by Martin Daley
It is not until Arroyo Day 1920 that the first written reference to the parading of the French Drums appears in the 1st Battalion’s Digest of Service; this was done during the interval of the sports activities. Six drummer boys dressed in replica drummer’s uniforms of the British 34th Foot carried the French Drums and another dressed as the 34th’s Drum-Major carried the French Drum-Major’s Staff in the post of honour at the head of Regimental Band and Drums on parade. Ever since – whenever possible – it has been the custom on Arroyo Day and on other Regimental occasions to parade the Drums and Staff; these now being carried by soldiers of the Regiment.
Further details about the Battle of Arroyo; the Peninsular War, of which it was part, as well as the countless other campaigns that have seen the Regiment’s involvement, can be found at the Border and King’s Own Royal Border Regimental Museum in Carlisle Castle, that is open to the public year round. Amongst the vast amount of valuable items and memorabilia from three hundred years of campaigning are the six Arroyo Drums themselves. Also displayed are the medals of Sergeant Moses Simpson, who wrenched the French Drum Major’s staff from him during the battle.
Some of the characters in the novel actually existed, such as Isaac Scott, Robert Gibson and Sir Henry Campbell- Bannerman. Others however did not and the fictitious character of Harry Vaughan should not be confused with that of Major Charles Davies Vaughan DSO, hero of the Regiment during the same period. Nor should Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Hulme be mistaken for one of the distinguished Hume family; several of whose members served the Regiment with honour and two of whom – brothers John and Robert Hume – both commanded units of the Regiment in the 19th century.
There are almost inevitably liberties taken in the novel with regard to certain geographical locations, such as the interior castle buildings and the police station, but it is hoped that local experts will forgive this, as our fictional heroes must be humoured during their adventures.
Martin Daley
If you enjoyed The Adventure of the Spanish Drums by Martin Daley, you might be interested in The Adventure of the Bloody Tower by Donald MacLachlan, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from The Adventure of the Bloody Tower by Donald MacLachlan
Chapter One
Eagerly I sprang to my feet in the crowded, sweltering and gassy Shoreditch Music-hall, in response to an impassioned and urgent cry that rang from the stage. “Is there a doctor in the house?”
“I am a doctor,” I shouted hastily, raising a proud and prominent hand on high. The actors stopped, confused, glancing in puzzlement at me and at each other. Only then did I understand, mortified, that theirs was not an authentic appeal; it was merely a supposedly comic line in the remarkably vulgar act.
I can look back now with a wry smile at my blushing humiliation before scores of cackling, finger-pointing Londoners. And, worse, before a roaring dozen of my fellow medical students, who had chosen this low venue to celebrate our final examination results and to launch our new careers in an atmosphere thick with smoke, sweat, beer and onions.
The incident comes wistfully to mind whenever I have occasion to tell my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes that he is lucky to have a doctor in the house at 221B, Baker Street; a doctor who can, and does, keep a watchful eye on his health, and is ready, no matter how brusquely treated, firmly to order him to rest and to recuperate from his constant overwork.
It was my own health, however, that was the more troubled in the summer of 1883. Holmes had kept me exceedingly busy on a skein of trying cases in the preceding months. The consulting detective, who was now working on a difficult case of embezzlement, was dog-tired, irritable and snappish. I, depressed also by a deep disappointment in my personal affairs, was truly brought low.
I had sought to divert myself from my depression by compiling notes on a most outré case of murder and attempted murder upon which Mr. Holmes (with me and my revolver in support) had been engaged early in the spring. The murderer’s foul modus operandi, and his horrible choice of a poisonous snake as his weapon, were truly bizarre, fantastic, even lunatic; yet a young woman had died, almost on the eve of her marriage. Her twin sister had been saved only by the skill and determination of Mr. Holmes; and justice had been visited upon the cruel and choleric murderer by his own serpent. It had struck me that if I had Mr. Holmes’s permission, and that if names, dates and circumstances were suitably disguised, I might submit this story to a magazine for publication as fiction. Thus I might increase my limited income and rely somewhat less on the unremitting generosity of my good friend. However, depression soon returned, and on this particular July day, despite the advanced morning hour, I had declined breakfast, and lay spiritless and despondent in my rumpled bed.
