Of course, the aim of this entire endeavour is to score as many points as possible, and there are two primary methods of doing so, although the weight given to each has varied through the years. A goal consists of a player’s kicking the ball through the opponent’s goalposts, above the crossbar. A try is achieved by bringing the ball across the opponent’s goal line and touching it down (“bringing it to ground”) in the opponent’s goal area. (For readers weaned on American football, a goal is roughly similar to a field goal, a try to a touchdown.) In the earliest days of rugby, a try scored no points but allowed a team the opportunity to place-kick a “free” goal. But the concept of the try gradually gained in significance, particularly with Rugby Union’s adoption, in the 1886–1887 season, of Cheltenham College’s system, in which three tries were the equivalent of one goal. Presumably, the Oxford-Cambridge match of “The Missing Three-Quarter,” which chronologists date anywhere between 1894 and 1897, used some version of this system of scoring. Rugby Union rules were changed again in 1905 such that a try equalled three points, a follow-up conversion goal two points, a dropped goal (a ball drop-kicked through the goalposts from the field during play) four points, and a penalty goal three points. Later rules changes finally brought Rugby Union’s scoring system to its current levels, in which a try is worth five points, a conversion two points, and a dropped goal or a penalty goal three points.
1 “The Missing Three-Quarter” was published in the Strand Magazine in August 1904 and in Collier’s Weekly on November 26, 1904. The manuscript is at the British Library.
2 In rugby, the position of the forwards on either side of the centre. For an explanation of the game of rugby and its associated terms, see “The Rules of Rugby,” page 1153.
3 The manuscript has “by the time that the table is cleared.”
4 Watson’s concern about Holmes’s cocaine habit appears touching. Yet, considering that Holmes is actually seen using cocaine in the accounts of only two cases—The Sign of Four and “A Scandal in Bohemia”—it is hard to describe the addiction as having jeopardised Holmes’s career. Troubling as the habit was, Watson may be indulging in a bit of vanity here, identifying himself as Holmes’s saviour and the one person able to stop him from imminent relapse. Jack Tracey and Jim Berkey, in Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson, trace the course of Holmes’s drug dependence from 1887 to 1902, with only short intermittent drug-free periods; and even they label Watson’s statement here an “insupportable boast.”
5 The Reverend Arthur Henry Stanton, according to Donald Redmond’s Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources, was wrongly accused of authorship of a book of Catholic prayers.
6 Michael Harrison, in In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, points out the omission of Louis A. Staunton, who with others of his family was convicted of murdering his wife in 1877 and surely would have been in Holmes’s index.
7 C. Alan Bradley and William A. S. Sarjeant regard Holmes’s ignorance as unfathomable, and an indication that Holmes must not have attended an English public school, where students could not help but learn at least the basics of rugby. “Indeed,” Bradley and Sarjeant exclaim, “could any man who had grown up in England—even if privately tutored, and however little interested in sport he might be—remain so ignorant?” This evidence leads them to decide that Holmes was not, in fact, a man, but a woman in disguise; a less bizarre conclusion might be that Holmes’s early education took place wholly outside England.
8 “ ’Varsity” was originally a colloquial abbreviation of “University.”
9 “Two years” in the manuscript.
10 The first rugby game in Cambridge took place in 1839, but the Cambridge University Rugby Union Football Club was not officially founded until 1872. The university’s rival, Oxford, can claim superiority at least in this instance, having established its own rugby club three years earlier.
11 The Blackheath Football Club was founded in 1858 as the world’s first “open” rugby club. Blackheath was one of the founding members of the fledgling, eleven-club Football Association, formed in 1863. But when the association proposed to adopt Cambridge rules, in which “hacking” (kicking in the shins) and running with the ball were disallowed, Blackheath withdrew from the association and in 1871 formed the Rugby Football Union, comprising twenty clubs and following a set of rules that the club had written up in 1862. It was this split that helped to clarify the distinction between football (or American soccer) and rugby. See “The Rules of Rugby,” page 1153, for more on the Rugby Football Union.
