With Sherlock Holmes and the King’s Governess I have done as I have with the previous manuscripts which I have edited, and attempted to find within the text internal proof that this story is indeed by John H.Watson.
This is not easy. I have written in my notes to other manuscripts about the difficulties of having no positively verifiable specimen of Watson’s handwriting, the problems of his carelessness about chronology and the strange mixture of real and invented names for places and people which he used.
When Stephen Kendrick’s Night Watch: A Long Lost Adventure in which Sherlock Holmes meets
Father Brown appeared in 2001 (Berkley Prime Crime, New York) there was brief hope that new and verifiable Watson material had surfaced, inasmuch as Kendrick claimed that the manuscript he
presented had been supplied to him by Watson’s daughter(!) accompanied by a codicil to the Doctor’s will.
Alas, the manuscript does not live up to expectations. On the first page of his introduction, Kendrick misstates the date of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s death by three years, leaving the reader cautious as to what may follow. What follows is, indeed, a fascinating story, but cannot be from Watson’s pen. The manuscript is clearly of American origin. Watson would never have written a three-word ‘sentence’
containing no verb, nor would Holmes have spoken of someone as being ‘slightly aghast’, which reminds one of bad jokes about being ‘slightly pregnant’. Holmes cannot have employed ‘momentarily’
in the American sense. In America it means ‘in a moment; in Britain it means ’for a moment‘. Watson is casually addressed as ’Mr‘ by persons who know him to be a doctor and Holmes’ age is misstated (one of the few facts about Holmes’ life that we know from the canon is that he was born in 1854). Not only would Watson not have used the American ’stoop‘ for a doorstep, he would probably not have known what it meant. Finally, though I hesitate to claim one of the manuscripts which I have edited in evidence, if Sherlock Holmes and the Rule of Nine (Severn House, 2003) is authentic, then Holmes and Father Brown had their first meeting in 1895, not 1902.
So, regretfully, the promise of an authentic Watson document fades and, as before, I am forced to research aspects of the narrative in the hope that they will provide proof. The extent to which I have succeeded, like the authenticity of the text, is a matter for individual readers. To assist them in reaching their own conclusions, I append below my notes on some of the avenues which I have pursued.
One
While confusion usually revolves around Watson’s dates and personal names, we appear to be lucky here. There seems no doubt that ‘Mrs Fordeland’ is, in fact, Mrs Anna Leonowens, heroine of Anna and the King of Siam, The King and I and Anna and the King.
The client’s identity serves also to confirm Watson’s date. Mrs Leonowens left Siam in 1868, to visit her daughter who had been left in an English boarding school. During the lady’s absence from Siam, the King died and was succeeded by his eldest son, Anna’s former pupil. As he was then only fifteen, a regency ruled the country and did not invite the lady to return. From England she moved on to the United States and later, when her daughter married a Canadian banker, established herself with her daughter’s family in Nova Scotia. In 1897, when she had been largely forgotten in Britain, she returned for a visit to the Diamond Jubilee and also to meet with her former pupil, the King of Siam, who was in London for the ceremony.
If this story is Watson’s work, one must have a certain sympathy with him in his efforts to conceal and fictionalize the identity of a client who, unknown to him, was going to be world-famous by the time his account was published.
Two
In the latter years of the nineteenth century, the Tzar’s Russia maintained an elaborate network of spies and informers in Britain, many of them based in London’s East End. There is a persistent rumour that the young Joseph Stalin was an informer for this network, cheerfully using it to destroy political opponents.
The reason for the spying was that revolutionary Russians would leave Russia and settle in Western European countries, where they could continue their plots against the Tzar’s regime. One by one the Tzar persuaded European governments to make life unpleasant for these plotters, so they tended to move on to England, where a more liberal regime left them alone as long as they caused no mischief in Britain.