I had received a long letter from my old friend Stevenson, in France, reporting upon his own health, which, happily, was somewhat improved since the winter. He expressed his gratitude, once again, both for my professional advice and for my past praises of his adventure story of the one-legged sea cook and the tropical island of pirate treasure. Stevenson told me that yet another tale of adventure for boys by “Captain George North”, his nom de plume, was beginning its appearance as a serial story in Young Folks. I had sent out for the edition of June 30th of this juvenile magazine, and finally began dejectedly to read Stevenson’s historical tale of The Black Arrow when Holmes bounded up the stairs and erupted loudly into my hitherto silent room. He announced that I must immediately accompany him on yet another expedition that promised more long and wearing hours. I regret to say that I simply blew up at him.
“Holmes, blast it, I cannot. You have worn me out. I am done in. I must have a rest; no, a proper holiday. You may go out on your own, and you are welcome to it. I shall finish my reading on Jon Amend-All and his Black Arrow, and then, this very day, I shall pack a bag and take a train to the seaside somewhere. I shall see you in two weeks time.”
“Oxford,” said Holmes, blandly.
“Oxford?” I returned, puzzled, and somewhat nettled at the offhand manner in which he greeted my unusual emotional outburst. “What has Oxford to do with it? Oxford is nowhere near the sea.”
“True, my dear Watson, but it is where I recommend that you and I begin this little holiday of yours.”
“You and I?” I exclaimed, rolling reluctantly out of bed and aiming my feet at my comfortable old slippers. “We? Well, I should be delighted if you would accompany me, most delighted. You most certainly need a holiday, too; but what of your cases, your work? And why Oxford, may I ask?”
“Because we have an intriguing invitation to visit there,” replied Holmes, with a sudden twinkle in his eye.
He went to the ornate Sheffield-plate letter tray as we entered our living room, and passed to me an opened cream envelope. “It is from my old sparring partner in Oxford, Masterman-Pugh, who has proposed a brief visit, and has included you, my dear and very tired friend, in his invitation. Work can wait; I seem to have mislaid my few skills anyway.”
“Sparring partner?”
“Edward Masterman-Pugh and I were intellectual sparring partners at the University,” said Holmes. “We were not close friends – I had but one, a chap called Trevor – but we did form our own private debating society, as it were, and fought many a strenuous battle of words and ideas with each other. I found his cerebral company both stimulating and challenging, and he mine. He is, pro tem., a Fellow at Magdalen. I imagine everybody there detests him.”
“Detests him?”
“Oh, indeed, Watson. He is quite the most arrogant and infuriatingly superior man I have ever known; outside myself, that is.” Holmes smiled easily. “He is also, outside my own family, quite the most naturally intelligent man I have ever met.”
Holmes began to fiddle with the ugly bronze ink well on his cluttered desk. I winced, awaiting the inevitable spill. My friend is a tireless fiddler, constantly picking objects up and putting them down again in the wrong place; he cannot stay still for a minute. Except when he is transport
ed by good music, his hands, eyes and brain are constantly on the move. “Holmes, do put the blessed ink well down,” I commanded him, wearily.
Holmes obeyed, hastily apologizing. His lofty brow knitted. “On second thought, Watson, perhaps a visit to the abrasive Masterman-Pugh would be far from a holiday for you. Better the seaside, although, in July, it would surely be far too crowded.”
“Holmes, I am intrigued, I admit it. Someone who draws from you such high praise, and high criticism, must be a man worth meeting. Oxford it shall be, then; but I shall be most careful to pack my swimming suit, and to flee at once for the seaside if he is one half as unbearable as you suggest.”
Holmes and I laughed together. “Good old Watson,” cried Holmes, clapping me on my pajama-clad shoulder. “Why, you are in better health already. We can go on to the seaside after Oxford, if you wish. I shall send a wire to Masterman-Pugh at once. Shall I call down for a late breakfast for you? Or is it an early luncheon?”
Masterman-Pugh’s reply stated that he would hope to see both of us on the 24th of the month. Magdalen’s hospitality then would extend, he added, to what he described as a special and unusual dinner in Magdalen’s Hall.
Then his beautifully scripted letter offered an intriguing challenge:–
Your professional services may be called upon to resolve a most puzzling criminal case: the mysterious disappearance of two young brothers, some time ago, and perhaps their foul murder by their own uncle.
Mr. Holmes laughed in delight.
