The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars

March 6th, 2013 · · Research Team Stories No comments - Tags:

By Mike Sutton

It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.

[The Noble Bachelor]

In several of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes expresses admiration for the USA and its people. For many years, this admiration has been reciprocated. Doyle’s books have sold well there, and American authors have written numerous sequels and critical studies. Meanwhile American actors, from William Gillette to Robert Downey Junior, have impersonated the great detective on stage and screen.

A remarkable illustration of this transatlantic regard for Doyle’s immortal character is a flourishing network of convivial societies, whose members celebrate (and re-enact) the adventures of their hero and his adversaries and allies. At the centre of this network is a New York group, named after the troop of street urchins employed by Holmes as auxiliaries – The Baker Street Irregulars.

There’s more work to be got out of one of these little beggars than out of a dozen of the force” Holmes remarked. “The mere sight of an official looking person seals men’s lips. These youngsters, however, go everywhere and hear everything. They are as sharp as needles too; all they want is organisation.

[A Study in Scarlet]

America’s Baker Street Irregulars were organised in 1934 by Christopher Morley – a former Rhodes Scholar and prominent New York journalist, editor, and novelist. Admission is by invitation only. The list of distinguished Irregulars includes US Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the mathematician Banesh Hoffman and many prominent authors. Affiliated societies, named after significant characters or objects in Doyle’s stories, include the Sons of the Copper Beeches in Philadelphia, The Diogenes Club of Dallas, and The Giant Rats of Sumatra in Memphis. (A number of similar societies are based in Canadian cities.) Their members convene regularly for lectures, seminars, theatrical performances and general socialising.

Why do these enthusiasts idolise Holmes, rather than an American detective hero like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlow? Is it mere snobbery, fostered by ex-Ivy Leaguers and their would-be emulators? Or does something in Doyle’s stories resonate with more widely held American aspirations? It seems probable that this question would repay further investigation.

One Holmesian characteristic which American readers may well admire is his dismissive attitude towards social hierarchies. He shows no deference to aristocrats, especially if they behave shabbily, and in “A Scandal in Bohemia” he delivers a crushing put-down to a contemptible king who is too insensitive to perceive its ironic meaning. Yet in “The Copper Beeches” he pursues an apparently trivial case brought to him by a frightened governess with the same commitment that he gives to the recovery of stolen Foreign Office documents in “The Naval Treaty”.

Holmes’ dealings with law-breakers are equally revealing. While confessing his respect for the villain’s intelligence and courage he pursues the master-criminal Moriarty to the death. But he allows a first offender to evade punishment, remarking to Dr Watson:

I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again. He is too terribly frightened. Send him to gaol now and you make a gaolbird of him for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness.

[The Blue Carbuncle]

All in all, Holmes seems more of a meritocrat than an egalitarian. Like such archetypal American heroes as Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Edison, he has built a distinguished career on innate talent and hard work. To men or women who follow a similar path (and remain honest) he shows courtesy and compassion, whatever their status.

Holmes also believes firmly in another central pillar of the American dream – the importance of education. On a train journey near Clapham Junction he remarks to Watson:

Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea.

The Board schools.

Lighthouses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.

[The Naval Treaty]

This remark has a special significance for me, because one of those “brick islands” near Clapham Junction was where my own education began in the nineteen-forties. But its wider significance is clear enough. Holmes believes that compulsory schooling can convert unwashed and illiterate street children into worthy citizens – for their own benefit, and for the good of society. (This might have seemed a dismal prospect to Huckleberry Finn, but Tom Sawyer would certainly have profited from it.)

The liberating power of education has been particularly emphasised by African-American activists from Booker T Washington onwards, and hence school desegregation in the 1950s was a critical point in the civil rights struggle. That struggle was already under way when the Holmes stories first appeared in print, and one of them addresses a particularly sensitive aspect of the racial question.

