The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors

by Edward B. Hanna

  26. As a matter of fact, we know now that the CID was then in a badly demoralized state due in part to the forced resignation, that previous August, of its popular and able chief, Assistant Commissioner James Monro. Monro had been replaced by barrister and socialite Sir Robert Anderson, who was physically, and probably professionally, unsuited for his new post. (He immediately left on a month’s holiday in Switzerland upon his appointment, thus leaving the detective branch without an effective head during what was to be a highly critical period.)

  27. Major General Sir Charles Warren, Royal Engineers, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1886 to 1888.

  Cullen, in Autumn of Terror, comments that Queen Victoria “could hardly have been less fortunate in her choice” of commissioner than Warren, “whose chief qualifications for the... post seems to have been his ability to handle the Bantu in Grinqualand West.” His previous experience in police work was in dealing with the Boers in South Africa, where he earned a reputation as an efficient but ruthless keeper of the peace.

  Watson’s portrayal of Warren in this account may appear to be broadly drawn, but it is not. Warren’s physical description and demeanor, and his penchant for wearing his general’s uniform with an old-fashioned policeman’s “chimney pot” hat, matches existent portraits of him. Wrote one contemporary: “He has a massive cavalry mustache in the Prussian style, curling below the edges of his mouth, an exceptional silver-brown growth that is distractingly different in color from the hair on his head, which is jet-black and pomaded into a severe, straight line across his forehead.”

  Warren habitually wore a monocle, which caused a perpetual frown, and he has been described by another source as “stiff-necked and overly military in bearing.” It was “Bloody Sunday” that earned him his knighthood (and the enmity of London’s working-class population): He was the one who commanded the troops and police forces that routed the unemployed squatters from Trafalgar Square. “He sat a horse well,” wrote Cullen, “but his appointment as police chief was little short of a national disaster.”

  28. Clarences was a nearby public house popular among off-duty police officers of the detective branch; Faulkner’s Hotel (which still exists as the Adelphi) was located in nearby Villiers Street and was a favorite of Holmes and Watson for both its two-shilling table d’hote and its Turkish bath. “Both Holmes and I had a weakness for the Turkish bath,” wrote Watson in The Illustrious Client. “It was over a smoke in the pleasant lassitude of the drying room that I found him less reticent and more human than anywhere else.” (See The Disappearance of Lady Francis Carfax and The Illustrious Client.)

  29. Holmes himself was to use the very same quote (although in its entirety and in the original German) a week or so later during his involvement in The Sign of the Four. It is taken from Faust, Part I, and reads: “Wir sind gewohnt, dass die Menschen verhöhnen, Was sie nicht verstehen.” (“We are accustomed to seeing that man despises what he does not understand.”) “Goethe,” said Holmes, “is always pithy.”

  30. Curiously, Watson quotes Holmes as speaking the very same words in the opening pages of The Sign of the Four. Possibly he referred to it and other published cases when putting together his notes for this one.

  31. Again, see The Sign of the Four. The reference is, of course, to Miss Mary Morstan, Watson’s future bride.

  32. See The Greek Interpreter.

  33. Watson, while serving as an army surgeon in Afghanistan, was severely wounded during the battle of Maiwand and, as a result, was invalided from the service with a pension shortly before his introduction to Holmes in 1881. The precise location of his wound (or wounds) has been the subject of considerable speculation and controversy over the years, because of Watson’s own conflicting assertions. At one point he tells us, “I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery.” (A Study in Scarlet.) Later we are told it was not his shoulder, but his arm: “His left arm has been injured,” says Holmes. “He holds it stiff and in an unnatural manner.” But at still another point we find Watson nursing his leg: “I had had a Jezail bullet through it sometime before,” he writes, later describing himself as “... a half-pay officer with a damaged tendo Achillis” (The Sign of the Four).

  Countless learned essays have been written about this paradox over the years, falling into three general categories: “pro-leg,” “pro-shoulder,” and “pro-leg and shoulder.” Clearly the most rational theory is the one first espoused by Mr. R. M. McLaren (“Doctor Watson: Punter or Speculator?” The Sherlock Holmes Journal, Vol. I, No. I, May 1952): “The wound sustained by Watson in Afghanistan was an extraordinary one, the bullet having entered his shoulder and emerged from his leg...”

  34. The tea and scones are indeed excellent at the Savoy, but they were not in 1888. Mycroft had anticipated the hotel’s arrival on the London scene by a full year (which perhaps accounts for Watson’s surprise). Still one of the world’s grandest hostelries, the Savoy contained many innovations when it first opened its doors in 1889 (charging a hefty eight shillings a night for a single room). However, it was the Savoy Theater that was among the first buildings in London to be illuminated by electricity, not the hotel.

  35. See The Greek Interpreter.

  36. While this particular anecdote may or may not have been true, other stories concerning London’s venerable gentlemen’s clubs have become legendary, such as the one concerning Lord Glasgow, who after flinging a waiter who displeased him through a window, calmly instructed the club’s secretary to “put him on my bill.”

  37. “Bertie,” naturally, was none other than H.R.H. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. Family members and a few close intimates were permitted on private occasions to call him by the diminutive of his first name.

