by June Thomson
It is not known either why Holmes chose Sussex as the place to which to retire. One reason could have been his familiarity with the area. He knew it well, having visited it during at least four investigations: the Musgrave Ritual, the Valley of Fear, the Sussex Vampire and the Black Peter inquiries. In fact, it was the location of the third case Holmes was called on to investigate, the Musgrave Ritual affair, during which he came to the decision to become a professional private consulting detective and, although sentiment played little part in Holmes’ personality, he may have remembered the area with particular affection. Certainly he was struck by the beauty of its countryside, for during the Black Peter case he took time off from his enquiries to walk with Watson in the ‘beautiful woods’ to admire the birds and the flowers.
From a practical point of view, Sussex was an ideal setting for retirement. It was not far from London and, had Holmes wished, he could have travelled easily by train to Victoria station and from there to the Albert Hall, Covent Garden or St James’s Hall to attend concerts and the opera, although there is no evidence in the canon of his having done so. But as he no doubt took his gramophone and records with him when he retired, as well as his violin, he could still enjoy the pleasure of listening to and making music.
Sussex is also a coastal county, with a long shoreline facing south towards the English Channel, where in the past fishing ports such as Hastings and, more recently, popular seaside resorts, for example Brighton and Eastbourne, have grown up. But, despite the development of some of these resorts and other urban areas in more modern times, Sussex still remains an agricultural county given over largely to sheep and arable farming. In Holmes’ time, it was even more rural and parts of it, as can be seen from the isolated setting of, for example, Ferguson’s house in the Sussex Vampire case, which was situated at the end of a long, winding lane, remained unspoilt.
The house which Holmes bought for his retirement was in such an undeveloped part of the county. Although not far from Lewes, the county town of East Sussex, a picturesque place of historic buildings and steep, narrow streets, it was isolated from any near neighbours. Standing alone on the southern slope of the South Downs, a continuation of the broad chalk uplands which extend from the borders of Hampshire to Beachy Head, it had views over the cliffs to the sea beyond and was within walking distance of the beach, which was reached by a steep path. The setting was superb.
Although attempts have been made by some Sherlockian scholars to identify the house, its exact location will probably never be established. Holmes valued his privacy and, in the same way that Watson altered certain details so that 221B Baker Street could not be precisely located, Holmes deliberately included false information in his description of the setting of his house to throw potential sightseers off the scent. The names of the nearest village, Fulworth, and Fulworth Cove on which it was built, are inventions, for no such places exist. Little is known either of its physical appearance. It is variously described by both Holmes and Watson as a house, a villa and a farm, but as the adjectives most often applied to it are ‘small’ or ‘little’ it is safe to assume that it was a modest building with some land attached to it and may have originally been what is usually referred to as a smallholding.
Holmes was happy there. As he himself expresses it, ‘I had given myself up entirely to that soothing love of Nature for which I had so often yearned during the long years spent amid the gloom of London.’ He describes with obvious pleasure the ‘thyme-scented Downs’ and the beauty of the coast with its long shingle beach, extending for several miles, broken only by Fulworth Cove and by the rock pools scattered along its length, which were filled by each new tide with sea-water as clear as crystal and which served as convenient bathing pools for Holmes and other residents in the area.
As we have already seen, this love of nature had begun to develop before the Great Hiatus when Holmes, tired of London and exhausted by the heavy demands made on him by his professional career, turned to a contemplation of nature for solace and relaxation. After his retirement, he benefited both psychologically and physically from the change in environment and lifestyle and, as the signs of stress which had marked his latter months in Baker Street gradually disappeared, he became more sociable and relaxed. His daily routine was simple and healthy. He went for walks, he swam regularly every morning, he read, and he tended his bees, a new interest, the relevance of which in connection with his childhood and his relationship with his mother has already been referred to in Chapter One, although, as was pointed out there, Holmes himself may not have been aware of the symbolic significance of the queen bee.
