Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

Sherlock Holmes

the Actor

A FRAGMENT OF BIOGRAPHY

Anumber of my readers will be familiar with the fragments of biography which I have recalled in illustrating the cases of my friend Mr Sherlock Holmes. As we enter the world of the London theatre—“gaslight and greasepaint,” as he used to call it—I must say something of his youthful stage career. It was very brief, beginning in 1879 and ending in the early spring of 1881, shortly before we first met.

I only once saw the tall, spare figure of Sherlock Holmes upon a stage. The audience had left the auditorium of the Royal Herculaneum more than an hour before. The curtains had been drawn open again to reveal the set. The lights had gone up and, by the battlements of Prince Hamlet’s Elsinore, stood Holmes, tall, hawk-like and angular. In the white tie and tails of his evening clothes, he was in conversation with the stage manager, Mr Roland Gwyn. Beyond earshot were two stage-hands, one or two actors with minor parts, and two officers from the Metropolitan Police. Inspector Hopkins of Scotland Yard was in plain clothes. Superintendent Bradstreet of the nearby Bow Street police station wore the frogged jacket of the uniformed branch. A few yards away, one of the greatest actors in England—in the world, indeed—lay dead in his dressing-room.

Let us leave that great tragedian lying there a moment longer, while I explain our involvement in what I have called “The Case of the Matinee Idol.”

If ever a man was a born actor, it was Sherlock Holmes. Early in our friendship, he employed masterly disguises as a cabman and as an elderly nonconformist clergyman, in our case of “A Scandal in Bohemia.” I remarked to him at the time that the stage had lost a great actor when he turned his back upon it in order to become a specialist in crime. To my surprise, he took the comment seriously and at once began to compare himself favourably with the great performers of the day. Holmes never suffered from false modesty. He thought he would have encountered little competition on the London stage—except perhaps from Irving and possibly from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. But that was all.

This will sound absurdly boastful to those who know little of his life before our meeting in 1881. Indeed, few of his clients or acquaintances at Scotland Yard, let alone his enemies, ever had any idea that he once lived and worked in the company of such theatrical giants as Sir Henry Caradoc Price or popular character actors like “Captain” Carnaby Jenks. On half-a-dozen occasions, as an understudy, he even played opposite the great Sir Henry Irving himself.

My companion’s longest theatrical acquaintance was with “Caradoc,” as the mercurial Welshman was universally known. By 1890, Caradoc Price’s Royal Herculaneum Theatre in the Strand was a by-word for the boldest and the best. In his own estimation, at least, this flamboyant actor-manager was the greatest Shakespearean of his day.

A few weeks ago, having decided to give this story to the world, I made my way once again up the steep stairs of the Baker Street attic. Among dust and cobwebs in that lumber room stand such souvenirs as the fine silhouette profile of the Great Detective, designed and fashioned by the renowned theatrical artist of Grenoble, Monsieur Oscar Meunier. When it was set against the curtain of our sitting-room after dark, those looking up from the street were convinced that it moved as the angle of the light changed. It was first used to bring to justice the notorious Colonel Sebastian Moran, and several times persuaded Holmes’s enemies that he was at home when in truth he was many miles away.

At the far end of the loft was the cumbersome tin trunk, which had belonged to my friend since he left home in his teens. Its hinge moved a little stiffly and the black lacquer was somewhat chipped. Yet the documents and legal parchments it contained were as crisp and alluring as ever. Each represented some tour de force of his analytical reasoning.

Here and there I noticed packets of letters, tied with tape and pencilled “Miss Ethel Le Neve in re H. H. Crippen for murder,” or “Society for Insuring against Losses on the Turf,” or “The City of Paris Loan Frauds.” Elsewhere, barristers’ briefs, black-letter legal parchments, had been marked by Holmes’s scribble. He had written on Rex v. Dougal, “The Case of the Naked Bicyclists,” and on Regina v. Temple, “The Bly House Murder.” The notorious Siege of Sidney Street by Russian anarchists, which brought gunfire and insurrection to the London streets, was annotated rather whimsically as “The Mystery of the Yellow Canary.” News of a missing canary was indeed the first clue to the conspiracy.

Holmes had been too busy until the last day of his life to find time for putting such a mass of papers into order. Fortunately, I knew what I was after and soon came to a stiff white envelope, about eight inches by ten. From this I shook out several theatrical programmes. The first was for McVicker’s Theater, Madison Street, Chicago. This ornamental structure had been rebuilt after the great fire of 1871 in that city. The cover of its programme for November 1880 announced “The Sassanoff Shakespeare Touring Company of London.” The drama to be played was Romeo and Juliet. Romeo was performed by Henry Caradoc Price and Juliet by Anna Weld. Among the supporting cast, the character of Mercutio was acted by “William Sherlock Scott Holmes.” At the Broad Street Theatre, Philadelphia, the programme for the Sassanoff company advertised Othello. The hero was once again personified by Caradoc Price and Desdemona by Miss Weld. The part of the hapless dupe Roderigo was taken by a young supernumerary, Carnaby Jenks, and the villainous Iago by “W. S. Holmes.”

These four actors played turn and turn about in Macbeth and Twelfth Night at the Lafayette Opera House in Washington, and The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet at the Garden Theatre in New York. From time to time they performed in front of university audiences at Princeton and Yale. Henry Caradoc Price invariably took the leading role, but “W. S. Holmes” seemed content to be Macbeth’s porter or Shylock’s servant, Hamlet’s Horatio or any of Falstaff’s unsavoury cronies.

I once asked Holmes why he had abandoned his career as a consulting detective and turned his back on forensic chemistry for a year. Was it merely to set off on this theatrical jaunt to America—as it seemed I must call it? He looked at me as if I should have known that he had not abandoned anything. It was imperative for an ambitious young “consulting detective” to add a thorough knowledge of acting and disguise to his other talents. In the end, as he boasted in the case of Colonel Moran, he could walk and crouch in such a manner as to take twelve inches off his height for several hours on end. His American tour was not a flippant diversion but the burnishing of an essential weapon in his armoury.

Nor did he abandon criminal science. He began in 1879 only as a part-time actor in London, almost two years before our first meeting in the chemical laboratory of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. By day he was the self-taught student of scientific method. Every evening he attended the Lyceum Theatre, sometimes as a “supernumerary” spear-carrier, often as a “walking gentleman” without words to speak, occasionally as an understudy. After one or two small speaking parts it was evident that he had a voice of command and could silence an auditorium by his presence. He was allowed to understudy the part of Horatio in Irving’s production of Hamlet. At least twice during that time he was called upon to act the part. In later years he could truthfully boast that he had played Horatio to Irving’s Hamlet. It was a play for which he nourished a lifelong enthusiasm.

As for Caradoc Price, later to be a household name, he was first of all among the most promising of Irving’s young men. Then, by resorting to the money-lenders, he bought for a song the effects and good will of the bankrupt Sassanoff Shakespeare Company. Within a week he announced to his friends that this “company” would seek its fortune in New York. He invited them to join him. You may judge the speed of his success by the fact that he repaid his entire loan within a year. Unfortunately, this convinced him that money would always be as easy to make.

Holmes seized this chance to see something of the New World. With the rest of the company, he spent about eight months there. Upon their return to London, the lease of the Herculaneum Theatre in the Strand had fallen vacant. Caradoc Price used his growing reputation to borrow or beg every penny needed to take it on. Not long afterwards, following a visit by the Prince of Wales and a supper party, this enterprise became the Royal Herculaneum Theatre.

Sherlock Holmes parted company with his theatrical friends on their return from America and went back to