street.
Nine
Watson’s description of Rotten Row in the late nineteenth century is admirably discreet. It was, as he says, the place to ‘see and be seen’ and was also a wonderful place for meeting new people in society or making covert assignations with sexual partners. While the horse riders might include actresses, royalty, soldiers, politicians, sportsmen and almost anyone from the upper middle class upwards, there is no doubt that many of the beautiful and expensively dressed women who rode in the Row were making a very good living there.
Ten
Watson’s initial meeting with Holmes is described in A Study in Scarlet, the first of Watson’s published records of a Sherlock Holmes enquiry. Watson, a military doctor, had been injured in Afghanistan and subsequently contracted fever. His health damaged, he was returned to England and placed on half pay.
He had no family in Britain and soon found himself at a loose end in London, overspending on his half pay in search of company. It was early in 1881 that a friend introduced Watson to Holmes, who was working at the London Hospital, carrying out a series of experiments in post-mortem bruising by beating the cadavers in the dissecting room. Holmes had discovered a set of rooms to rent and required a flatmate. The deal was done and the immortal partnership forged.
Eleven
The three brass balls which hang by tradition outside pawnbrokers’ shops are actually a symbol of three bags of gold in honour of Saint Nicholas.
The saint whom we know better as Santa Claus, Sinter Klaas or Father Christmas, is the patron saint of children, sailors, thieves and pawnbrokers.
Nicholas, who was a bishop of the early Christian Church at Myra in Asia Minor, was orphaned in his childhood but inherited great wealth. Nevertheless, he grew up to be a kindly and concerned young man. A legend tells that Nicholas heard of a poor man with three daughters, bewailing the fact that he had no money to provide his daughters with a dowry. Nicholas sneaked into the man’s house (by the chimney - how else?) and left a bag of gold. So the first daughter was married and Nicholas repeated the trick. After the second girl was married, their father guessed that there might well be a third gift, so he kept watch at night to thank his unknown benefactor. So it was that Nicholas’ kindness was revealed and three bags of gold became the symbol for him as a saint.
The golem is a monster of Jewish legend, supposedly a large crudely humanoid thing made from clay.
The story is usually told about the Great Rabbi Loew of Prague, who became deeply concerned by the hard lives led by his people. Seeking ways to alleviate their hardship he came across an ancient document which described how to make a humanoid creature from the clay of the River Moldavka. The Rabbi made such a creature and recited the chant, ‘Shanti, Shanti, Dahat, Dahat!’ whereupon the creature came to life and would obey the Rabbi’s instructions. Soon the Rabbi realized that the golem would be more useful if he didn’t have to tell it everything, so he taught it to read so that it could learn what it needed to know. Armed with its great strength and newly acquired knowledge, the golem became a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. An American urban legend says that the golem has now mastered the Internet and that American youngsters receive emails from the golem, luring them into dangerous situations.
Twelve
I am reminded by the text that we have never, so far as I know, learned what became of Sherlock Holmes’ Stradivarius violin. It cannot, surely, be one of the ones that hang in various Holmesian museums and displays? Without the connection to the Great Detective the instrument would be hugely valuable. What price would it fetch if the association could be proved? Has it been carelessly destroyed or equally carelessly disposed of, so that somebody somewhere is playing what may be the world’s most valuable violin?
The Irregulars were, of course, the so-called Baker Street Irregulars, a team of street ragamuffins employed by Sherlock Holmes to act as his eyes and ears all over London, to go where he could not go and to carry out errands for him.
Sherlock Holmes, according to Watson, was skilled in a Japanese martial art which Watson calls
‘baritsu’, and here Holmes confirms that his instructor was Japanese. While we tend to think of eastern wrestling as characteristically Japanese, in fact it is believed that many of the techniques involved originated on the Indian continent and passed, via China, to Japan. Over the centuries many different forms and specialities have developed, and it is not impossible that there is (or was) a fighting art called
‘baritsu’, but no one seems to have tracked down any reference to it. The name may, of course, derive from a mishearing by Watson, by his own inability to read his notes or from a printer’s inability to read Watson’s medical handwriting!
Thirteen
Holmes, as we know, was missing from England (and largely from Europe) from the spring of 1891 for three years, the so-called ‘Great Hiatus’. Whether or not it was the disappearance and reported death of Holmes which brought it about, there was an upsurge in acts of violence by alleged anarchists in that period, both on the Continent and in Britain. In France it culminated in the arrest of the murderer Ravachol, a savage multiple killer who had terrified France. We, sadly, are more familiar with the kind of pervert who wraps his bloodlust in politics, piety or both.
In England the situation culminated with the only successful prosecution of alleged anarchist terrorists at Stafford Assizes in April 1892. Ravachol’s dramatic arrest in France was reported in the British press during their trial, which must have helped their chances no end!
The ringleader, to whom Holmes and Watson refer, was a man named Deakin, a booking clerk from Walsall and organizer of a ‘Socialist Club’, which operated in a rented house immediately alongside the town’s police station. His co-accused were workingmen and tradesmen who belonged to the club, and the accusation was that they had used the club as a front for the manufacturing of bombs to be used in Russia.
In December 1891 Walsall’s police chief informed Scotland Yard that he was suspicious of the club’s activities. Secret Department officers (including the redoubtable Inspector Melville, later to become one of MI5’s first spies) were sent to the town, observation was kept on the club and its officers and, early the following year, arrests were made. The arrested men were kept in what was known as the
‘Black Hole’ under Walsall’s Guildhall, so called for the not unreasonable cause that it was a set of cells deep underground and painted black throughout. After weeks in such custody, fed only on bread and water, Deakin was taken from his cell in the small hours and fed whisky, after which he signed a lengthy ‘confession’. When the case came to Stafford, the men were not, by the law of the day, permitted to give evidence in their own defence. Self- appointed, unqualified, ‘experts’ in explosives gave evidence, and a handwriting ’expert‘ whose expertise had been comprehensively trashed in the Parnell Commission Enquiry, costing The Times a third of a million for relying on his wrong opinion.
The Judge knew how Deakin’s ’confession‘ had been obtained, but deemed it good evidence and
Deakin and three others were convicted. Two were acquitted. Those convicted got ten years, apart from Joe Deakin, who got five (presumably because of his susceptibility to alcohol!). He was released in December 1897 and returned to Walsall, where he lived above his sisters’ drapery shop and kept their books. In time he became secretary of Walsall Trades Council. He is remembered by a blue plaque over the shop front of the building at the southern end of Stafford Street where his sisters kept their shop. He lived well into the twentieth century and I have met people who knew him.
It was believed among anarchists and socialists in the 1890s that Deakin and his comrades were the victims of an agent provocateur called Coulon, an alleged professor of languages. It may well have been true. The Autonomic Club was the principal anarchist meeting place in London at the time. See John Quail’s The Slow-Burning Fuse and my own On the Trail of the Walsall Anarchists, Walsall Library, 1992.
Fourteen
If there could be any doubt that Holmes’ client was Mrs Anna Leonowens, this part of the manuscript destroys it. The story she tells Holmes and Watson, of her upbringing and marriage, though not the biography which she invented for herself (and which still appears in modern American editions of The English Governess at the Siamese Court) accords almost exactly with the account of Anna’s life given in Cecilia Holland’s The Story of Anna and the King, Harper Collins 1999. Nevertheless, mysteries remain. Some commentators on Anna’s life say that, while she was born in India, she was sent to a school in England kept by a relative at the age of six, only returning
