by June Thomson
There was a fireplace with a mirror hanging above it, possibly part of an elaborate wooden overmantel. A coal-scuttle, where Holmes kept his cigars, stood in the fender and bookcases filled the chimney alcoves containing Watson’s modest collection of medical books and Holmes’ more extensive library of reference volumes. These included a copy of the current Bradshaw which contained railway timetables, an Almanack de Gotha, listing the genealogies of all the European royal families, a Whitaker’s Almanac and his own, personally-compiled commonplace books of newspaper cuttings as well as his encyclopaedias in which he collected any facts which he considered interesting or relevant. Near at hand were Holmes’ pipe-rack and the Persian slipper he used as a tobacco pouch.
The windows were fitted with blinds and also with curtains, probably two sets, one of lace and a heavier pair made of velvet or some other thick material to exclude draughts.
Readers who wish to see what the room may have looked like are recommended to visit the Sherlock Holmes public house in Northumberland Street to the south of Trafalgar Square, where a reconstruction of it is on display upstairs. The pub itself has a strong Sherlockian connection, for it was formerly the Northumberland Hotel, where, it is believed by some commentators, among them William S. Baring-Gould,* Sir Henry Baskerville stayed before travelling to Dartmoor and where two of his boots so mysteriously disappeared.
Or if such a visit is not possible, readers may picture it for themselves on, say, the wild, tempestuous evening in late November 1894 when Inspector Hopkins called on Holmes and Watson at the beginning of the Golden Pince-Nez inquiry. The wind is howling down Baker Street and the rain is beating against the windows but inside all is warm and cheerful, with a bright coal-fire burning in the grate and the gas jets lit, as well as the oil lamps for extra illumination, their yellow glow falling on the room strewn with Holmes’ and Watson’s possessions; mainly Holmes’, it must be admitted. They consist mostly of documents connected with his cases and they lie everywhere, piled up in every corner of the room. He had a horror of destroying papers and over the months they would accumulate until Holmes found the time and energy to docket them and put them away.
Newspapers add to the general untidiness. Holmes was an avid reader of the daily press, particularly the personal advertisements or ‘agony’ columns, as well as the reports on criminal cases. There are references to at least eight London dailies which Holmes regularly studied, including The Times and the Daily Telegraph, and seven evening papers, among them The Echo and the Evening News. Mixed up with the documents and newspapers are relics of the cases he had worked on which, Watson remarks, with a touch of humorous exaggeration, got everywhere, even into the butter-dish.
Apart from the books and possibly also one of the desks, Holmes and Watson introduced other items of their own over the years into the sitting-room, including a gasogene, a curious Victorian invention consisting of two glass globes which produced aerated or soda water; a safe for more confidential papers, and a spirit case or tantalus for bottles of whisky, brandy and so on. Holmes was later to buy a gramophone which he put to good use in recovering the Mazarin stone. By 1898, the date of the case involving the retired colourman, he had had the telephone installed; quite late, as the telephone was introduced into London in 1876 and Bow Street police station was equipped with one by 1889. Perhaps he preferred his privacy to remain undisturbed.
Watson’s contribution was the two pictures of General Gordon and Henry Ward Beecher, referred to in Chapter One.
A door in the interior wall of the sitting-room led to Holmes’ bedroom which was at the back of the house, while another door in the bedroom itself gave direct access to the landing. The only description Watson gives of Holmes’ bedroom is in ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’, a case which occurred much later in November 1890, but the room probably had much the same appearance during this earlier period. Every wall, Watson writes, was adorned with pictures of celebrated criminals, while the mantelpiece was covered with ‘a litter of pipes, tobacco-pouches, syringes, pen-knives, revolver cartridges, and other debris’.
Apart from the bed, which had a headboard high enough for Watson to conceal himself behind it (‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’), the room must also have contained a chest of drawers and a wardrobe in which Holmes kept his clothes as well as his store of many disguises which he adopted when the need arose.
