Ask Jot

Air Commandant Dame Jean Lena Annette Conan Doyle, Lady Bromet (21 December 1912 – 18 November 1997), DBE, AE, WRAF, ADC was best-known as Jean Conan Doyle, nicknamed "Billy". The second daughter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, she served for thirty years in the WRAF, where she worked in intelligence during World War II and by the time of her retirement she had attained the rank of Air Commandant, the highest rank in the Women's Royal Air Force. Until 1966 she served as an honorary Aide-de-Camp to Queen Elizabeth II. She was styled as Lady Bromet after marrying Air Vice-Marshal Sir Geoffrey Rhodes Bromet (1891 – 1983). Her husband served a term as Lieutenant-Governor of the Isle of Man. Sir Geoffrey and Lady Jean Bromet had no children. After the death of her brother, Adrian Conan Doyle, in 1970, Dame Jean became her father's literary executor and the legal copyright holder to some of the rights to the Sherlock Holmes character as well as her father's other works. She assiduously defended Sherlock Holmes' character. She and her brothers, Adrian and Denis Conan Doyle, Arthur Conan Doyle's children by his second wife, Lady Jean Conan Doyle, inherited the copyrights with the estate when their mother died in 1940. A spirited child, described as a tomboy by Houdini, she had difficulty determining her sexual identity, and used to sign herself "Your loving son". But on her tenth birthday she announced she had decided to be a girl after all. She then went to her Aunt Ida's school, Granville House in Eastbourne, where she took after her mother in her love of nature . As a schoolgirl she was a classmate and friend of actress Anna Lee, who was her father's god-daughter. At her death at age 84, her will stipulated that any remaining copyrights she owned were to be transferred to the Royal National Institute for the Blind. According to a 1990 interview, Dame Jean's eyesight was poor from an early age.