The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors (55 page)

10. Holmes had been studying analytical chemistry and “morbid anatomy” at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (or “Bart’s” as it is affectionately called) when he and Watson first met in January of 1881, as Watson related in
A Study in Scarlet
:

“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.

“How are you?” Holmes said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

A bronze plaque commemorating the event may be found on the wall of the hospital’s pathological laboratory.

11. This was from
The Star
of August 31. For some inexplicable reason, Watson was reading a two-day-old newspaper. But he is right about some of the facts being wrong: Mary Anne (Polly) Nicholls was removed to the
mortuary
, where her abdominal wounds were discovered, not the hospital. And, strictly speaking, she had not been disemboweled.

12. It is difficult to appreciate just how badly shaken Londoners were by the Nicholls murder. The brutality of the attack was unprecedented, and sex crimes per se were virtually unknown — so foreign to Victorian England that the murder of Polly Nicholls was not even recognized as a sex crime until years later, the term not having yet been created.

Sir Melville Macnaghten, who was to join Scotland Yard the following year as assistant chief constable in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division, was to write: “No one who was living in London that autumn will forget the terror created by these murders. Even now (1915) I can recall the foggy evenings, and hear again the raucous cries of the newspaper boys: “‘Another horrible murder, murder, mutilation, Whitechapel!’”

13. Strangely, there are only two references to the gasogene in the writings edited by Conan Doyle: one in
A Scandal in Bohemia
, the other in
The Mazarin Stone
. Yet this ingenious apparatus, which produced carbonated water, is certainly among the better-known furnishings of 221B Baker Street. The gasogene, or
Gazogene-Briet
as it was properly called, was of French manufacture and consisted of two wire-bound glass globes, one on top of the other, connected by a glass tube. The lower globe contained water, the upper globe the chemicals for producing the carbonation. Michael Harrison (in
The London of Sherlock Holmes
) thinks it was probably purchased by Holmes at Mondollot Fils’s London establishment, 13 Little James Street, Bedford Row.

14. Holmes had at least three dressing gowns, or long lounging robes, that have been mentioned from time to time by Watson: one blue, one purple, and one “mouse-colored.” His favorite (based on the number of references to it) would appear to be the latter.

15. This “interesting little matter” could only have been
The Manor House Case
, which Watson mentioned briefly in
The Greek Interpreter
but never bothered to write up, apparently feeling it lacked in dramatic interest. Baring-Gould sets the probable date of its occurrence as Monday, September 3, 1888.

16. Holmes must have been referring to Oscar Wilde’s condemnation of fox hunters as being “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.” However, he was somewhat premature in that the line had not yet been written. It was taken from Wilde’s play
A Woman of No Importance
, which did not have its London premiere until 1893.

17. The London telegraph system was truly a marvel of the age, and Holmes made frequent use of it, even after the telephone came into wide use. Occupying several of the upper floors of the General Post Office Building at St. Martin’s le Grand, the telegraph department employed some 3,000 operators in the 1880s, most of them women. Once a message was received over the wires in the central office, it was rushed by underground pneumatic tube to one of a network of district offices scattered throughout the city, and then by foot messenger to the recipient, often being delivered within minutes of being sent.

18. London’s police constables had been known colloquially as both “bobbies” and “peelers” for several years, the names taken from Sir Robert (Bobby) Peel (1788-1850) who, after taking charge of what was then a small disorganized department, made it into the world’s foremost metropolitan police force.

19. The crest was that of the Sussex Regiment. Some sources give the date of the postmark as 28 August.

20. Holmes could never be accused of false humility, but it would be misleading to leave the impression that he was a braggart. He was simply honest to a fault. “I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues,” he is on record as saying. “To a logician, all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate oneself is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.” (
The Greek Interpreter
)

In any event, there can be no doubt that he was indeed the world’s leading authority on the subject of tobaccos, being the author of the seminal monograph
Upon the Distinctions Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos
. (See
The Sign of the Four
.)

21. Of the Baker Street Irregulars, Watson quotes Holmes as remarking (in
A Study
in Scarlet
): “There’s more work to be got out of one of those little beggars than out of a dozen of the force. The mere sight of an official-looking person seals men’s lips. These youngsters, however, go everywhere and hear everything. They are as sharp as needles.”

Holmes employed the Irregulars to good advantage in several cases, including
The Sign of the Four
,
The Crooked Man
, and
The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax
. This description of Wiggins, by the way, is somewhat more detailed than any found in Watson’s earlier accounts, although this is not the first time he was referred to by Watson as “unsavory and insignificant.” (See
A Study in Scarlet
.)

22. This would have been a park-keeper’s wife by the name of Elizabeth Long, who testified at Annie Chapman’s inquest that she was on her way to early morning market when she also saw and heard the man who was with Annie. She confirmed the conversation “Dicko” heard, but her description varies somewhat. He was indeed wearing a deerstalker and long coat, she told police, but his accent was that of a foreigner, not of a cultured English gentleman. Since he had his back turned to her as she passed, she did not see his face.

23. One authority, Tom Cullen (
Autumn of Terror
), says that according to some “witnesses” who claimed to have seen him, the man carried a Gladstone bag (what was then known in America as a “carpet bag”). Others claimed he carried a bag of a shiny black oilcloth, or “American cloth” as the Victorians called it. Such bags, says Cullen, were popular novelties in the ‘80s, but after the murders began, anyone spotted carrying one in the East End “was not only in peril of arrest, but in positive danger of his life.”

24. Watson, by alluding to socialists “who are always stirring up so much trouble,” may have been thinking about two events that rocked England’s complacent upper classes in the mid-1880s: A riot, during the winter of 1886-87, of unemployed dockworkers and laborers who rampaged and looted their way through Piccadilly and Mayfair before being dispersed; and the events of “Bloody Sunday” in November 1887, both widely believed to have been sparked by socialist agitators. “Bloody Sunday” occurred when troops were called out to disband thousands of unemployed workers who were camping out in Trafalgar Square and St. James’s Park in protest. Altogether four thousand constables, reinforced by grenadiers and mounted cavalry, were deployed to break up the mob, described by the conservative press as “a foul camp of vagrants” and “the scum of London.” A pitched battle ensued, and before the day was over hundreds were injured and more than three hundred arrested.

25. To add to the confusion, when the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police moved to larger quarters on the Victoria Embankment in 1891, the new building became known as
New
Scotland Yard and the old site became
Great
Scotland Yard (originally named because it occupied the site of a palace maintained in medieval times for visiting Kings of Scotland).

It did not end there. Approximately one hundred years later, police headquarters was to be moved yet again, this time to a modern glass office block at Broadway and Victoria Street. It is known as the “new” New Scotland Yard.

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.”