Later on, Holmes was to make use of the two lumber rooms, presumably in the attic, as extra storage space for newspapers and some of these disguises, for in ‘The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet’, Watson writes of Holmes coming down the stairs after having changed his appearance. Over the years, he also acquired the use of at least five small refuges in different parts of London where he could adopt a disguise without the need to return to Baker Street, as Watson reports in ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’.
While on this subject of apparel, it is worth pausing here to consider what clothes Holmes – and Watson, also – would have possessed.
Conventions of the period demanded that a gentleman dressed according to the occasion. For formal day-wear in town, a frock-coat worn with a topper and a stiff shirt with a wing-collar was considered de rigueur. For less formal occasions, a short jacket and a bowler or Homburg hat were acceptable. A dinner or theatre engagement called for full evening dress of tails, starched shirt and silk hat, worn either with a cloak or a dress overcoat. Tweed suits or jackets and plus-fours were acceptable in the country. Holmes would have worn his famous deer-stalker hat and cape only when travelling or out of town, never in London. Other clothing would have included a smoking-jacket, blazer and flannels and, of course, a dressing-gown, which features in so many of Watson’s accounts. Over the years, Holmes owned at least three, a grey or mouse-coloured one, a blue one and a purple.
Despite his untidiness over papers, Holmes was neat in his personal appearance and Watson refers to his ‘quiet primness of dress’.
Watson’s bedroom was on the second floor (American third) at the back of the house and would have been furnished in a similar fashion to Holmes’ room. There are several references to his coming downstairs to the sitting-room and in ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’, he describes the back yard and its single plane tree, which he could see from his window.
There may not have been gas laid on in the upper floors, for in ‘The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist’, Watson mentions lighting a candle when woken by Holmes in the early hours of the morning. But this may have been easier and quicker than fumbling his way in the dark across the room to light the gas jets which were usually placed on the wall over the fireplace.
Mrs Hudson almost certainly occupied the front bedroom on this floor, while the servant slept on the floor above. In A Study in Scarlet Watson writes of hearing her and the maid passing the sitting-room door on their way upstairs to bed.
There is no reference to a bathroom, although Watson twice mentions taking a bath, but he could have done so in a hip-bath in his bedroom. All the bedrooms would have been equipped with a marble-topped wash-hand stand, complete with a large china bowl and jug. Hot water would have been carried up from the kitchen. Nor is there any reference to a lavatory although, after the cholera epidemic of 1849, a sewer system was installed in the 1860s and by 1881 many houses were connected to the main drainage.
Strangely, for Watson gives detailed accounts of the women he encounters, there is no description anywhere in the canon of Mrs Hudson, apart from one reference to her ‘stately tread’, suggesting she was a dignified, well-built lady. As there is no reference either to a Mr Hudson, William S. Baring-Gould is probably correct in suggesting she was the widow of a prosperous shopkeeper who had invested the money he left her in buying the leasehold of 221 Baker Street with the intention of taking in lodgers, thus providing herself with a steady income.
Certainly, whatever her antecedents, she was a woman of amazing tolerance, putting up with Holmes’ untidiness and irregular life-style, although even her good nature mu
st have been sorely tried when, in one of his ‘queer humours’ as Watson describes them, presumably a manic phase, he carried out revolver practice in the sitting-room, neatly picking out the letters V. R., for Victoria Regina, in bullet holes in the plaster of one of the walls. One wonders what the neighbours thought of the noise. His habit of keeping the old plugs and dottles from his pipes on one corner of the mantelpiece for his first smoke of the morning or of skewering his unanswered correspondence to the centre of the mantelshelf with a jack-knife cannot have been very endearing either.
One has the impression that Holmes and Watson were Mrs Hudson’s first tenants and that she had not become case-hardened by a succession of lodgers and their peculiar ways. She was to grow very fond of both her gentlemen, especially Holmes, who knew how to charm women when he put his mind to it. When she thought he was seriously ill (‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’), she was genuinely distressed. In later years when he became successful, Holmes was to reward her by increasing the rent he paid to a sum Watson regarded as princely.
