WALK 2
At A Glance – the following stories, plays and novels are highlighted in this walk:
The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Greek Interpreter. The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor. The Adventure of the Illustrious Client. The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge. The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez. A Scandal in Bohemia. The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans. The Final Problem. The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter. The Adventure of the Speckled Band. The House of Temperley. Fires of Fate. The Tragedy of Korosko. Brigadier Gerard. The Adventure of the Dying Detective. The Red-headed League. The Sign of Four. The Man with the Twisted Lip
Distance: About 3 kilometres/1.8 miles
Time to allow: At least a complete morning or afternoon; if you plan to have a drink or meal in one of the dozens of cafes, restaurants and pubs en route, get a little lost in some of the alleyways off Fleet Street, and/or take in St Paul’s, a complete day is more realistic. It is a wonderful walk and distractions abound; notably, you will pass within yards of the Adelphi, Lyceum and other theatres so the walk can be combined with a matinee or evening performance (try the cut-price ticket kiosk in Leicester Square on the day of the show or up to a week in advance; near Leicester Square underground station).
Walking conditions: Very busy, obviously, with buses, cars and thousands of people everywhere. Northumberland Avenue has a slight upward gradient but from the Strand to St Paul’s it is pretty flat, although you have to cross some major junctions, for example at Aldwych. Take a camera!
Route
• Embankment tube station
• Northumberland Avenue
• Strand
• Fleet Street
• Ludgate Hill
• St Paul’s Cathedral
• St Paul’s Wharf
We begin the walk at Embankment tube – District (green), Circle (yellow), Bakerloo (brown) and Northern (black) lines. If you arrive at Charing Cross station, walk the few hundred yards down Villiers Street to the Embankment. Turn right on leaving the station entrance and then turn right again into Northumberland Avenue, a grand leafy thoroughfare leading up to Trafalgar Square. It features in several of the adventures, perhaps most famously in The Hound of the Baskervilles when Sir Henry Baskerville, newly arrived at Waterloo station, checks into the Northumberland Hotel, where he mysteriously has his boot stolen from outside his room.
There are several contenders for Sir Henry’s Hotel. Northumberland Avenue was designed as a hotel venue from the 1880s on land previously occupied by Northumberland House, home of the Percy family, Dukes of Northumberland. Among the finest hotels were the Grand, the Metropole and the Victoria. Prince Albert, later Edward VII, was a regular visitor to the Metropole; both the Grand and the Victoria had over 500 bedrooms and the latter generated its own electricity through dynamos. In Sherlock Holmes’ day, Thomas Edison’s UK headquarters was also here, and many famous politicians and actors made speech and song recordings. Subsequently, the government, notably the War Office, took over much of the accommodation. Today it is a mixed area of hotels, corporate entertainment venues and offices. It is a very wide road because for a while planning regulations dictated that new buildings could not exceed in height the width of the thoroughfare.
In The Greek Interpreter we learn that Mr Melas was able to obtain clients from among the wealthy Orientals that frequented the Northumberland Avenue hotels. The hotels feature once again in the latter stages of The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor where Holmes explains that he was able to trace the man he sought as he knew that he had recently settled his bill at one of the most select hotels in London. As there were not many that charged ‘eight shillings for a bed and eightpence for a glass of sherry’, he investigated Northumberland Avenue and in the second hotel he tried found that Francis H. Moulton, an American, had left only the day before. It was the vital clue he was looking for and he quickly wraps up the case. On another occasion, Watson was walking alone along Northumberland Avenue between the Grand Hotel and Charing Cross Station in The Adventure of the Illustrious Client when he saw the placard on a news stand with the terrible headline, black on yellow background, telling of a physical attack on Sherlock Holmes. Badly shaken, he grabbed a paper without paying for it, then paid, and retreated to the doorway of a chemist’s shop to read the dreadful news report in full.
