by Daniel Smith
Scouting for Heroes
Like much of the British population of his age, Conan Doyle was an admirer of Robert Baden-Powell, who had achieved national hero status when he led a force of a few hundred soldiers and civilians against a besieging force of several thousand Boers in the South African town of Mafeking. He held off the Boers for a total of 217 days before relieving British forces arrived, in what was regarded as an outstanding example of military leadership. The siege ran from the end of 1899 into early 1900, just as the Second Boer War was getting into full swing. In 1900, Conan Doyle wrote his rallying call to the British people, The Great Boer War, in which he described Baden-Powell in these terms:
Colonel Baden-Powell is a soldier of a type which is exceedingly popular with the British public. A skilled hunter and an expert at many games, there was always something of the sportsman in his keen appreciation of war . . . There was a brain quality in his bravery which is rare among our officers. Full of veldt craft and resource, it was as difficult to outwit as it was to outfight him. But there was another curious side to his complex nature . . . An impish humour broke out in him, and the mischievous schoolboy alternated with the warrior and the administrator.
It should thus perhaps come as little surprise that Holmes – with whom he seemed to share a number of traits – appealed to Baden-Powell. In his military manual, Aids to Scouting for N.C.O.s and Men, written just a few months before the siege of Mafeking, he named the Sherlock Holmes stories as recommended reading for all cavalry Scouts. He wanted them to pick up tips on tracking and deductive reasoning from the master. He adapted much of that text for his book Scouting for Boys, which helped launch the modern Scouting movement in 1908. Again, Holmes featured prominently, with the text making no less than six references to the detective or his real-life counterpart, Joseph Bell. He also suggested to Scout leaders that they hone their boys’ deductive skills by setting up ‘crimes’ for the Scouts to solve, either using the canonical tales as a blueprint or else devising cases of their own. In his 1933 biography, Lessons from the Varsity of Life, Baden-Powell again emphasized the importance of the Holmes example to the military man:
When I went scouting with Fred Burnham [who taught Baden-Powell woodcrafting in Rhodesia], he was quicker than I in noticing ‘sign’, but in pointing it out to me he would ask: ‘Here, Sherlock, what do you make of this?’ Unfortunately we British make very little use of the art, either in our military or civil training, so when we go on service, not being accustomed to tracking habitually, we often neglect to use it, even when the ground before us lies open like a book, full of information . . . There was a lot of Sherlock Holmes work to be done in our job.
His Master’s Voice
Of the sixty canonical stories, Holmes narrates just two himself. These were ‘The Lion’s Mane’ and ‘The Blanched Soldier’, both late stories dating to 1926. ‘The Lion’s Mane’, notable for exposing one of the most unexpected killers in the canon, had good reason not to be narrated by Watson. It is set during Holmes’s retirement and the good doctor was simply not there. ‘The Blanched Soldier’ is different, though. It is set in 1903 and begins with a justification for the choice of narrator.
The ideas of my friend Watson, though limited, are exceedingly pertinacious. For a long time he has worried me to write an experience of my own. Perhaps I have rather invited this persecution, since I have often had occasion to point out to him how superficial are his own accounts and to accuse him of pandering to popular taste instead of confining himself rigidly to facts and figures. ‘Try it yourself, Holmes!’ he has retorted, and I am compelled to admit that, having taken my pen in my hand, I do begin to realize that the matter must be presented in such a way as may interest the reader.
It is a brave admission on the part of Holmes, but also, by proxy, on the part of Conan Doyle. The absence of the mediating presence of Watson is felt in all those stories that he does not tell. For many readers, the Holmes-told or third-person narrations do not quite come up to scratch. Holmes himself arguably nailed the problem in ‘The Blanched Soldier’. Watson is, he said, ‘one to whom each development comes as a perpetual surprise, and to whom the future is always a closed book’. In other words, he stands in for the reader on adventures, knowing as little as we do about what is coming next. It is his wide-eyed wonder at what might lay ahead that gives the stories their energy and perhaps explains why Holmes was allowed to wield the pen himself only twice.
The Bee-All and End-All
We learn from the canon that Holmes retired (in truth, semi-retired) from the world of detection in 1903, moving to the rolling hills of the Sussex Downs, a few miles from Eastbourne on the English south coast. There, despite increasing problems with rheumatism, Holmes became an apiarist – that is to say, a bee-keeper. This being Holmes, however, he was not content to dabble in his new hobby but looked instead to utterly master it. The result was a tome going under the title of The Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, With Some Observations Upon the Segregation of the Queen. In certain respects, this change of lifestyle might be considered emblematic of Holmes returning to his roots in old age. He was, after all, descended from a line of country squires. But in apiary he also found a pastime that allowed him to practise many of the same skills that he had wielded so effectively as a detective. For him, a bee colony represented a complete society to be observed and understood, a world to be intellectually conquered. His handbook, then, was not so much a retreat into rural tranquillity but was instead ‘the fruit of pensive nights and laborious days when I watched the little working gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London’.
And so, the man whose intellectual brilliance had struck fear into the hearts of the nation’s criminals ended his days, fittingly, as the master of all he surveyed.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conan Doyle, A., Memories and Adventures (Hodder & Stoughton, 1924)
Conan Doyle, A., The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (Penguin, 1981)
Haining, P. (ed.), A Sherlock Holmes Companion (Barnes & Noble, 1980)
Haining, P. (ed.), The Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook (Reed Editions, 1987)
Lellenberg, J., Stashower, D. and Foley, C. (eds), Arthur Conan Doyle – A Life in Letters (HarperPress, 2007)
Lycett, A., Conan Doyle – The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007)
Nown, G., Elementary, My Dear Watson: Sherlock Holmes Centenary – His Life and Times (Ward Lock, 1986)
O’Brien, J., The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics (OUP, 2013)
The Sherlock Holmes Journal (the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, 1952–)
Smith, D., The Ardlamont Mystery: The Real-Life Story Behind the Creation of Sherlock Holmes (Michael O’Mara Books, 2018)
Tracey, J., The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana (Jack Doubleday & Co., 1977)
Wagner, E. J., The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective’s Greatest Cases (John Wiley & Sons, 2007)