Educational Media Reviews Online

This video focuses on the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), the English gentleman who brought the world Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was an educated criminologist himself, and he did much to reform the way that the English justice system worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is illustrated in the film by two actual cases that Doyle helped to solve: the case of George Edalji, and the case of Oscar Slater. In each of these cases, innocent men were incarcerated for crimes that they did not commit, and Doyle was instrumental in finding the real perpetrators of the crimes, and having the innocent men set free and compensated appropriately by the English government. The actor Iain Cuthbertson reenacts these cases as Sir Doyle himself. But Doyle was also interested in many areas related to war, the military, and skiing: his experience in the trenches during the Boer Wars in South Africa showed him how important proper training in weapons and in self-protection were to the British, so he developed the steel helmet for the British Army, as well as trained a home guard for the English with his own resources. He also introduced cross-country skiing into Switzerland. Later in life, Doyle became very interested in spiritualism, and wrote a number of pamphlets and treatises about its effect on his life. All in all, an interesting short biographical video on the life of a very influential and prominent writer, detective, and personality.