12 On March 27, 1871, the first international match was played, organised by Blackheath and pitting England against Scotland in Edinburgh. In the following decade and a half, the countries of the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales) began playing one another annually, and have done so continuously with only a few exceptions occurring over national disputes. The “Internationals” are now known as the “Six Nations” and include Italy and France.
13 According to J. P. W. Mallalieu, Holmes is not the only person whose lack of rugby knowledge is being exposed by this exchange. In “The Sussex Vampire,” Watson passes himself off as a former rugby player for Blackheath, but Mallalieu, a rugby fan and a former M.P., uses Overton’s speech here to demonstrate that Watson probably never played the game. After all, the doctor has clearly never heard of Staunton nor of Overton. And Mallalieu looks skeptically upon some of the statements that Watson attributes to Overton, claiming that no skilled rugby player would speak in such a manner. For example, in considering candidates to replace Staunton, Overton bemoans that one player, Stevenson, despite his speed, “couldn’t drop from the twenty-five line, and a three-quarter who can’t either punt or drop isn’t worth a place for pace alone.” To this, Mallalieu cries, “Twaddle!” explaining that any other player might “drop from the twenty-five line” in Stevenson’s place, and that a three-quarter rarely has the opportunity to score (hence there is little need for him to kick the ball). For Mallalieu, Overton’s incongruous references indicate plainly that Watson’s familiarity with the sport is not much greater than Holmes’s, that he misstated Overton’s comments about the game, and that he did not play at Blackheath so much as accidentally wander onto the field from the stands.
14 Of course, neither Holmes nor Watson, both in their forties (“The Missing Three-Quarter” is usually placed in 1896 by the chronologists—see Chronological Table), would have participated in amateur team sports for some years. “[Football],” remarks the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th Ed.), “is a game more adapted to youths than to middle-aged persons, and should not be indulged in after the frame is full-grown and set, when the tumbles and scrimmages incidental to the Rugby code are apt to be baneful.”
15 “Rugger” is simply another word for rugby.
16 The very first Cambridge-Oxford match was played at Oxford in 1872, the year Cambridge’s club was founded. (Oxford emerged the victor, a fact that remains notably unreported on Cambridge’s website.) Two years later, the match was moved to a neutral site, Kennington Oval, and various other venues, including Blackheath’s Rectory Field, were subsequently tried out until the game moved to Queen’s Club in 1887. With the exception of the years during World War I, when all rugby matches were suspended, Queen’s Club continued to host the so-called Varsity Match—which came to be held every second Tuesday in December—until it was determined that the location had become too small for the throngs of fans that turned out to witness the intense rivalry. In 1921 the game was moved to Twickenham Stadium, where it has been played ever since.
17 The manuscript reads “down Northumberland Avenue in the direction of the Thames Embankment.”
18 To cheat or victimise.
19 Gout is a disorder that strikes men, usually over the age of thirty, and is characterised by chronic inflammation of the joints. A buildup of urate deposits in the tissue surrounding the joints can cause deformity and extreme stiffness, particular in the feet and hands. In a remarkable case of coincidence, this editor disc
overed that Sir Thomas Watson (1792–1882), in his Lectures on the Principles and Practice of Physic, wrote: “A namesake of mine, Mr. Henry Watson, describes in the first volume of Medical Communications, the case of a Mr. Middleton, who was accustomed, when playing at cards, to chalk or score the game upon the table with his gouty knuckles.” Did Overton use this phrase by chance in describing Lord Mount-James? Was he perhaps repeating a remark by the physician of Lord Mount-James—who may have even been Sir Thomas Watson? Or did John H. Watson, who may well have attended a lecture by his namesake or read his great work, interpolate the remark himself in reporting the incident?
