♪ [Knock on door] Lucy Worsley: Early on a gray August morning in 1903... [Knocking] the police make an unexpected raid in a small village in Staffordshire.

♪ Mrs. Edalji?

♪ Worsley: They're investigating a series of attacks on animals and are hunting for evidence.

♪ I need you to bring me your son's clothes and dagger.

What dagger?

What's he talking about?

♪ Worsley: These muddy boots and this damp coat will help to condemn an innocent man, the vicar's son George Edalji, to 7 years in prison.

We'll be back later.

All right.

♪ Worsley: Doesn't this sound exactly like the start of a Sherlock Holmes story, but this happened in real life, and the crime wasn't investigated by the fictional Mr. Holmes but by Arthur Conan Doyle himself.

He was about to discover that fact was more complicated than fiction.

♪ On December the 14th, 1893, the world was reeling from shocking news.

Arthur Conan Doyle's short story "The Adventure of the Final Problem" had been released upon an unsuspecting public.

Sherlock Holmes was dead, thrown over a Swiss waterfall.

The papers even ran obituaries for the fictional hero as if he were a real person.

Listen to this.

"Sherlock Holmes is no more.

"He dies with his name ringing in men's ears.

"The police of the world are left with their inferior resources to deal with crime as of old."

Worsley, voice-over: But while readers were in mourning, Sherlock's creator certainly was not.

♪ Action man Arthur was on a skiing holiday... Arthur, what are you doing there?

Worsley, voice-over: Hitting the slopes here in Switzerland.

If Sherlock Holmes fans had known, they might have felt that the killer was returning to the scene of the crime, but really, Arthur himself was indifferent.

He was moving on.

He was planning his next projects.

He had become a household name thanks to the popularity of his detective, but he wanted something more than a reputation as a mass market author.

He craved respectability and social status.

For Arthur Conan Doyle, the stakes had never been higher.

He'd taken this massive gamble of killing off his most successful character.

Would Sherlock Holmes finally stop hogging all the limelight?

Was Arthur finally going to be able to be the hero of his own story?

♪ It seems to me that this was the plan.

Arthur was already working on a new novel based on his own life.

"The Stark Munro Letters" blurred the facts of Arthur's time as a young doctor here in Portsmouth with fiction.

It had his love of sport, the story of how he met his wife... and even a version of his own opinionated mother.

At the time, Arthur said it was the best thing he'd ever written.

There are funny bits in it and crowd-pleasing parts, but there's also philosophy and religion.

Arthur had killed off Sherlock Holmes in order to get serious as a writer, and here he was actually doing it.

Worsley, voice-over: I want to get a sense of how Arthur was feeling post-Holmes, and I suspect the best way to find out is to see what he told his mam.

[Riders screaming] Here's the letter he wrote to her March 1895.

So that was when the "Stark Munro" book was just coming out in an American magazine, and he tells her that it's getting loads of great coverage in America and in Britain, too.

In fact, he says to her, "I should not be surprised to see it outlast all my other work."

Well, he turned out to be wrong about that, but at this moment Arthur was riding high.

He's living his dream.

He's achieving success without a deerstalker hat in sight.

♪ Instead of relying on one character, he invented multiple new ones, who appeared in a wide range of stories-- a series of "Boy's Own" war tales, a historical novel about a boxer, an imperialist adventure set in Egypt... ♪ but to Arthur, success beyond Sherlock wasn't just about proving himself as a writer.

He wanted to be a hero off the page, too, and that meant proving himself as a man... ♪ but what did manliness look like in the dying days of the Victorian age?

I found a potential clue.

Heh heh.

This is an entry from Arthur's diary from 1898.

It's pretty short.

He isn't one for much introspection in his diary, but I do like this entry because there's something of the Bridget Jones about it.

"Weight 15 stone, 9 pounds," and that's in his trousers and singlet, or vest.

That's about 219 pounds, which isn't a bad weight at all for a tall man, but he was about to turn 40.

He was feeling in need of an overhaul, so he also says that he began Sandow's course.

