by Daniel Smith
Baritsu or Bartitsu
During his legendary encounter with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes turned not to boxing but to his notable abilities in baritsu – a ‘Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me’. There is just one problem with his claim. There is no such sport, nor any indication that it ever existed. It is likely Conan Doyle was deliberately or accidentally mis-rendering Bartitsu, a form of self-defence containing elements of boxing, jujitsu, kickboxing and stick-fighting. It was the brainchild of an Englishman, Edward Barton-Wright, who introduced it in Britain around 1898 having lived for several years in Japan. It was gaining some traction among enthusiasts at the time when Conan Doyle was writing of Holmes’s encounter with Moriarty, although it had not yet been invented when their fight was supposed to have taken place. But then, Holmes always was ahead of his time.
A Dog-ged Pursuit
In ‘The Creeping Man’, Holmes claimed to be giving serious thought to writing a monograph on the use of dogs in the work of the detective. He could claim a number of canine successes in his own career. In particular, he used ‘an ugly, long-haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher, brown-and-white in colour, with a very clumsy waddling gait’ called Toby in The Sign of the Four. He was, Holmes said, ‘a queer mongrel, with a most amazing power of scent. I would rather have Toby’s help than that of the whole detective force of London’. Then there was Pompey in ‘The Missing Three-Quarter’, ‘the pride of the local draghounds – no very great flier, as his build will show, but a staunch hound on a scent’. The advantage Holmes obtained from his dog companions was in marked contrast to the experiences of the London police in the late Victorian period. During the Jack the Ripper investigation of 1888, the employment of two bloodhounds called Burgho and Barnaby was a fairly unmitigated disaster. It was after the slaughter of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes at the end of September that there was a call for dogs to be put on the scent of the killer. Burgho and Barnaby were duly trialled for a permanent position on the force, having been obtained from a bloodhound breeder in Yorkshire called Edwin Brough. While the dogs proved effective at tracking scents over long distances in practice exercises, the experiment soon started coming undone. With the Ripper briefly ceasing his activities, there was no fresh scent to pursue. Then the press inaccurately reported that the dogs had got lost in the London fog just as they were being summoned to an assignment. In fact, they were on a training session on Tooting Common when the call came from a distant part of the city, so it was actually London’s geography that prevented them from attending. By the end of October, Brough had taken his dogs back after receiving no official indication that they were wanted long term. But word of their departure had not spread widely among the police, so when Mary Kelly fell victim to the Ripper in early November, the dogs were again summoned (this being the ideal opportunity for them to prove what they could do) and the crime scene was left undisturbed for fully two hours before it emerged that the hounds would not be making an appearance after all. Several years later, Brough would suggest that the Ripper deliberately paused his slaughter while the dogs were operating in the city. Whether that is true or not, we shall never know. But how many lives might have been saved had Pompey and Toby been on the murderer’s trail rather than Burgho and Barnaby.
Ripper Yarns
It was the crime that shocked a nation and has resonated down the generations. Jack the Ripper prowled the East End of London from 1888 until perhaps 1891 and was responsible for the brutal murders of at least five women and maybe as many as eleven. They were slayings for which no one was ever ultimately held responsible. As we have seen elsewhere in this book, Conan Doyle eagerly seized upon real-life crimes to inform the Holmes stories. However, the absence of any Ripper-inspired narratives, or even allusions, are striking in a ‘curious incident of the dog in the night time’ sort of way. Several authors and film-makers have subsequently matched the detective against the Ripper, with varying degrees of success – the movies A Study in Terror and Murder by Decree are two of the more notable examples. Yet Conan Doyle steered clear of the subject entirely. The reason is perhaps to be found in an observation Holmes made in ‘The Naval Treaty’: ‘. . . the most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.’ Holmes’s genius relied on an ability to spot the detail that did not fit with the expected norm – the snag in the fabric that when tugged could unravel a whole case – along with a deep understanding of human motivations (among them, revenge, passion and greed) that belied his reputation for being unempathetic. In a case like that of the Ripper, though, the crimes lacked any clear rationale – there was no pre-existing relationship between killer and victim in each case, no sane motivation to explain the slaughter. They were instead crimes that suggest the kind of psychopathological or sociopathological malfunctioning that did not ever find a place in the canon. Nonetheless, Conan Doyle did undertake some exploration of the Ripper murders himself – but he made precious little headway. The case did not seem to grab his imagination in the way of the Edalji or Slater cases (see pages 148 and 162), where clear lines of evidence could be examined and evaluated.
