by Daniel Smith
Doctor, Heal Thyself!
Doctor Watson had a traumatic time while serving as a doctor with the army. So disturbing were his experiences that he was not entirely clear whereabouts on his body he was hit by a near fatal shot on the battlefield. His military career began in 1878 after he qualified as a doctor at the University of London and signed up as an assistant surgeon with the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers. Posted to India at the onset of the Second Afghan War, he was sent to Candahar but his experience was marred by ‘misfortune and disaster’ (the exact nature of which remained unspecified) and before long he was reassigned to the Berkshire regiment. On 27 July 1880, he found himself engulfed in the Battle of Maiwand. Facing an Afghan force headed by the famed military leader, Ayub Khan, the British forces suffered a defeat in which almost a thousand troops died and a further two hundred were wounded. Watson was among their number, receiving a shot from a Jezail (a typically hand-made, long-barrelled muzzle-loading weapon). In A Study in Scarlet, Watson clearly states that the bullet entered his shoulder, yet in The Sign of the Four the entry point had moved down to his leg. By the time of ‘The Noble Bachelor’, the reader’s confusion is compounded by a reference to the Jezail bullet lodged in ‘one of my limbs’. Fortunately, Watson’s life was saved when a comrade by the name of Murray flung him over a packhorse that took him to safety. But while recuperating in Peshawar, Watson succumbed to enteric fever and returned to England with his health ‘irretrievably ruined’ and, presumably, his grasp of anatomy seriously compromised.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DISAPPEARING DOG
The question of Watson’s wound is by no means the only mystery that surrounds Holmes’s intrepid narrator. Another concerns the fate of a bull pup that Watson told Holmes he owned in A Study in Scarlet. This was, however, the only mention ever made of the poor dog. What happened to it? There is no suggestion that it ever found its way to 221b Baker Street. Mrs Hudson had quite enough to deal with in terms of her human tenants, so it is difficult to imagine she would have assented to the arrival of a dog as well. Some scholars have suggested that perhaps Watson was referring to this pet in symbolic terms. The dog, the theory goes, may have been emblematic of the low moods Watson suffered in the aftermath of his ill-fated military adventures and his return, penniless and somewhat lost, back in Britain. The use of canines to figuratively describe depression has a long heritage, after all – an example being the ‘black dogs’ that plagued Winston Churchill in his darkest moments. On the other hand, if we should take Watson’s reference to the bull pup in literal terms, it is sad that the creature did not make it into other stories. It would doubtless have made a worthy companion to the pair, particularly given Holmes’s penchant for using the talents of our four-legged friends in pursuit of wrong-doers (see here).
Serial Monogamist?
Yet another in a series of baffling Watson mysteries surrounds the number of wives that he had. We know for certain the name of only one spouse – Mary Morstan, who came into his life when she appeared as Holmes’s client in The Sign of the Four. His attraction to her was clear from the outset, even as he hinted at a somewhat extensive history with the opposite sex. ‘Her face had neither regularity of feature nor beauty of complexion,’ he noted (somewhat unpromisingly, admittedly), before continuing, ’but her expression was sweet and amiable, and her large blue eyes were singularly spiritual and sympathetic. In an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents, I have never looked upon a face which gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature.’ The couple married a short while after the events of The Sign of the Four– in about 1889 – but by the time Sherlock Holmes returned from his Great Hiatus (in 1894), Mary had died. Holmes’s reappearance, we are told, helped his erstwhile companion briefly forget his ‘sad bereavement’. Yet by the time of ‘The Blanched Soldier’ (1903), Holmes talks of Watson having ‘deserted him for a wife’. On the face of it, there can be no doubt that Watson has remarried, but to whom is never revealed. However, the subject remains a topic of hot debate among Holmesians. Some argue that Watson’s ‘bereavement’ concerned the temporary break-down of his marriage to Mary Morstan (a subject Watson would doubtless not have wished to share with his readers), and that they subsequently reunited. In other words, there was only ever one wife – Mary. The general consensus, though, is probably in favour of the two-wife solution. But other notable scholars have suggested anything up to six wives, based on hints and inconsistencies in the canonical texts, mixed with a good dose of conjecture. In ‘The Five Orange Pips’, for example, Watson originally referred to his wife visiting her mother. Yet we know that Mary Morstan’s mother was dead, so some have assumed there was another wife who pre-dated Mary. In later editions of ‘The Five Orange Pips’, meanwhile, the reference to the wife’s mother has been changed to the wife’s aunt. Regardless, it is easy to see why Holmes once referred to the female sex as ‘Watson’s department’.
