Outrage: The Edalji Five and the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes
A great Midlands mystery
The brutal Great Wyrley animal outrages of 1903.
A national sensation:
The trial and conviction of George Edalji, son of the local vicar, for the 8th of the outrages, a savage attack on a pit-pony.
A worldwide cause célèbre
Sherlock Holmes seemingly come to life when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle campaigned to prove George innocent.
A bit more...
The tale has been told many times, notably in Julian Barnes's Arthur and George short-listed for the Man Booker prize in 2005. Roger Oldfield however believes that the fame of Conan Doyle’s campaign has obscured the fascinating history of the Edalji family as whole: Shapurji, George’s father, a Bombay-born Parsi who served as an Anglican vicar for 42 years; Charlotte, George’s mother, descended from generations of English conquerors and looters of South Asia; and the three children, George, Horace and Maud, Anglo-Asians raised in an isolated English mining village. The lives of all five were haunted by the story of that dying pit-pony.
The author has an insider's perspective: he once taught in Great Wyrley and knew descendants of players in the Edalji family drama.
The true story of an extraordinary family obscured till now by a dying pony and Conan Doyle’s world-famous campaign
This book hopes to appeal to Midlanders and others still intrigued by the sensational events in the region a century ago, to those who want to see the lives of real-life Asians and Anglo-Asians in Britain pulled out of the shadows, and to worldwide fans of Sherlock Holmes and Julian Barnes's Arthur and George. It explores late Victorian and Edwardian England from contrasting viewpoints, including those of the Edalji five, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Jawaharlal Nehru, Salman Rushdie and Julian Barnes. It also unpicks the ways in which versions of the Edalji story have changed through time.
Part 1
A DYING PONY
Part 2
A LIVING FAMILY
Part 3
A WATCHING WORLD
The People
Significant people from Outrage: The Edalji Five and the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes
George Edalji
His criminal case became one of the most famous in Edwardian England
George Edalji (1876-1953), the son of an Anglo-Asian couple, was brought up in Great Wyrley in Staffordshire. He worked as a solicitor in Birmingham, but his career was blighted by his conviction for maliciously wounding a pony, the eighth of the notorious Great Wyrley animal outrages of 1903. He was released from prison after three years and appealed to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Britain’s most famous contemporary writer, to help prove his innocence. Conan Doyle’s 1907 campaign made George and his family world-famous. The Home Secretary responded to Conan Doyle’s pressure by setting up a Committee of Enquiry, which concluded that George should be given a pardon. It added, however, that he had helped bring his troubles on himself by allegedly writing anonymous letters claiming he was one of a gang involved in the outrages. The Home Secretary’s failure to grant compensation for wrongful imprisonment provoked outrage in Parliament and elsewhere. Indignation over the case was a factor behind the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.
Roger Oldfield's book includes the most comprehensive biography of George Edalji ever published.
Rev. Shapurji Edalji
A Bombay-born Parsi who became a Church of England pioneer
Rev. Shapurji Edalji (c1841-1918) was born into a Parsi family in Bombay, but he converted to Christianity as a teenager and was disowned by his family. He trained at the Free Church of Scotland College in Bombay and served for a period as a missionary among the pre-literate Warali people north of Bombay. He then became an Anglican and travelled to England to train as an Anglican missionary at St Augustine’s College in Canterbury. To the College’s chagrin he never returned to India. After serving as a curate in seven parishes across England he became Vicar of Great Wyrley in Staffordshire in 1876 and remained there until his death. The 42 years in Great Wyrley were filled with struggle and controversy; Shapurji even had to appear in front of the Attorney-General in 1907, the year in which Conan Doyle made the Edalji name world-famous. He was a remarkable pioneer, perhaps the first native South Asian to have been preferred to an English living.
Charlotte Edalji (née Stoneham)
Her English family was at the heart of British imperialism in India
Charlotte Edalji (née Stoneham) (1842-1924) was the daughter of the Vicar of Ketley in Shropshire and lived almost the whole of her life in vicarages. She had a fascinating ancestry, claiming that one of her family fought in the Crusades and that another distant relative was related to Katherine Howard, wife of Henry VIII. From the 17th century, members of the Thompson, Swan and Stoneham branches of the family were involved in British exploitation and conquest of India. Some stayed in Bombay itself for a period. She campaigned passionately to have her son declared innocent of the attack on a pony for which he was convicted in 1903. She wrote, among others, to the King and the Queen, and appeared on a platform alongside George Bernard Shaw.
