Had we once more lived a charmed life? Or were we allowed to live because Holmes was Mycroft’s younger sibling?
Postscript
Several readers kindly asked after Philip Jacobus Pretorius. They recalled how the summons from Holmes to meet Edward Grey led to the abandonment of my planned visit to the great jungles of central Africa. Subsequent obligations led to further postponements until, as happens, the entire enterprise fell away, to be dreamed about on cold winters’ evenings. Soon after the outbreak of the Great War a letter arrived from Pretorius, by then an officer in the British Imperial Government attached to Admiral King-Hall. To enlist in the service Pretorius had had to escape from German-occupied territory in East Africa, undergoing an ordeal in the vast jungles quite unparalleled in my own experience, despite my warring years in the deadly Frontier Tribal Areas of British India. His exceptional scouting skills were to lead to the hunt for the German raider SMS Königsberg, a light cruiser of the Kaiser’s Imperial Navy named after the Capital of Prussia. On 20 September 1914 she surprised and sank the British protected cruiser HMS Pegasus in the Battle of Zanzibar. With Pretorius’s involvement, revenge was soon to hand.
Notes From The Author
My Endpieces seem to grow in length with each succeeding Sherlock Holmes adventure I write. Kindly readers tell me they enjoy reading this section but of course you do not need to bother. I add them simply for interest and colour. I list the books I have read as background including memoirs of the Edwardian age in England and Turkey. Some of the writing is so atmospheric I incorporate small bits into Holmes’s and Watson’s Stamboul adventure. I have also tended to use the spelling current in the Edwardian period, so for example Mombasa was often Mombassa, diplomats spelt Baghdad without the ‘h’, hence Bagdad, and Kiev as Kieff, and the ‘s’ many British now prefer to use in words like ‘civilisation’ was then a ‘z’, like the USA today.
Readers of my other ‘sherlocks’ will have realised I have very considerable admiration for Dr. John H. Watson. There’s no doubt the Sultan was correct. If Watson had not taken on the task of chronicling Holmes’s cases, the latter’s career as a Great Detective may never have taken off. It was sheer kismet the former Army doctor on a wound-pension needed to find and share the cost of digs in London in 1881 at the precise time the peripatetic young Sherlock Holmes did too. I have little time for the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce depiction as a well-intentioned bumbler, loyal but clueless. Watson said of himself, ‘If I have one quality upon earth it is common sense’. He was also eager, chivalrous and courageous. Much more than Holmes he was like his creator Arthur Conan Doyle. Like Doyle, Watson had the qualities of a good doctor - kindliness, optimism and a healthy scepticism. Watson had another value to Holmes. Medicine is said to be as much the ability to gain the confidence of the patient as it is an abstract science.
‘Your best friends would hardly call you a schemer, Watson,’ Holmes told him, adding later, ‘I never get to your limits. There are unexplored possibilities about you.’
It’s not possible to trace the various paths by which Conan Doyle himself created Watson. While writing these notes I was on the train to London Charing Cross from deepest East Sussex reading The Crooked Scythe by George Ewart Evans, an anthology of memories of men and women of a past era - farm labourers, shepherds, horsemen, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, sailors, fisherman, miners, maltsters, domestic servants. The introduction by a David Gentleman described the author Evans as follows:
‘George was in his mid-fifties when I first saw him...upright and vigorous, with an open and friendly manner and a clear, piercing gaze. He looked the part of a countryman, in a tweed jacket, a hat also of tweed, drill trousers, and stout brown shoes. As I grew to know him, I discovered that he was sympathetic and generous with help and encouragement. He was intelligent and shrewd; his judgements, though seldom sharply expressed, were acute and rational. In conversation he was tolerant and unassertive, but it was soon clear he held independent views with firmness and conviction.’
I’m certain this is how Watson’s many friends at the Junior United Services club and at the Gatwick races would have viewed him too, a man of gentility though of limited means and no property. We should all have friends who wear stout brown shoes.
At several points in this new adventure I mention Watson’s unfulfilled plans to go to Africa (‘the Dark Continent with its great herds of elephants, odd-toed ungulates on the Luangwa, hippo on the Shire River, the Tsavo man-eating lions, dust, blood, sleeping sickness, malaria, alcoholism, the smell of camp-fires long extinguished...’). Writing about his plans took me back nostalgically to my own late-teenage years in East and Central Africa. One day I shall get Watson there too.
Miscellany
Abd-ul-Hamid 11 (22 September 1842 - 10 February 1918). Variously spelt Abdul Hamid and Abdülhamid. 34th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. An article in the Manchester Guardian on July 24 1905 reported an attempt on the Sultan’s life when he attended the Mosque. Titled ‘The Sultan’s Escape’, the Manchester Guardian commented, ‘Judging by the number killed (the majority of them soldiers lining the road near the Mosque) and by the material damage, the bomb used must have been a formidable engine... the Sultan preserved the most remarkable sang froid, although a wild panic ensued among the onlookers...’
In an Editorial Article the same day, the Manchester Guardian opined, ‘There is hardly a race in Turkey but has its grounds for vengeance, and few living creatures in all the Empire who would not rejoice in the Sultan’s death, unless, perhaps, the dogs in the Stamboul streets that owe their lives to his capricious and incalculable mercies...The whole Osmanli brood is tainted by its prison-palace life, degenerate, uneducated, and incapable of resisting the influence of the counter-spies who manage it.’
In the summer of 1908, the Young Turk Revolution broke out. On being told troops in Salonika were advancing on him, Abd-ul-Hamid capitulated. The last Sultan to exert autocratic control over the Ottoman Empire, he was deposed by the parliament on April 26 1909 and conveyed into captivity at Salonika (‘that city of vipery’, he had called it). In 1912, when Salonika fell to Greece, he was returned to captivity in Constantinople. Just as he (and Shelmerdine) had predicted, in World War One the Young Turks threw their lot in with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. The 34th Sultan spent his last days studying, carpentering and writing his memoirs in custody at Beylerbeyi Palace in the Bosphorus, where he died on 10 February 1918, the year the Ottoman Empire collapsed. He was buried in a mausoleum along with Sultans Mahmud II and Abdülaziz near Sultanahmet Square. His obituary appeared in The Times.