THE EVENTS of November 1895 to which Dr. Watson refers have proved tantalisingly difficult to identify. In “1896–1964, ‘The Wheel Has Come Full Circle,’ ” Jennifer Chorley proposes that the “revolution” was that of Turkey; that the threat of “possible war” impelled troops to be sent to Ashanti, in Ghana; and that the “impending change of Government” involved Bechuanaland’s becoming part of Cape Colony. A different sort of “change of Government” is named by Owen F. Grazebrook, in Volume 3 of Studies in Sherlock Holmes. He posits that the naming of Lord Farnet Joseph Wolseley as the new commander in chief of the army would have been a suitably delicate situation, since Queen Victoria had favoured the previous commander in chief, the Duke of Cambridge. “It may well be that in Dr. Watson’s somewhat slipshod mind,” Grazebrook reasons, “and being an old army veteran, the office of Commander-in-chief was connected with the governance of the country, and that the substitution of the Duke of Cambridge by Wolseley meant, to him at any rate, ‘an impending change of Government.’ If this is so, November 1895 may stand as being correct; for in November of that year the Queen graciously received Lord Wolseley and, to continue a military metaphor, ‘buried the hatchet.’ ”
Still other political affairs are noted by Christopher Morley in Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship. Without specifically identifying the events alluded to by Watson, Morley fingers South Africa, where brewing conflicts between the Boers and British settlers would lead to Sir Leander Jameson’s ill-fated Transvaal Raid on December 29, 1895. Further political tension arose from a dispute with Venezuela over the border of British Guiana. And awkward relations with Germany were somewhat complicated by the completion, in the summer of 1895, of the Kiel Canal, giving the large German Baltic fleet direct access to the North Sea and the adjacent English Channel.
W. E. Edwards states definitively that the revolution involved the Japanese assassination of Korea’s Queen Min in October 1895 and the subsequent imprisonment of King Kojong. The massacres of Armenians in Turkey, he continues, suggest the “possible war” that was only avoided after France expressed reluctance to commit to military action; and the “change of government” was then occurring in France, where the socialist Léon Bourgeois assumed the premiership on November 1, 1895.
Then as now, the state of international affairs at any given time leaves the possibilities of revolution, impending war, and regime change infinitely open to debate. Plus ça change . . .
NAVAL WARFARE
MYCROFT HOLMES grandly claims that the “Bruce-Partington” submarine would make naval warfare impossible within the radius of the submarine. But recall that the Royal Navy never ended up building any submarines of its own, and rather ordered several based on John Holland’s design, six years after the Bruce-Partingon plans were lost and recovered. (See note 14.) What caused Mycroft’s prediction to fail?
Could this be a “Bruce-Partington” submersible?
The Victorians: A World Built to Last
Fletcher Pratt, in “Holmes and the Royal Navy,” writes, “[There is not] very much doubt that [Mycroft’s] hopes were completely disappointed. The date was 1895; and not for a decade and a half thereafter was any submarine produced which made the operations of surface ships even dangerous, to say nothing of impossible. . . .” In attempting to build the submarine, Pratt concludes, the Admiralty quickly discovered serious design flaws. Knowing the plans had depreciated in value, the Sea Lords then allowed them to be stolen, hoping to flush out a rumoured traitor and simultaneously to set back their enemies’ submarine programs. The Admiralty could hardly have been pleased, Pratt surmises, with Holmes’s recovery of the plans, but fortunately copies had apparently been made by the thief before the Royal Navy’s “disintelligence” efforts could be spoiled. Pratt sees support for this theory in the construction of the French submarine Morse, which was built in 1896 and did not last beyond a few disappointing sea voyages. He suggests that the Morse was designed on the basis of the flawed Bruce-Partington plans.
J. S. Callaway, U.S.N., in “An Enquiry into the Identity of the Bruce-Partington Submarine,” rejects this identification. Pratt, he notes, ignores that a working model of the Bruce-Partington submarine would have already existed in 1895, a date that eliminates identification with the Morse, which was not built until 1896. Instead, Callaway observes that in 1893 the French navy had completed work on the submarine Gustave Zede (named after the designer of the Gymnote) and theorises that the British must have acquired the plans for that boat from a third party in order to prevent either the United States or Germany from obtaining them. Callaway suggests that army funds were used to purchase the plans, thus explaining why the plans were kept at Woolwich, an army arsenal, rather than a navy depot. In “What Were the Technical Papers, Mycroft?,” Daniel Morrow proposes a British-built version of the Holland submarine, a theory that involves redating “The Bruce-Partington Plans” to 1901. See Chronological Table.
