The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors (57 page)

65. The work among the poor performed by the Barnetts in the East End was legendary. In time Mrs. Barnett was to be created a Dame of the British Empire in recognition of her services.

Dr. Thomas Barnardo, known as the “Father of Nobody’s Children,” was credited with rescuing, unbelievably, over 12,000 of them from the slums.

66. This observation goes a long way toward explaining why Watson’s accounts of Holmes’s cases are replete with conflicting dates, a state of affairs that has long caused dismay, confusion, and controversy among Sherlockian scholars. Obviously, Watson had a prudent editor and cautious lawyer.

The man credited with being Watson’s literary agent and editor, Arthur Conan Doyle, admittedly took a cavalier approach to checking out his facts. Said he: “... It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little.”

67. Oscar Wilde’s active literary and theatrical career was yet to come, as was the notorious sex scandal involving him and Lord Alfred Douglas, the young son of the Marquess of Queensbury. The affair, which ended up in the courts, ultimately ruined Wilde’s reputation and resulted in a prison sentence for him, followed by self-imposed exile to France. However, even at this early period in his life, he had already become the toast of avant-garde London, an arbiter of “good taste,” and the acknowledged leader of the so-called Aesthetic Movement.

68. George Bernard Shaw would have been in his early thirties at the time of this meeting. While he had yet to write any of the plays for which he would later become justly famous, he had already begun making a name for himself as a critic and social reformer. It is interesting to conjecture that the idea for his “Pygmalion” may have resulted from this one casual meeting with Holmes — all the
more
interesting when one stops to consider that the only comment Shaw ever made about the great detective was when he was quoted as saying: “Sherlock Holmes was a drug addict without a single amiable trait.”

69. Dr. Openshaw was actually with the Pathology Department of London Hospital. He had already confirmed the authenticity of the contents of an earlier package from the Ripper, one sent on October 16 to Mr. George Lusk, the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. It was the other portion of the missing kidney. Accompanying it was a note addressed “From Hell:”

Mr. Lusk

Sir I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate whil longer

Catch me when you can, Mishter Lusk.

70. The “patriotic sentiment” was the initials
V.R.
for Victoria Regina, spelled out by Holmes “in one of his queer humors” with the aid of a target pistol, according to Watson.

“I have always held,” wrote Watson, “that pistol practice should distinctly be an open-air pastime; and when Holmes in one of his queer humors would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.” (See
The Musgrave Ritual
.)

71. William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), called “the Grand Old Man” by his contemporaries (affectionately by his admirers, derisively by his detractors), was four times prime minister of Great Britain, the leading social reformer of Victorian England, and the dominant figure of the Liberal Party for almost thirty years. A deeply religious and highly moral man (“insufferably self-righteous,” was how one critic described him), he had the curious habit of scouring the streets at night for “unfortunate young women” whom, it is said, he would “take home to his wife and lecture.”

Queen Victoria, who disliked Gladstone intensely — as much for his politics as for his patronizing manner (she complained that he had the habit of addressing her as if she were a public meeting) — was well aware of his nocturnal activities and suspected him of much worse. But it is unlikely he was capable of energetic murder. He was seventy-nine years old at the time.

72. The fact that the Ripper murders all occurred at either the beginning or end of the month, when the moon was either in its first phase or its last, led to some elaborate theories (some of them from respected scientists of the day) regarding “lunar madness.”

73. James Monro, the popular and able former assistant commissioner and head of the CID, had been forced out of office by Warren the previous August.

74. The Queen was extremely upset by the East End murders; her diary during this period contained several entries pertaining to them, and she bombarded Salisbury, Matthews, and other officials with memoranda demanding “the absolute necessity for some very decided action.” She even made suggestions pertaining to improved street lighting, better training for detectives, and increased police patrols: “All these courts must be lit, and our detectives improved,” she wrote to Lord Salisbury. “They are not what they should be.”