Three
Throughout Watson’s accounts of Holmes’ enquiries there are descriptions of the detective’s
extraordinary ability at disguise and the numbers of times when he fooled his old friend, even at close range. I had always believed that Watson was exaggerating Holmes’ skills, until I discovered that the American film star Danny Kaye (David Kaminski) had similar abilities. It seems that, when shooting was delayed by a technical problem one day, Kaye had the studio make-up artists turn him into an old man and took a taxi to his home. Having told the studio switchboard that all calls from his family were to be met with the statement that Mr Kaye was on the set and could not be disturbed, he presented himself to his own family as an elderly distant relative who had arrived from Russia speaking no word of English. Apparently he drove them crazy for hours before he admitted the imposture. So, maybe Sherlock Holmes was as good as Watson would have us believe.
In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Watson’s published accounts of Holmes’ cases, he tells us that, after taking his medical degree, he took the course for intending army surgeons at the Royal Military Hospital at Netley in Hampshire. There is a long note on this great and strange building in my Sherlock Holmes and the Harvest of Death. Among the facilities it offered was an in-house postcard-printing shop to supply the sick and their visitors with souvenirs. Sadly, only the hospital’s chapel now survives.
Four
Mycroft’s use of the term ‘gay’ is not meant to imply that the girl was a Lesbian. From at least the eighteenth century until comparatively recently the word was used to mean ‘randy, promiscuous or immoral’. As a verb it could mean ‘to copulate’ and ‘gaying stick,’ ‘gaying pole’ or ‘gaying pintle’
referred to the male member. The standard prostitute’s come-on query was ‘Are you gay?’ It was the survival of that expression among American homosexuals, meaning ‘Are you looking for action?’ that brought about the modern use of the term to mean ‘homosexual’, rather than the alleged derivation from ‘Good As You!’
The misbehaviour of royal and diplomatic visitors is always a problem to the host government, no less so today than in the 1890s. As to Russian noblemen misbehaving abroad, one has only to consider that the Russian Crown Prince himself, Nicholas who became the last Tzar, was involved in an incident in Japan in 1891. Nicholas and other assorted royalty were, it seems, sampling the delights of Otsu when, perhaps at the instigation of the homosexual Prince George of Greece, they visited a male brothel.
Prince George mistreated a Japanese youth and the party fled. A Japanese police officer stopped Nicholas, who was returning from a temple by rickshaw, and laid about the future Tzar with his sword, inflicting a severe blow on Nicholas’ head and having to be stopped and tied up by the rickshaw drivers. The whole incident was a grave embarrassment to Japan, though they got their revenge when Nicholas became Tzar by defeating his army and his navy and forcing him to evacuate Manchuria. The injury to the head caused Nicholas headaches for the rest of his life. Who knows what effect it may have had on the future of Russia?
Seven
Watson’s comments on the Khodynka Meadow incident refer to an event which happened three days after the coronation of Nicholas and Alexandra. A public festival for the people of Moscow had been set up by the Tzar’s uncle, the mayor of Moscow. Gifts of sweetmeats, a printed handkerchief and a commemorative tumbler were to be distributed. By early in the day more than 400,000 people had mustered. Rumours spread that there would not be enough gifts to go round. The crowd became
restless, barriers collapsed and thousands were crushed in the panic that followed. Russians never forgot the incident, continuing to blame the Tzar’s German wife. The enamel cup distributed on that dreadful day became known as the ‘Cup of Tears’ and is much sought after by collectors of Royal Commemoratives. The writer recalls seeing one displayed at Bilston Art Gallery in a Jubilee exhibition in 1977. It is a white enamel tumbler, printed with a coat of arms in red, blue and gold, with the cipher of Nicholas and Alexandra and a motto in Russian.
Eight
A ‘growler’ was a four-wheeled, horse-drawn, cab, as opposed to the lighter, two-wheeled, hansom cab.
The growler took its familiar name, I believe, from the characteristic sound of its heavier wheels on the
