A Mystery for Sherlock? Conan Doyle's Father and 'Sunnyside'

 It was noted in several reports that idleness affected the patients badly and that separation from the surrounding scenery of the countryside was not beneficial.  This was taken into consideration by the late 1830s and patients were allowed out to places such as Dunninald Woods, and were allowed to spectate at ship launches in Montrose.  Despite this the authorities were frustrated by lacking leisure activities to distract patients:  A difficulty is often experienced in devising means of re-educating the obscured or barren mind – means which shall be sufficiently attractive to create an interest, and yet so little exciting as to be compatible with perfect serenity and equanimity.   In 1835 it was advised:  'No visitors, whose motive is curiosity, are allowed to see the Patients.  The public have a right to know whether such an establishment be conducted on principle of justice and benevolence, and the law has provided that this right should be duly exercised.'  [Memoranda, p. 128]

   From the initial site on Montrose Links, the hospital moved to Sunnyside farm in 1858 following a nationwide review three years earlier by the Scottish Lunacy Commission. There was a growing site for patients on the new site, leading to the provision of a new facility for private patients named Carnegie House, which opened in 1899.  Howden Villa and Northesk Villa opening in 1901 and 1904 to house non-paying patients.  Angus House, an annex for dementia patients, was built 40 years later.  Around this time, in 1940, patient numbers reached  the maximum recorded, 1052.  But pressure on the hospital’s resources had levelled off, in terms of inpatient need, throughout the 1950s and 1960s because of new drugs and improved treatments.  In 1962 the institution was renamed Sunnyside Royal Hospital and came under the jurisdiction of new management. Sunnyside Royal Hospital celebrated its bicentenary in 1981, at which time the number of patients was nearly 400. 

   Following the transfer of services to the new £20 million Susan Carnegie Centre at Stracathro in 2011, Sunnyside site was declared surplus and was empty and in limbo for four years until it was put on the market by NHS Tayside.  A victim of changing times and perceptions, the hospital buildings soon fell into disrepair and dereliction, like that other major mental facility, Strathmartine Hospital, just north of Dundee.  Collections from the on-site museum and archive were split between Montrose Museum and Dundee University. Exhibits included nursing uniforms, lantern slides, straigh jackets, and – most poignantly – crafts completed by long gone patients, including some Victorian paintings.   In common with other abandoned buildings the complex became the target of criminals and much copper and other material was robbed from the upper floors.  The place also attracted other unauthorised visitors, including various official and amateur investigators who heard that the hospital was haunted.  Whether this rumour of haunting was inspired by its history or dereliction, at least one ex patient advised the place was haunted by the sound of female footsteps.  One Arbroath based paranormal team, Afterdark, were refused permission to enter when they asked, on the basis that the buildings were too rundown to ensure physical safety.  The site was eventually sold in 2016 to an Edinburgh-Montrose business partnership and plans were drawn up to rejuvenate the site as a ‘development of distinction’, a process which is still in the pipeline.

 Sunnyside’s most famous inmate was the father of author Arthur Conan Doyle.  Born and raised in England, though from an Irish family, Charles Altamont Doyle (1832-1893), was an artist who moved to Edinburgh in 1849.  Struggling with depression and alcoholism he was dismissed from his employment at the Office of Works, with a pension, in June 1876. The extent to which drink got a grip of him is described in a letter by his wife Mary:   ‘He would strip himself of all his underclothes, take the very bed linen, climb down the water spout at risk of his life, break open the children’s money boxes. He even drank furniture varnish.’  Five years later he was sent to the nursing home of Blairerno House at Drumlithie in the Mearns, and shortly afterwards he developed epilepsy.  Following a violent attempt to escape he was sent to Sunnyside on 26 May 1885, where he remained for some years.  At that time, Doyle was one of 500 patients at Sunnyside.

full of the tragedy of unfulfilled powers and of underdeveloped gifts. He had his weaknesses, as all of us have ours, but he had also some very remarkable and outstanding virtues. A tall man, long-bearded, and elegant, he had a charm of manner and a courtesy of bearing which I have seldom seen equalled. His wit was quick and playful. He possessed, also, a remarkable delicacy of mind which would give him moral courage enough to rise and leave any company which talked in a manner which was coarse… He was unworldly and unpractical and his family suffered for it.