The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (83 page)

5
.
Birmingham
: Conan Doyle studied pharmacology in the great Midlands city at various times between 1879 and 1882.

6
.
Cockneys
: Technically those born within the sound of Bow Bells, i.e. the bells of St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, in the City of London. The term Cockney has for centuries been used in a semi-insulting sense to describe anyone born in London, especially the East End, who speaks with a proletarian accent. In the nineteenth century cockneys were notorious for confusing the voiced labiodental fricative
/v/
with the voiced bilabial semivowel
/w/
, a trait which afflicts Sam Weller, amongst others, in Charles Dickens's
The Pickwick Papers
: ‘Now Villam, run 'em out. Take care o' the archvay, gen'l'men… Not a wery nice neighbourhood this.' Nowadays cockneys typically confuse the linguodental fricatives
/θ/
(the ‘th' in ‘thin') and
/δ/
the ‘th' in ‘there') with the voiced and unvoiced labiodental fricatives
/f/
and
/
v/, as in the cockney riddle ‘How many fevvers on a frush's froat?'/‘Five fousand free hundred and firty-free'. The word ‘cockney' is derived from ‘cocks' eggs', a slang term for the misshapen eggs laid by fowls.

7
.
Volunteer regiments
: These were set up in the 1860s to counter the threat of invasion. The regiments subsided after the Territorial Army was established in 1907, but Conan Doyle took part in re-establishing them before the First World War.

8
.
lost my crib
: Cockney slang for ‘lost my job'.

9
.
Drapers' Gardens
: An alleyway in the City half a mile north of the Bank of England, now subsumed into the grounds of Richard Seifert's National Westminster Bank building.

10
.
Venezuelan loan
: The South American country had financial difficulties at the end of the nineteenth century, following defaults in repaying public debts.

11
.
came a nasty cropper
: Cockney slang for ‘suffered failure'.

12
.
Lombard Street
: A City thoroughfare, near the Bank of England, lined with banks. Its name derives from the Italian merchants who used to frequent the area.

13
.
I dare say E.C. is not much in your line
: E.C. is the Eastern Central postal division, used here as slang for ‘the City'.

14
.
The screw
: The salary.

15
.
Potter's Terrace
: A fictitious address.

16
.
sheeny
: A derogatory term for a Jew.

17
.
Ayrshires
: Railway stock for the Glasgow and South-Western Railway.

18
.
New Zealand Consolidated
: The company went into liquidation in 1900.

19
.
British Broken Hills
: A mining company in Australia.

20
.
126B, Corporation Street
: The ‘B' for ‘bis', ‘twice', signifies that this is an upstairs address, as is 221 B Baker Street.

21
.
New Street
: A major street in Birmingham and the location of the city's main railway station.

22
.
Day's Music-Hall
: It stood on Hurst Street, Birmingham, until 1893; the building was demolished following wartime bombing in 1951.

23
.
Bermondsey
: Working-class riverside district of south-east London to the immediate south-east of London Bridge. The name comes from ‘the island of Beormund'.

24
.
Capture of the Criminal
: A newspaper would not find a man guilty prior to his visit to a court of law.

First published in the
Strand
in April 1893. A possible source for the plot, according to Donald A. Redmond in
Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources
(1982), was the hijacking of the brig
Cyprus
in August 1829 after it left Tasmania with forty convicts on board. The story is one of only two in the canon in which Watson appears but plays no dramatic role, acting purely as narrator of past events. The other is ‘The Musgrave Ritual' (see below). The story could be set in or around 1874.

1
.
during the two years that I was at college
: Meaning that Holmes spent two of his three university years in college. Readers never discover which university Holmes attended but it is tacitly understood to be either Oxford or Cambridge, the latter featuring in ‘The Missing Three-Quarter' from
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
as ‘this inhospitable town'. Christopher Morley in ‘Was Sherlock Holmes an American?' noted how Sidney Paget's illustrations for the story in the
Strand
of April 1893 indicate that Holmes could be wearing a light-blue ribbon on his straw hat and was therefore at Cambridge.

2
.
Bar fencing and boxing
: Conan Doyle, a keen boxer, was invited to referee the world heavyweight contest between Jim Jeffries and Jack Johnson in 1909, but declined.

3
.
Donnithorpe
: Fictitious.

4
.
long vacation
: From the beginning of July to the end of September.

5
.
Langmere
: In the Norfolk Broads, wide expanses of water in the flat countryside.

6
.
callosities
: Hardening of the skin caused by excessive use. In
The Sign of Four
Holmes claims he has written a ‘curious little work' upon the subject of one's trade shaping one's hand.

7
.
I saw that ‘J.A.' had been tattooed in the bend of the elbow
: In ‘The Red-Headed League', from
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, Holmes reveals that he has ‘made a small study of tattoo marks and… even contributed to the literature of the subject'.

8
.
Why, dear me, it is surely Hudson!
: One of the three Hudsons in the Holmes canon, the 221B landlady being the most famous, the other being Morse Hudson, the Kennington art-dealer in ‘The Six Napoleons', from
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
. Christopher Morley in ‘Was Sherlock Holmes an American?' (pp.
5
–15) amusingly suggested that the seafaring Hudson of the
Gloria Scott
was the estranged husband of the Baker Street landlady Mrs Hudson.

9
.
I'm just off a two-yearer in an eight-knot tramp
: i.e. a two-year service on a freight-carrying craft.

10
.
organic chemistry
: J. H. and Humfrey Michell suggested in ‘Sherlock Holmes the Chemist' (
Baker Street Journal
, 2.3 (July 1946), pp.
245
–52) that Holmes went to London to be near the Harrow chemical works set up by the chemist W. H. Perkin, who in 1856 had created a mauve dye derived from coal-tar which didn't run when washed. Within a few years mauve-dyed ladies' clothes were all the rage.

