Watson's Last Case

by Ian Alfred Charnock

  When Watson returned from Afghanistan he said that his health was ‘irretrievably ruined’. Some have taken this as simply the words of someone who was at a low ebb at the time but I think that there was more to it than that. Watson had been used to being very fit and active — you did not play for ‘the club’ in that golden era under Lennard Stokes without being a fine athlete. Now, as he returned from his army campaign, he was aware that his wounds would prevent him from playing top-class rugby again. It was Watson the athlete, not Watson the man who was looking on his health in such a poor light. A.E. Housman was to draw the distinction between athlete and non-athlete years later in his rather melancholy way when he spoke of the athlete knowing something of death before he actually died because he had already died a little when he had stopped playing his sport. Thus Watson was being factual, not dramatic.

  John H. Watson was born in Northumberland but never really knew the place as his mother died shortly after his birth and his father took him and his brother south to stay with his sister and her husband. The stay there was only temporary as the three Watsons, father and sons, soon travelled to Australia in an effort to find fortune. Watson’s father, Mr H. Watson, was a success in Ballarat[10] as a claims and land agent. This was a job which called for strength of character in the face of often armed adversity, but above all it called for honesty.

  These qualities, as well as being prepared for action, were clearly passed to Watson ‘minor’. However, the rough and tumble of frontier colonial life also passed on to John an appreciation of drink, women and gambling as well as the natural aptitudes for army life in the far-off stations of Empire.

  So successful was Watson père that he was able to send his sons to school in England where John was to befriend Percy (‘Tadpole’) Phelps, ‘a very brilliant boy’ whose uncle was Lord Holdhurst, ‘the great Conservative politician.’

  The school was a natural one for a sporting youth — Rugby. Because Watson was two forms below Phelps it has been taken that Watson was rather a plodder. This is unfair. He had done remarkably well to overcome the deficiencies of a colonial educational background and earn a place at such an exalted school. Unfortunately from the academic point of view, Watson preferred sport to books and so tended to shine on the field, not in the classroom. Given what we know of Phelps from the ‘Naval Treaty’ he was a rather feeble and highly strung young man given to emotional outbursts of self-pity. I do not think Watson suffered by being two forms below ‘Tadpole’.

  It was during the holidays that Watson spent his time with his guardian, who was of course his aunt, in the south of England. Thus he fondly remembers the glades of the New Forest and the shingle of Southsea from his schooldays, a time of contrast to the impecunious spell he found himself in in later life which gave rise to his fond yearnings.

  Watson’s father died when he was still at school but there were sufficient funds to provide his brother with a legacy, including the £50 watch which Holmes was to use in his accurate deductions in the Sign of Four which offended Watson by their coldness (cf. Trevor at Oxford) and enough to defray the school fees for the remainder of Watson’s education.

  Watson’s elder brother — also H. Watson — returned to Australia but was not the same success as his father. He lived in poverty apart from occasional periods of prosperity — these as a result of success in gambling on horses — at once a Watsonian and Australian failing. (I have known Australians bet on everything from the number of beans in a tin to the exact score in a Test Match innings.) He finally died of drink in Australia in 1885, the £50 watch passing to his younger brother as all that remained of his father and brother, the H. Watsons.

  Watson clearly states at the beginning of The Study in Scarlet that he had ‘neither kith nor kin in England’ on his return from active service in Afghanistan. Thus we can assume that his aunt and her husband had both died and that his brother was back in Australia for the last years of his life.

  What was Watson like as a student? He did not play rugby very often for the hospital — only in the Hospital Cup when needed. He was, as I have said, noted for his fairness and firmness by the dressers but we did not really mix with the finals boys. Not that that stopped us from playing tricks on them when using the cadavers. We would do such things as put mice into the abdominal cavity and wait for the reaction which was usually a case of the fainting finalist. Such tricks did not work with John H. Watson. He never fainted[11] — he had nerves of steel.