Conan Doyle tells the following story. Once he was staying at the Northumberland Avenue Hotel – probably not one of the above; apart from anything else he was a very practical man and would likely have balked at the expense. One evening he took a walk down by the Embankment and saw a man in a distressed state who appeared to be about to jump in the river. He threw himself towards the man and managed to grab hold of his knees. Leading him across the road he learned that there had been a domestic upset, but the main cause of the would-be jumper’s distress was that his business – the man was a baker – was in trouble. Conan Doyle did his best to console the man and gave him some money, ‘such immediate help as I could’, and having obtained a promise from the man that he would go home and keep in touch, returned to his hotel. He was then troubled by the thought that he had been the victim of a clever swindler and was relieved a few days later to receive a letter from the man, giving name and address.21
About halfway up this grand thoroughfare, on the right-hand side, is the Sherlock Holmes Pub. This is undoubtedly the most famous pub associated with Holmes in the UK, but there are others around the world also – including in Budapest, Hungary; Bagarmossen, Sweden; and Pistoia, Italy. The Sherlock Holmes pub serves English pints and traditional food and the tables outside are a great place to sit and watch people going about their business on Northumberland Avenue. Inside is a recreation of Holmes’ sitting room and a unique collection – first put together for the Festival of Great Britain 1951 – of Sherlockian artefacts.
Around here somewhere would have been the Turkish Bath establishment visited by Holmes and Watson as The Adventure of the Illustrious Client begins. It was on an upper floor but we do not have the exact address. Some Sherlockians claim that the entrance is on Craven Street which leads off the avenue at this point. Craven Street is also the location of the Mexborough Private Hotel where, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Stapleton kept his wife imprisoned in her room while, disguised by wearing a beard, he followed Dr Mortimer to Baker Street and then to the Northumberland Hotel, all the while planning the demise of Sir Henry Baskerville. It is the perfect spot, tucked away and yet right at the centre of his evil web, so to speak. The other claim to fame of this narrow street, of particular interest to American visitors, is that here was the home of Benjamin Franklin for much of the period 1757–75, although exactly where is not universally agreed – possibly one of the houses numbered 27 or 36.
Conan Doyle himself was fond of a Turkish Bath and recounts an amazing incident, worthy of a Holmes story, of a very unusual one at which he just happened to bump into the Prime Minister of Great Britain. It occurred when he was staying with Lord Burnham who had a Turkish bath in the front of his house with a drying room next door. Conan Doyle had finished his bath, arrayed himself in a long towel with another screwed around his head and was in the drying room when the door opened and in walked Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister of England. Not knowing the house, it is possible that Balfour entered the room in error. He looked with amazement at Conan Doyle who raised the towel on his head in greeting. Not a word was said and the Prime Minister left the room.22
Another Prime Minister he knew, and played golf with (he was apparently not very good) was Mr Asquith,23 whom he admired as a sweet-tempered man who said little but lived up to what he did say.
At the top, ahead of you, you will see Nelson standing on top of his column; Trafalgar Square is discussed in detail in Walk 6. Here the walk turns right into the Strand. The traffic – private cars, taxis and buses – and the throngs of people is pure bedlam, so it is essential to cross the roads using the pedestrian crossings. Once into the Strand, the pavements are slightly less crowded and also flat.
The Strand takes its name from the old English word ‘strond’, meaning the edge of a river; here, from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries the rich and powerful owned mansions that stretched down to the river, each with a private mooring. Thereafter it became very much as we see it today, a street of fashionable coffee shops, restaurants, taverns and theatres. It has always fascinated writers. Virginia Woolf for one was struck by its character – she writes in Mrs Dalloway (1925) that the Strand was ‘quite different from Westminster’, being ‘so serious; it was so busy’; John Masefield, in his poem ‘Growing Old’ writes of ‘jostling in the Strand’.
Hereabouts, if we are playing the Great Game, is the location of the ‘worn and battered tin dispatch box’ entrusted to Watson’s bank, Cox and Co, which contains many adventures not as yet released to the public. This would be the Holy Grail for Sherlockians and many are the pastiches – new tales of Holmes – that begin by pretending that the author has somehow come by the mystical box. From 1888 the HQ of Cox and Co. was at the junction of Trafalgar Square and the Strand, 16–18 Charing Cross, subsequently moving to Pall Mall.
‘To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.’
Virginia Woolf, 1930
As already mentioned, Watson stayed at a private hotel in the Strand when he first returned to England from his military service. There used to be a large hotel called the Golden Cross Hotel just before reaching Charing Cross station where rooms could be had for considerably less than the Northumberland Avenue establishments and it is thought by many that Watson could have stayed here.