He was, however, conscious of another parallel. The bee-hive with its ‘little working gangs’ reminded him of London’s criminal underworld, an unusual comparison which suggests the wide gulf which now existed between this new Holmes and his former self as a private consulting detective. No longer involved emotionally or professionally in the world of crime, he could now stand back and regard it with an aloof detachment.
Watson’s reference to bee-farming, quoted in the heading to this chapter, could imply that Holmes’ apicultural activities were not confined to keeping a few hives for his own use and he may have been running a small commercial enterprise, selling honey to local shopkeepers and residents. The thyme, growing wild on the Downs, would have given the honey a pleasantly distinctive flavour.
Writing still remained one of his interests. During his retirement, Holmes wrote and published his Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen, the ‘fruit of my leisured ease’, as Holmes himself describes it, and the magnum opus of his latter years. He was obviously proud of this product of ‘pensive nights and laborious days’ for, when he finally had the opportunity to show it to Watson, he declares, ‘Alone I did it.’ No doubt he intended the remark to be a wry reminder that so much of his life had been chronicled, not by himself, but by his old friend and former close companion. It was a small book, bound in blue with the title printed in gold across the cover. Unfortunately, no copies of it have survived. Nor apparently was he to find the time to produce the other volume he had intended writing, his textbook on the art of deduction, referred to in Chapter Fourteen. Perhaps, once he had retired, he no longer wished to be reminded of the life he had left behind.
There were other hobbies and interests to fill his time. He remained an ‘omnivorous reader’ as he himself states, and he took his books with him from Baker Street, which presumably included his encyclopaedias, his commonplace books of newspaper cuttings as well as all the other records of the hundreds of cases he had investigated during the twenty-three years he had been in active practice in London. There were so many volumes that some had to be stored in the attic of his house which, Holmes reports, was ‘stuffed with books’. Others, the ones he needed for more regular reference, were no doubt kept on shelves in the main rooms. He also mentions a bureau, almost certainly the desk fitted with pigeon-holes which used to stand in the sitting-room of 221B Baker Street and which he took with him when he moved. Other furniture was presumably bought especially for the Sussex house, as Mrs Hudson owned the contents of Holmes’ old lodgings. Knowing Holmes’ ascetic tastes, the house was probably furnished very simply with only the barest essentials.
Another new interest was photography. In the Lion’s Mane inquiry, a case which occurred in July 1907, Holmes was evidently skilful enough at this particular hobby to produce an enlarged photograph of the injuries to Fitzroy McPherson’s back, the victim of a mysterious and apparently murderous attack. Holmes may very well have developed and enlarged the print himself. He had the necessary knowledge of chemistry to carry out the process and the equipment was available for amateurs. If so, he must have set up his own dark-room on the premises. Photography may have replaced his earlier interest in chemical experimentation, for there is no reference to any such research during his retirement.
Apart from these activities, there were social contacts as well. Although Ho
lmes reports that ‘the good Watson had passed almost beyond my ken’, Watson travelled from London occasionally for weekend visits, presumably alone as there is no reference to his wife accompanying him on these trips. There were also other friends and acquaintances to visit and who paid calls on Holmes, in particular Harold Stackhurst, who owned a private school, The Gables, half a mile away, where about twenty young men were coached for entry into various professions by a staff of several teachers.
Holmes met Stackhurst soon after he retired to Sussex and struck up an immediate friendship with him on such good terms that the two men called on one another in the evenings without waiting to be invited, another indication of Holmes’ more relaxed attitude to life. When he was living in London, he would not have encouraged such easy-going informality on so short an acquaintance and the calls he made even on Watson, a longstanding friend, were infrequent. To a certain extent, Stackhurst replaced Watson as Holmes’ companion. Like Watson, Stackhurst was a cheerful, athletic man, a former well-known rowing Blue, who shared Holmes’ pleasure in walking and swimming. A graduate of either Oxford or Cambridge University, Stackhurst was also an excellent all-round scholar, a distinction to which Watson, with his less academic education, could not hope to aspire. Holmes also had contact, although not so close, with some members of Stackhurst’s staff, including Fitzroy McPherson, the science master, with whom he would also have had common interests, and he became acquainted at least with the more unsociable Ian Murdoch, the mathematics coach, a taciturn man who made no friends.