THE BLACK MUSEUM
In late 1892 – when the Ripper murders were still fresh in the collective memory – Conan Doyle was shown around Scotland Yard’s ‘invitation only’ museum (known as the Black Museum). There he was shown a letter that purported to be from the Ripper. Why, Doyle asked, had a facsimile not been made and publicized around the world – as he was sure Holmes would have done – in the hope that someone, somewhere would recognize the handwriting? Then, in 1903 or 1904, he was taken on a tour of the Whitechapel streets that had provided the backdrop for the Ripper’s violence, with an officer who had worked on the case showing him around. All to no avail, though. Jack the Ripper was simply not the kind of quarry that Holmes or Conan Doyle were well adapted to stalk.
A Bad Habit
There is a popular misconception that Holmes was addicted to opium. He was not. He was famously spotted by Watson in a Limehouse opium den in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, but that was in the interests of an investigation and he was quick to reassure Watson that he had not taken up the evil O. He was, though, an inveterate user of cocaine and an occasional user of morphine. In The Sign of the Four, for example, there is the most astonishing scene of Holmes – for want of a better phrase – shooting-up. A story published in 1890 and set a couple of years earlier, there he is with a bottle of his favoured seven-per-cent solution of cocaine and a hypodermic syringe extracted from a neat morocco case. His long, white fingers are described as ‘nervous’ and his ‘sinewy forearm and wrist’ are ‘all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks’. Only with the hit is he able to sink back into his ‘velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction’. The fact of the matter is that at this stage in Holmes’s career, cocaine was still a relatively new and little understood drug.
THE ORIGINAL COKE
It had only been in 1884 that the Austrian ophthalmologist, Karl Koller, first heralded cocaine as a wonder anaesthetic. His friend Sigmund Freud was another enthusiast, publishing a celebratory scientific paper (‘On Coca’) that same year. Two years later, in the US, John Pemberton would use the coca leaf from which the drug is derived in his initial formulation for Coca-Cola.
Holmes’s addiction probably began when cocaine was still regarded as a legitimate means of bringing peace of mind and inducing positive physiological effects. It was not long, however, before serious doubts as to its safeness arose. Freud, for example, had introduced it to a friend who soon began suffering the symptoms of chronic addiction, leading ultimately to his death in 1891. By the end of the 1880s, few were labouring under the illusion that it was the panacea it had once been assumed to be. Watson was certainly well attuned to its dangers and even Holmes acknowledged: ‘I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one.’ Nonetheless, he continued to use for several more years, although with diminish
ing regularity. By the time of ‘The Missing Three-Quarter’ (published 1904 but set in the mid-1890s), thanks in no small part to Watson’s prolonged intervention, Holmes had stopped using, saving him from ‘that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career’.