I want to know what on earth Arthur was getting involved in here... so I'm hoping historian of physical culture Conor Heffernan can tell me what Sandow's course was all about.

Heffernan: This is some of the earliest film footage ever taken, so I'll let you... Hee hee hee!

experience this in its full glory.

Here's a muscular man in his pants.

What is he doing?

Is he clenching his muscles?

Ooh!

Ha ha ha!

This is, you know, the first... Oh, I love it, I love it!

modern bodybuilder Eugen Sandow.

And what was-- what's his story?

What's special about him?

He's a strong man who's seen as the world's most perfectly developed specimen.

Influencer is a term I loathe, but Sandow was a fitness influencer, so it's very much a trend of the time.

He sold books, magazines, workout equipment.

So this is a 5-pound dumbbell, spring grip dumbbell.

Let me-- Would you like to try?

I would love to squeeze.

Now remember... Would these have been the sort of thing that Arthur himself used?

This would have been the exact thing that Arthur would have used.

Total concentration as you do this.

Well, it's a bit easy.

It is a bit easy, yeah.

Ha ha ha!

Did they come in bigger sizes?

No.

This is--I mean, this is the full stack, but this is the marketing genius of Sandow because you can feel it's quite light.

Yeah.

You could ship this throughout the world.

So Arthur would have likely have had an anthropomorphic chart, as well, where he could have tracked his measurements and compare himself to Sandow because this was the sale, right?

Can you fit your physique to Sandow's?

His physique is seen as so perfect that in 1904 the Natural History Museum commissioned a statue of Sandow's body so that they have a symbol of the perfect white man that later generations can look back on and see what perfection looked like in the early 1900s.

The perfect white man.

That rings alarm bells.

There is now a fear that Britain's getting weaker compared to its colonial subjects, and Sandow's own zeal spreads to this idea of improving Britain's racial stock, their racial fitness.

If we can make Britain's men and women strong and fit and healthy and physically active, we can ensure the place of Britain within her empire.

This started out as camp fun, but it's gone to a very dark place.

♪ Worsley: Even with this dark side, Arthur was willing to embrace Sandow's ideas of masculinity... ♪ so much so it led him here... to the Royal Albert Hall to judge Britain's very first bodybuilding competition.

Yes, you did hear me correctly.

Oh, my giddy aunt!

Ha ha ha!

I don't know what to say.

Worsley, voice-over: Can you imagine?

80 men standing on pedestals, wearing leopard skin.

Worsley: You think I'm joking, but look at this.

It did really happen.

[Camera shutter clicks] Worsley, voice-over: If Sherlock Holmes had been about brains, this was about brawn.

♪ Sandow's regime was all about creating the perfect physical specimen, a type of elite action man able to defend the country, and Arthur wanted to be match fit.

Worsley, voice-over: Because the Empire needed all the strength it could muster.

When Arthur started Sandow's workout in 1898, the country was on the brink of the Boer War.

The British were taking on the Boers, descendants of Dutch white settlers in South Africa, in a battle for gold and land.

If Arthur was ever going to step out of Sherlock's shadow, perhaps bravery on the battlefield was the way to go.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: But first, this 40-year-old wannabe action man had to ask a certain someone's permission.

♪ Arthur told his mam war was coming and he was on a mission to enlist.

He'd written plenty of war heroes, and now he wanted to be one... but Mary Doyle was a woman who knew her own mind.

Oh!

"My own dearest and very naughty son, "how dare you!

"Your very height and breadth will make you a simple and sure target."

That seems a bit harsh.

Arthur's been on his fitness regime for a whole year by this point, and even his mum is saying that he's too big for a bullet to miss.

♪ But buoyed up by patriotism, Arthur applied to the War Office on Pall Mall.

A firm believer in the values of the British Empire, he felt honor bound to fight.

Here's Arthur's poor mum again.

She's getting desperate by this point.

She says, "Listen.

There are hundreds of thousands "who can fight for one who can make a Sherlock Holmes."