75. The Prince of Wales’s secretary wrote to Queen Victoria’s on one occasion: “I ask again,
who
is it tells her these things?” According to Dulcie M. Ashdown (
Queen Victoria’s Family
), the queen was very well informed about her grandson’s activities, as she was about most things concerning her large and far-flung family. The Queen felt Prince Eddy “was by no means suited to become king. He had little intelligence, little application, no interest in politics, no firm moral principles to make up for the other defects, and not one vestige of likeness to his sainted grandfather, Prince Albert. To the Queen, he was even more of a disappointment than his father had been.”

Mycroft’s assessment of him was an accurate one. Stanley Weintraub (in
Victoria: An Intimate Biography
) writes: “Eddy was so backward and lethargic as to be nearly uneducable. He had a reputation for taciturnity, but only because he had nothing to say. He could barely read, had inherited deafness from his mother, had a drooping, vacant face that some women — and perhaps some men — found attractive.”

Wrote one of Prince Eddy’s tutors to the Prince of Wales in 1879: “He fails not in one or two subjects, but in all. The abnormally dormant condition of his mind, which deprives him of the ability to fix his attention to any given subject for more than a few minutes consecutively rules out any lingering hope that it might be possible to send him to a public school.” And in 1880: “Prince Eddy sits listless and vacant and wastes as much time in doing nothing as he ever wasted... This weakness of brain, this feebleness and lack of power to grasp almost anything put before him, is manifested... also in his hours of recreation and social intercourse. It is a fault of nature.”

76. This brief discussion between Holmes and his brother is of more than passing interest. Britain’s rigid social structure lay at the core of the class struggles taking place in England at that time in its history — class struggles brought about by the extreme social inequities that had always existed but had become more apparent as
the country became more heavily industrialized. It was this to which the East End murders helped call attention.

Even after the reforms of 1884, only one man in five was eligible to vote: England and its Empire were governed by men of the upper classes who, by virtue of their birthright, were trained to rule, just as those of the middle and lower classes were trained to submit to that rule. That members of the aristocracy considered themselves “better” than the middle and lower classes was a premise, interestingly enough, that seemed to be readily accepted by
all
concerned. An Englishman’s fate was decided at birth, as it had been since feudal times, and knowing one’s “place” was a foregone conclusion.

It was this firm, almost congenital belief in obedience — “absolute obedience,” in the words of Mycroft, “to God, the Queen, and one’s betters, whoever they may be” — that was the foundation of English Victorian society, a society characterized by Lord Palmerston, who served as prime minister earlier in the period, as being one “in which every class accepts with cheerfulness the lot which providence has assigned to it...”

77. Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903), was Conservative prime minister of Great Britain on three separate occasions: Briefly in 1885, again from 1886 to 1891, and finally from 1895 to 1902.

Salisbury was perhaps the greatest of the many who headed the government during Victoria’s long reign (Melbourne and Disraeli notwithstanding). Certainly he was the most highly principled, often opposing his own party in matters that ran counter to his moral views, sometimes to the detriment of his own career. (Disraeli once compared him with “a madman whose delusion it was to believe himself the one sane person in a world of lunatics.” Years later he was to call him “the only man of real courage that it has ever been my lot to work with.”)

78. Philip Magnus, in
King Edward VII
, says the Prince of Wales formed his own club in a fit of pique in 1869, when the club officers of Whites refused his request to lift a ban on smoking in the morning room. Located at 52 Pall Mall, the Marlborough Club remained in existence until 1952, when rising costs and a declining membership caused it to be torn down to make room for a modern skyscraper.

79. Not surprising, after all, when one considers that the Prince of Wales was more German than English. His father, Prince Albert, was of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, as was his maternal grandmother, Princess Mary Louisa Victoria (Victoria and Albert were cousins). His maternal grandfather, the Duke of Kent, was the fourth son of George III, and as such was descended from the German House of Hanover.