  38. Mycroft had to have be en referring to Sir Henry Matthews, Home Secretary in the government of Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. Matthews’s ministry had jurisdiction over Scotland Yard.

  39. We do not know precisely what position Mycroft Holmes held in government. Presumably he was a member of the civil service, ostensibly an auditor in “some” of the government departments (see The Greek Interpreter). But according to no less a reliable source than Sherlock Holmes himself, Mycroft occasionally was the British government:

  “The same great powers I have turned to the detection of crime, he has used for this particular business. The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearing house, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience... in that great brain of his everything is pigeon-holed, and can be handed out in an instant. Again and again his word has decided national policy.” (See The Bruce-Parkington Plans.)

  40. See The Bruce-Parkingt on Plans.

  41. Baring-Gould dates Holmes’s and Watson’s involvement in The Hound of the Baskervilles as being between September 25 and October 20 of 1888. If so, the pair would have spent most of September 26 engaged in that case, part of it indeed in Regent Street as deduced by Mycroft, not in perusing the shops, but rather in attempting to chase down the man who was stalking Sir Henry Baskerville. Watson wrote that following that escapade he and Holmes dallied at “one of the Bond Street picture-galleries” before keeping their luncheon appointment with Sir Henry and Dr. Mortimer at the Northumberland Hotel. Afterward, according to Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles, they returned to Baker Street, where, “all afternoon and late into the evening he (Holmes) sat lost in tobacco and thought.” But as we now know, at least part of the evening was spent with Mycroft at the Diogenes Club.

  Obviously, Mycroft’s deductions made from Watson’s walking stick missed the mark, but apparently neither Holmes nor Watson had the heart to tell him so. It is interesting to note, by the way, that the building that housed the Northumberland Hotel still stands at number 11 Northumberland Street. Except it is now known as the Sherlock Holmes Tavern.

  42. Salisbury also said t
h at with his mood swings, Lord Randolph had a temperament that was basically feminine, “and I have never been able to get on with women.”

  43. It is difficult to know what scandal Lord Randolph was referring to, the Prince of Wales was involved in so many of them — including one twelve years earlier involving Lord Randolph himself, a complicated business with comic opera overtones, having to do with a secret affair the prince previously had with another man’s wife (the Earl of Aylesford’s, a close friend of his), who subsequently was having an open affair with Lord Randolph’s older brother, George. Randolph, in a naive effort to keep his brother’s name out of a potentially messy divorce trial (all of the aristocracy’s divorce trials in Victorian England were potentially messy), foolishly went to the Princess of Wales with some letters the prince had written to Lady Aylesford sometime earlier. His motive was to get the princess to convince her husband to bring pressure on Lord Aylesford to call off the divorce proceedings and avoid a major scandal. To no one’s surprise but Lord Randolph’s, the prince became furious, accused him of blackmail, and challenged him to a duel. The Queen got wind of it and the duel never took place, of course. Instead, Lord Randolph was banished to a government post in Ireland and the prince was banished for a time from his mother’s sight (a relief to both of them, according to one observer).

  The affair is often held up as proof, if proof be needed, that the true measure of Victorian respectability, among the upper classes, at least, lay not in refraining from extramarital sex, but in engaging in it with discretion. Or, as one member of society put it: “It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”

  Be that as it may, Holmes could not have been involved in these goings-on. He was still attending Cambridge at the time and did not start his consulting practice until the following year, 1877.

  44. The son Lord Randolph was referring to was no doubt the future prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill.

  45. Holmes’s earlier statement that he and Watson “are to go down to Dartmoor on Saturday” and the subsequent change in plans are of more than incidental interest. In Watson’s published account of the Baskerville case we are told that he did indeed accompany Sir Henry and Dr. Mortimer to Dartmoor by himself. Holmes remained behind, giving the excuse that he was occupied with another matter, and would follow sometime shortly thereafter (“At the present instant one of the most revered names in England is being besmirched by a blackmailer, and only I can stop a disastrous scandal”). It is obvious only now what the other matter really was.

  46. The Adventure of the Creeping Man, which according to Baring-Gould took place in September 1903. Interestingly enough, Holmes was to admit a dependence of a sort upon his friend. In The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier, Holmes wrote: “If I burden myself with a companion in my various little inquiries, it is not done out of sentiment or caprice, but it is that Watson has some remarkable characteristics of his own to which in his modesty he has given small attention amid his exaggerated estimates of my own performances.” And, he is recorded as saying to Watson (in The Hound of the Baskervilles), “It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.”

  47. There is some disagreement as to the date of receipt of this now-famous (or, rather, infamous) letter, which first introduced to the world the sobriquet “Jack the Ripper.” Some sources maintain the letter, though dated September 25, was not postmarked until the 28th, while others say the Central News Agency received it on the 27th, a day earlier. In any event, its first publication by the press was not until the 30th.

  48. Thousands was more like it. Watkin W. Williams, in his biography of his grandfather, Sir Charles Warren, claimed that Scotland Yard was receiving 1,200 letters a day at the height of the Whitechapel murders, while other sources suggest a more realistic figure of about 1,400 a month.