It is not known exactly what rent she charged for the set of rooms. In Pascoe’s London Guide and Directory for American Travellers, the recommended prices in Baker Street were £1 10s (£1.50p) a week for a single room to £5 for two. As Watson describes the rent as ‘moderate’, she probably charged between £4 and £5 for the three rooms, that is £2 to £2 10s (£2.50p) each, amounting to £208 to £260 a year. This would have included food, cleaning, and possibly also laundry and lighting as well, although they may have had to pay extra for coal. At the end of the week, Watson would have still been left with £1 17s 6d (about £1.87p) or £1 10s 6d (about £1.52p) for clothes, tobacco, travelling expenses and entertainment. It was not a large sum considering Watson’s rather extravagant habits but, once he had settled down into the lodgings, there was less need for him to go looking for company in such places as the American bar at the Criterion.
Mrs Hudson was a good, plain cook of the Scottish style, as Holmes describes her, which probably meant she provided large helpings of nourishing food but nothing fancy. When he wished to entertain guests, such as Lord St Simon, more lavishly, he sent out for an ‘epicurean little cold supper’ consisting of a brace of cold woodcock, a pheasant, a pâté de foie gras pie and bottles of vintage wine. The dinner of oysters and a brace of grouse, served with ‘something a little choice in white wines’, to which he invited Inspector Athelney Jones at the end of the Sign of Four case was probably also supplied by an outside caterer.
Having inspected the rooms, Holmes and Watson decided then and there to take them, Watson moving his possessions in that very same evening, taking with him his tin despatch box but not apparently the bull pup, as there is no further reference to it. As Watson was a kindly soul, one assumes he found it a good home. As she herself owned an elderly and ailing terrier, Mrs Hudson may have put her foot down about allowing another dog into the house. With her permission, Holmes was later to put it out of its misery by giving it one of the pills containing an alkaloid poison he had found in Joseph Stangerson’s room. It was a quick and merciful death.
Holmes arrived the following morning with several boxes and portmanteaus, including the large tin trunk containing papers and mementoes relating to those cases he had already undertaken during the five and a half years he had spent at Montague Street.
And so they took possession of the apartment which was to be Watson’s home for the next eight years, Holmes’ for the next twenty-two and which was eventually to become one of the most famous addresses in London.
* Stamford must have been a qualified doctor at this date, having served as a dresser, like Watson, during his final year as a medical student. He would appear to have held the post as a house surgeon at St Bartholomew’s, a post Watson also held before leaving hospital service to join the army.
* When the American or Long Bar was converted into a cafeteria in the 1960s, the walls and ceiling were covered over with formica which, when removed during renovation in 1984, revealed the original decorations. The Criterion Restaurant was opened in 1992.
† The Holborn Restaurant has since been demolished.
* Baker Street was developed in the eighteenth century by the Dorsetshire businessman Edward Berkely Portman (1771–1823), who named it after a friend of his, Sir Edward Baker. Portman’s son and grandson, the first and second Viscounts Portman, continued to own the land. The properties were therefore leasehold, the land on which they stood part of the Portman estate to which the leaseholders paid ground rent.
* The Abbey National Building Society still receives on average twenty letters a week from all over the world, some asking for Sherlock Holmes’ help with specific problems.
* In ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, Holmes refers to a Mrs Turner who had ‘brought in the tray’ containing ‘the simple fare our landlady had supplied’. Although Watson gives no explanation for her presence in 221B Baker Street, she could either be the maid who brought up the tray prepared by Mrs Hudson, the landlady, from the kitchen, or a temporary replacement for Mrs Hudson, who may have been ill or absent for some reason.
* Other commentators suggest the Grand Hotel in Trafalgar Square or the Hotel Metropole in Northumberland Avenue as the most likely candidate for the hotel where Sir Henry stayed.
CHAPTER FIVE
A STUDY IN SCARLET
4th March 1881–7th March 1881
‘There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.’