There's that name again that Arthur just can't escape.

He must have found this exasperating.

His own mother thinks that his greatest achievement has been his detective.

It's almost like Arthur's willing to risk his life to get away from this, to get away from being haunted by Holmes.

Ultimately, Arthur didn't get to make the choice.

Because of his age, the army rejected him.

He would have to find another way to become the hero of this story... [Ship horn blows] [Cheering] so he boarded a ship and headed to South Africa anyway.

Arthur sometimes seems like a man who is relentlessly in search of a purpose.

Was he a writer, or was he a man of action?

Whenever Sherlock Holmes doesn't have a case on, he sits around, he gets bored, he gets frustrated.

Arthur never has that problem.

Arthur is onwards upwards, looking for the next adventure.

♪ He was also running away from issues in his personal life.

His wife of 15 years Touie was slowly dying of tuberculosis.

She'd been ill for nearly half of their marriage... and Arthur was now developing feelings for a younger woman called Jean Leckie.

Arthur felt like he'd been trapped in Touie's sick room for the last 6 years.

He was really ready to escape.

♪ In December 1899, Arthur decided his best option was to return to being Dr. Doyle... so he joined the unpaid staff of a private military hospital in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

Perhaps the war would bring him the respect and glory he craved.

I've been given special access to Arthur's notebooks to try and find out if reality measured up to his expectations.

Ooh!

Wow!

"War diary 1900."

It's amazing to think that this was actually in Arthur's tent with him at Bloemfontein... and what's this little one?

Oh!

It's a doctor's pad.

This is a real witness to history.

Oh, this is what's going on in the hospital, and it does not sound like Bloemfontein is a nice place to be.

He's written here, "You could find your way to Bloemfontein by the smell of dead horses."

"Diarrhea."

"Right lung congested."

"Pain in stomach."

This is not a picture of military glory, I'm guessing here.

It's--it's a picture of pain and poo.

Worsley, voice-over: The hospital where Arthur worked was plagued by a typhoid epidemic, which was sweeping through the army.

By the end of the war, around 2/3 of British deaths had been caused not by bullets but by disease.

The Boer War clearly wasn't the exciting "Boy's Own" adventure that I think Arthur thought that it was going to be, and in his private diary, he's actually quite honest about that.

Listen to this.

"The smells, sights, and sounds were most ghastly and horrible."

Oh!

Oh, dear.

"One man died as I fanned him," Arthur says.

"I saw the light go out of his eyes."

♪ This wasn't a fictional situation where Sherlock Holmes could sweep in and sort everything out.

This was messy and real.

♪ After 4 months on the medical frontline, Arthur hung up his stethoscope and hopped on the next boat home.

The war hadn't given him the personal glory he'd hoped for, but he planned to exploit his wartime experiences to make his mark in another way.

When Arthur got back to Britain, he--heh--characteristically started looking around for a new role.

He felt he had this higher destiny.

Was it politics?

He thought he might stand as an MP.

He wanted to go on supporting the war in parliament, but he couldn't get elected.

Had to think again.

Hmm.

He decided to become a war historian.

Before the war was even finished, Arthur had published a history of the conflict.

Then in 1902, he wrote another war book.

This one was a pamphlet, and Arthur claimed he wrote it to defend Britain from a growing tide of criticism... which was quite a task because in response to a guerrilla campaign from the Boers, Britain had introduced a policy of scorched earth.

They burned Boer farms and moved their now homeless families into concentration camps.

These camps were rife with disease, which led to the deaths of 22,000 Boer children.

I want to understand why Arthur would want to justify this, so I'm meeting cultural historian Helen Dampier.

How did Arthur defend these tactics?

He really places the blame for the tactics ultimately at the feet of the Boers themselves.

Had they not adopted the tactics of guerrilla warfare, the British wouldn't have been forced into, from his point of view, carrying out a campaign of scorched earth, and if scorched earth hadn't taken place, the civilians-- the Boer civilians wouldn't have been displaced.