It is interesting to note that this area already had an impeccable literary pedigree; almost fifty years earlier, Charles Dickens placed the adult David Copperfield and his Aunt Betsy in a similar location. In fact, the whole of this area – Embankment, Villiers Street, the Strand and Covent Garden – were Copperfield’s world as a youngster growing up while his father was imprisoned for debt. These events in the novel are largely autobiographical.24 The hopelessly grim blacking factory to which Copperfield – i.e. Dickens – was sent was where Embankment tube is now; on a happier note, Copperfield tells us that he became an expert in where to buy bread pudding in this area – the ‘flabby’ sort with currants widely spaced was half the price of his favourite which was much more fruity and could be had in a shop on the Strand – and he would eke out his meagre pay as best he could. Once, he thinks it might have been on his birthday, he had the courage to enter a pub somewhere around here called ‘The Lion or The Lion and something’, and ask the landlady for a pint of ‘your very best ale’. She gave it to him, no doubt considerably diluted, along with a kiss, refusing to take his money.25
Charing Cross itself in the front of the station is a copy of a medieval ‘cross’ (such crosses were granted by the monarch to mark something or somebody special, e.g. Norwich was granted one by King Edward II in 1341 to denote the right to hold an open market in perpetuity, and they were edifices of any shape, rarely in the form of an actual cross) erected in 1291–4 by Edward I as a memorial to his wife, Eleanor of Castile. This was destroyed on the orders of Oliver Cromwell in 1647 and a reimagining of the original, designed by E.M. Barry and made of stone and Aberdeen granite, was erected in 1865.
Both Charing Cross station and Charing Cross Post Office feature in several Holmes adventures. Telegrams from Charing Cross Post Office – actually situated in this period behind where you are walking now, in Trafalgar Square, on what was subsequently the site of South Africa House – feature in The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge. As regards the station, Holmes arrives back at Charing Cross accompanied by Hopkins at the successful conclusion of The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez and in Scandal in Bohemia Holmes learns that Irene Adler – the woman – has left for the Continent on the 5.15 train from here.
The thrilling end of The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans takes place in the smoking room of the Charing Cross Hotel, an enterprise fronting the station itself, still thriving and looking much the same on the outside as in Holmes’ day. Oberstein is tricked by a dictated note from Holmes to come to the hotel to collect the final tracing of the plans for £500 and here he is duly arrested before being ‘engulphed for fifteen years in a British prison’. In his trunk are located the invaluable Bruce-Partington plans which he had been intending to sell by auction to a rival naval power in Europe. Following this, Holmes spends a day at Windsor whence he returns with a remarkably fine emerald tie-pin saying it was ‘a present from a certain gracious lady in whose interests he had once been fortunate enough to carry out a small commission’.
Almost opposite the station is Coutts Bank. This was previously ‘the Strand end of the Lowther Arcade’, through which, in The Final Problem, Watson is directed by Holmes to rush in order to pick up a cab to Victoria Station. Watson does as he is bidden and arrives in the appointed first-class carriage only to find that Holmes does not appear. Instead he is sharing the compartment, which has been reserved for Holmes and himself only, with a decrepit Italian ecclesiastic. The train is about to pull out and Watson feels ‘a chill of fear’ before hearing a voice, ‘My dear Watson, you have not even condescended to say good-morning.’ The venerable Italian priest is, of course, Holmes in disguise.
The first scene of The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter finds Holmes puzzling over a strange telegram: ‘Please await me. Terrible misfortune. Right wing three-quarter missing, indispensable tomorrow.’ Holmes remarks that it has a Strand postmark and was dispatched at ten thirty-six. Thus begins one of the most unusual of tales. Although we are not told as much, the telegram would have presumably been sent from the Charing Cross Telegraph Office which at the time was situated at 447 Strand, just a few doors from the Lowther Arcade on the same side of the road.
Charing Cross Hospital was, at the time of the Holmes adventures, in Agar Street, just off the Strand on the landward side at this point. At the beginning of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes challenges Watson to make what he can of a stick which has been left by a visitor at 221B. It bears the words ‘from his friends of the CCH’. Watson judges this to be of ‘the Something Hunt.’ In one of the most amusing exchanges in the canon, Holmes tells Watson that he excels himself but unfortunately most of his conclusions are erroneous. Holmes judges it to be ‘Charing Cross Hospital’ and when the man, Dr James Mortimer, returns he is, of course, proved quite right. His friends had presented it to him when he left the hospital to go into private practice. In The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, Holmes is attacked by two men and escapes through the Café Royal into Glasshouse Street. He is carried to Charing Cross Hospital and then insists on returning to Baker Street (see above where a severely shaken Watson reads the newspaper report of this frightening occurrence in Northumberland Avenue).