Horace Edalji
Family outcast with a bizarre response to rejection
Horace Edalji (1879-1953?) gave the police evidence that his brother may have been involved in some of the anonymous letter-writing which plagued Great Wyrley between from 1892 to 1895 and during 1903. He became the family outcast and when he married took on his wife’s surname.
Maud Edalji
Keeper of the family archive covering over 300 years of history
Maud Edalji (1882-1961) lived at St Mark’s vicarage in Great Wyrley until her father’s death and was a key witness to all that happened to her brother and the rest of her family. She moved from the Midlands to Welwyn Garden City in 1930, and George joined her. After his death in 1953 she pursued the campaign on his behalf into its sixth decade. As the last of the Edalji family she held the whole family archive in her house, including a chest full of material on George’s case, portraits from her mother’s Stoneham family going back to the 18th century, and documents about the Stonehams and their connections with South Asia.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The creator of Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) wanted to be remembered by his historical romances, especially The White Company and Sir Nigel, but his worldwide fame rests on his creation of the detective Sherlock Holmes. He did try to kill Sherlock Holmes off at the height of his fame in 1893 by having him fall into the Reichenbach Falls with his arch-enemy Moriarty. In 1903, however, the year of the Great Wyrley outrages, he bowed to public demand and brought Sherlock Homes back to life in The Return of Sherlock Holmes. His first wife died in 1906, and it was in the period of turmoil which followed that George Edalji appealed to him to help prove his innocence. For six months in 1907 Conan Doyle poured all his energy into the campaign. The sight of a real-life Sherlock Holmes on the trail excited a worldwide public. Almost all of Conan Doyle’s biographers deal in detail with this episode in his life, though usually relying on Conan Doyle’s writings for most or all of their evidence. One or two researchers have questioned Conan Doyle’s approach to the case, pointing to his gullibility on other subjects such as spiritualism and photographs purporting to prove the existence of fairies.
George Anson
Staffordshire Chief Constable for 42 years who declared war on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
George Anson (1857-1947), son of the Earl of Lichfield of Shugborough, was Chief Constable of Staffordshire from 1888 to 1929. The Edalji family’s troubles started in 1888 with the first of a series of anonymous letter-writing episodes which plagued Great Wyrley, on and off, for decades. Anson suspected George Edalji was involved. When Conan Doyle investigated George’s case in 1907 he came to the conclusion that a main reason for George Edalji’s wrongful conviction for wounding a pony had been the fact that George Anson had infected his police force with his racial prejudices. The relationship between Anson and Conan Doyle developed into seething hostility, with each of them eventually appealing to Home Secretary Winston Churchill for support.
Julian Barnes
Leading British novelist, author of Flaubert’s Parrot
Julian Barnes (1946- ) is one of Britain’s most famous contemporary writers. Three of his novels – Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), England, England (1998) and Arthur and George (2005) have been short listed for the Man Booker Prize. Arthur and George examines the converging lives of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Birmingham solicitor George Edalji, convicted for maliciously wounding a pit-pony in his home village of Great Wyrley in Staffordshire in 1903. The novel has been translated into several languages. Leading playwright David Edgar has adapted the story for the stage.
Dadabhai Naoroji
A founding father of the Indian National Congress who became known as the ‘Grand Old Man of India’
Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917) was a Parsi educated at the same Bombay college as Shapurji Edalji. In 1885, along with Shapurji Edalji’s former classmate Dinshaw Edulji Wacha and others, he founded the Indian National Congress, which later became the leader of the Indian independence movement. His defeat as Liberal candidate in Holborn in the 1886 British general election led Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury to make his notorious comment that ‘however great the progress of mankind has been, and however far we have advanced in overcoming prejudices, I doubt if we have yet got to the point of view where a British constituency would elect a black man’. In 1892 however Naoroji became the first Asian to be elected a member of the British House of Commons. He eventually became known as ‘The Grand Old Man of India’.
Rudyard Kipling
Bombay-born imperialist who wrote about India with affection
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay. It is conceivable that Shapurji Edalji, who was an Anglican by that time, attended his baptism in St Thomas Cathedral. Kipling’s works with an Indian setting include Kim (1894) and Jungle Book (1901). The imperialist emphasis of his work is epitomised by the poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, the year of Conan Doyle’s campaign on George Edalji’s behalf.