Holmes was also on good terms with the local policeman, Anderson, whom he describes as a ‘big, ginger-moustached man of the slow, Sussex breed’, a breed which, Holmes hastens to add, ‘covers much good sense under a heavy, silent exterior.’ This tolerant attitude is a far cry from the exasperation he had shown towards Watson’s ‘methodical slowness’ of mentality in the months prior to his retirement.
Inevitably, despite his dislike of publicity, Holmes’ reputation as a private consulting detective had followed him to Sussex. Anderson was aware of it. So, too, was Inspector Bardle who, when called in to enquire into the death of Fitzroy McPherson, refers to Holmes’ ‘immense experience’ in criminal investigation, while Stackhurst, in pleading with Holmes to use his powers when a similar attack is made on another of his staff, Ian Murdoch, speaks of his ‘world-wide reputation’.
But not every facet of Holmes’ personality was altered on his retirement, as is made evident during the Lion’s Mane inquiry. He was still prone to secrecy. When Inspector Bardle asks him if he has any idea what has caused the strange weals on McPherson’s back, Holmes replied enigmatically, ‘Perhaps I have. Perhaps I haven’t.’ He was also willing to take the law into his own hands when necessary, suggesting that Murdoch’s rooms should be secretly searched in his absence, a clandestine operation in which, incidentally, Stackhurst collaborates, in much the same way as Watson has assisted in the past with some of Holmes’ other illegal activities.
And Holmes was still subject to exaggeration on occasions. In the opening sentence of his account of the case ‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane’, he describes the mystery of McPherson’s death as being as ‘abstruse and unusual as any I have faced in my professional career’ and one which, as he states a little later, brought him to the limits of his powers. This is an overestimation of the importance and difficulty of the inquiry. Compared to such earlier cases as the Hound of the Baskervilles or the Second Stain, the Lion’s Mane inquiry is relatively straightforward, its unusualness depending solely on the means by which McPherson met his death.
In carrying out the investigation, Holmes shows a distinct waning of his skills, perhaps through lack of use. It was almost four years since he had last undertaken a major inquiry. Or increasing age may have blunted his former mental agility; he was fifty-five. It took him over a week to realise the significance of McPherson’s dying words, ‘the lion’s mane’, and to relate them to a passage he had once read in the book Out of Doors by J. G. Wood, a copy of which was in his attic. A younger Holmes, with his capacity for storing information and recalling it at will, an ability referred to in Chapter One, would not have taken so long to remember the relevant passage with its detailed description of Cyanea capillata.*
Holmes himself may have been aware of this diminution in his mental powers, for he compares his mind to ‘a crowded box-room with packets of all sorts stored therein – so many that I may well have but a vague perception of what was there.’ This is in sharp contrast to the description he had given to Watson before the Study in Scarlet inquiry twenty-six years earlier, in which he speaks of a man’s brain as being like ‘an empty attic’ which each individual has to stock as he or she chooses. It was the fool who kept the lumber. The wise man stored only that knowledge which was useful to him, discarding everything else.
But in one significant area of his life, Holmes underwent a fundamental change of heart which, like his increased forbearance and sociability, shows a more sympathetic response to other people. This was his attitude to women. Even before his retirement, he was already becoming less intolerant of them. In 1902, during the case of the Illustrious Client, he had expressed concern for Violet de Merville. Although exasperated by her pride and supreme self-complaisance, he was sufficiently moved by the thought of her fate, should she marry Baron Gruner, to remark: ‘I was sorry for her, Watson. I thought of her for the moment as I would have thought of a daughter of my own.’
He was even more affected by Maud Bellamy, whom he met during the Lion’s Mane inquiry. ‘Women have seldom been an attraction for me, for my brain has always governed my heart,’ Holmes writes, ‘but I could not look upon her perfect clear-cut face, with all the soft freshness of the Downlands in her delicate colouring, without realising that no young man would cross her path unscathed.’ Later, he adds, ‘Maud Bellamy will always remain in my memory as a most complete and remarkable woman.’