“The question is: Is Masterman-Pugh playing games? Or does he mean it? I can think of no such disappearance in the area of Oxford, and certainly of no such murder. I shall examine my records, but surely I should be aware of such an unsolved mystery. Aha, Watson, perhaps we face another challenge.”
“Holiday,” I replied, wearily. “A holiday, not work; not a challenge, and not another case.”
“Very well, Watson,” said my companion. “You win. But you never know –” his voice trailed off. “It might be –”
“Holmes, you are incorrigible.”
The detective looked up apologetically from the puzzling letter.
“You know, Masterman-Pugh would have made an excellent consulting detective if he had chosen so to apply himself. Alas, I regret to say, while he has his good points and can be most generous, he is a living caricature of supercilious academic snobbery. What he thinks of Army physicians, I hesitate to imagine. What little he thinks of consulting detectives, I am afraid that I already know.”
The ominous thought began to restore my dejection. Holmes then kindly and manfully tried to cheer me up, fussing over me like a solicitous mother hen, and playing for me his own most spirited and uplifting solo version of the third movement from Mendelssohn’s lovely violin concerto.
Magdalen College was all that Holmes had spoken of, and everything that an Oxford college should be, with its fine Founder’s Tower, its echoing and beautiful chapel, and the soothing play of light through the arched openings of the flagged cloisters. Its dignified Perpendicular Gothic architecture was engaging. Its lichened, crenelated walls were studded with fantastic gargoyles and grotesques, of abbots and apes, of bishops and beasts, of mitres and monsters. It was a quiet, soothing world, and upon entering it I felt strangely at peace, if a little nervous at the prospect of encountering the daunting Masterman-Pugh.
I found that Masterman-Pugh was also all that Holmes had described. I have encountered some exceedingly strange customers in my time, and many of them have been inflicted upon me by the detective and his cases. Masterman-Pugh eminently so qualified. He was remarkably tall, taller than Holmes by two full inches, gangling, jerky in his movements, never still. Like Holmes, he was always moving and fiddling, his eyes constantly roving, and his mind, clearly, always at full gallop. No wonder, I thought, that he and Holmes had gravitated together; two rushing rivers of nervous energy clashing together in an intellectual whirlpool of argument and debate. And his voice! A sneering voice of pretentious accent, more offensively “cultured” than that of any starched young society snob. It was a voice that dominated conversation, made it clear that its owner suffered not fools gladly; and implied that, in Masterman-Pugh’s world, everybody but Masterman-Pugh was by definition a fool. He spoke, even to one person, as if addressing a large and slow-witted audience, and with painfully pedantic exactitude.
He greeted us cordially enough, however. His small but comfortable rooms were fastidiously tidy. While Holmes’s part of our Baker Street quarters was a hopeless mess of books and papers, strewn at random as if by a tempest, Masterman-Pugh’s immaculate mahogany desk and table bore precise pyramids of books; the largest book at the bottom, the smallest at the top. His bookshelves were not sorted by author or by subject, but uniformly had the tallest books at the left, the shortest at the right. Masterman-Pugh even used his pocket-handkerchief, needlessly, to dust our chairs as he showed us to them.
Mr. Holmes and Masterman-Pugh touched verbal foils, and fenced with each other over names and arguments from the past, and more created on the spur of the moment. Musing over Masterman-Pugh’s fino for almost an hour, I could see why they suited each other so well as intellectual sparring partners. As they tussled, Masterman-Pugh’s acid voice soon became less urgent, and Holmes’s more relaxed, too. I could even follow some of their inductive flights, but carefully stayed neutral on the touch line, watching and listening and occasionally nodding.
“Time for dinner,” Masterman-Pugh declared at last, consulting his watch and meticulously polishing it with his handkerchief before returning it to its pocket. “President Bulley is a brilliant man. But he is a devil for punctuality, and reprimanded me for supposed tardiness upon one occasion. I disliked his tone, and, in consequence, I make it a practice to be precisely one minute late for engagements with him; but for your sakes, gentlemen, we shall be on time tonight. We are, after all, honouring a royal visitor.”
I was about to inquire as to the visitor’s identity, when Masterman-Pugh continued.
“I cannot imagine why Magdalen would want to honour a reputed murderer, but so be it.”
I gasped. “A reputed murderer? We are to entertain a murderer? A royal murderer, you say? A royal murderer, really? Here? On the loose?”
“Oh, a murderer several times over. And I think he will entertain us, rather than we entertain him. We must go. Follow me.”
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