Holmes: A Study in Scarlet
For the first few weeks of their shared tenancy of 221B Baker Street, Holmes was on his best behaviour and proved to be a model companion and lodger. He was, Watson reports, quiet in his ways and regular in his habits. Usually in bed by ten o’clock at night, he was up early in the mornings and had breakfasted and left the house before Watson had come downstairs. As far as Watson could discover, his days were spent either at Bart’s in the chemistry laboratory or the dissecting room, or in long solitary walks which took him to the seedier parts of London. On his return, Holmes, with his delight in deliberately mystifying others, at times quite unnecessarily, would show Watson the mud stains on his trousers and explain how, by their colour and consistency, it was possible to tell exactly where he had acquired them, although to what purpose he failed to make clear.
It was during these excursions that Holmes must have set about recruiting the six ragged little street urchins who were to form the Baker Street division of the detective police force, as Holmes at first called them, or the Baker Street Irregulars, their subsequent and best remembered title.
Led by Wiggins, they were to assist Holmes in at least two inquiries, the Study in Scarlet case in March of that year, and the Sign of Four affair seven years later in September 1888 when their number was increased to twelve. It is possible that the same Wiggins acted as leader on both occasions. If he were first recruited at the age of ten or eleven, he would have been only seventeen or eighteen at the time of the Sign of Four inquiry. Watson writes of him then as being ‘taller and older’ than the others while the adjective ‘little’ applied to him in the same passage may refer to his lack of inches compared to better-nourished youths of the same age. On the other hand, ‘Wiggins’ may be a generic name used by Holmes to apply to any of the lads appointed as group-lieutenant and spokesman. One of the ‘Baker Street boys’ was to mount guard on Henry Wood’s lodgings in Aldershot during the Crooked Man inquiry in 1889.*
There was no shortage of such urchins to choose from, as Dr Barnardo† had discovered through his work among them in the East End. London teemed with them. Some were orphans or had run away from violent homes, but many were turned out into the streets by parents too poor to feed them. They earned a few coppers as crossing sweepers or by running errands. When these legitimate methods failed, they survived by pilfering from coster-mongers’ barrows or living off the discarded fruit and vegetables they fo
und in the gutters.
From among their number, Holmes was careful to pick the most intelligent and streetwise. As he was to point out to Watson, they were invaluable as assistants as they were able to go anywhere and hear everything, unlike a more official investigator to whom some people would hesitate to speak openly. All they needed was organisation. The sums of sixpence or a shilling each which Holmes paid a day for their services must have seemed a fortune.
Wiggins must have had a permanent address, for in the Sign of Four inquiry Holmes sent him a wire, instructing him to report with his gang to him at Baker Street. Evidently none of them lived in the immediate area, for Holmes had to reimburse Wiggins the 3s 6d (approximately 17p) it had cost him in fares for the twelve of them to travel there for the appointment. Holmes may have employed a similar group of street urchins during his time in Montague Street, although there is no evidence in the canon to prove this.
He was also careful not to introduce them into 221B Baker Street until he had established himself in Mrs Hudson’s good books as a model lodger. Even so, the sight of six little ragamuffins invading her house en masse was too much for even that good lady’s tolerance, and her exclamations of disgust led Holmes to warn Wiggins that in future only he must report directly. The others were to wait outside on the pavement. These instructions evidently went unheeded, for in the Sign of Four case all twelve came rushing upstairs into the sitting-room and Holmes had to repeat the warning.
These first few weeks were a honeymoon period in Holmes’ and Watson’s relationship as fellow-lodgers, although there were some doubts and minor irritations on Watson’s part. While Watson enjoyed Holmes’ playing of Mendelssohn’s Lieder and other of his favourite pieces on his violin, he found his companion’s habit of laying the instrument across his knees and scraping out a succession of desultory chords, some melancholy, some cheerful, extremely trying at times. Aware of Watson’s impatience, Holmes was careful to round off these exasperating solos with a performance of those musical items which Watson enjoyed.
