Sherlock author was a secret football star ...but his skills were rather elementary
IT IS an act of subterfuge which could have leapt from the pages of his own novels.
Assuming a false name, Arthur Conan Doyle – creator of Sherlock Homes – had a secret life as a football player.
In new documentary Killing Sherlock, historian Lucy Worsley highlights how the author used the name AC Smith to play for Portsmouth AFC in the 1880s – and was one of the club’s founding members. Doyle, then working as a doctor, had yet to fulfil his dream of becoming a successful writer.
In the new three-part BBC series Worsley says she believes Doyle created the alternative persona because football was not considered a suitable activity for a respectable middle class professional.
She says: ‘Arthur the footballer is rather mysterious. Why was it when he played football he disguised his real name? He was 26 years old, 6ft 1in, 15 stone, just the sort of man to stop a ball.’
She adds: ‘Football didn’t have the same upmarket image as some of Arthur’s other hobbies. Football was the sport of the working man and maybe he used his false name to preserve his reputation as a newly established family doctor.’
In newspaper reports from the time, uncovered by The Irish Mail on Sunday, Doyle – under his assumed name of AC Smith – is often singled out in match reports, playing in most games as either goalkeeper or a ‘back’ player, and seems to have established a reputation for ‘heavy kicking’.
On November 1, 1886, a report about a game against Petersfield noted: ‘AC Smith, besides keeping goal satisfactorily, was invaluable by his great powers of heavy kicking.’ In the same month, the Portsmouth Evening News also highlighted the ‘serviceable heavy kicking’ of AC Smith in a match against a team known as The Grammar School.
It is believed he played 76 times for the club. On 29 of these occasions he was in goal, where he conceded 30 goals, helping the team to win 18 games and draw four.
Last night, Andrew Lycett, Doyle’s biographer, said that the author helped develop football in the Portsmouth area.
Doyle continued to play even after publishing his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study In Scarlet, in 1887.
But by the early 1890s, he had had abandoned his secret life on the pitch.