"MY DEAR WATSON"

Evening Post, Volume CXIV, Issue 69, 19 September 1932, Page 7

"MY DEAR WATSON"

CONAN DOYLE'S FEIEND

RESIDENT IN CHICAGO

(From "The Post's" Representative.)

NEW YORK, 17th August.

"Dr. Watson," the famous character associated with Sherlock Holmes, was and is a real person of flesh and blood. He has resided in Chicago for'five years.

Dr. William. Henry Watson grew up with Sir A. Conan Doyle in Scotland, and, as an artist, later iin life, was a pupil of Whistler. As a child, he painted with such precocity that Morpeth and John Ruskin hailed .him as a child genius arid exhibited many of his paintings at the West Kensington Galleries.

"It was when we were at Edinburgh University together that Conan Doyle, first got his idea for his Sherlock Holmes stories," said Dr. Watson. "He was 17 and I was 12. They called me the 'boy medium,' you know* We were both interested in spiritualism, when we we're very young. But Conan's imagination wouldn't let him. rest. 4 When we read about the French Revolution and the great deeds of some of the early French patriots he conceived the idea of v writin"g a .play about a modern character who performed stupendous deeds through his own keen intelligence, and thus was Sherlock Holmes born. Conan always called me Dr. Watson, and he put my name in the play and the subsequent stories and novels which were to flow SO rapidly from his prolific pen."