What he suggests is that far from being Britain sort of mistreating Boer women and children, that Britain was heroic in stepping forward.

Had Britain left Boer women and children on the veldt that really Boer women would have been subject to sort of danger from black African "natives," as he terms them.

So really, I think, he invokes the well-worn trope in colonial kind of contexts of the so-called black peril, this threat that African men allegedly pose to the racial purity, the sexual purity of white women, so for Doyle, the camps are really a place of refuge, a place of protection for Boer women.

"How can anybody critique us?"

What sort of an impact does it have?

He arranges for the pamphlet to be published in 20 languages.

20 languages?

20 languages.

Oh, gosh.

This is a global campaign.

This is a global campaign, and he particularly targets key individuals who he thinks are going to be influential in really sort of helping to restore Britain's imperial reputation.

Why do you think, Helen, that Arthur takes it upon himself to become this sort of spokesperson for imperialism?

I think he cares about Britain's honor, and he sees really Britain's national honor as being brought into disrepute.

He cares about chivalry, and he thinks the British soldier really embodies this chivalric ideal, and therefore, he really feels that it's his patriotic duty to really sort of defend that chivalric code, to defend that honor.

Hmm.

Our boys.

Yeah, exactly.

♪ Hmm.

That was quite difficult to hear, especially about the concentration camps.

I'm trying to get my head around the idea that Arthur clearly knew about the horrors of war and yet he remains so enthusiastic about it all to the extent of writing unsolicited propaganda for the British government.

It can only have been because he believed so sincerely in Britain's role as a world leader.

He couldn't bear any criticism of the government or its soldiers, its heroes.

Arthur was used to the world of fiction, where there was good and bad with no gray in between... and that's how he'd rewritten the story of the war.

♪ In this case, it feels now like Arthur was on the wrong side of history, but at the time, the people in power loved Arthur for making Britain the hero, and he was rewarded with his own storybook ending.

On the 24th of October, 1902, Arthur came here to Buckingham Palace to be knighted by the new king Edward the VII.

What a moment.

What a journey for this boy who had effectively been brought up by a single mum, his dad locked away in that asylum.

The outsider was now on the inside.

He was part of the establishment and knight of the realm.

It must have felt like a huge win for Arthur.

Here he was being rewarded for his writing and not for creating a fictional detective but for defending his country.

Finally, Arthur had a role that seemed more important than simply the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

♪ The war in South Africa had won Arthur respect outside his fictional creation, but the war had also inspired another story.

On the way back from South Africa, Arthur met a journalist called Bertram Fletcher Robinson.

They became pals, and Robinson would entertain Arthur with a story about a ghostly hound who lived on the moors of his native Devonshire.

The two of them started going on holiday together, and on one trip, they came here to Dartmoor to check it out as a possible location for a story.

Arthur would call this story "a real creeper."

It is of course "The Hound of the Baskervilles," my favorite story.

It's the tale of a young man returning from abroad to inherit his family mansion on Dartmoor.

He's haunted by a legend... [Dog howling] the curse of a mysterious ghost hound, who, it appears, may have killed his uncle.

Arthur thought he had the makings of a great ghost story.

There was this phantom hound.

There was the spooky setting of Dartmoor.

What he needed was a hero.

At the heart of this Gothic tale, there was a mystery to be solved, and one man would be perfect for the job... but Arthur had spent the last 8 years trying to make a name for himself away from Sherlock Holmes.

Could he really be tempted to bring him back?

Here's part of a letter that Arthur wrote to his editor, which I think gives an insight into what was going on in his mind at the time.

He'd offered the story to "The Strand Magazine" at his normal rate of £50 per 1,000 words, but then he raises the possibility of bringing back Holmes.

He says, "The revival of Holmes would attract a great deal of attention," and he suggests that he writes the story with Holmes in it, but he wants twice his usual rate, £100 per 1,000 words.

Which would they choose?

Ha ha ha!

Arthur got his cash.

In fact, by making it one of the longer Sherlock stories, Arthur rather conveniently earned exactly the same amount as he'd recently spent building a 14-bedroom mansion in Surrey.

