets all he has,
double or quits, on a boxing match – his man against that of Sir John. But when
the big day arrives, Sir Charles’s fighter is kidnapped on Sir John’s orders,
and it is only when Sir Charles’s noble brother, Captain Jack Temperley, steps
into the ring that the day is saved. Sir John is enraged and takes his anger
out on Jakes, a bookmaker who saw Sir John preparing to cheat Sir Charles at
the card table and who had been blackmailing him. Out of revenge, Jakes reports
Sir John to Watier’s and Devil Hawker is duly expelled.
Sir John’s comeuppance is much the same in the play and the
story. The play also has nods to ‘The Croxley Master’ (Episode 32), in that Sir
John attempts to save the match by organising a crowd invasion of the ring. There’s
also a nod to ‘Silver Blaze’ in a sequence where a tout is said to be hanging
around the trainer ground.
Drury Lane and the “unknown”
H.B.
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| John Doyle (1797-1868) |
In a time before lithography, engravings were the principal
way in which the faces of famous people were known.
ACD makes reference to his grandfather, John Doyle (“HB”),
the great illustrator of the mid-19thC. In his day, John Doyle mixed with Collins,
Thackeray and Macaulay but by 1930 he was had slipped into obscurity. His “genteel”
political cartoons were far less memorable than those of Gilray or indeed his
son, Richard “Dicky” Doyle who made his name with Punch. When an auction
of John Doyle’s possessions was organised in 1882, fifteen years after his
death, it had to be abandoned for lack of interest.
Devil Hawker’s description is somewhat reminiscent of that
of Dr Grimesby Roylott from ‘The Speckled Band’. The Roylott family had been
ruined by a gambler in the family at the time of the Regency, so maybe Grimesby
was descended from Hawker…
Tom Cribb’s Parlour
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| Tom Cribb pub, Panton Street |
Tom Cribb, the boxing champion of England from 1808-1822,
has been mentioned several times on the podcast. In 1909, ACD made him the main
character in ‘The Lord of Falconbridge’ which was written around the same time
as Temperley.
In 1808, Cribb beat Gregson to take the English boxing
title, but he was more famous for his fights in 1810 and 1811 against Tom
Molineaux, a former slave from America, whom he beat. he beat again a year later. Their fights are
immortalised in Goerge Macdonald Fraser’s excellent novel Black Ajaz (1997).
In the Aubrey-Maturin novel Letter of Marque (1988), Aubrey has a
long-gun nicknamed Tom Cribb.
After his retirement in 1822, Cribb bought the Union Arms in
Panton Street. The pub survives to this day, now renamed the Tom Cribb,
and has a plaque naming ACD and Rodney Stone outside next to the front
door. Pierce Egan, the author of Boxiana, said that Cribb had stepped
back from boxing to "serve his customers in a more palatable style."
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| The plaque outside the Tom Cribb pub |
The parlour descriptions in ‘Devil Hawker’ and ‘Falconbridge’ are most likely taken from Egan's influential 1821 work Life in London, which included an illustration of 'Cribb's Parlour' by George Cruikshank.
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| Cruickshank's illustration of Tom Cribb's parlour from Pierce Egan's Life in London (1821) |
Byron
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| Byron c. 1813 by Thomas Phillips |
ACD clearly had an affection for Byron, even if he was not
the manliest of types for ACD’s tastes. He supported the Byron Society in 1896,
writing to its secretary that “such a cause is one for which a man might be
proud to speak, write, subscribe or fight.” In his speech on Poe’s centenary
(1909), he observed that, had Byron not died and Poe made it to the Greek war
of Independence, the two great poets might have met.
Card cheats
Jakes, himself a card sharper, catches Sir John marking the
deck of cards with his thumbnail. Card cheats are common in ACD’s works,
notably in ‘A Regimental Scandal’ (1892) and ‘The Empty House’ (1903), which both riff
off The Tranby Croft Scandal (1890) which implicated the future Edward VII.
In ‘The Five Orange Pips’, we learn of ‘The
Tankerville Club Scandal’ in which Holmes saved Major Prendergast when the
latter was wrongfully accused of cheating at cards. Marshall Millefleur, in the
Brigadier Gerard story, was also broken for cheating at cards.
In Temperley, Jakes is horsewhipped off stage, but in
‘Devil Hawker’ we see Sir John’s brutal attack, in which he runs his spur
across Jakes’s face. It’s pretty horrible stuff.
Watier’s
One of the three great clubs of the Regency period, after
White’s (the Tory dominated favourite of the Guards) and Brooks’ (famed for its
extravagant dares and bets).
Watier’s was established at 81 Piccadilly in 1807 by the
Prince of Wales (later George IV) in response to comments that the fare at
London clubs was all the same. The story goes that the Prince, on hearing this
complaint, called for his cook and asked whether he would organise a dinner
club. The cook, Watier, accepted. The club folded in 1819, having ruined many
fortunes.
Committee members
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| John Ormsby Vandeleur |
General Scott, the ‘toast and water man’, was a real person.
Scott’s notorious sobriety and knowledge of whist is referenced in Captain
Gronow’s Reminiscences, one of ACD’s sources for his Regency and Gerard
stories.
Poyntz is probably William Stephen Poyntz, the Whig MP for
St Albans. Poyntz was a supporter of Grenville and voted against the Peace of
Amiens. Poyntz was also the name of one of ACD’s fellow cricketers at the MCC.
General Sydenham Poyntz also fought for the Parliamentarians during the English
Civil Wars.
Vandeleur is probably Colonel Sir John Ormsby Vandeleur who
served in the Peninsular War and led a cavalry charge at Waterloo. ACD re-used
the name for one of Stapleton’s aliases in The Hound of the Baskerville.
Inconsistencies in the story
Samuel E. Bassett, Professor of Greek at University of
Vermont, wrote an article entitled ‘Homer
and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’ in The
Classical Weekly, USA, 17 November 1930, in which he observed several inconsistencies
in this story. They include: Colonel D’Acre becoming Colonel Tufton (or Rufton);
the change in Hawker’s note from ‘In Consideration of your Silence’ to ‘In
Consideration of Services Rendered’; and Hawker’s reference to White’s Club,
when the action takes place in Watier’s.
Bassett argues that these error show ‘that a good
story-teller – and likewise a reader who reads for the sake of the story and
nothing more – regards such things as names of minor characters and details of
various kinds, as of secondary importance.’ His point is actually about Homer
and the internal inconsistencies in The Iliad, e.g., Pylaemenes is
killed by Menelaus, only to reappear three days later.
‘The creative poet has more important work on hand that to
test the consistency of his narrative in all minor and unessential details. He
must be an impressionist in thinking only of the effect of his tale at the
moment – except where that moment is big with possibilities for making other
parts of the tale more impressive.’
Next time on Doings of Doyle…
We are joined by Nick Lane, author of several Sherlock
Holmes plays for Blackeyed Theatre, to talk about their new production Sherlock
Holmes: The Hunt for Moriarty.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com),
and our supporters on Patreon
and Paypal.
Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur
Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce
these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.
Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod
(incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
YouTube video created by @headlinerapp.
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