A Gambling Man? You Bet
Think of Dr Watson and the chances are you imagine a figure of doughty dependability and straightforwardness. But Watson had his demons as much as the next person. He may have scolded Holmes for his chemical vices, but his own life was far from vice-free. In particular, Conan Doyle hinted that the doctor had something of a gambling problem. Take, for example, an exchange between Holmes and Watson in ‘Shoscombe Old Place’ – a story that pivots around one man’s desire to win the famous Epsom Derby race. ‘By the way, Watson, you know something of racing?’ Holmes asks. ‘I ought to,’ comes the reply. ‘I pay for it with about half my wound pension.’ Then there is a curious detail in ‘The Dancing Men’. Watson has been invited to make an investment but Holmes concludes that he is not keen to since ‘Your cheque book is locked in my drawer, and you have not asked for the key.’ Why on earth should Holmes be guardian of Watson’s money? Because, simply, he cannot be trusted with it himself – the result of his penchant for gambling. Gaming is a recurrent motif in the Holmes stories. Besides ‘Shoscombe Old Place’, horse racing is also central to ‘Silver Blaze’, while in other tales assorted characters are shown to have fallen on hard times as a result of betting – among them the ancient Roylott family in ‘The Speckled Band’ and Sir George Burnwell in ‘The Beryl Coronet’.
VICTORIAN GAMBLERS
For the ostensibly strait-laced Victorians, gambling represented a serious threat to the social fabric. Generally regarded as a vice of the lower classes (one contemporary commentator claimed that it blossomed amid the ‘ignorance of servants and others of the least intelligent class’), in truth it claimed many upper-class victims, too. For instance, in the mid-nineteenth century a certain Squire Osbaldeston SHERLOCK UNLOCKED – a Member of Parliament and celebrated sportsman who excelled as a jockey, rower and cricketer – built up gambling debts in excess of £200,000 (some £2 million in modern money) and had to sell his estates before dying in poverty in 1866. By the time Holmes was at work, the bookmaker was regarded as among the lowliest figures in society. It is somewhat surprising that Conan Doyle should then inflict a gambling problem upon the otherwise upright Watson, but it certainly makes for a far more nuanced character.
Beastly Behaviour
In ‘Silver Blaze’, Holmes detects a subtle pattern of animal mutilations inflicted by scalpel. That story was published in 1892 but fifteen years later Conan Doyle would find himself fighting the case of a man accused of much more gruesome animal butchery. George Edalji was brought up in a village, Great Wyrley, not far from Birmingham. His mother was an English woman and his father a Parsee Indian who had become a Church of England vicar. It was an unorthodox background and George experienced a good deal of racial intolerance growing up. Nonetheless, he was a bright boy who applied himself to his studies and looked set to prosper. Then, about the time that ‘Silver Blaze’ first appeared in The Strand, he was accused of sending a series of disturbing, anonymous letters around his village. Eleven years later, Great Wyrley experienced a spate of grisly attacks on horses, sheep and cows, in which the animals were cut along their stomachs with a sharp knife and left to bleed to death. More anonymous letters flew around the town, naming Edalji – who by then had established a successful legal practice – as the culprit. He was arrested, found guilty and sentenced to seven years of hard labour. Yet the evidence against him was scant. An expert witness who had accused him of being the author of those earlier abusive letters was discredited, soil samples that were used to link him to the crime scenes were flawed and, perhaps most pertinently, the mutilations continued even after his conviction. The case garnered significant attention and, under pressure from campaigners convinced there had been a miscarriage of justice, Edalji was freed after three years. However, he was not pardoned and was thus unable to continue to work as a solicitor. Conan Doyle heard of the case in late 1906 and was soon convinced of Edalji’s innocence. Then, early the following year, he went to meet Edalji in person. Edalji was already in the hotel lounge designated for their interview, reading a newspaper when Conan Doyle arrived. The author at once realized from Edalji’s mode of reading that he had terrible eyesight – so bad, he was sure, that the idea that he could carry out the finely executed mutilations in the dead of night of which he was accused did not stand up. Conan Doyle took to the press to fight Edalji’s corner and within a few months he was cleared by a specially assembled government commission. This meant he could at last resume his career in the law. His case was also instrumental in pushing forward plans for a Court of Criminal Appeal, which was established before the year was out.
The Best Man for the Job
Early in The Hound of the Baskervilles, James Mortimer tells Holmes that he has consulted him because ‘you are the second highest expert in Europe’.
‘May I inquire who has the honour to be first?’ Holmes asked, not unreasonably.