He got around the fact that Sherlock was supposed to be dead by setting it before the Reichenbach Falls.

[Water rushing, man screaming] This was a prequel, and the detective made a suitably spectacular return.

[Wind blowing] "There outlined as black as an ebony statue "on that shining background, "I saw the figure of a man upon the tor, "his arms folded, his head bowed as if he were "brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat and granite which lay before him."

♪ Sherlock was back, more brooding and more brilliant than ever.

♪ I'm heading to a rather atmospheric location to find out more from Professor Darryl Jones.

So, Darryl, this is one of the candidates for the "original" Baskerville Hall.

There are others, but it's pretty spectacular, isn't it?

Jones: It's fantastic.

It has--either side of the doorway, it has the pair of towers like sharp teeth that the novel tells us about on several occasions, so it might well be.

Would you say that "The Hound of the Baskervilles" is a typical Sherlock Holmes story?

No, it's not a typical one at all, and there are very good reasons for that, which is that it didn't start life as a Sherlock Holmes story.

It started life as a Gothic novel.

Arthur Conan Doyle was a professional writer, who knew what the public wanted, and one of the things that the public very much wanted across the 1890s and early 1900s was gothic novels, supernatural fiction of various kinds.

So "Dracula" was just published a few years before "The Hound of the Baskervilles."

This is the period in which the ghost story as we know it began to emerge, and it's a novel that's absolutely stuffed full of what we think of as Gothic elements.

These--these--these ambiguous, haunted landscapes of various kinds.

I mean, most particularly the great Grimpen Mire, which is the bog at the center of the novel that sucks everything down.

Sucks people down!

Vanishes without trace in which there is no sure footing.

We have this folkloric creature.

We have the ancestral curse.

We have the old, dark house.

In fact, there is the old, dark house, you know, in which this action takes place.

Into this Gothic world, how does Arthur manage to introduce Sherlock Holmes?

He seems a bit out of place in lots of ways.

Well, he is out of place, so, I mean, the answer is that he's absent from the novel for a good half of the novel, and certainly for the whole middle section, and this tells us something about the way in which Conan Doyle wrote the novel, that he started to write a story and grafted the Holmes story on top of the Gothic novel, and you can still see the joins.

That's one of the fascinating things about the novel is that you're never quite sure what kind of novel you're reading.

You know, is it a supernatural tale based in this kind of haunted, ambiguous landscape, or is it a modern, urban, rational, scientific detective story?

And the answer is it's both.

It has a foot in both worlds, and Holmes himself, don't forget, is-- I mean, he's an ambiguous figure in "The Hound of the Baskervilles."

You know, we saw him fall to his demise off the Reichenbach Falls arm in arm with Professor Moriarty 8 years previously, and now he's back except he's not quite back because it's presented as a posthumous story.

So is he alive?

Is he dead?

We're not quite sure.

We're never quite sure.

♪ I think that with "The Hound" Arthur was having his cake and eating it, too.

He wanted to write a Gothic novel.

Then someone offered him all this cash to bring back Sherlock Holmes, which he did, but he wrote the Gothic novel anyway and just sprinkled a little bit of Sherlock on top.

This is very clever.

Sherlock Holmes is back, sort of, but he's under control.

Arthur is the boss of him.

Sherlock's return was a triumph.

The heroic detective had once again solved the case and restored order, but could Arthur also impose that kind of clarity on the real world by turning detective himself?

♪ [Train whistle blowing] ♪ The public had wanted Arthur to channel his inner Sherlock for years.

After all, he was great at coming up with clear solutions to fictional mysteries.

Arthur liked to complain that people were always harassing him to solve real-life crimes.

He'd say, "Don't these silly people know that I'm not Sherlock Holmes?"

At the same time, though, I think he was flattered, and sometimes he couldn't resist getting sucked in.

In his memoirs, he claims he once solved a missing person case using deduction to work out that the person was in Scotland.