It concerns a British merchant, Grant Munroe of Norbury, who has recently married the young widow of a successful American lawyer. He seeks Holmes’ assistance because his wife lives in fear of something relating to her past, about which she refuses to confide in him. Several other Holmes adventures involve sinister transatlantic connections – for example with the Mafia (“The Red Circle”), the Ku Klux Klan (“The Five Dried Orange Pips”) and the Chicago Mob (“The Dancing Men”). In this case, however, the story is very different.

The lady’s first husband was an African-American. Fearing to tell her second husband this, or to reveal the existence of her dark-skinned daughter, she has installed the child with a nursemaid in a nearby cottage, and is visiting her secretly. When Holmes, Watson and Munroe enter this cottage – expecting to discover a blackmailer, if not something worse – the truth is exposed.

And now tonight you at last know all, and I ask you what is to become of us, my child and me? She clasped her hands, and waited for an answer.

It was a long two minutes before Grant Munroe broke the silence, and when his answer came, it was one of which I love to think. He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held out his other hand to his wife, and turned towards the door.

We can talk it over more comfortably at home”, said he. “I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.

Holmes and I followed them down to the lane, and my friend plucked at my sleeve as we came out. “I think”, said he,” that we shall be of more use in London than in Norbury.

[The Yellow Face]

Holmes often reminds us that it is profitless to speculate without evidence. And yet one is tempted to think that it would have gladdened his heart to learn that one day another child of a black father and a white mother would occupy the Oval Office.

‘War without Guns’: Sport and the Anglo-Boer War

February 7th, 2013 · · Research Team Stories No comments - Tags: , , ,

By Dean Allen

In the 40 years before the outbreak of the First World War one of the most notable social phenomena in Britain was the dramatic rise of organised sport, both amateur and, increasingly, professional. In much the same way that civilian society’s passion for sport grew, the military was also affected as sport came to dominate the lives of soldiers during this period. The development of sport and physical training in the late Victorian British army meant that for the soldiers serving in South Africa during the 1899-1902 campaign, sporting activity formed an important part of their daily existence.

'Sports at the Sanatorium during the Siege of Kimberley, 1899' 'No. 2 Company, King's Regiment at the Pull' (Public Collection, McGregor Museum, Kimberley)

An important factor in the growth of regimental sport in the latter part of the 1800’s was, according to Campbell, the movement throughout English society to form associations and leagues to regulate play and provide for championships. The Football Association (soccer) was formed in 1863, and the Rugby Union in 1871. The army was heavily represented among the individuals and teams that initially formed these bodies, and something of this organising and propagating spirit was transferred to the nascent institution of regimental sport in South Africa. Within this culture, soldiers of all ranks were encouraged to participate in army sport and build upon interests they had carried with them from civilian society. As a result, accounts of regimental sport during the South Africa campaign continued to dominate the journals of the various regiments based across the country. Around the turn of the century, as Campbell shows, The Thistle, the monthly journal of the 1st Regiment of Foot, The Royal Scots, and The Thin Red Line, journal of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, contained more information about company and regimental football than about the regiment’s actions on active service in India and in South Africa. For the English, regimental cricket was especially popular with reports in the April 1901 issue of St. George’s Gazette detailing the exploits of The Northumberland Fusiliers in cricket matches played throughout South Africa against rival regiments (St. George’s Gazette, 30 April 1901).

This keen interest in sport was in fact shared by the Boers who, on numerous occasions, challenged the British to less deadly contests during the war. For example, shortly after Jan Smut’s departure from the North Western Cape for the peace talks at Vereeniging in April 1902, Field General Manie Maritz challenged the besieged British garrison at Okiep to a football match. Originally written in High Dutch this now famous letter is housed in the South African Rugby Museum at Newlands in Cape Town. The English translation reads:

The Honourable Major Edwards,

O’kiep

Dear Sir,

I wish to inform you that I have agreed to a football match taking place between you and us. I, from my side, will agree to a cease-fire tomorrow afternoon from 12 o’clock until sunset, the time and venue of the match to be arranged by you in consultation with Messrs. Roberts and Van Rooyen who I am sending to you.

I have the honour etc.,

pp. S.G. Moritz

Field General

Transvaal Scouting Corps.