Arguing on the basis of Sir William Laird Clowes’s The Royal Navy: History, published in 1903, Jack Crelling (in “The Mystery of the Bruce-Partington Plans”) suggests that the plans were not for a submarine at all. Sir William wrote, “Until the Autumn of 1900 British Admiralty appeared to pay but little attention to the assiduity with which certain foreign powers had been experimenting with submarines during the previous twelve or fifteen years,” and Crelling proposes that the plans were instead for a steam turbine PT boat, along the lines of the Turbinia, demonstrated at the Diamond Jubilee Review of 1887.
Peter H. Wood, in “An Automatic Self-Adjusting Solution: Bruce-Partington Dives Again,” points out that the word “submersible” is a noun meaning a submarine boat. If the term “submarine” is meant to serve as an adjective, it must have modified the missing word “torpedo.” Wood goes on to lay out an ingenious case involving fraudulent plans for an improvement to the accuracy problems of the Mark III torpedo (already in use by the Royal Navy), covered up by the theft of the plans.
Joseph A. Coppola, in an impressive article entitled “Submarine Technology and the Bruce-Partington Adventures,” contends that inventor John Holland himself obtained the Bruce-Partington plans and incorporated them into his successful design for the Holland VI, which was launched in 1897. Michael Kean, in a letter headed “The Politics of Defense,” notes that if Holland did indeed use these plans as the basis for the modern submarine, “then he might also be accused of ‘adding insult to injury’ with respect to the Royal Navy; for John Holland actually sold his plans back to the British!”
THE POLYPHONIC MOTETS OF LASSUS
HOLMES’S special interest in Roland de Lassus’s motets, as opposed to the thousands of other pieces the master musician composed, has long intrigued Sherlockians of a musical bent. Benjamin Grosbayne takes the placid view that after retiring to his bee farm, Holmes took a more detailed look at de Lassus’s oeuvre, turning out monographs on the composer’s other works. “As for being ‘the last word upon the subject,’ ” Grosbayne writes sceptically, “the enthusiasms of friendship must be taken into consideration. Tovey, Koechlin, Jeppesen, Matthieu, Bäumker, Sandberger, E. Van der Straeten and other authorities make no mention of Holmes’s monograph.”
Edward R. Staubach, in “The Polyphonic Motets of Lassus,” addresses the possible appeal of the motets to a thinking man such as Holmes:
The unexpected has been described as typical in Lassus’s motets with frequent changes from fast to slow, sudden breaks, unexpected beginnings and endings, and from regular accents to strong offbeat accents (syncopation). The personality reflected in these motets would certainly gain the interest of a man whose violin playing Watson described in A Study in Scarlet as sometimes “sonorous and melancholy,” then “fantastic and cheerful,” maybe the result of “a whim or fancy.”
In writing his monograph, Staubach surmises that Holmes would have focused on de Lassus’s “highly individualized style and approach . . . the emotions and character of the works, and their compositional tech
niques.”
