The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes

The secret files of Sherlock Holmes

In July 1939 a travel-worn and battered tin dispatchbox with the name, ‘John H. Watson, MD, Late Indian Army’, painted on the lid, came into the possession of the famous doctor’s namesake, a certain Oxford philosophy don who had read widely in the Sherlock Holmes’ canon and became an acknowledged expert.

Subsequently left in his will by the professor to his nephew, the present co-selector of the files, the box contained records of ‘some curious problems’ which the great consulting detective investigated and which were never fully related, either because the final explanation was not forthcoming or in order to protect the secrets of certain families in ‘exalted positions’.

The collection contains an investigation into the disappearance of a head-waiter, his locked wardrobe and a baker’s van; a missing medical student and a secretary to a charitable organization who contrives simultaneously to run an Australian sheep-farm; the contents of a matchbox which provokes the defenestration of a famous Peruvian journalist; the blackmailing of the indiscreet Duchess of Welbourne; the skin trade in desirable domestics; how two glasses of 1867 port led to the apprehension of an artful burglar; a bird-watching ‘holiday’ in Cornwall which leads to the unmasking of a spy.

The discovery of these secret files, never before committed to print, will be eagerly awaited by Baker Street devotees.

Aubrey B. Watson, LDS, FDS, D. Orth., as is stated above, is the nephew of the late professor, the namesake of Dr John H. Watson, Sherlock Holmes’ celebrated confidant and collaborator.

June Thomson is the author of sixteen crime novels. It is hoped that her collaboration with Aubrey Watson will lead to the publication of a further selection from this most important and fascinating cache of documents which has for so long remained undiscovered.

I should like to take this opportunity of expressing my thanks to June Thomson for her help in preparing this collection of short stories for publication.

Aubrey B. Watson
LDS
,
FDS
,
D
. orth.

Students of the Sherlock Holmes’ canon will be familiar with the opening sentence of ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’ in which Watson, Holmes’ companion and chronicler of many of the great consulting detective’s cases, states that:

Watson goes on to explain that the dispatch box contains records of ‘some of the curious problems’ which, at various times, Holmes was called upon to investigate and which were never fully narrated, either because the final explanation was not forthcoming or in order to protect the secrets of certain families in ‘exalted positions’.

It was this same battered tin dispatch box which my late uncle claimed came into his possession in 1939, and the contents of which – or rather his copies of the papers it contained – he later bequeathed to me.

The story of how he acquired the box is a curious one and I shall relate it exactly as it was told to me by my late uncle,
leaving it to the reader to form his or her own judgement as to its reliability.

My uncle was also Dr John Watson although, in his case, the middle initial was F, not H. He was, moreover, a Doctor of Philosophy, not medicine, and up to the time of his retirement he taught that subject at All Saints College, Oxford.

He was, of course, fully aware of the similarity between his name and that of the famous Dr John H. Watson. He could hardly be otherwise; it was the subject of much light banter among his fellow dons at High Table. Rather than let it be the cause of any personal embarrassment, he decided to turn the situation to his advantage.

Consequently, despite the demands of his own academic studies (he published several philosophical treatises, among them
In
Praise
of
Anguish,
all of which, alas, are no longer in print) he read widely in the Holmes’ canon and became an acknowledged expert. He even wrote a short monograph on his illustrious namesake which he had privately printed and distributed amongst his friends and fellow enthusiasts. Unfortunately, I have not been able to trace any copies of it.

He was also, in a modest way, a collector of Holmesian and Watsonian memorabilia and had in his possession copies of the original
Strand
Magazine
in which Dr Watson’s accounts of Holmes’ adventures were first published.

It was, he told me, because of his reputation among students of the canon, and no doubt also the similarity of his name to the other Dr Watson’s, that in July 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, he received a visit in his college rooms from a lady, a certain Miss Adelina McWhirter, whom he described as elderly, respectable and of an impoverished, genteel appearance.

She was, Miss McWhirter claimed, related to Holmes’ Dr Watson on his mother’s side of the family and had acquired, although she declined to explain how, the doctor’s tin dispatch box, together with its contents, which had been deposited at Cox and Co., and which she was anxious to sell to someone, as she put it, ‘of proven academic scholarship who would appreciate its true value’.