Arthur looked at the man's last known movements in London-- theater, hotel-- and he looked at the railway timetable to see which cities still had trains running.

Yes, the man was in Edinburgh.

In 1907, he received another letter from a fan, who'd read "The Hound of the Baskervilles" while in prison.

His name was George Edalji.

George believed he'd been wrongly accused of a crime, and he thought that Arthur Conan Doyle was the man to help.

This plea came along at just the right moment because Arthur was in need of distraction.

He was in a bad way.

His wife Touie had finally died, and as well as grief, I imagine he was experiencing a bit of guilt because of that other relationship he'd started up with a younger woman.

Arthur needed something to occupy his mind, and up steps George Edalji.

[Train whistle blows] Perhaps the best way to outshine Sherlock was to become him.

So what would Holmes do?

Well, naturally, he'd visit the scene of the crime.

Arthur headed for the West Midlands and the mining village of Great Wyrley.

Great Wyrley.

Worsley, voice-over: In 1903, Great Wyrley had been terrorized by a spate of attacks on animals.

Someone was slashing the bodies of horses, leaving their insides trailing until they died.

The police had arrested the local vicar's son George Edalji, himself a solicitor.

♪ They seized his coat and his muddy boots, claiming they linked him to the crime.

George spent 3 years in prison, and although he'd been released, he wasn't cleared.

That meant he couldn't get work as a solicitor.

He wanted Arthur to clear his name.

The case must have seemed pretty familiar to the author of Sherlock Holmes.

11 years before the Wyrley crimes, Arthur had written "The Adventure of Silver Blaze."

It, too, had a rural location, an injured horse, and a man wrongly accused by the police.

It even had Sherlock traveling to the scene of the crime to see the evidence, like muddy footprints, for himself.

[Gate squeaks] Arthur arrived here at Great Wyrley, and he instantly went into character as Sherlock Holmes.

He started checking out the local neighborhood, visiting the church, St. Mark's Church-- there it is-- and the vicarage where George lived right by the railway line, and Arthur also retraced the routes that George supposedly took down to where the body of the horse had been discovered, also the site, so the police said, of George's footprints.

Arthur spoke to the police, made contacts with locals, and reviewed the evidence.

He was ready to make his deductions.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: Wrapped up safely in the depths at the National Archives is a piece of crucial evidence from the Edalji case, and I've been allowed to examine it.

"Piece of skin within."

This is what I've been looking for.

Ugh.

I don't quite want to touch it.

It's a bit icky.

It doesn't look like it's more than 100 years old.

So that's a small piece of a murdered horse, and this is one of the things that was used to condemn George Edalji.

♪ When the police raided the Edalji vicarage, they were looking for evidence connecting George to the crime.

That is not horsehair.

That's your truth, sir.

I think the judge will have something else to say about it.

Worsley: By that evening, a police doctor claimed he'd found 29 hairs from the dead horse on George's jacket.

It was a vital part of the trial, but Arthur had a theory.

He thought that both the crime scene and the evidence had been contaminated.

He deduced that the horsehairs had got on to George's clothing because the police had used the same piece of brown paper to wrap them up together into a parcel to take them into custody.

♪ The police refuted this, but of course, the more you shout about something, the more it becomes fact, and Arthur was going to shout about this.

He went to the police, he went to the government, and even more importantly, he went to the press.

There was this gigantic spread in the "Daily Telegraph."

Here it is.

"The Case of Mr. George Edalji-- Special Investigation by Sir A. Conan Doyle," and Arthur very cleverly said that this article would have no copyright so that any newspaper could reproduce it, and they did.

Arthur was using two things to run his campaign.

He was using the power of his own name--Sir Arthur-- as a pillar of the establishment, and he was also using his association with Sherlock Holmes.

The title of the article, "The Case of Mr. George Edalji," and the way it's a special investigation, it's almost like Sherlock Holmes himself is investigating here.

In the article, Arthur says that the police are fools.

They've contaminated the evidence and the crime scene.

They haven't recorded these supposed footprints that George left.