Jawaharlal Nehru
First Prime Minister of India after independence
Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) was educated at Harrow (1905-7) and Cambridge (1907-10), where he was awarded a law degree. Whilst at Harrow he wrote to his parents complaining about George Edalji’s treatment. The case may have played a small part in changing his view of the British and becoming more self-consciously Indian. After his return to India he practised as a barrister but was eventually drawn into the struggle for independence, alongside Gandhi. He headed the Indian National Congress four times and, like Gandhi, was jailed several times for his part in civil disobedience campaigns. In 1947 he became the first Prime Minister of an independent Indian state.
Salman Rushdie
Bombay-born novelist and biting critic of British imperialism
Salman Rushdie (1947- ) was born in Bombay. He achieved world fame though his Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981; the novel is about the children born on the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence in 1947. Much of the rest of his work is set in South Asia too. In a Channel 4 broadcast in 1983 he laid out his view of the impact of British imperialism on British people’s racial attitudes: ‘If you want to understand British racism... it is impossible even to begin to grasp the nature of the beast unless you accept its historical roots; unless you see that 400 years of conquest and looting, centuries of being told that you are superior to the fuzzy-wuzzies and the wogs... leave their stain on you all; that such a stain seeps into every part of your culture, your language and your daily life; and that nothing much has been done to wash it out...’
The Author
Roger Oldfield
Outrage Author
Author Roger Oldfield has a personal connection with the Edalji story. He was Head of History at Great Wyrley High School from 1971 to 1986 and met descendants of players in the drama which had once made the village world-famous. His students produced inherited photographs and theories about the horrific animal outrages of 1903 to 1907. St Mark’s vicarage, the Edalji family home, was a few hundred yards from the school, and all the outrages were committed within two miles of the site.
Later, as Advisory Teacher for Multicultural Education in Staffordshire, he was able to investigate the wider experiences of the Edalji family and discover whole areas of their lives unreported by any other writer.
Academics, journalists, authors and television programme-makers have drawn on his research. He himself has appeared in television programmes about the events of 1903 to 1907, including the BBC’s Conan Doyle for the Defence and ITV’s Forensic Casebook with Matthew Kelly.
Contact The Author
Send an email to Roger Oldfield
To get your copy of Outrage please email Roger directly using the form below.
A DYING PONY
The Great Wyrley Outrages and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s campaign to prove George Edalji innocent
The horrific Great Wyrley animal outrages of 1903 haunted the community for generations. Horses, cattle and sheep were all ripped open. Who were the perpetrators? This great Midlands crime mystery still preoccupies thousands of writers on the worldwide web.
The eighth outrage, a brutal attack on a pit-pony, led to the sensational arrest of George Edalji, the son of the Vicar of Great Wyrley. His trial and conviction at Stafford Quarter Sessions were reported by national newspapers to an engrossed public.
On his release George appealed to Britain’s most famous contemporary writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to help to have him declared innocent. Through 1907 Conan Doyle led a passionate campaign on his behalf. It seemed to a fascinated audience around the world that Sherlock Holmes had come to life in a story as gripping as those in the Sherlock Holmes books themselves.
Until the 1980s every writer on the case repeated Conan Doyle’s version. Then local researcher Michael Harley investigated the previously hidden records at the Public Record Office. He suggested that the gullible author had been taken in by a scheming George Edalji.
A LIVING FAMILY
Bombay-born Rev. Shapurji Edalji; Charlotte Edalji (née Stoneham) and her family’s South Asian links; George, Horace and Maud Edalji, Anglo-Asians raised in an English mining village
There is much more to the Edalji family story than is contained in all the accounts based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings.
Study of the family’s lives and experiences in the Great Wyrley community reveals rich insights into English economic and social life from the 1870s to the end of the First World War.
George’s father, Shapurji Edalji, had a remarkable career. Born a Parsi in Bombay, he rebelled as a boy against his family and his faith. His conversion to Christianity led, among other things, to a period alone as a missionary among the pre-literate Warali people. He came to England to train as a Church of England missionary, but stayed and became Vicar of Great Wyrley for 42 years.
George’s mother, Charlotte Edalji (née Stoneham) came from a family with a colourful history of involvement in what Salman Rushdie (also born in Bombay) once called the ‘400 hundred years of looting and conquest’ which have ‘left a stain on you all’. From the 17th century, generations of her ancestors produced merchants, sailors and soldiers involved in the forging of British domination of India.