A Troublesome Son
If Conan Doyle initially enjoyed the runaway success – and the accompanying financial rewards – of the Holmes short stories he wrote for The Strand, it was not long before he grew to despise his creation. As early as 1891 he was confiding to his mother: ‘I think of slaying Holmes . . . and winding him up for good and all.’ His character was, he explained, a distraction from the serious historical novels he wanted to write, one ‘who has tended to obscure my higher work’. This thought was still haunting him two years later when he wrote to his fellow writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, in response to Stevenson’s slightly barbed compliments about the great detective. ‘I hope you will allow me to offer you my compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes,’ he wrote. ‘That is the class of literature that I like when I have the toothache. As a matter of fact, it was a pleurisy I was enjoying when I took the volume up; and it will interest you as a medical man to know that the cure was for the moment effectual.’ Doyle retorted: ‘I’m so glad Sherlock Holmes helped to pass an hour for you. He’s a bastard between Joe Bell and Poe’s Monsieur Dupin (much diluted). I trust that I may never write a word about him again. I had rather that you knew me by my White Company.’ Sure enough, by the end of the year Conan Doyle had apparently thrown Holmes to his death over the Reichenbach Falls.
‘KILLED HOLMES’
While hordes of readers were bereft after Holmes’s demise, Conan Doyle was sanguine, noting in his diaries simply: ‘Killed Holmes.’ Of course, he was a rather less adept assassin than he perhaps realized and Holmes would come back to life, fuelled by the cheques that Conan Doyle couldn’t bring himself to refuse. But Conan Doyle could never love his creation with the same passion displayed by his readers.
A Good Sport
The sport of rugby was a product of the nineteenth-century English public-school system, fuelling the snobbish idea of it being ‘a thug’s game played by gentlemen’, as opposed to football which was a ‘gentleman’s game played by thugs’. Rugby plays a pivotal role in the 1904 story, ‘The Missing Three-Quarter’. It is a gripping yarn concerning the disappearance of one of the key players for Cambridge University ahead of the fiercely contested Varsity Match against their rivals from Oxford. Although Holmes confessed to having no interest in the sport, he nonetheless praised amateur sport in general as ‘the best and soundest thing in England’. A fact often overlooked is that Watson was, in his youth, an enthusiastic and talented player of the game. In ‘The Sussex Vampire’, it is noted that he used to play rugby union for the Blackheath team in London. As a man elsewhere described as ‘middle-sized’ and ‘strongly built’ with a ‘square jaw’ and ‘thick neck’, it is clear he had the physique for the game. Blackheath – in south-east London – was the world’s first open rugby club (that is to say, open to anyone regardless of membership of a particular school or institution) and had the pick of the nation’s finest players. In 1871, for example, when the world’s first rugby international match was played between England and Scotland,
the English side featured no less than four Blackheath players, including the captain. Given that Watson played his rugby for the club during the same decade, he was obviously no slouch.
Bowled Over
If Watson was a talent on the rugby pitch and Holmes was a force to be reckoned with in the boxing ring, their sporting achievements fell some way short of Conan Doyle’s own. He was, for instance, an accomplished footballer who – playing under the name A. C. Smith – appeared as a goalkeeper for the amateur Portsmouth Association Football Club (a precursor of the modern-day Portsmouth F.C.). He also turned his hand to cricket, playing ten first-class matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club between 1900 and 1907 and being described by Wisden, the ‘bible’ of the cricketing world, as capable of hitting hard and bowling slow ‘with a puzzling flight’. He scored a respectable 231 runs at an average of 19.25 per innings but took only one wicket. What a wicket, though! In 1900, he bowled out the greatest cricketer of the age, and perhaps even of all time, W. G. Grace. Conan Doyle would later celebrate the moment in verse:
Once in my heyday of cricket,
Oh, day I shall ever recall!