Whether the monograph actually exists, however, is not free from controversy. Guy Warrack, writing in Sherlock Holmes and Music, expresses grave reservations about the entire enterprise, particularly since the music of de Lassus was not widely performed in London. “It seems very doubtful whether Holmes had ever heard any of de Lassus’s Motets,” Warrack writes, considering not only the detective’s lack of opportunity to hear the music but also the demands of his career in 1895, a year in which chronologists generally place “Wisteria Lodge,” “The Three Students” (with Holmes travelling in connection with his researches into early English charters), “The Solitary Cyclist,” and “Black Peter” as well as “The Bruce-Partington Plans.” Holmes’s familiarity with de Lassus’s motets would likely have been from the printed music, rather than from the experience of listening to the music being sung. Even then, it has never been firmly established as to whether or not Holmes could read music, or whether he played by ear. Warrack observes that the vocally polyphonic complexities of de Lassus’s motets would be difficult to grasp by one who was not a skilled reader of music, or by one who played violin rather than sang. Morever, he argues, to speak of “polyphonic motets” is redundant, exposing Holmes’s lack of knowledge on the subject of sixteenth-century music. Of course, as Warrack admits, this may be easily explained by attributing the error to Watson. Holmes might have mentioned that motets were polyphonic pieces of music, and in writing up his notes, Watson could have looked at “motets (polyphonic)” and transcribed it as “polyphonic motets.” Ultimately, given these many doubts and the fact that no scholars have ever been able to track down the monograph (supposedly printed only for private circulation), Warrack deduces that Holmes’s claim to have written such an authoritative work was nothing more than a boast: “When we come to balance probabilities, we may be driven to the melancholy conclusion that the monograph was at best only projected, at the worst a complete myth.”
But Staubach disagrees, even going so far as to write an article entitled “Taking Issue with Mr. Warrack.” He points out that Warrack’s contention that Holmes was not an expert reader of music is unsubstantiated. He also claims that lack of exposure to the performance of de Lassus’s music is but a mere technicality in this case, arguing, “There have been and are a few outstanding artists, conductors, and composers, who can look at a page of a symphonic score and hear the music by sight; some even with the timbre of the instruments for which the piece is scored. . . . Could not such a case be made for the analytical genius of Sherlock Holmes to extend into a not so distant field?” As to the demands on Holmes’s time, Staubach argues that “a definitive article on the works could have been published by studying a representative sampling of each classification.” “The monograph did indeed exist,” he asserts. “Each decade seems to bring forth a ‘lost’ cello concerto of Haydn or preludes of Bach. We can hope.”
1 “The Bruce-Partington Plans” was published in the Strand Magazine in December 1908 and in Collier’s Weekly on December 12, 1908.
2 See “An Impending Change of Government,” page 1334.
3 A passenger vehicle, drawn by a horse along rails.
4 See “The Greek Interpreter” for discussions of Whitehall and the possible identity of the Diogenes Club.
5 Presumably Holmes is referring to Mycroft’s Baker Street visit in “The Greek Interpreter,” generally dated from 1884 to 1890. Yet in “The Empty House,” Mycroft is said to have “preserved [Holmes’s] rooms and papers exactly as they had always been”; W. E. Edwards marvels, “it appears that, eminently characteristically, he had accomplished this feat without going near them. . . .”
6 In a bimetallic system, both gold and silver are minted and made available as legal tender. For most of the nineteenth century, all countries practised bimetallism except England, which had established a gold standard in 1798 and 1816.
7 The Royal Arsenal of military institutions, located in the town of Woolwich, was established in 1805 and included the Royal Military Academy and the Royal Artillery. Baedeker described the arsenal as “one of the most imposing establishments in existence for the manufacture of materials of war. . . . The chief departments are the Gun Factory, established in 1716 by a German named Schalch (the new Woolwich guns are not cast, but formed of forged steel and wire); the Laboratory for making cartridges and projectiles; and the Gun-carriage and Waggon Department. The arsenal covers an area of 598 acres, and affords employment to over 14,000 men.”
8 A workman on the track or roadbed.
9 Several train routes convened at Willesden Junction, where the suburban lines of the London & North Western, North London, and Great Western railways connected with London & North Western’s main line.
10 A passenger would generally have had to show his ticket to railway officials twice: once after purchasing the ticket, in order to ascertain the correct platform; and once upon completing the trip. Baedeker explained that “the tickets themselves are marked with a large red O or I (for ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ line of rails), corresponding with notices in the stations. . . . Passengers leave the platform by the ‘Way Out,’ where their tickets are given up. Those who are travelling with through-tickets to a station situated on one of the branch-lines show their tickets at the junction where carriages are changed, and where the officials will indicate the proper train.”
