I Have Supper With Sherlock Holmes
lFrom DXSttOUD ROBIHSOX, in Londoe] T HAD supper the other night at the rooms of Mr Sherlock Holmes.
You know, of course, that he is still hale and hearty in spite his great age, although he has long since retired from professional work ?
Despite the competition of thousands of parvenu investigators. the old pioneer has survived all attempts to get rid of him since 1891, when it was falsely reported that he had died in a desperate struggle with his old enemy Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.
The man held responsible for this tragic event was the man who restored him almost miraculously to life— Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, later to be knighted for his efforts. Bereaved admirers of the great detective wrote to Dr. Doyle at the time urging him to abandon all his other work and devote his skill to the Holmes case. Some of the letters he received at that time were very direct. “You brute!” wrote one lady in a fervour of indignation.
“I heard of many who wept,” wrote Doyle later, in his “Memoirs and Adventures” ... “I fear I was utterly callous myself.”
But not too callous happily, to deny his professional services to one of the greet men of the age. So in the end all was forgiven. Doyle is dead these many years, but Holmes lives on. and so I am delighted to report. does his dear friend Dr. Watson.
To my greet regret, neither of them was able to be present in person when I supped at their rooms, but they were there in spirit, all right. Indeed I am not sure that Holmes, in one of his masterly disguises, did not watch me as I ate.
They no longer live in Baker Street. The row of charming Victorian houses of which 221 b was (me has given way to the premises of the Abbey National Building Society. When next you go to London, you will find Holmes and Watson at a small inn in Northumberland Street, just off Northumberland Avenue, a stone’s-throw from Trafalgar Square. Inn Renamed To honour its distinguished guests, the inn has been renamed. “The Sherlock Holmes." Previously it was the "Northumberland Arms.” Holmes first came across it in the 1880’s when it was still part of a larger establishment called the Northumberland Hotel. Sir Henry Baskerville, one of his best known dien'*, stayed there (“Hound of the Baskervilles.*’ Chapter 4). Perhaps the place lacks some of the magic of the Baker Street rooms, but it is a useful address. It is not far from Scotland Yard from which Inspector Lestrade has long since retired. It is almost next door to Charing Cross station —so convenient for one of those sudden forays into the country. ("The game’s afoot. Watson!”) It is also directly opposite a building where Holmes and Watson used to take their Turkish baths. The baths are no longer in It, but the building survives, looking much as it used to. and so do the gas lamps in the street outside, still functioning as they did in the 189 O's. Holmes and Watson are part of the London which lingers on to the delight of the visitor, in spite of efforts that have been made to change it by Kaiser Wilhelm 11, Adolf Hitler and finally the Welfare State. Nastalagia To judge from the appearance of their sitting-room, the famous pair have not ehanged their way of life an
iota since the Baker Slrect days. Holmes's deerstalker cap and Inverness cape hang with Watson’s top-hat frockcoat and stethoscope on a peg behind the door of the sitting-room.
As a romantic-minded wanderer savouring his native London for the first time for many a year, I was inclined to linger lovingly over these items, hoping that the owners would soon bustle in and order Mrs Hudson to produce supper. But I had to eat without them—in the adjoining hotel dining-room, separated from their menage by a sheet of plateglass. Neither of them, I felt, was tar away. There was their thick red wallpaper with its weighty Victorian pattern. The fire glowed in the grate. The worn, cosy arm-chairs stood on each side of the hearthrug. Holmes’s unanswered correspondence was “transfixed by a jack-knife in the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece." just as Watson described it (in the first chapter of “A Study in Scarlet"). Holmes Relics There was the Persian slipper used as a tobacco container: Holmes's pipes and violin; his chemical apparatus on a table in the corner and his amal! case of hypodermic needles which he used in his regrettable period as a cocaine addict.
There were his scrap-books and reference volumes, as well as some of his own works, including the "little monograph on the hundred-and-fourteen varieties of tobacco ash."
From the walls hung his unique collection of rare weapons. On one wall was the patriotic “V.R.” done in bullet pocks by Holmes with a hair-trigger and Boxer cartridges while “in one of his queer humours." Standing before the window was the wax figure of the great man himself, which he used as a decoy for Colonel Sebastian Moran—and the bullet hole through the forehead which the bluffed Colonel duly put there.
The waxen face brooded over me as I ate. The fire and the gas lamps seemed to flicker. Outside the London fog closed in. Did the image of Holmes cock a speculative eye-brow’ Did the brass door-knob rattle, and the folds of the Inverness cape stir gently as the door began to open? Surely they did. Surely Holmes and Watson had arrived at 1 •' to join me at the feast
Ah. nostalgia. Footnote: Cynical London friends tell me that Holmes and Watson don’t live at the inn. They say that the room is a reconstruction first arranged on the site of the old Baker Street address for the Festival of Britain in 1951, to the designs of Mr Michael Weight. They say the exhibit was later taken to New York, and that it has now found a permanent home in Northumberland Street with the consent and help of Mr Adrian Conan Doyle. If this means that the whole thing is a fantasy. 1 couldn’t bear it. Could you?
Archaeological SocietySeveral small groups which have been operating in the Wellington area for some time have combined to form the capital’s first archaeological society. The new society will make field work a regular feature of its activities.— (P.A.)
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Press, Volume C, Issue 29500, 29 April 1961, Page 8
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1,081I Have Supper With Sherlock Holmes Press, Volume C, Issue 29500, 29 April 1961, Page 8
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