I captured that glorious wicket,
The greatest, the grandest of all.
If all that were not enough, he was also a decent crown green bowler, a skilful golfer and played a pivotal role in popularizing skiing among a sceptical British public. Conan Doyle became a regular visitor to Switzerland in the early 1890s, prompted mostly by the hope of improving the health of his wife, Touie, who suffered from tuberculosis. It was suggested that the alpine air might prolong her life. It was at Davos that Conan Doyle discovered his love of the snow, taking on some hugely challenging routes. Writing of one expedition for The Strand, he said:
But now we had a pleasure which boots can never give. For a third of a mile we shot along over gently dipping curves, skimming down into the valley without a motion of our feet. In that great untrodden waste, with snow-fields bounding our vision on every side and no marks of life save the tracks of chamois and of foxes, it was glorious to whizz along in this easy fashion.
Such invigorating prose played its part in persuading a generation of British adventurers to take up the pastime.
Heading for a Falls
As the man with the power of life and death over Holmes, it was in the summer of 1893 that Conan Doyle began to devise the specifics of his murder plot against the detective. At the time, he was staying in Lucerne in Switzerland, where he was due to present a talk. While there, he found himself socializing with a group that included Henry Lunn (a church minister who would go on to establish a travel firm that became part of the famous Lunn Poly agency), Rev. W. J. Dawson (who edited a magazine to which Conan Doyle had previously contributed) and Silas Hocking (a novelist whose book, Her Benny, about the poor of Liverpool had been published in 1879 and sold in excess of a million copies). Conan Doyle declared to this circle that Holmes had become such a burden upon him that life was becoming unbearable. He was in search, he told them, of a suitable place to kill off his hero. According to Lunn, it was Dawson who first suggested that the Reichenbach Falls, near the town of Meiringen, might serve as a suitable spot. The suggestion struck a chord with Conan Doyle and in due course Dawson accompanied the author and Touie to the falls, where Conan Doyle could stare into the roaring cauldron into which he planned to launch Holmes. As such, Lunn would later describe himself as ‘an accessory before the fact’ in the purported death of Holmes, while Dawson called himself ‘an unintentional accomplice’. But Hocking felt it was he who had been first to pinpoint the Alpine landscape as the ideal spot for a murder. ‘If you are determined on making an end of Holmes,’ he claimed to have said, ‘why not bring him out to Switzerland and drop him down a crevasse. It would save on funeral expenses.’
A Whale of a Time
The 1904 story, ‘Black Peter’, centres on the investigation into the gruesome murder of an old whale- and seal-fishing captain by the name of Peter Carey. Carey, also known as Black Peter, died from being stabbed through the chest with a harpoon, pinning him to a wall ‘like a beetle on a card’. In writing about Black Peter’s previous ocean-bound exploits, Conan Doyle was able to draw on significant personal experience. In 1880, he had taken up a commission with a whaling ship, SS Hope, serving as the ship’s surgeon after a friend had been forced to relinquish the role. The vessel departed the port of Peterhead for the Arctic on 28 February that year but was spectacularly unsuccessful in finding much in the way of whales. In six months, its crew killed just two. On the other hand, 3,600 seals were culled, along with five polar bears and two narwhals. Conan Doyle kept a vivid journal throughout the voyage. In it he related an incident where he fell into the icy water in his rush to join a seal cull. He was almost killed, first by drifting ice and then hypothermia. It was an event that earned him the nickname ‘the Great North Diver’ among his crewmates.
HARPOONED
On one occasion, Conan Doyle told the story of how one of those unlucky whales perished, lanced through the neck (perhaps providing the inspiration for Black Peter’s harpooning). Despite his near-death experience, he was buoyed by the adventure of it all, reporting to his mother: ‘I just feel as if I could go anywhere or do anything. I’m sure I could go anywhere and eat anything.’