They've trampled all over them.

That's something that's always happening in Sherlock Holmes stories, and Arthur says that basically the police have framed George because of the color of his skin.

George Edalji was of mixed heritage, the son of a white English mother and an Indian father.

Arthur Conan Doyle believed racism was at the heart of this story.

Hmm.

So this time, it does seem like Arthur's on the right side of history.

He's standing up for the underdog.

He's tackling institutional racism in the police.

But this is the same chap who was writing that pro-British propaganda in the Boer War, and he was on the hunt for the perfect specimen of the white strongman.

It's contradictory.

I want to understand more about Arthur's involvement in the Edalji story, so I'm meeting author Shrabani Basu, who studied the case.

Basu: So here's this board with the names of the vicars, and here we have him.

Worsley, voice-over: We're meeting in the church where George's father was vicar.

Do you think that Arthur was right when he said that racism had played a part in the verdict on George?

Of course.

It was a major thing that happened, the racism.

The harassment of this family started long back, when George is just 12, so there is a history already of anonymous letters, racist graffiti, feces thrown into the vicarage, and letters saying George will be in his grave, really violent, scary letters, and what happened is when the vicar Shapurji he went to the police, the police were not bothered and for some reason thought it was George who had done it.

Hang on.

I've got to pause here.

So there's a campaign of racist hate against the family, and the police conclude that the family is doing it to itself.

Yes.

So moving forward several years when there is an actual crime in this village, and the police have no clue, so they need a killer, and there is this suspicion of George, you know.

He is seen as somebody who has a strange religion, and it's picked up actually in the media, and they say he's going out for nocturnal sacrifices to his strange gods.

Even though, in fact, they're members of the Church of England.

Absolutely.

I mean, George is born in Great Wyrley.

He's never left Great Wyrley.

He was baptized in this church.

His father is the vicar.

You don't get more Christian than that, but there we are.

He's still the foreigner in this village-- mysterious, evil.

Let's not forget that this time it is the height of empire, so the stories they are reading are about, you know, India, and then you've had the history of the mutiny, and you have a crime, which you can't solve.

You pin it on these people.

They're the obvious suspects.

Arthur Conan Doyle could clearly see past that.

He could see that something was wrong here.

And yet in other parts of his work, he does the same thing.

He characterizes people negatively and unfairly on the basis of race.

You know, I'm a real fan of Arthur Conan Doyle, but, yes, he has these racist tropes that come up in his books.

Take "Sign of Four," one of his most famous stories.

It's set in India, in the city of Agra just after the mutiny.

He describes Agra as teeming with fanatics and devil worshipers.

He has a character, called Tonga, and he's almost subhuman.

He describes him as almost like an animal.

In his other stories, he has this woman who is a chieftain's daughter, and she is a serial killer, so it's all pretty grim.

So Arthur Conan Doyle created a woman of Indian heritage in the English countryside who was going around killing people.

Yes.

And then he was wondering why people thought that George was the killer on the basis of his skin.

Well, that's so ironic, isn't it?

It is.

I mean, they were cracking good stories, but they had this running through, but with George, it's different because George, I think, appeals to him.

I mean, Arthur Conan Doyle is a supporter of empire.

He believes in the goodness of empire, that it's bringing justice and law and railways and everything else, so in a way, I think his support for George is because it's been a miscarriage of justice, and he needs to right that wrong because, you know, empire doesn't do miscarriages of justice, and also, I think he really sees this as a human case, that this is a young lawyer who is being targeted by a racist police force, and he's going to fight for him.

Worsley: Arthur's fight paid off.

The press attention forced the government into a corner.

The Home Office opened an inquiry into the case, and in May 1907, George Edalji was pardoned... but there was a sting in the tale.

They refused to give George any compensation, claiming he'd brought the trouble on himself.

Arthur, as always, made his thoughts on the matter very clear.

Now, these are just a handful of the almost daily letters that Arthur wrote that summer of 1907.

He was writing to the police, to the press, to the home secretary, and his rage comes leaping off the page.