20 In football, a cut or gash in the skin caused by a kick. In some editions the word is “back.”
21 A mute was an undertaker’s attendant, assigned to walk in the funeral procession alongside the coffin. An example is provided in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), in which the orphan Oliver is apprenticed out by Mr. Bumble to Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker, who eventually sets him to work as a mute for children’s funerals. It is the solemnity of the orphan’s face that strikes the undertaker as useful: “ ‘There’s an expression of melancholy in his face, my dear,’ resumed Mr. Sowerberry, ‘which is very interesting. He would make a delightful mute, my love.’ ”
22 The “Bayswater” omnibus ran every five minutes from Burdett Road to Shepherd’s Bush Green.
23 This no doubt explains why “one of the richest men in England” travelled by bus, which charged a fare of 1d. to 6d., depending on the destination.
24 In the manuscript, “two telegraph offices at equal distances from the hotel.” Watson is evidently engaging in some geographical obfuscation here and elsewhere in the manuscript.
25 “Fenchurch Street Station” in the manuscript.
26 In the manuscript, originally “we rattled down the Strand.”
27 This comment seems to contradict Holmes’s earlier remark that “amateur sport . . . is the best and soundest thing in England.”
28 While Watson had sold his practice in 1894 (see “The Norwood Builder”) this statement seemingly contradicts Watson’s continued diligent reading of medical texts, reported in “The Golden Pince-Nez” only a few years earlier.
29 This remark contrasts with “The Creeping Man,” in which Holmes refers to the unnamed university locale of that tale as “this charming town.” Scholars of course seize upon the point to insist that the university locale of “The Missing Three-Quarter”—most assuredly Cambridge—was not Holmes’s alma mater.
30 A whist reference—see “The Norwood Builder.”
31 “St. John’s College” in the manuscript.
32 See “The Rules of Rugby,” page 1153, for an explanation of the scoring of the match. Richard Lancelyn Green, in trying to determine the exact year that “The Missing Three-Quarter” might have taken place, notes that since matches between Oxford and Cambridge were played every second Tuesday of December at the Queen’s Club, “if the dates in the story are taken literally, then the match would have been played either in 1894, 1895, or 1896. The last would be the most likely as it was the only one of the three won by Oxford.” A different theory is put forth by D. Martin Dakin (among others), who observes that Oxford won by two tries in 1897. Neither the 1896 nor the 1897 game fits the score exactly. Jay Finley Christ reports that Whitaker’s Almanac says of the 1897 game that “the Cambridge three-quarter line did not come off,” which seems to refer to “The Missing Three-Quarter.”
33 The English text omits the word “instrument” here, found in both the Strand Magazine and American texts.
34 That portion of a stable where horses are kept untied.
35 Hounds trained to race by following a scent left by a “drag” over a predetermined course. Originally, the dogs followed the scent of a fox let loose on the course, but later, to bring control to the event, an artificial scent, usually aniseed, was applied to an object dragged over the ground.
36 The village of John o’ Groats was founded during the reign of James IV (1488–1513) when Dutchman Jan de Groot and his two brothers settled near Dunnet Head in Scotland, at the northernmost tip of the British mainland. In order to appease his descendants, who argued over their precedence in the family, de Groot built an octagonal house with eight doors and eight windows. (He also built an octagonal table—in some stories, a round table—so that no one person was ever seated at the head.) A mound and a flagpole now mark the site of the original house. The expression “from Land’s End to John o’ Groats” means from one end of Great Britain to the other.
37 The river upon which Cambridge stands.
38 And what “excellent qualities” are those that would draw the renowned head of the medical school and European “thinker” to an athlete with no obvious intellectual tendencies? Marshall S. Berdan suggests only one: money. The heir to Lord Mount-James’s fortune surely must have provided an enticing mark for a doctor on a university salary. “With the parsimonious old nobleman racked with gout,” Berdan deduces, “Armstrong saw an easy way to finance his future research and altogether dispense with his bothersome practice.”