A WATCHING WORLD
From Conan Doyle’s investigation in the role of Sherlock Holmes to Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George
Whatever the wider significance of the lives of the Edalji five, there is no escape from the tale of the dying pit-pony. Was George guilty? Was Michael Harley right? Conan Doyle is famous for having been taken in by spiritualists and by faked photographs of fairies. Was he taken in by George Edalji?
Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur and George has pitched the George Edalji case back into the world limelight. His novel was the bookies’ favourite for the Man Booker Prize in 2005 but was pipped at the post. The premise of the book is that George Edalji was innocent and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was right. How true is the novel to the historical record? Roger Oldfield provides an insider's critique of Julian Barnes's version of the George Edalji case and its background.
The Edalji family photograph of c.1892 is the only one we have showing Maud Edalji, George’s sister. Yet she is a key to the story. She was the family’s last surviving member, the keeper of its archive and its memories. What was her verdict on all its experiences?
COMMENTS
What readers are saying about Outrage...
Got it last week, read it over the weekend, loved it. Your book is certainly the best thing there is concerning the Edalji case on every count.
D. Michael Risinger, John J. Gibbons Professor of Law, Seton Hall University School of Law, One Newark Center, Newark, New Jersey, USA. Author of 'Boxes in Boxes: Julian Barnes, Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and the Edalji Case'.
I'd enjoyed Barnes's novel, and your book is an excellent companion piece to it.
Jane Leaper, Canada
As a lifelong resident of Great Wyrley (the village at the centre of this book's events) I found Roger Oldfield's Outrage breathed invigorating life into the true events of one of this country's most fascinating and influential stories - a story still so important and significant on many levels.
Only a local historian could recreate this community in the way Oldfield does and, for the wider audience, it is good to see his excellent and unbiased dissection of both Weaver's and Barnes' books. Oldfield's analysis of their strengths, weaknesses and (essentially) their historical inaccuracies is absolutely intriguing.
This book is as by far the best written on the subject and grips the reader from start to finish. Highly recommended.
Emerson Mayes, Great Wyrley, England. Writing a play about the case of George Edalji.
Now that I've finished reading Outrage I congratulate you on your tour de force; you've clearly spent much of your life on this matter and brought together many different strands, many I never knew about. The book should stand as a 'book end', closing a chapter, although someone else may come along with another 'book end'.
Steuart Campbell, Scotland. Grandson of John Campbell, the Police Inspector who directed the investigations leading to the arrest and conviction of George Edalji in 1903.
REVIEW
unlikely to be surpassed as a comprehensive, intelligent, balanced and intensely readable account.
Newsletter of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London
REVIEW
There are as many different kinds of family life as there are families. Like the individuals that compose them families are unique. The family which is the subject of this book however has a place in history on two clear counts. First because the father, Shapurji Edalji was probably the first Asian parish priest with a living in England, being a Bombay (Mumbai today) born Parsi who left his family of origin to convert to Christianity. Secondly there was later the controversial conviction of the eldest son George which led to the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. The telling of this story shines a light on the complexities and intractability of racism, 'the stain' of the British Empire.
It was in 1971 that Roger Oldfield started teaching at Great Wyrley High School and encountered the story of the Edalji family for the first time. The family becomes entangled in a story of horse mutilations and various series of anonymous letters in this parish. This eventually became a matter of national notoriety. Roger Oldfield taught the descendants of many of the local families, some caught up in the story. He includes pictures of some forebears in this book, and he used the story as the basis for some of his teaching, sharing with the class slides of the various anonymous letters at which he says they stared wondering what 'lunatic' could possibly have written them. Over time the Edaljis became his substitute family, at least until 2010 when this book was published. His reaction to the publication in 2005 of Julian Barnes' book 'Arthur and George' about the same subject humorously reveals how devoted Roger Oldfield felt to the family. He says of Julian Barnes,
'How dare this interloper march in and whisk the Edalji's away? Just because he can write a bit?....This man is exactly the same age as me, attended the same university...and now is in control of my substitute family.' p326
In spite of this attachment, or possibly because of it, Roger Oldfield is scrupulous in presenting the evidence of the Edalji case even-handedly. He is careful to distinguish at all times between fact and speculation by himself and others. This produces a very different book from that of Julian Barnes, at times heavier going and dense but with the reassuring sense of reaching after reality and not an imaginative foray into the case, good read though the Barnes book was.