80. The prince’s treatment of his friend Christopher Sykes is well documented. Wrote Louis Auchincloss (in
Persons of Consequence
): “Sykes used to submit, with a frozen impassivity that only more excited the Tudor mirth, while the Prince, amid the yelps of his sycophantic entourage, would pour brandy over his head, burn his hand with a cigarette, or shove him under the billiard table and poke him with a cue.”

Sykes is believed to have gone through a fortune entertaining the prince and his cronies: It is said that his sister one day appeared at Marlborough House to inform the prince that his friend was on the verge of bankruptcy, and he was persuaded to clear up the most pressing debts.

81. In those days there were up to ten mail deliveries a day in London.

82. We will probably never know for certain the reasons behind the antagonism between Holmes and the future
King Edward VII
, but there is considerable evidence that Irene Adler had something to do with it. The late Edgar Smith, a preeminent Sherlockian scholar of his day, theorized that “the Hereditary King of Bohemia” in the case involving Miss Adler,
A Scandal in Bohemia
, was in reality the Prince of Wales thinly disguised, and this fragment of discussion between Holmes and Watson tends to support that view. We know that the events dealt with in
A Scandal in Bohemia
occurred in March 1888 (the same month and year, according to Watson in
this
account, that the Prince of Wales visited Baker Street “on a matter of some delicacy and extreme urgency”). And we know that Holmes took an almost instant dislike to “the King” in that affair, going so far as to ignore his hand when it was held out to him at the conclusion of the case.

It may also be that Holmes’s hostility was, in part, a reaction to the Prince of Wales’s personality. Variously described by those who knew him as “the first gentleman of Europe” and “fat, vulgar, dreadful Edward,” the prince evidently appeared to Holmes as being more the latter than the former.

Still, in later years, after Edward ascended the throne, Holmes was to be of service to him yet again, the exact nature of that service remaining unknown, though it was of sufficient magnitude for an offer of a knighthood to have been made as a result. Holmes, as we know, declined it. (See
The Adventure of the Three Garridebs
.)

83. Buckingham Palace did not become the official residence of the reigning monarch until Victoria’s accession to the throne. Prior to that time St. James’s Palace bore that distinction, and to this day foreign ambassadors are still accredited to “the Court of St. James.”

84. “Everyone was there: Tum-Tum, Mrs. Tum, and the five little Tums,” wrote the future Lord Darby in a letter describing a wedding he had attended. (See
Edward and the Edwardians
by Phillippe Jullian.)

85. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894) was a noted jurist and legal scholar and the author of, among other works,
The History of the Criminal Law of England
(1883). Unfortunately, he is best remembered for presiding over the trial (in 1888) of the notorious Mrs. Maybrick, accused of having poisoned her husband with arsenic — a trial he so badly mishandled that the police had to be called in to protect him from the public. He was forced to retire from the bench in 1891, diagnosed as suffering from “brain disease.”

The younger Stephen, James Kenneth, appeared in every way to be an ideal choice as tutor and companion to the young heir to the throne. He was described as “a man of striking personality” who “fascinated not only the men of his own age but also those of an older generation with his rare physical beauty and his quite unusual intellectual brilliance.” Wrote a contemporary: “He was by general consent the ablest of the younger generation... no better choice could have been made.”

86. Albert Victor and his younger brother (the future King George V) were sent on an extensive world cruise as midshipmen aboard a naval vessel when still in their early teens. Young George thrived on it (he was to become known as the “Sailor King”); young Albert Victor, a year older, was generally miserable. (See
The Cruise of HMS Bacchante
, 1879-1882 by Reverend John Neale Dalton.)

87. The 10th Hussars, raised in 1715 by King George I (as the 10th Dragoons), fought and distinguished themselves in countless campaigns through the years, including Waterloo, the Crimea, Egypt, and Afghanistan, but achieved the largest measure of their fame as being the regiment of the dashing Beau Brummell, who, in 1806, designed the regiment’s uniforms.