Fiddling the System
In ‘The Illustrious Client’, Holmes likens his antagonist in the story, Baron Gruner, to one of the most colourful real-life criminals of the nineteenth century, Charles Peace. ‘A complex mind,’ Holmes said. ‘All great criminals have that. My old friend Charlie Peace was a violin virtuoso. Wainwright was no mean artist. I could quote many more.’ But just who was Charles Peace? Born in 1832, he spent long stretches of his life travelling between towns and cities, trading bric-a-brac and consolidating his income by playing the violin to a very high standard. He was also a career-burglar and in 1876 became a murderer, too. First, he killed a police officer, Nicholas Cock, who had tried to apprehend him in Manchester during an attempted break-in. Then, later the same year, in Sheffield, he shot dead his neighbour, Arthur Dyson, whose wife he had taken a fancy to. He then went on the run, fleeing to London, but was arrested during another attempted burglary in the well-to-do suburb of Blackheath in 1878. Charged with the Dyson murder, he went on trial in Leeds and was executed early the following year. The Wainwright to whom Holmes referred, meanwhile, was Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (Conan Doyle missed out the ‘e’ in his surname). Born into affluence in 1794, he was orphaned at a young age and, though a talented artist (he exhibited at the Royal Academy), was beset by financial problems. A forger, he was found guilty of fraud against the Bank of England in 1837 and was transported to the Australian penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land (modern-day Tasmania). He was also suspected of killing at least three people for financial gain, although he never answered any such charges. He lived out a further decade in Van Diemen’s Land, during which he produced portraits of the colony’s social elite.
The Guy’s in Disguise
Holmes once admitted that the ‘touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-staged performance’, while Watson described him as ‘the master dramatist’. This sense of theatricality was reflected in his penchant for donning a disguise, something he did with admirable skill. In the canonical stories he variously posed as sailors and sea captains, general workmen, men of the cloth, a boozy groom, a plumber, an elderly lady, an Irish-American agent, a Norwegian explorer, an opium addict, a bookseller, an ‘old sporting man’ and a layabout.
Ringing a Bell
When The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the first short-story collection, was published in 1892, it was dedicated ‘To My Old Teacher, Joseph Bell’. Bell, Conan Doyle made clear, had been the true-life inspiration for his literary detective. He had been one of Conan Doyle’s teachers when he had studied medicine at Edinburgh University in the 1870s, and had even employed him as his medical assistant. Bell was famous among his students for an unnerv
ing ability to pick up on the smallest non-verbal clues to establish a subject’s background. He could, for instance, discover where someone lived from traces of soil on their shoes, or establish their occupations from their gait or the way they sported a hat. Conan Doyle studied Bell’s methods and extended them into the character of Holmes. In 1892, he wrote to Bell: ‘It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes . . . Round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I heard you inculcate,’ he said, ‘I have tried to build up a man who pushed the thing as far as it would go . . .’ Holmes elucidated Bell’s method in A Study in Scarlet:
By a man’s fingernails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt cuffs – by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed. That all united should fail to enlighten the competent enquirer in any case is almost inconceivable.
What was less well known at the time was that Bell had spent the previous twenty years investigating a string of perplexing criminal cases with Dr Henry Littlejohn, another member of the Edinburgh University medical faculty. Littlejohn was Edinburgh’s police surgeon, which meant he was the first medical man on the scene of countless crimes in Scotland throughout the second half of the twentieth century. He was also a pioneer in the then nascent discipline of forensics – the use of scientific methodology in the practice of criminal investigation. It was almost certainly him that first introduced Conan Doyle to many cutting-edge forensic techniques (including crime scene analysis) that he weaved so deftly into the Holmes stories. Yet it was only in 1929, long after Littlejohn’s death, that Conan Doyle acknowledged Littlejohn’s influence. Bell and Littlejohn, he said, had inspired him to write detective stories from ‘the point of view of the scientific man’.