11 The lowest balcony of the theatre, for which the wearing of evening dress was then obligatory.
12 Siam (Thailand), long the only country in Southeast Asia to avoid European colonisation, was at the time of “The Bruce-Partington Plans” being subjected to a turf war between England and France. Fighting to retain Siam’s independence, the Thai monarch Chulalongkorn, or Rama V (son of Mongkut, the king immortalised in the films Anna and the King of Siam and The King and I), was forced to make several concessions toward the two expansionist Western powers in the form not only of trade treaties and diplomatic emissaries but also of land. In 1893, after France sent warships up the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok, Siam agreed to give up its claims to the Laotian territory east of the Mekong River. Meanwhile, the British, having acquired nearby Burma in 1886, had interests of their own, and were competing with the French for the territory north of Siam, from Chiang Saen up to China. France and England would settle their differences with an 1896 agreement stating that neither country would go to war over Siam or its disputed territories, acknowledging (but not guaranteeing) Siam’s sovereignty. Siam itself had no part in the treaty. It would lose Laos and Cambodia to France in 1907, and four Malay states to Britain in 1909.
13 The prime minister in 1895 was Lord Salisbury.
14 The first underwater vehicle was built in 1620 (by a Dutch inventor who tested his craft fifteen feet below the surface of the Thames), and inventors such as Robert Fulton attempted to refine the craft; but efforts to develop a working submarine intensified in the late nineteenth century. During the Civil War, the Confederacy constructed several vessels designed to affix explosives to the hulls of enemy ships. Of the three submarines, which were powered by hand-cranked propellers, only one, the H. L. Hunley, had any success in attacking a Union warship.
The greatest strides in submarine technology began taking place sometime around 1880, when English clergyman George W. Garrett built an underwater vehicle powered by a coal-fired boiler. The steam generated prior to launch could power the submarine for several miles. In 1886, fellow Englishmen Andrew Campbell and James Ash had slightly better success with the Nautilus, which used an electric motor and could travel a maximum of eighty miles before the battery had to be recharged. The French equivalent was Gustave Zédé’s Gymnote, built in 1888 but prone to control problems. France’s designs improved (with Zédé’s collaboration) over the next decade, and the Narval, built by naval engineer Maxime Laubeuf and launched in 1899, made several satisfactory dives. It was powered by steam on the surface of the water and electricity when submerged. At the dawn of the new century, in 1905, the French navy would be th
e first to lay claim to a diesel-powered submarine, the Aigrette.
Competition in the U.S. between two rival inventors precipitated tremendous advances. For an 1895 naval contract, Irish immigrant John P. Holland designed the Plunger, which would have used steam on the surface and electricity below the surface. The craft was never completed, and Holland poured his own financial resources into his next design, that of the Holland VI (gasoline on the surface, electricity below). Launched in 1897, Holland VI carried a crew of nine and could fire torpedoes and guns. It was adopted by the U. S. Navy in 1900. Simultaneously, another U.S. inventor, British-born Simon Lake, was developing submarines intended for research rather than warfare. The gasoline- and electricity-powered Argonaut I—one of several submarines built by Lake—was completed in 1894, and four years later it sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, to New York City, becoming the first underwater vessel to navigate extensively in the open sea.
France and the United States had become innovators in the field of submarine development, and technology was progressing even further still. By 1911, the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th Ed.) acknowledged, “By far the greater number of submarine boats in existence in 1910 were developments through a process of continuous experiment and improvement of the Gymnote and of the early Holland boats, although the process of evolution had been so rapid and extensive that the parentage of these modern boats is barely recognizable. . . .” The British navy, however, declined to participate in the race for invention, choosing to commission five Holland-design submarines in 1901. The first was completed in 1903. Germany did not build its first submarine, the U-1, until 1905.
Ronald S. Bonn suggests that, in contrast to outward appearances, the Germans already had the Bruce-Partington submarines—which were superior to the Holland boats—and thus refrained from purchasing any of the latter. Germany, Bonn proposes, obtained the plans from Doctor Watson, “the greatest non-governmental criminal who ever lived.” Michael H. Kean, in Who Was Bruce-Partington, concludes that “Bruce-Partington” was not an individual, for no single Englishman solved all the major challenges of the submarine, but rather that the plans were the joint product of Simon Lake and the Reverend Garrett, who, between them, solved all of the problems of constructing efficacious submarines. Sadly, it appears that the plans were (in the words of one scholar, “like many more modern British defence projects”) abandoned as too sophisticated for the times.
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 63