‘To the man of precisely scientific mind,’ came the reply, ‘the work of Monsieur Bertillon must always appeal strongly.’
It was by no means an unreasonable claim as Alphonse Bertillon developed new investigative methods adopted throughout the world around the time that Holmes was active. Holmes even acknowledged his greatness, expressing enthusiastic admiration in ‘ The Naval Treaty’ for the ‘French savant’. So just what did Bertillon do? His greatest contribution was to revolutionize methods of criminal identification and cataloguing through the application of anthropometry (the scientific study of the proportions and measurements of the body). Born in 1853, he became an officer in the French police force and soon recognized the deficiencies in the existing system of identification, which was based on names linked to photographic images. As a result, it was all too easy for recidivist miscreants to assume a different name or superficially alter their appearance and so escape the clutches of the law for years at a time. Alongside photographs of arrested felons, Bertillon introduced a record of numerous physical features, among them the length and breadth of the head, and lengths of the left foot, the forearm and the middle finger – all features that could not be easily altered. He also took account of the shapes of facial features and noted specific individual characteristics including tattoos and scars. Furthermore, he helped develop the standardized ‘mugshot’, with views taken from the front and side. The so-called Bertillon system was not without its flaws – it was, for instance, best suited to cataloguing fully grown males, although in reality that encompassed the majority of serious criminals – but it was a major step forward. Before long it was rolled out throughout Europe and the Americas. Only with significant advances in fingerprint technology – an area to which Bertillon himself contributed – was it eventually superseded.
FOOTPRINTS AND BALLISTICS
Bertillon also oversaw a number of other forensic advances that Holmes would doubtless have regarded with a mixture of appreciation and mild envy. For example, he developed means of footprint preservation using plastic compounds, pioneered new methods of crime scene photography and recording, progressed our understanding of ballistics and even invented a bit of kit that could measure the amount of force used in cases of breaking-and-entering. The head of his profession, with Holmes a close second? It is a bold claim but a case can certainly be made.
Away with the Fairies
Holmes – with his reputation for unshakeable rationalism – was not one to give much credence to the idea of the supernatural. In ‘The Devil’s Foot’, he flatly refused ‘to admit diabolical intrusions into the affairs of men’. It came as a huge surprise to some fans, then, when in the 1920s Conan Doyle took up his pen to suggest that the world was in possession of photographic evidence of the existence of fairies. It was in 1920 that Conan Doyle, whose belief in Spiritualism
was already well established (see here), learned of the existence of the said photos. They had been taken by two young Yorkshire girls, Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances Griffiths, and purported to show fairies spotted in the village of Cottingley back in 1917. Doyle was at first sceptical but his friend, Edward L. Gardner – a member of the mystical Theosophical Society – was convinced. Whatever they were, Conan Doyle came to believe that there was something deeply mysterious about the figures captured in the images. When it turned out that the girls had taken more fairy photos in 1920, Conan Doyle seems to have been swept up in the excitement. He wrote an article about the fairy pictures for The Strand in December 1920, which led to him being deluged with more photographs, some claiming to be further authentic images of fairies and others claiming to show how easily they could have been faked. Conan Doyle remained resolute, claiming that the legitimacy of the Cottingley fairies pictures had yet to be undermined. In 1922, he wrote an account of the entire affair called The Coming of the Fairies. In its conclusion, he said that there was sufficient evidence ‘already available to convince any reasonable man that the matter is not one which can be readily dismissed, but that a case actually exists which up to now has not been shaken in the least degree by any of the criticism directed against it’. It was only in the 1980s that Elsie Wright admitted the photos were a hoax after all, constructed in part from pictures of fairies cut from the 1915 edition of Princess Mary’s Gift Book (to which, ironically, Conan Doyle had been a contributor). Frances Griffiths, however, claimed the authenticity of one of the photos until her dying day. Conan Doyle never lost his faith in the pictures.