  For his part he would tell us stories of life in Australia which would be a mixture of the picturesque and the bizarre. One occasion I particularly remember was when he told us about an Aboriginal ceremony called ‘pointing the bone’ in which the tribesman who had been found guilty of breaking their laws would be brought before the elders and a bone pointed at him with the result that he inexplicably died. It was a gloomy winter’s afternoon and the gas lamps hissed a mournful wail and seemed not as bright as usual. His story soon had everyone in the dissecting room enthralled as he built up to the climax. He described the rituals and the staccato dances of the initiates as the condemned man was brought before the elders and the final life-extinguishing bone pointing which left the victim writhing in agony before death took him. Just as he reached this point in his tale he pulled a fibula from the corpse on which he had been working and pointed it at one of the dressers who promptly fainted on the spot. After that we all thought him ‘a good sport’ and even more so when he treated us to a drink at the local public house — called ‘The Butcher’s Arms’ of all names. For myself I was very impressed by his ability to tell a story and thought that he had a second career if doctoring failed to provide for him.

  Despite these thoughts, Watson’s choice of a career as an army surgeon seemed natural enough to one of his honest, healthy, patriotic instincts. (Colonial children were often more patriotic than the home-grown variety!) That his regiment was the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers was a reflection of his birthplace which he would have had to have put down on his registration document at Netley. The army in those days felt that having ‘home-town’ members in a regiment improved morale. This was to reach its height in the First World War with the so-called ‘pal’ regiments which consisted of all the males of a certain location joining up together. On the credit side was the very high morale of these regiments, but that was more than outweighed by the terrible effects on local communities of the whole-scale slaughter of a complete generation of young men of one specific area. It was this which helped to give rise to the legend of the ‘lost generation’ of the First World War and the practice of recruiting ‘pal’ regiments was never resorted to again. Later Watson was to tell that it amused him being attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as he had no recollection of that county — so much for military theories of regimental morale.

  It was during these early army days that Watson got to know Shoscombe and the horse-racing stables there, a knowledge that Holmes was to find very useful in later years so that he even called Watson his ‘Handy Guide to the Turf.’ On the debit side Watson’s love of the Turf was to cost him half his wound pension.[12]

  We now reach the Afghan campaign and the mystery of Watson’s wound. Where exactly was he wounded? He clearly states in The Study in Scarlet that ‘I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery.’ Yet he also wrote of a wounded leg in The Sign of Four — ‘I had a Jezail bullet through it some time before, and, though it did not prevent me from walking, it ached wearily at every change of the weather.’ Finally in The Noble Bachelor he writes of ‘the Jezail bullet which I had brought back in one of my limbs as a relic of my Afghan campaign throbbed with dull persistence.’ Holmes himself added a more precise location by talking of a ‘damaged tendo Achillis’ which all doctors and classics scholars will know is in the heel.

  The answer to this conundrum is quite simple. During the withdrawal from Maiwand, Watson stopped to attend to a wounded soldier who had dislocated
a shoulder by falling off his horse on the rocky outcrops of that area. In the dire circumstances Watson had to attend as best he could to his patient. Thus he laid him on his back and sat next to him bracing his feet against his comrade’s body and pulling on his shoulder and arm with his hands, his attitude being similar to an oarsman in his boat. It was then that the murderous Ghazi fired from below the rocky outcrop. The bullet passed through the right leg injuring the Achilles tendon and then across his body before lodging in his left shoulder where it remained. To a rugby wing forward who needs speed off the mark and the ability to push with the shoulder, the bullet could not have done more damage. His playing days were over and he knew it, hence his sentiments as to irretrievably broken health. By the time he had recovered from those injuries he would be too old to play to a high standard again. He had learnt something of death and, as a consequence, of life.

  What light can I throw on Watson’s famous Knowledge of the Women of Three Continents? It never ceases to amaze me how so many have got this all wrong. ‘Knowledge’ does not mean ‘carnal’ knowledge as so many imply. The simple observation of mannerisms of talk, dress and deportment all bring ‘knowledge of women’; and as Watson had lived on three continents his observations came from the women of three continents. ‘Making love’ has come to mean something far more physical since Watson’s time and so has the expression to have a ‘knowledge of women’.