Both Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens knew the Strand very well, featured it in their writings and also put on plays here with considerable financial success.26 One of the most remarkable for Conan Doyle was The Speckled Band which was premiered at the Adelphi, still thriving today and on the left as you now look up the Strand, on 10 June 1910. Conan Doyle writes that it was a very quick job – two weeks, in fact, was all it took to convert the story – and this was necessary because his previous play at the venue, The House of Temperley, had been forced to close despite financial success, as a mark of respect, agreed by all west End producers, on the death of King Edward VII. This in effect ended the play’s run. Conan Doyle, however, having leased the theatre could not afford to have it standing empty, and luckily the new play quickly made up any losses – when full, the theatre could house 1,500 people plus another 500 standing and a successful season could enrich all concerned very quickly. He writes that he purchased a live snake for the production – ‘the pride of my heart’, he says in Memories and Adventures – a feature not appreciated by all critics, one of whom wrote that it was ‘a palpably artificial serpent’; Conan Doyle was tempted to offer the critic a good sum of money to go to bed with it.
The real problem with the hastily written play, according to Conan Doyle, was that in trying to give Holmes a worthy adversary, he managed to produce a more interesting character in the villain. He also considered the ending terrible. Neither of these things, however, prevented the play being a runaway financial success.
Other Conan Doyle theatrical productions
Conan Doyle considered Fires of Fate (1909 initially at the Lyric in London) to be his best theatrical work. It starred Lewis Waller and it is adapted from the story The Tragedy of Korosko (1897). Conan Doyle remarked that he loved to sit and watch the audience responding to the play and that there was really nothing like this in the life of a book writer. However, its relative failure was a disappointment. A silent film was made with the same title in 1923.
His other dramatic venture was Brigadier Gerard (performed between March and June 1906 at the Imperial and Lyric Theatres, London) and which he described as ‘mildly successful’. Once again it starred Lewis Waller, his performance being described by Conan Doyle as ‘glorious’. The brand-new uniforms of chestnut and silver cost over £100 and when the author saw them during dress rehearsal he was appalled because the soldiers were meant to have been out for months in all weathers. He said that the men were warriors, not ballet dancers and he covered the uniforms in mud and dust and tore holes in them – all except that of Waller who insisted on maintaining his immaculate appearance during performances. Conan Doyle was a great fan of the man, and writes that he once came down to Windlesham where, reciting in the music room, his clear resonant voice made the glass lampshades on the wall tremble. Waller died prematurely of pneumonia in 1915, Conan Doyle remembering him as ‘a very wonderful man’.
Walking on from the Adelphi you will soon see, on the other side of the road, one of London’s legendary hotels: The Savoy, the gilded entrance tucked back from the main thoroughfare in its own private street. It is the only luxury hotel on the River Thames. Edward VII, Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Frank Sinatra, Oscar Wilde, Harry Truman, Bob Dylan and many others of the world’s rich and famous have stayed here. Winston Churchill liked to bring his cabinet colleagues here for lunch.
A little farther along is Simpson’s in the Strand. Conan Doyle and Dickens were regulars here at the peak of their respective careers. Not surprisingly, therefore, this was also a favourite restaurant of Holmes and Watson with Simpson’s own website proudly pointing out that at the end of The Adventure of the Dying Detective, Holmes, after fasting for three days, tells Watson ‘something nutritious at Simpson’s would not be out of place’. Also, in The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, Watson meets up with his friend one evening at Simpson’s to discuss the case. A short while later in the same story, Watson writes that they once more dined here.
Burleigh Street branches off the northern side of the Strand a short distance along from Simpson’s. This was the original home of The Strand Magazine which ran to 711 issues from 1891 to 1950. It was the first to publish the Sherlock Holmes stories and settled down at sales of about 500,000 copies an issue for several decades up to the 1930s. In all, Conan Doyle provided the magazine with 121 short stories and nine novels. During serialisation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, people queued up outside the offices, impatient for the next instalment. It also published the Raffles series, written by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung; these stories are discussed in detail in Walk 6.