11
.
for the north
: Norfolk, being in East Anglia, would never be referred to as the north, even though technically it is north of London.

12
.
dog-cart
: See ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip', note
7
.

13
.
Fordingbridge
: Hampshire town.

14
.
one of those ingenious secret codes
: In ‘The Dancing Men', from
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
, Holmes claims he is ‘fairly familiar with all forms of secret writings' and is the author of a ‘trifling monograph upon the subject' in which he analyses 160 ciphers.

15
.
Falmouth
: Coastal town in Cornwall which has the third-largest natural harbour in the world.

16
.
N. lat. 15° 29', W. long. 25° 14'
: Just off the Cape Verde Islands.

17
.
bound for Australia
: Transportation of felons to New South Wales, the main penal colony, ended in 1840 but was resumed in 1844 and continued haphazardly until 1851. Transportation to Tasmania ended in 1853, but criminals continued to be sent to Western Australia until 1868.

18
.
Crimean War
: The Crimean War took place from 1853 to 1856, with Russia on one side and Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire on the other.

19
.
new clippers
: Fast sailing vessels with overhanging bow and tall masts developed in America from about 1840.

20
.
dibs
: Slang for ‘money', the word originating
c.
1800 probably from the children's street game dibstones.

21
.
the Bay
: The Bay of Biscay.

22
.
junk
: A type of salted beef given to sailors.

23
.
found no difficulty in believing
: Surely a captain picking up survivors would be rather more suspicious?

24
.
Terai
: As wamp in India north of the Ganges by the foot of the Himalayas.

First published in the
Strand
in May 1893. Conan Doyle ranked ‘The Musgrave Ritual' eleventh on his personal list of the twelve best Holmes stories (excluding those that appeared in
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
), as revealed in the
Strand
magazine in June 1927. The story is one of only two in the canon in which Watson appears but plays no dramatic role, acting purely as narrator of past events. The other is ‘The
Gloria Scott
' (see above). The story could be set in or around 1875.

1
.
hair-trigger
: A dangerous pistol with a secondary trigger, the slightest pressure on which releases the main trigger. It is banned in shooting and would not be of much use in detective work.

2
.
patriotic V.R.
: V.R. for ‘Victoria Regina', ‘Queen Victoria', who celebrated her Golden Jubilee in 1887. When in 1893 a joint Conan Doyle/J. M. Barrie collaboration on a comic opera fell flat, Barrie wrote a Holmesian parody of this line which ran: ‘Holmes was amusing himself with a little revolver practice. It was his custom of a summer evening to fire round my head, just shaving my face, until he had made a photograph of me on the opposite wall…'

3
.
somewhere in these incoherent memoirs
: In
A Study in Scarlet
.

4
.
Montague Street
: A small street between the British Museum and Russell Square. When Conan Doyle first moved to London in 1891 he took rooms at 23 Montague Place to the immediate north-west of Montague Street. The house was demolished when the University of London built its huge administrative headquarters, Senate House, in the 1930s. The story fails to reveal at which number Montague Street Holmes lived.

5
.
a scion of one of the very oldest families
: See ‘The Noble Bachelor', note
9
.

6
.
I am member
: i.e. Member of Parliament.

7
.
Don Juan
: Don Juan Tenorio of Seville, nobleman and philanderer, subject of Mozart's
Don Giovanni
(1787), Byron's eponymous epic satire (1819–24) and George Bernard Shaw's
Man and Superman
(1903), amongst other works.

8
.
You will leave my service tomorrow
: A trifle harsh, one would suggest.

9
.
What was the month?/The sixth from the first
: When the story was first published in the
Strand
this couplet was missing. It was inserted for the book version in Britain but omitted from most American book versions. As for the sixth month from the first, when the ritual was drawn up in the seventeenth century the year started on 25 March. This was changed in 1752, when the Gregorian calendar was adopted in England, resulting in eleven days being skipped.

T. S. Eliot was so enamoured of the ritual that he contrived a scene around it in his play about Thomas à Becket,
Murder in the Cathedral
(1935). When Thomas arrives in Canterbury one of the Tempters urges him to submit to King Henry's will. When Eliot was accused of plagiarizing ‘The Musgrave Ritual' for this scene, he replied in a letter to a reader, which was quoted in the
Times Literary Supplement
of 28 September 1951, that his use of the Musgrave Ritual was deliberate.

10
.
We took no pains to hide it
: If so, why is Brunton dismissed for poring over it?

11
.
It was nine feet in length
: Professor Jay Finley Christ claimed in his essay ‘Musgrave Mathematics' (
Client's Second Case-book
, pp.
14
–19) that if a rod of six feet threw a shadow of nine feet in latitude 51°N (Sussex), then the sun was practically due west and 33.7° above the horizon and the time could not have been later than 4.20 p.m. – something which would happen only once a year around the time of the summer solstice in June, and so could not have been six months from the first, when the ritual was drawn up.

12
.
having first taken the cardinal points by my pocket-compass
: The location of magnetic north, now some thousand miles from the North Pole, moves about seven miles every year and by the late 1870s (the period in which the story is set) it would have been some 20° to the west of where it lay in the 1650s when the ritual was devised.

13
.
It was the figure of a man
: Musgrave earlier claimed that the whole house had been searched ‘from cellar to garret' to find the missing Brunton. Since Musgrave knew this cellar was there, why had it not been searched? But then again a man as slow-witted as Musgrave, who has had so enticing a document in his possession for years without seeking a solution, would probably overlook ‘unlikely' places during a search.