  We must not forget that at all times Watson was chivalry itself to women, and his admiration of them is revealed by the number of times his writing is at its most descriptive when describing a woman. He was at first pleased and then aghast to hear of Holmes’s/Escott’s engagement to Milvertan’s servant. He thought that she was being cruelly used. Even women who have little physical beauty still have nobility of bearing or some redeeming feature in Watson’s eyes whether they are the mutilated Mrs Ronder or the at first unprepossessing Anne of the Golden Pince-Nez.

  Watson was one of those characters who, like so many young men making their way in the world at that time, felt that they knew everything about women but blushed to the roots if one of them asked him to post a letter for her.

  He also married only once, but more of that later.

  Thus we are now back to early 1881 and the Criterion bar with Watson ‘as thin as a lath and brown as a nut’, wounded, without any friends, and with bleak prospects. I wrote earlier that I rendered Mr Sherlock Holmes a great service by introducing him to Watson and not vice versa. I sincerely meant it. Without Watson, Holmes would have become too cold and calculating. Watson was able to give him perspective. Holmes was even to agree with this by saying that he needed Watson so that he could use him as the whetstone for his mind by thinking aloud in his presence. He even went so far as to say that he was ‘lost’ without his Boswell.

  The attraction of opposites, my sister would no doubt say. I suppose on the mental level that my sister would be right, but deep down they were similar in many ways. Both were chivalrous, honest, fair men who completely trusted each other — Watson because of his friend’s great intellect, and Holmes because to him Watson was a symbol of all that was good and worthy of preservation and protection in a world where crime and injustice were without a true champion until the world’s first consulting detective appeared on the scene.

  The Dresser

  Young Stamford I have been for so long that I shall remain thus and not enlighten anyone as to my proper forename. I rather like my eternal youth and as my forenames are rather prosaic it would add nothing for me to reveal them.

  That I was Watson’s dresser during his final year and the agent of the introduction of Holmes and Watson, you already knew.

  That I came from Kent, the son of a local brewer, the brother of the wife of Neville St Clair (The Man with the Twisted Lip), you now know. There is much you still do not know and some of it I am loath to reveal, but as you will be reading this when I am dead there is no reason for me to hold back now.

  Firstly, my appearance. As a young man I was rather shorter than Watson and also thicker-set. My face was round and ruddy and my hair was red with a curious lock of bright carrot hair at the front. Many people, particularly my barbers, recognized me for that one feature alone. I was rather heavy for my height so that I am quite pleased to be remembered as ‘young Stamford’. To my contemporaries I was ‘Stumpy’, meaning short, or with the perversity of English humour, ‘Lofty’. One wag obviously well up on his history called me ‘Harold’s last victory’ which was more difficult to unravel. I think ‘Young’ will do.

  My next revelation is one that I make by way of a confession. I was Sherlock Holmes’s source of cocaine. I had both the money and the access. Laudanum was still fairly freely available as a medicine on prescription and otherwise, but morphine and cocaine were decidedly more difficult. There were places — Jermyn Street was a regular place — but these sources were not really to be trusted. On the one hand it was not always of good quality (although Holmes was soon adept at refining it) and on the other, it left one open to blackmail. Cocaine was first brought to Europe in about 1750 but was not well known until its use in 1884 by the Viennese oculist Koller, and then only in medical circles. But by 1879 it was already well known to Sherlock Holmes. He had made a study of poisons as part of his self-imposed researches as early as 1876, and even Watson noted in early 1881 that Holmes was ‘well up in belladonna, opium and poisons generally.’ In fact it was one of the most well-known features of him at Bart’s. As Watson recorded me saying at the time, ‘I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness.’ That was precisely what he had done, and as fortune would have it he took it at just the wrong moment. He had just completed a long series of experiments and researches but was still without a case. His mind needed something — alas it got cocaine.

  There were no laws as such against cocaine and it is a great credit to Watson that he was so early aware of its dangers — another proof of Watson’s abilities and learning. However, what I was going to say was, as there were no laws against cocaine, why should the user be liable to blackmail? It is quite simple, the supplier of any addictive drug can have a strong hold over his client and his knowledge can be sold to others who might not be so sympathetic. It is a tightrope that all addicts tread at great risk.