Concordia, April 28, 1902.[1]

Although the match never took place, the challenge itself indicates a common ground represented here by rugby, between Boer and Briton. At Mafeking too, towards the end of April 1900, cricket and war also mixed in a lighter vein. A British patrol inspecting railway lines to the south west of the town found a letter addressed to Colonel Baden-Powell from Sarel Eloff, Commandant of the Johannesburg Commando and one of Paul Kruger’s thirty-five grandsons. It read:

Dear Sir,

I see in The Bulawayo Chronicle that your men in Mafeking play cricket on Sundays, and give concerts and balls on Sunday evenings. In case you will allow my men to join in, it would be very agreeable to me, as here, outside Mafeking, there are seldom any of the fair sex, and there can be no merriment without them being present. In case you would allow this we could spend some of the Sundays, which we still have to get through round Mafeking, and of which there will probably be several, in friendship and unity. During the course of the week, you can let us know if you accept my proposition and I shall then, with my men, be on the cricket field, and at the ballroom at the time so appointed by you.

I remain,

Your obedient friend,

Sarel Eloff,

Commandant.[2]

 

Baden-Powell, his biographer Hillcourt records, read the letter with a sardonic smile – a Sunday cricket match with the Boers – he sent his answer to the Boer lines under a white flag:

Sir,

I beg to thank you for your letter of yesterday, in which you propose that your men should come and play cricket with us. I should like nothing better – after the match in which we are at present engaged is over. But just now we are having our innings and have so far scored 200 days not out against the bowling of Cronje, Snyman, Botha and Eloff, and we are having a very enjoyable game.

I remain,

Yours truly,
R.S.S. Baden-Powell[3]

Despite their many differences these incidents, although isolated, indicate a mutual appreciation for sport. The Anglo-Boer War it would seem, did not prevent either side from continuing forms of sporting activity and the shared passion for games such as rugby and cricket would form part of the reconciliation process long after the last shot was fired.

 

[1] See A.C. Parker, The Springboks 1891-1971, 1970, p. 5 and South African Rugby Board, Rugby in South Africa, 1964, p. 19.

[2] Quoted in J. Winch, Cricket in Southern Africa, 1997, p. 44.

[3] Quoted in J. Winch, Cricket in Southern Africa, 1997, p. 44.

Further readings:

J.D. Campbell, ‘Training for sport is training for war’. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 17(4), 2000.

W. Hillcourt, Baden-Powell, The Two Lives of a Hero, 1964.

 

Digging up the English Radical Tradition

January 8th, 2013 · · Research Team Stories No comments

By Joe Hardwick

In June 2012, a small group of young people calling themselves ‘Diggers2012’ left London and the corporatism of the capital and established an ‘eco-village’ on land in Brunel University’s Runnymede Campus: an area, they claimed, that was designated for the development of luxury homes and student accommodation, but was ostensibly terra nullius. According to newspaper reports, their initial destination had been disused farmland near the Queen’s estates at Windsor, but after clashes with the authorities the group—who at the time of writing in October 2012 appear to number fifteen—were forced to settle in fields not far from where King John signed one of the defining documents of the English political tradition, Magna Carta (see this Guardian article). In subsequent weeks the historical significance of the land provided a fitting context for the clashes that developed between the eco-village and the National Trust, which, after claiming that the Diggers had trespassed on their land (something the diggers deny), organised for an injunction that would allow them to evict the group from the Runnymede Estate. In addition to raising questions about the possibility of forming an alternative to the social, political and economic order, the conflict is one in which various institutions, values and images that have at one time or another been evoked as capturing a sense of Englishness and what it means to be English appear to sit in tension. Representative democracy, agriculture, the land, Magna Carta and, perhaps, the National Trust, might all conjure up images of England, but here they seem to be in conflict (The voice-piece for the Digger2012 movement is their website).

