DOYLE, Arthur Conan (1859-1930). An extensive archive of correspondence between his acting secretary Charles Ashton Jonson (1861-1930) regarding his spiritualism lecture tour with his family to Africa in 1929 and accounts of various séances conducted by Margery (Mina Crandon) and others while Doyle was away.
Comprising 8 autograph letters signed and 1 typed letter signed by Doyle (13 pp. total including an original drawing of Doyle hunting crocodiles); 13 typed letters signed to Doyle from Jonson (26 pp. total); a large envelope with the notation “my darlings letters to Charles and Charlie’s to him”; 1 autograph letter to Jean Elizabeth Leckie (1874-1940), Doyle’s second wife, from an unknown correspondent (perhaps from Charles’ sister Edith or his wife Ethel); an autograph postcard with a poem addressed to Doyle; 3pp. typed dictated séance message “from Kingsley through Mrs. Scales”, 28 December 1929; 1pp. typed “Psychic notes” regarding the sinking of the Waratah which disappeared with 211 passengers and crew aboard, still never to be found; 1pp. typed manuscript describing Doyle’s lecture at Nairobi in March 1929 where he had shown psychic photographs that represented a figure in a haunted house. A man in the audience stood up and claimed that he had himself posed for that photograph pretending to be a ghost, but this was later debunked although the photograph was most likely a hoax. Accompanied with a 1pp. note addressed from Doyle’s home, with additional notes in an unknown hand.
From November 1928 to April 1929, Doyle traveled with his family to Africa (the account was published by John Murray in Doyle’s 1929 work titled “Our African Winter”) conducting numerous Spiritualism lectures in Rhodesia and Nairobi. Charles Ashton Jonson, music critic and Spiritualist, traveled along with his wife Ethel to Africa with Doyle as acting secretary helping him with his Spiritualist work. In Jonson’s obituary, Doyle wrote of his dear friend and the time spent together in South Africa: “the success which we achieved was greatly aided and increased by their fine team-work… his charming personality, interviewing all comers, while his wife did splendid unselfish anonymous work, preparing the answers for the whole pages of catechism which used to appear in the papers each day. He had a way of disarming and converting opponents by his courteous and convincing answers to their difficulties, which put him in a class by himself among our propagandists.” In a letter to Jonson dated 19 November 1929, Doyle writes that he is publishing a full account of the corroborations between him, and the spirit called Phineas. He speaks of an occurrence where Phineas intervened and stopped Doyle from traveling to Scandinavia “in so decisive a way that it was perfectly impossible for me to go. I wonder whether he saw that danger threatened me from the quarter?” Ironically enough, Jonson dictates what a spirit medium (Mrs. Scales) predicted during a séance in a letter dated 29 December 1929: “… by the middle of January you will be very much better [speaking on his underlying health conditions] and it also seems as if you would get so very much better that you will go some kind of a continental tour in the Spring, and that it will be very triumphant and memorable occasion”. Doyle would travel to Scandinavia that same year of writing this letter where he would later fall ill and succumb to a heart attack (See following lot). Other letters from Doyle include mentions of Arthur Ford receiving Harry Houdini’s “code word”, several crises that were avoided because of Phineas, and a wealth of information regarding the success of his African tour. In several letters from Jonson to Doyle, Jonson gives a detailed synopsis of the seances that he is attending including one he states as being of “vital importance that Margery herself should never know of its occurrence” which included a conjured thumbprint by way of Margery’s channeled dead brother, Walter. Others include a lengthy seance by Mrs. Scales that involved Doyle’s deceased son, Kingsley, and Jonson’s deceased father which, according to the medium, “united by a band of love and friendship” in the afterlife. The two spoke highly of Doyle, expressing to Charles that Doyle’s “life work will be exquisitely crowned…after all he stands out strikingly as one who has the highest types of earthly and spiritual knowledge and [Jonson’s father] would like you to tell him this as our greeting for the year which he knows will be a read letter one”.