39 See “The Final Problem,” note 40, for a discussion of the prevalence and impact of consumption in Victorian England.
40 Sportswriter Red Smith scandalously suggests, in “Dear Me, Mr. Holmes,” that Holmes made bets on the match and that his actions in the case were designed to assure his winnings. While Holmes immediately grasped the importance of Dr. Armstrong, he allowed himself “to be put off with windy bluff. . . .” Attempting to trail Armstrong, Holmes carelessly loses him on a stretch of land “as flat and clean as the palm of your hand” and then forbids Watson to give chase to Armstrong. Why, ponders Smith? “Well, the match hadn’t been played yet,” Smith notes. Holmes had induced Overton to admit that Cambridge was likely to lose the match without Staunton. Spotting an opportunity to make a quick profit, Smith proposes, Holmes busily spent his time in Cambridge corresponding by telegram with bookies. Only after Oxford’s victory, notes Smith, did Holmes finally manage to find Armstrong and Staunton.
Marshall S. Berdan attempts to refute Smith’s character assassination, arguing that Holmes’s delay in solving the case may be explained on the basis that he perceived no urgency and was experiencing a temporary lack of work. Further, Berdan suggests, he may have wanted, as an alumnus of Oxford, to see Oxford win. While this latter point suggests an interest in amateur sports that Holmes flatly denies, Berdan goes on to propose that Watson, the incorrigible gambler (see “Shoscombe Old Place”), who—despite having played rugby himself (“The Sussex Vampire”), feigned ignorance of both Overton and Rugby—arranged to bet on the game with clubmen friends. “All of the discrepancies in the adventure can thus be accounted for without having to resort to the unacceptable depravity of the Master alleged by Mr. Smith. Smith, it seems, had the right charge but the wrong suspect.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ABBEY GRANGE1
In this, one of the four cases in which Holmes protégé Inspector Stanley Hopkins appears (the others being “The Missing Three-Quarter,” “Black Peter,” and “The Golden Pince-Nez,” all recorded in The Return), we witness Holmes’s knowledge of wine, contrasted with a disdain for the upper class first viewed in “The Noble Bachelor.” Most emblematic of the detective’s complicated views is the wealthy Sir Eustace Brackenstall, the murder victim, who is unfavourably contrasted with the plucky heroine and her seaman friend. The self-reliant Lady Mary Brackenstall awakens Holmes’s usual sympathy for Australians (as seen by his treatment of them in “The ‘Gloria Scott’ ” and “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”), and as in those cases, Holmes takes the law into his own hands. Here, however, his sympathies may have overridden his judgement: Many scholars believe that Holmes lets himself be fooled by a villainess cleverer than he credited.
IT WAS ON a bitterly cold night and frosty morning, towards the end of the winter of ’972 that I was wakened by a tugging at my shoulder. It was Holmes. The candle in his hand shone u
pon his eager, stooping face, and told me at a glance that something was amiss.
“Come, Watson, come!” he cried. “The game is afoot.3 Not a word! Into your clothes and come!”
Ten minutes later we were both in a cab and rattling through the silent streets on our way to Charing Cross Station. The first faint winter’s dawn was beginning to appear, and we could dimly see the occasional figure of an early workman as he passed us, blurred and indistinct in the opalescent London reek. Holmes nestled in silence into his heavy coat, and I was glad to do the same, for the air was most bitter, and neither of us had broken our fast.
It was not until we had consumed some hot tea at the station and taken our places in the Kentish4 train that we were sufficiently thawed, he to speak and I to listen. Holmes drew a note from his pocket and read aloud:
Frederick Dorr Steele, Collier’s, 1904
ABBEY GRANGE,5 MARSHAM, KENT, 3:30 A.M.
MY DEAR MR. HOLMES—I should be very glad of your immediate assistance in what promises to be a most remarkable case. It is something quite in your line. Except for releasing the lady I will see that everything is kept exactly as I have found it, but I beg you not to lose an instant, as it is difficult to leave Sir Eustace there.—
Yours faithfully,
STANLEY HOPKINS.
“Hopkins has called me in seven times,6 and on each occasion his summons has been entirely justified,” said Holmes. “I fancy that every one of his cases has found its way into your collection, and I must admit, Watson, that you have some power of selection, which atones for much which I deplore in your narratives. Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story instead of as a scientific exercise has ruined what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstrations. You slur over work of the utmost finesse and delicacy, in order to dwell upon sensational details which may excite, but cannot possibly instruct, the reader.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 2) (The Annotated Books) Page 43