On a few occasions, in investigating Holmes’ activities, some mild detective work of our own is needed. Here is one such. Soon, as the walk continues straight along the Strand and past Waterloo Bridge on your right, you will come to the magnificent Somerset House and it is here that Holmes presumably checked out the details of Mrs Stoner’s will in The Adventure of the Speckled Band. Holmes told Watson that he was going to ‘Doctors’ Commons’ – which used to house wills and is lampooned by Dickens in David Copperfield as ‘a cosy, dosey, old-fashioned, time-forgotten, sleepy-headed little family party’, and was based at Paternoster Row near St Paul’s – but this had been closed down in 1867 and wills transferred to Somerset House; The Adventure of the Speckled Band is set in 1883.
Soon the Strand becomes Fleet Street. Holmes and Watson would walk these streets not just on business but also for pleasure. At the beginning of The Resident Patient, Watson writes that Holmes suggests a ramble through London: ‘I was weary of our little sitting room and gladly acquiesced. For three hours we strolled about together, watching the ever-changing kaleidoscope of life as it ebbs and flows through Fleet Street and the Strand’. It was ten before they returned to Baker Street.
Ye Old Cheddar Cheese is a small pub at 145 Fleet Street, on the left-hand side as you walk. It has been frequented by many literary figures, including Dickens, Conan Doyle and probably once or twice – he is reputed to have forsworn alcohol in his later years, preferring tea – by Dr Johnson who lived just behind it in Gough Square where he completed his famous Dictionary in 1755. Nip up the alleyway at the side of the pub, Wine Office Court, to take a look at this and some of Dr Johnson’s ‘innumerable little lanes and courts’. A sign on the side wall of the pub claims that some of the people who came either in search of Dr Johnson or the pub itself include Voltaire, Congreve, Pope, Tennyson, Boswell, Macaulay, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Chesterton, Yeats and a host of others.
It has been claimed by some that the headquarters of The Red-headed League, which Conan Doyle gives as 7 Pope’s Court, was in one of the little alleyways at the back of ‘The Cheese’; others consider Poppins Court, a little farther up Fleet Street on the same side of the road, to have been more likely. In this story, all red-headed men who were looking for a job at a salary of £4 a week ‘for purely nominal services’ were asked to report here to a Mr Duncan Ross at eleven o’clock on a Monday. It turns out to be a highly creative attempt at mischief by a villain named John Clay and at the end of the story Holmes expresses his admiration for a man whose mind could come up with something like this (although, of course, regretting that such a mind is devoted to crime).
One thing we know as fact from the Guardian newspaper is that on 5 October 1926, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a guest speaker here, at the beginning of the Pudding Season at the pub, for a very convivial evening in honour of Dr Johnson. The newspaper reports that Lord Birkenhead spoke first and then Sir Arthur, who said that Dr Johnson was a great man but a poor writer; his English was fit for tombstones, not for books – and no one read his books. This was disputed by the next speaker, Mr Birrell.
The walk continues through Ludgate Hill to St Paul’s Cathedral. St Paul’s has been on this site for 1,400 years and has been built and rebuilt five times. The task of designing the present structure was assigned to Sir Christopher Wren in 1669 – he had already begun the task of replacing over fifty churches destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was consecrated on 16 December 1697.
Returning to the story of The Red-headed League, it was at ‘17 King Edward Street, near St Paul’s’ that the affronted Mr Jabez Wilson seeks in vain for the offices of his supposed employers but finds at the address ‘a manufactory of artificial kneecaps’. Also, in the final stages of The Sign of Four, as Holmes, Watson and Jones track down the Aurora along the River Thames past St Paul’s, we find Watson in poetic mode: ‘As we passed the City, the last rays of the sun were gilding the cross on the summit of St Paul’s.’ Well, maybe this is because he was in love with Miss Mary Morstan by now, ‘as truly as ever a man loved a woman’, which in the story he is to tell her shortly.
One last stop on this walk could be St Paul’s Wharf, which some believe to be the site of The Bar of Gold in The Man with the Twisted Lip, an opium den, ‘the vilest murder-trap on the whole riverside’. Alternatively, this could be farther along the river, near London Bridge; that it is on the east side is generally agreed but Sherlockians have not been able to agree more. One thought is that it is a disguised name for various similar locations. Victorian and early twentieth-century authors, such as Dickens,27 Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle, were much given to contrasting the domestic bliss and comforts of a middle-class home with the terrors, filth and degradation that were merely a short cab ride, or small addictive habit, away.
A further item of interest about this tale is that it contains one of Conan Doyle’s mistakes, probably caused by the rapidity with which it was written: at the beginning of the tale Mrs Watson refers to her husband as ‘James’ and not ‘John’.
The first silent film version of this tale was in 1921.