The actual monetary value she placed on it was £500, a not inconsiderable sum in 1939. She hinted that her own straitened circumstances had forced her to part with this family heirloom.

Miss McWhirter’s excessive gentility inhibited my uncle from pressing her for too many details about her exact situation or how the box had come into her possession in the first place. However, when he examined it and the papers it contained, he was convinced they were genuine and, the £500 having been paid over (in cash, on Miss McWhirter’s insistence), both box and contents passed into his possession.

It was at this point that international events intervened.

The date, you will remember, was July 1939. War seemed imminent and my uncle, fearful for the safety of the Watson papers, decided to make copies of them which he kept in his rooms in Oxford, depositing the box and its contents, together with his editions of the
Strand
Magazine
and other valuable Holmesian memorabilia, in the strong-room of the main branch of his own bank, City and County, in Lombard Street, London EC3.

It was an unwise decision.

While All Saints College escaped unscathed, the main branch of the City and County suffered a direct hit during the bombing of 1942 and, although the dispatch box was rescued from the ruins, its paint was so blistered by the heat that the name on the lid was totally obliterated while the papers inside it were reduced to a mass of indecipherable charred fragments.

My uncle was placed in a dilemma.

Although he still had his copies of the Watson papers, they were, of course, in his own handwriting and he had nothing to prove the existence of the originals apart from the fire-damaged box and its burnt contents, which, to those of a sceptical disposition, amounted to no proof at all.

Nor could he trace Miss Adelina McWhirter, despite strenuous efforts on his part to do so. She had given him her address in London, a small, residential hotel in South Kensington where she said she was living, but when he applied there, he was told that she had moved out in the summer of 1939 – not long, in fact, after she had visited my uncle in Oxford – and had left no
forwarding address. Repeated appeals to her through the personal columns in
The
Times
to contact him failed to elicit any response.

Because of this lack of evidence to prove the authenticity of the Watson archives, my uncle, careful of his reputation as a scholar, decided not to publish any of the material, and on his death at the age of 98 on 2 June 1982 – ironically, forty years to the exact day after the originals were destroyed – the copies he had made passed to me under the terms of his will.

By the way, I do not know what happened to the dispatch box and its charred contents. It stood in my uncle’s rooms in All Saints until at least 1949 for I remember seeing it on his desk when, as a child, I visited him in Oxford. What happened to it subsequently, I have no idea. It was not found among his effects after his death and may have been thrown out, as so much rubbish, by the staff at the Eventide Nursing Home in Carshalton, Surrey, in which he spent his last years.

For the same reason that made my uncle hesitate to publish the Watson papers in his lifetime, I, too, have thought long and hard for several years about what to do with his copies of them.

However, as I have no one to whom I can in turn bequeath them and being by profession an orthodontist and therefore having, unlike my late uncle, no academic reputation to protect, I have decided to risk bringing down on my head the obloquy and derision of all serious students of Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson by offering them for publication.

I make no claims for their genuineness. They are, as I have said, not the originals, if indeed the originals themselves were authentic and not mere forgeries. I can only present the facts, such as they are, as they were told to me.

There is a large quantity of these copies, all in my uncle’s handwriting: some full-length accounts to which my uncle, the late Dr John F. Watson, added his own footnotes; and some rough jottings which the original Dr Watson, if indeed it were he who made them, appeared to have recorded hastily, perhaps as a memorandum of the events which may – or may not – have occurred.

The first of these I have chosen is one of the full-length
accounts, concerning an apparently unsolved case undertaken by Sherlock Holmes and also referred to by Dr Watson at the beginning of ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’. It is the investigation into the sudden disappearance of Mr James Phillimore, who, ‘stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world’.

There is no indication of the year in which the events purported to have happened may have occurred nor when the account was written down, although, from internal evidence, I tentatively suggest that the case may be placed in the late 1880s or early 1890s, but certainly subsequent to the time when Watson, after his marriage to Miss Mary Morstan, moved out of the lodgings which he shared with Holmes at 221B Baker Street.

As the account is also unnamed, I have taken it upon myself to give it the title of ‘The Case of the Vanishing Head-Waiter.’

Aubrey B. Watson
LDS
,
FDS
,
D.
orth.