The eldest of three children of an Indian father and an English mother, George Ernest Thompson Edalji was born in England in 1876. His father, Shapurji Edalji, a Parsi from Bombay, had converted to Christianity in the 1850s and after settling in England was ordained as an Anglican minister. In 1874, he married Charlotte Elizabeth Stuart Stoneham; two years later, he was appointed vicar of St. Mark’s Church in the parish of Great Wyrley, a mining and farming community in Staffordshire. A second son, Horace, followed George in 1879; a daughter, Maud, was born in 1882.
Reverend Edalji was one of the first South Asians to serve as a parish vicar in England, and his background, along with his mixed marriage, doubtless raised Victorian eyebrows. But the family’s life in Great Wyrley seemed untroubled at first. “Placed in the exceedingly difficult position of a coloured clergyman in an English parish, he seems to have conducted himself with dignity and discretion,” Conan Doyle would later write. “The only time that I can ever find that any local feeling was raised against him was during elections, for he was a strong Liberal in politics.”
In 1888, when George was twelve, the Edaljis began to receive anonymous threatening letters; after a police investigation, a maidservant at the vicarage was arrested. She was tried, though not convicted, and the letters stopped—for a time. Then, in 1892, a new series of hateful letters began arriving in Great Wyrley, many sent to the vicarage but others directed to the Edaljis’ neighbors. “Before the end of this year your kid will be either in the graveyard or disgraced for life,” an 1893 letter to Reverend Edalji ran. During this period, an unknown hoaxer also carried out a series of practical jokes at the Edaljis’ expense, with objects stolen from around the village left conspicuously outside the vicarage and bogus advertisements, couched as George Edalji’s apologies for having written the hate mail, appearing in local newspapers.
By all accounts a brilliant student, George attended law school and in 1899 became a solicitor. He continued to live in the vicarage, commuting each day by train to his office in Birmingham, some twenty miles away. In 1895, the second round of letters ceased, though there would be far worse to come.
In early 1903, when George was in his late twenties, the countryside around Great Wyrley was beset with a series of fatal animal maimings, with horses and cattle eviscerated alive in the fields. The savagery, which became known as the Wyrley Outrages, continued for months, with no trace of a culprit. At the same time, the Edaljis became the targets of a third series of letters, sent to neighbors and the local police. Some of the letters identified George Edalji as a member of a gang that had attacked the animals. He was arrested in August 1903 and charged with mutilating a pony.
The police searched the vicarage and seized several items, including a set of Reverend Edalji’s razors, which bore dark stains, and a damp coat of George’s, also stained. The stains on the razors were found to be rust, but at trial, an expert witness identified those on the coat as mammalian blood.
Covering the trial, the press did little to stanch the race hatred that flowed freely among the public. One article, from the Birmingham Daily Gazette, described Edalji in language that could have come straight from Lombroso’s anthropomorphic index: “He is 28 years of age but looks younger….There was little of the typical solicitor in his swarthy face, with its full, dark eyes, prominent mouth, and small round chin. His appearance is essentially Oriental in its stolidity, no sign of emotion escaping him beyond a faint smile as the extraordinary story of the prosecution unfolded.”
In another, from the Wolverhampton Express and Star, the writer reported, “Many and wonderful were the theories I heard propounded in the local ale-houses as to why Edalji had gone forth in the night to slay cattle, and a widely accepted idea was that he made nocturnal sacrifices to strange gods.”
Tried in October 1903, Edalji was convicted and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. That the mutilations continued while he was in prison was not remotely exculpatory in the eyes of the police: they maintained that the work was being carried out by members of Edalji’s gang. England had no criminal appeals court then, and it seemed a foregone conclusion that Edalji would serve his entire sentence. But over time, as it would in Slater’s case, a measure of public unease arose; a petition drawn up by Edalji’s supporters garnered ten thousand signatures. In October 1906, after he had served three years, Edalji was released, without pardon or explanation.
As a convicted felon, he could no longer practice law. Attempting to clear his name, Edalji wrote a number of articles about his plight. He had read the Sherlock Holmes stories in prison, and after his release he sent a packet of his articles to Conan Doyle.
“As I read, the unmistakable accent of truth forced itself upon my attention and I realized that I was in the presence of an appalling tragedy, and that I was called upon to do what I could to set it right,” Conan Doyle later wrote. “What aroused my indignation and gave me the driving force to carry the thing through was the utter helplessness of this forlorn little group of people, the coloured clergyman in his strange position, the brave blue-eyed, grey-haired wife, the young daughter, baited by brutal boors and having the police, who should have been their natural protectors, adopting from the beginning a harsh tone towards them and accusing them, beyond all sense and reason, of being the cause of their own troubles.”