In branding themselves Diggers2012 the group are positioning themselves as the descendants of the English agrarian reformers who, in response to the excursions into common land by an entrepreneurial yeoman elite, moved in 1649—the year of the execution of Charles I—to establish ‘digger’ communities on common land at St. George’s Hill in Surrey and three other places in Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Essex. The current diggers will probably hope that their own experiment in the idea that the earth is a common treasury from which each should benefit equally will be more long-lasting than their seventeenth-century forbears: through late 1649 and ’50 the settlements endured attacks from local yeoman and authorities, with the final nail in the coffin of the Surrey settlement coming in Easter 1650 when a gang led by the local parson tore down the digger homes. But in reclaiming the spirit of the diggers and the digger leader Gerrard Winstanley (who once wrote that the reform of land ownership would mean there was no ‘need of Lawyers, prisons, or engines of punishment one over another, for all shall walk and act righteously in the Creation, and there shall be no beggar’) the modern diggers are doing more than just drawing links between the inequalities of land ownership past and present, between the revolutionary ferment of the late 1640s and today, and between contemporary and historical disillusionment with the ability of the parliamentary political process to bring a more equitable future: they are also pointing to the enduring importance of a tradition of English radicalism whose counter-hegemonic ideas on liberty, democracy, land ownership and community have tended to lurk at the background, if not obscured entirely, during debates about English national identity or Britishness. Certainly the radicalism and extremism of the digger take on the English past and identity was for many a welcome relief from an Olympic summer where debates about national identity were crowded with those familiar English tropes of monarchy and fair play.

The recovery of this radical tradition extending from the 1381 Peasants Revolt, through the diggers and up to the Chartists and beyond was driven by a group of left-wing (if not communist) historians in the 1960s. While this group—the names of E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm are perhaps the most famous—had success in bringing this radical history to the awareness of the historical academy, left-leaning members of the public, and history undergraduates, they always had a much harder time communicating their thesis to a wider constituency. The main problem was that they could not convince the British public the campaigns for social justice of Winstanley, the apocalyptic millennialism of Joanna Southcott (‘O England! O England! England!…The midnight hour is coming for you all’),[1] the republicanism of Tom Paine or the proto-communism of Thomas Spence were genuinely an English tradition rather than something brought from outside to disturb England and her comfortable traditions of Magna Carta, parliamentary government and the separation of power in Kings, Lord and Commons (it is worth noting that none of the radical luminaries mentioned above got a walk on part in the Olympic opening ceremony).

This is not to say that the radical narrative has greater claim to represent true Englishness than those myths of identity that involve Morris Dancing, warm beer and ladies cycling to communion. As with all ideas about the existence of a native tradition the Marxist notion of a continuous English radicalism linking Winstanley and Wollstonecraft, Jack Straw and Thomas Spence had more than just a hint of myth about it. Though all were labelled radicals, it was not clear whether Winstanley’s ‘socialism’ (if he was a proto-socialist at all), bore any resemblance to modern socialism, and it was not clear that the ideas on republicanism articulated by the Thetford-born Tom Paine in the last decades of the eighteenth century were peculiarly English. All these ideas were worked out in a larger European, and American context.[2] Hence the English radical tradition is maybe just another example of one of the ‘invented traditions’ that Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, in a book published in the early 1980s, spotted elsewhere.

But regardless of the historical accuracy of the English radical tradition, it may be that the shadow of Scottish devolution, the rising political significance of the Englishness debate, and current efforts to shed Englishness of its right-wing and xenophobic associations will mean that the work of the Marxist historians and the characters they wrote about will once again come on the political and cultural radar of the English: certainly a group wider than the more than just the well-read and articulate members of the Diggers2012 movement. It might also be, as one commentator has pointed out, that those politicians who have favoured the deployment of the more inclusive ‘Britishness’—most notably those in the Labour Party, the supposed heirs to the radical tradition—might be forced by Scottish devolution and the break-up of Britain to embark on a new project of rethinking a more equitable, inclusive and possibly radical understanding of English national identity (also see this Guardian article).

[1] Southcott quoted in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), p. 422.

[2] Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein, ‘Introduction’, in their English Radicalism, 1550-1850 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 4, 6.