  49. That Holmes was an expert in handwriting analysis, and far ahead of his time in that particular science, is indisputable. Jack Tracy, in The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana, lists six separate cases in which Holmes displayed his skill in this specialty to help solve a crime. In The Reigate Squires Holmes went so far as to claim the ability to deduce from a man’s handwriting not only his character and age, but even the state of his health.

  50. Among his other skills, Holmes was a past master in the art of “tailing” (and, of course, was the first to admit it). Witness this exchange between Holmes and Sterndale in The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot:

  HOLMES: You went to the vicarage, waited outside it for some time, and finally returned to your cottage.

  STERNDALE: How do you know that?

  HOLMES: I followed you.

  STERNDALE: I saw no one.

  HOLMES: That is what you might expect to see when I follow you.

  51. In The Adventure of the Empty House, Watson was to write: “Holmes’s knowledge of the byways of London was extraordinary...” And in The Red-Headed League, Holmes is quoted as saying: “It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London.”

  52. While it is true that portions of human anatomy were recovered from the Thames during this period, none of them were ever tied to the Whitechapel killings. A severed arm fished out of the river on Tuesday, September 11, was indeed found to belong to a torso unearthed in the excavation being dug for the new police headquarters building. Dubbed “The Whitehall Mystery” by the press, the affair remains a mystery to this day. (See Autumn of Terror by Tom Cullen.)

  53. Wrote Benjamin Disraeli of Victorian Britain: “There are two nations between whom (sic) there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws... the rich and the poor.”

  54. Temple Bar, a gate which had obstructed traffic at the boundary of the City for years, was removed in 1878, but the place where it stood continues to bear the name and continues to mark the boundary (and continues to suffer from clogged traffic). Traditionally, the sovereign requires the Lord Mayor’s “permission” to cross the line — one of those curious customs the English take to heart, this one going back to a day in 1588 when Elizabeth I entered the City to attend a service of thanksgiving at St. Paul’s Cathedral following the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

  55. One cannot question the assertion that Sir Henry was a man of some wit. His memoirs were to be subtitled The Story of Sixty Years, Most of Them Misspent.

  56. There is no way of knowing whether there is any truth to the legend. Mitre Square, in the sixteenth century, was the site of the Priory of the Holy Trinity, and the murder was supposed to have occurred in front of the high altar. According to legend, a woman, kneeling in prayer, was seized from behind and stabbed by a crazed monk by the name of Brother Martin, who then plunged the knife into his own heart — an act, it was widely believed, that put a curse on the place forevermore.

  57. Inspector James McWilliam, who headed the Detective Department of the City Police.

  58. The Bertillon system, the first “scientific” method of criminal identification, was developed by Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914) and was based on the classification of skeletal and other body measurements and characteristics. It was officially adopted by the French police in 1888 and soon after by authorities in other countries. Fingerprinting was first used in connection with the Bertillon system as only a supplementary measure; it was not until after the first practical classification of fingerprints by Sir Francis Galton in 1891 that it achieved wide acceptance by criminologists and in time supplanted the Bertillon system altogether. Scotland Yard, in 1901, was one of the first police agencies to adopt the Galton system.

  Holmes expressed admiration for Bertillon’s system of measurements in Watson’s account of the cas
e, entitled The Naval Treaty, but while fingerprints played a role in at least seven of his recorded cases, there is no indication that he ever endorsed the idea of fingerprinting criminals as a means of identification. Probably for good reason; as Michael Harrison points out (In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes), it would be only natural for Holmes to be skeptical of any theory that was intrinsically unproven and unprovable.

  The Bertillon system in time became discredited, as did Bertillon himself — he spent years trying to prove that a diabolically clever Alfred Dreyfus actually forged his own handwriting in the infamous spy scandal which rocked the French Army at the turn of the century. (All of which goes to prove that Holmes’s judgment was not always infallible.)

  59. Sir Robert Anderson, who was to head the CID, expressed the opinion in his autobiography (The Lighter Side of My Official Life) that “an enterprising journalist” was the author of the correspondence. His view was shared by Assistant Chief Constable (and later Commissioner) Sir Melville Macnaghten, who even claimed to know the identity of the journalist responsible (though he never named him). All of this has been hotly disputed, and the authenticity of the correspondence remains in dispute.

  Modern handwriting analysis reveals that whoever the author was, he had a “propensity to cruelly perverted sexuality to a degree that even the most casual amateur graphologist could hardly mistake.” (See C. M. MacCleod, “Ripper Handwriting Analysis,” The Criminologist, August 1968.)

  60. The now-famous Sherlock Holmes blood test was probably perfected by him in 1881, but did not achieve worldwide recognition until 1887, when mention of it was made in A Study in Scarlet. Because the chemistry involved was not revealed at the time, a fierce debate raged among chemists for nearly a century over what chemicals were actually used in the test. The matter was finally (?) put to rest in 1987 with the publication of two learned papers in The Baker Street Journal, one by Raymond J. McGowan (March 1987), the other by Christine L. Huber (December 1987). Experiments performed by each of them independently indicated that Holmes must have used one or the other combinations of chemicals mentioned in this passage. Now we know he experimented with both.