I think he got obsessed.

He was saying that the result had been cruel, that it had been un-English, and he just kept going in Sherlock Holmes mode.

He was bombarding the police with new clues he felt that they ought to follow up to find out who had really done it... ♪ Worsley, voice-over: But Arthur wasn't Sherlock.

His evidence didn't stack up, and the case remained unsolved.

In the real world, answers didn't seem to tie up as neatly as they did in fiction... and Arthur had to operate within the confines of the legal system, something that his detective didn't have to trouble himself with.

Only about 1/3 of the Sherlock Holmes stories ends with someone actually getting arrested.

In the other cases, a criminal--heh-- one gets sucked into a bog, another gets lost at sea-- ooh--another gets killed by Dr. Watson, and Sherlock Holmes is quite happy to withhold information from the police.

He just decides for himself who gets mercy and who gets punishment.

In 3 different stories, Sherlock Holmes describes himself as the last court of appeal.

When it comes to justice, he has the final word.

♪ Worsley, voice-over: But reality wasn't quite so clear cut.

To find out more about the system Arthur was battling, I'm heading to London's legal quarter to meet lawyer Nneka Akudolu.

Nneka, this is one of these shouty letters that Arthur Conan Doyle used to get published in the papers, and he has this to say.

"To whom, then, are we to turn "when there's been a miscarriage of justice?

"Are we to admit in despair that there is no tribunal "of any sort in England to which we can look to set a wrong right?"

What was the situation if you felt like justice had gone wrong in 1907?

Well, he's pretty spot on with what he says in that letter because there wasn't really a forum where you, an individual, could appeal against their conviction or against their sentence.

You could apply to the Home Office for clemency, but that process was quite political and very rarely successful, or you could apply to your trial judge for your trial judge to refer a case on a point of law only, essentially another or more judges marking his homework, so again, that was very rarely exercised.

And were there other people apart from Arthur Conan Doyle who thought, "Oh, there's something wrong here.

There's a flaw in the system"?

Well, many people thought there was a flaw in the system, but there was also, at the time, no political will and certainly no judicial appetite to create a court of appeal because they didn't want to undermine the public's perception of the long established role of juries.

So they thought, "Hang on.

We don't want to admit the possibility that we ever get anything wrong"?

Exactly.

How did the Edalji case affect this debate?

I mean, it showed so publicly that the system was flawed.

People trusted Arthur Conan Doyle because of their affection towards the character he created, Sherlock Holmes, and so in keeping Edalji's case in the public eye, it increased the level of public disquiet, and therefore, it brought about change.

It was Edalji's case and 3 other cases that were pivotal in the inception of the Court of Appeal.

So the Court of Appeal was created in 1907 and heard its first case in May 1908, and in simple terms, it allows an individual to seek permission to appeal against their conviction, their sentence if they feel that they've been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

So assessing Arthur Conan Doyle's performance as a detective, if you like, I suppose he gets half marks because he could see that Edalji didn't do it, but he couldn't work out who did do it, but on the other hand-- and this is something Sherlock Holmes would never have done-- he got the system changed.

He was fundamental in that process to getting the law changed and the creation of this appeal court, which was something that was just not available to individuals before 1907.

He made the law a better thing.

Well done, Arthur Conan Doyle.

Absolutely.

♪ Worsley: Arthur had always wanted to be the hero of his own story, and now he was.

He had made a mark on the world.

He was respected, so much more than simply the creator of Sherlock Holmes and yet willing to use the detective when needed, but a humorous poem he wrote in 1912 suggests his relationship with Holmes still wasn't entirely straightforward.

"Please," he says, "Please grip this fact "with your cerebral tentacle, The doll and its maker are never identical."

Ha!

That's just Arthur at his best.

It's so clever and funny.

"The doll and its maker."

That's Sherlock Holmes and Arthur himself.

He's saying, "Look.

We are not the same person!

Get over it!"

♪ "Lucy Worsley's Holmes vs Doyle" is available on PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video ♪