  It also makes a liar of the user. When Holmes and Watson swapped shortcomings as a preliminary to sharing lodgings, Holmes told Watson of his chemicals, experiments, violin playing, and getting in the dumps at times. Unless this last was a hint there is no mention of drug addiction. However, Watson was soon to notice that when Holmes lay idly on the sofa he had ‘such a dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes, that I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic.’ Watson the medic was spot on — Holmes had been addicted for two years that I know of. Yet Watson the chivalrous man steps in and concludes the above sentence by adding — ‘had not the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a notion.’

  It grieves me to use such words as ‘liar’ and ‘addict’ with reference to such a man as Holmes, but cocaine is as insidious and as deadly as any Moriarty and I must be blunt. As I look back through Watson’s stories I see that Watson speaks of ‘weaning him from his drug mania’ but he was well aware that it could return, hence his blessing Cyril Overton’s timely intervention by presenting him with the case of The Missing Three-Quarter. Watson all through shows himself as an enlightened practitioner way ahead of his time and as the loyalest of friends. I said that I had done Holmes a service by introducing him to Watson. It was the least I could do to atone for my other introduction. Perhaps I am too hard on myself. Such a resourceful man as Holmes would have found a source without me, but I still feel guilty.

  I did not become addicted to its use — then. As a bre
wer’s son I had another set of vices. Alcohol was my drug, as it was for many others. It was socially acceptable to be a member of a rugby team and drink to excess, particularly after a famous victory, than to be a Bohemian ascetic alone with a needle in a shuttered room. The one appears healthy indulging in ‘harmless horseplay’, the other somehow more sinister. It was my indulgence in ‘harmless horseplay’ that made me leave Bart’s under a cloud and upset the lives of those I held most dear; whereas Holmes only ever hurt himself. They are both either guilty or innocent — there can be no compromise. Watson and his Beaune, Stamford and his ale are in the same dock as Holmes and his cocaine.

  Talking of dock reminds me of what I should be talking about. I had had three years at Bart’s and that was sufficient to be able to sign on a ship as a ‘surgeon’. It was only a named appointment which involved a seaman’s duties as the norm but a rapid transformation into a surgeon in time of crisis.

  I had prepared myself for my voyage. My reefer jacket was thick and warm but I had a change of clothing for hotter climes. Pride of place in my sea chest went to my surgeon’s bag with its highly polished instruments ready for action.

  My plan was simple. I wished to sail around the world via Australia and I was sure that my skills would help me to achieve that end. If they failed I hoped that my Englishness would be able to fill the breach.

  As a boy I had read stories of tea-clippers, the Horn, the Cape, becalmed, the Barbary Coast, Singapore, the South China Seas, whales and dolphins, giant squids, shipwrecks, junks, sampans, dhows, Magellan, Drake, Raleigh (my hero), and the Spanish Main. Would I meet a pirate? Would I make my fortune? What did the future hold in store for me? Holmes, Watson, family, everything was forgotten as I made my way to my ship. The morning was young and raw, flecks of snow spun helter skelter in the breeze, landing on my newly grown moustache. My nose was cold and as grey-blue as the Thames. The leather of my boots was hardened by the chill and they were like strangers to me. I held my ticket in my hand and searched along the quay for my ship. The Stour was nowhere to be seen. Rigging creaked, water plopped and sprayed, steam hissed but the Stour was invisible. At last I chanced upon a caricature. He was seated on an upturned shrimp basket, a dirty clay pipe between discoloured teeth. His white beard grey with grime, an eye patch giving him a piratical mein, his hooped black and white shirt, red necktie, white trousers (at least I presume that was the original colour), laceless boots, and heavy reefer a grandfather to my own, suggested a nautical calling. I asked him if he knew where the ‘Stour’ was anchored. First he asked if I was a bat. Next he chuckled and spat a large residue of chewing tobacco at a cockling gull near his foot. Finally he pointed. I looked over my shoulder and my heart sank. Between two fire vessels bound for Bombay was a dirty single-stack barge — the Stour. This was my first ‘ship’.