Not since his brief acquaintance with Irene Adler eighteen years earlier had Holmes’ emotions been so moved by a woman’s beauty and strength of personality. There is, too, in these remarks a note of uncharacteristic wistfulness, as if Holmes were regretting the daughter he had never had or were mourning his lost youth when he might have met and fallen in love with someone like Maud Bellamy, if only his heart had not been ruled by his head. But it was too late.
Holmes was cared for by an elderly housekeeper whom he does not name. It has been suggested by some commentators that she was none other than Mrs Hudson, who had given up the Baker Street house to look after Holmes in his retirement. I consider this unlikely. Had the housekeeper been Mrs Hudson, Holmes would have referred to her by name. Nor was it in Mrs Hudson’s nature to indulge in gossip, as Holmes’ Sussex housekeeper obviously does, to the extent that he was obliged to discourage such conversations. Through her long relationship with Holmes, which had lasted for nineteen years,* Mrs Hudson knew better than to try to engage her gentleman lodger in idle chat. The impression one has of the anonymous Sussex housekeeper is of a garrulous local woman, possibly a widow, who had lived all her life in the area and whom Holmes employed after his retirement.
While on the subject of housekeepers, it is worth looking ahead to the events of August 1914, in which Martha, another elderly housekeeper, was to play a part. It is unlikely that Martha, whom Holmes introduced as his agent into the household of Von Bork, the German spy, was either Mrs Hudson or the Sussex housekeeper, although the description of her as ‘an old, ruddy-faced woman in a country cap’ with her knitting and her cat might better fit the anonymous Sussex lady than Mrs Hudson with her London background. However, the Sussex housekeeper, with her predilection for gossip, hardly seems capable of acting as Holmes’ undercover agent, while Mrs Hudson, apart from the one occasion when she helped Holmes to bring about Colonel Moran’s arrest by turning the wax bust in the sitting-room window of 221B Baker Street, had never played any active role in assisting him in any of his other enquiries. In addition, Holme
s arranges to meet Martha at Claridges Hotel in London for a debriefing after the case has been successfully concluded, an unnecessary rendezvous if she had been Mrs Hudson, for he could have interviewed her more conveniently at 221B Baker Street, or, if she were his Sussex housekeeper, waited until they had both returned home. I suggest, therefore, that the three women are quite separate individuals and that Holmes recruited Martha, possibly through an employment agency, to act as Von Bork’s housekeeper, having interviewed her personally and coached her in her role.
Less is known about Watson’s activities during this period. Presumably he was kept busy with his Queen Anne Street practice, although, as we have seen, he found time to spend an occasional weekend with Holmes in Sussex, where no doubt he accompanied Holmes on his walks across the Downs and may also have joined him in his early morning expeditions to the beach, although there is no evidence in the canon that Watson could swim. He was probably also introduced to Holmes’ new friends, in particular Harold Stackhurst. Knowing Watson’s kind and generous nature, it is unlikely that he felt any resentment towards them but welcomed the fact that Holmes had found some like-minded companions.
Despite his busy professional life, Watson still found time for writing. In September 1903, the month of the Creeping Man inquiry, according to Watson one of the last cases which Holmes undertook before his retirement, Holmes lifted the ban on publication which he had imposed on his return to England in April 1894 after the Great Hiatus, although, as we have seen, it had been partially lifted in 1901 when Watson was permitted to publish The Hound of the Baskervilles in serial form between August of that year and September 1902.
Watson made the most of this new authorial freedom. Between September 1903 and December 1904, he published both in this country and in America thirteen accounts of his earlier exploits with Holmes, beginning with ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’, in which he chronicled Holmes’ return to London in April 1894 and which was first published, not in The Strand but in the American magazine Collier’s Weekly. The series ended with ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’, which first appeared in The Strand in December 1904 and in Collier’s Weekly in January 1905. Readers are referred to the chronology set out in Chapter Fourteen for the titles and publication dates of the other eleven accounts. All thirteen were published in 1905 in volume form under the general title of The Return of Sherlock Holmes.