The book also recounts a personal journey for the author and to that extent is also biographical. The personal journey is one into a deeper understanding of racism. It is in many ways a similar journey to that taken by Charlotte Edalji who writing in 1904 to the MP for Birmingham says:
'I am an English woman, and I feel that there is in many people a prejudice against those who are not English, and I cannot help feeling that it is owing to that prejudice that my son has been falsely accused.' p266
As Charlotte married Shapurji Edalji and since he seems to have encountered no prejudice from her family, her uncle in fact recommending him for the Great Wyrley living, we can assume there was an acceptance of him as an equal. For those with this perspective the extent of negative attitudes and readiness to do down those who are 'not English' or even those who are English but have a different skin tone is always surprising. Roger Oldfield goes on this journey where he begins to see what many chose to hide from or ignore, the true ingrainedness of racist attitudes. His book is explicitly informed by this perspective, he says at the start:
'I am thankful beyond words for my six years in multicultural education when ... I learnt so much about the consequences of Britain's imperialist past...' Acknowledgements, p.15.
Looking back to 1986 he tells us
'As a fledgling Advisory teacher for Multicultural Education I am getting used to grappling daily with the ugly evil of racism...' p.135
But what he hears in Salman Rushdie's Channel 4 broadcast about the ubiquity of racism resulting from imperialism is a hard perspective even for him to easily comprehend.
George Edalji was seen by many as a man of great promise and in effect the outcome of his life, that this promise is blighted and the family is visited with the most enormous amount of pain and suffering, may be seen as a victory for racism. An outcome which has generated a surprising amount of subsequent literature on the subject as may be seen in the bibliography at the end of this carefully researched and referenced book.
The book brings to the fore questions of the extent to which conscious and/or unconscious racism influenced the arrest and conviction of George Edalji. Since the facts of this case are so complex the answer is not clear cut but central to it is the huge stand-off between Conan Doyle and Anson, the Staffordshire Chief Constable. There are faults on both sides in this battle. Anson remains central to the issues arising from the case which continues to this day to give rise to books and articles. Michael Harley (mentioned as researching the case for a book) dismisses the suggestion that Anson was racially prejudiced p. 317. But of Gordon Weaver's book 'Conan Doyle and the Parson's Son', which Roger Oldfield regards as more fully tied to fact, and which is informed by Salman Rushdie's analysis of racism, Roger Oldfield comments
'Anson is condemned throughout not just for racial prejudice but for utter bigotry' p337.
Roger Oldfield gives us the benefit of these cross cutting arguments and is scrupulously fair and even handed in his assessment of them.
This book is fully footnoted, referenced and indexed. The author is by training a historian. However this book is not a dry academic text, it is peppered with observations relating to the author's journey and his understanding of the family, for example he says of Shapurji Edalji
'Shapurji in particular, was a man of such strong principle and sense of moral duty that it is hard to believe that he would have covered up for a wayward son and deliberately implicated an innocent person.' p. 313.
Then there are the comments to Maud which intersperse the text and a letter which Roger Oldfield drafts to Julian Barnes as if from Maud, pointing out the likely family reaction to his book (p. 328). The book therefore is many things, a family history, a social history, an account of an injustice with possible racist motivations, a journey towards understanding aspects of racism, a detective story and an imagined relationship with a family no longer extant. What it does not fully celebrate, though it does draw it to our attention, is the warmth and support for the Edalji family from the parish. This is common decency and it needs to be celebrated; in Maud's letter to Hesketh Pearson in 1956 she says:
'I have been to Great Wyrley many times since my father was vicar and I always got a good welcome from the people, for, though many who lived there when we were there are now dead, there are still a good many left, and they always speak of my parents and my brother with real affection.'
The reference is here to brother, not brothers, though she had two. Readers will find the explanation for this in the book along with the many other twists and turns the story takes. The book is a good read though it does not fall clearly into any particular genre. I liked its honesty and sense of personal relationship to the subjects. The depth and reach of the research undertaken is masterly and it is refreshing to have a book which pulls away from the magnetising fascination with the creator of Sherlock Holmes and looks with respect and understanding at the Edalji family. It is a history for our time if not of our time. It is a tale of the human spirit turned malign, of corruption but also of the decency of people. It tells of how one family essentially survived, though not without casualty, circumstances that would have destroyed many others. The behaviours and attitudes of which it speaks are still part of our lives today.