Conan Doyle’s modus operandi, which he would repeat on a grand scale in Slater’s case, took three forms: investigation, publication, and agitation. After reviewing newspaper accounts and other documents relating to the case, he arranged to meet Edalji at a London hotel. A single glance, he reported in his 1907 pamphlet, The Case of Mr. George Edalji, told him that the young man could not possibly have been the culprit:
The first sight which I ever had of Mr. George Edalji was enough in itself to convince me both of the extreme improbability of his being guilty of the crime for which he was condemned, and to suggest some at least of the reasons which had led to his being suspected. He had come to my hotel by appointment, but I had been delayed, and he was passing the time by reading the paper. I recognised my man by his dark face, so I stood and observed him. He held the paper close to his eyes and rather sideways, proving not only a high degree of myopia, but marked astigmatism. The idea of such a man scouring fields at night and assaulting cattle while avoiding the watching police was ludicrous to anyone who can imagine what the world looks like to eyes with myopia of eight dioptres….But such a condition, so hopelessly bad that no glasses availed in the open air, gave the sufferer a vacant, bulge-eyed, staring appearance, which, when taken with his dark skin, must assuredly have made him seem a very queer man to the eyes of an English village, and therefore to be naturally associated with any queer event. There, in a single physical defect, lay the moral certainty of his innocence, and the reason why he should become the scapegoat.
What astounded Conan Doyle, who had trained as an ophthalmologist, was that Edalji’s lawyers had not brought this defect to light. “So bad was this defence that in the whole trial no mention, so far as I could ascertain, was ever made of the fact that the man was practically blind, save in a good light, while between his house and the place where the mutilation was committed lay the full breadth of the London and North-Western Railway, an expanse of rails, wires and other obstacles, with hedges to be forced on either side, so that I, a strong and active man, in broad daylight found it a hard matter to pass.”
To drive home the point empirically, Conan Doyle had a pair of glasses made up that would replicate Edalji’s eyesight in a wearer with unimpaired vision. “My own sight is normal,” he wrote, “and I can answer for the feeling of helplessness which such a glass produces. I tried it upon a Press man, and defied him to reach the lawn-tennis ground in front of the house. He failed….To my mind it was as physically impossible for Mr. Edalji to have committed the crime as it would have been if his legs, instead of his eyes, were crippled.”
Combing the trial transcript, Conan Doyle pinpointed the ambiguous nature of the stains that the police found on Edalji’s coat:
Now the police try to make two points here: that the coat was damp, and that there were stains which might have been traces of the crime upon it. Each point is good in itself; but, unfortunately, they are incompatible and mutually destructive. If the coat were damp, and if those marks were blood-stains contracted during the night, then those stains were damp also, and the inspector had only to touch them and then to raise his crimson finger in the air to silence all criticism. But since he could not do so it is clear that the stains were not fresh….How these small stains came there it is difficult to trace—as difficult as to trace a stain which I see now upon the sleeve of my own house-jacket as I look down. A splash from the gravy of underdone meat might well produce it. At any rate, it may most safely be said that the most adept operator who ever lived would not rip up a horse with a razor upon a dark night and have only two threepenny-bit spots of blood to show for it. The idea is beyond argument.
In January 1907, Conan Doyle set forth his conclusions in a series of articles in the Daily Telegraph, later published as The Case of Mr. George Edalji. Afterward, he wrote, “England soon rang with the wrongs of George Edalji.” Once his involvement in the case became public, Conan Doyle, too, began receiving letters threatening his life, written in the same hand as those the Edaljis received—“a fact,” he wrote, “which did not appear to shake in the least the Home Office conviction that George Edalji had written them all.”*
From his work on the case, Conan Doyle formed a private theory about the identity of the culprit, a disreputable local youth named Royden Sharp. Among the points that told against Sharp logically, Conan Doyle came to believe, were the fact that he had worked as a butcher’s apprentice, which gave him both a knowledge of animal anatomy and skill with a knife, and the fact that he was away at sea during the periods when the menacing letters came to a halt. Mindful of the danger of accusing someone who hadn’t been charged, Conan Doyle suppressed this information; his pamphlet outlining his argument, The Case Against Royden Sharp, was published fully only in 1985.
As a result of Conan Doyle’s investigation, the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, convened a government commission to review Edalji’s conviction. In May 1907, the commission published its findings. “The conclusions it came to were very strange,” Conan Doyle’s biographer Pierre Nordon observed. “On one hand it disagreed with the jury which had condemned George Edalji in 1903 for disembowelling a pony, and declared the verdict unfounded; on the other hand it stated that Edalji was the writer of the anonymous letters incriminating himself….There was no question of granting him damages for his three years in prison nor an official vindication.”
Though the result was a partial victory, Conan Doyle viewed it with bitterness. “It was a wretched decision,” he wrote. “This unfortunate man, whose humble family has paid many hundreds of pounds in expenses, has never been able to get one shilling of compensation for the wrong done. It is a blot upon the record of English Justice.”
For Conan Doyle, however, there were three bright spots in the rest of 1907. The first was that Edalji was reinstated to the bar and could practice law again. The second, in September, was that he married his longtime love, Jean Leckie. Edalji was a guest at the wedding reception, and “Conan Doyle claimed,” his biographer Daniel Stashower has written, “that there was no guest he felt prouder to see.” The third was that his efforts on Edalji’s behalf helped spur the establishment of England’s first criminal appeals court. As a result of his highly public work on the case, Conan Doyle would be drafted into the even more formidable battle to exonerate Oscar Slater.
* The Home Office is the British ministerial department in charge of domestic affairs; its purview includes judicial matters in England and Wales.