Bertram Fletcher Robinson

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Bertram Fletcher Robinson (22 August 1870, 80 Rose Lane, Mossley Vale, Wavertree, West Derby, Liverpool - 21 January 1907, 44 Eaton Terrace, Belgravia, London) was a British sportsman, author, journalist and newspaper editor, at one point an editor of the Daily Express. His uncle Sir John Robinson (1828-1903) was editor of the Daily News. His works include 9 playlets (4 of which he co-wrote with his friend PG Wodehouse), 4 songs, 44 articles, 24 poems, 3 books 55 short stories, along with editing 8 books and co-writing 4. At 31 he married the 22 year old actress called Gladys Hill Morris (eldest daughter of the painter Philip Richard Morris), on 3rd June 1902 at St. Barnabas Church, Kensington. He is buried at St Andrew’s Church, Ipplepen, near Newton Abbot.

He was a friend of Arthur Conan Doyle, first meeting him in 1900 at the latest, on a return voyage back from South Africa. It was Robinson who showed him around Dartmoor and told him of the legend of evil local squire Sir Richard Cabell being dragged to hell by monstrous hounds. The pair intended to collaborate in writing a story directly about that legend, though in the end the experiences in the end only led to Doyle's own The Hound of the Baskervilles. Robinson has also been argued as the model for the journalist Malone in The Lost World.

The historian Rodger Garrick-Steele has claimed that Robinson wrote the original story and Doyle stole this, put his own name to it and then poisoned his friend with laudanum five years after Hounds was published and has applied for permission to exhume Robinson's body to test his theory. Doyle is often seen as downplaying Robinson's contribution, or Robinson as exaggerating the extent of any such contribution - W. W. Robson writes that, though it "may now be impossible to determine" the extent of any such role, in all probability it was merely an idea or "creative trigger" that Robinson provided rather than the plot or anything regarding the novel's "literary skill". He adds that, once the element of Sherlock Holmes was added to the idea (rather than simply a retelling of the legend), the novel as it was produced was far from the joint project the pair had possibly posited.^[1]