We meet monthly and discuss an adventure in The Canon (the combined collection of the stories of Sherlock Holmes).  One person is given the honor of being the presenter and may present their thoughts or ideas "on anything Sherlockian, Holmesian, or Victorian anyone wishes to contend or debate", as our flyer states.

We have met monthly since 28th January 1989.  The scion was recognized by The Baker Street Irregulars in November 1988, after our formation in August 1988.  We have been especially thankful that our existence mirrors the time-period of Holmes and Watson, one-hundred years later. Victoria stills reigns as Queen in our lives and the British Empire surrounds the globe.

Our meetings were first conducted at The Miller's Daughter Pub, an authentic English Pub located at 329 South Main Street in St Charles, Missouri.  After the closing of our beloved pub, we moved to the Mother-in-Law House at 500 South Main Street, St Charles, where we have met, after a bit of wandering, since July 1992.

We have been through The Canon twice.  The first time, we followed the William S Baring-Gould "Annotated Sherlock Holmes", which is in chronological order (according to Baring-Gould, that is).  We finish the second round through The Canon October 2001 and followed the "Oxford Edition of Sherlock Holmes", which is in the most recent estimation of actual publishing order.  In 2002, the Apocrypha was explored -- as something entirely different.  2003 thru 2006 we did the Brett series. 2007 started the Rathbone/Bruce series. In June we celebrated our 221b meeting. The event was very rewarding in the number of people that showed up that we had not seem in a while and the amount of fun we had.

2008 will find us starting the new Klinger Annotated Sherlock Holmes and will find us starting once again on the books and examining the writings of Dr. Watson and the world that is "always, 1895."

We have a few new members that are, well, bringing something new to the meetings.

Hope to see you at one of our meetings soon. Lots of great stuff starting up, come and be part of it.

   

This is 'Petey' our mascot, always ready to give 'The Master' a helping hand.

I

 

“Date of Birth?”

 

By: The Late Rev Raymond L ‘Vic’ Holly, OEH, HSU

 

(Presented to the HSU

22^nd July 1989)

 

Most of my argument for the birth-date of Sherlock Holmes being 5^th April 1854, and not 6^th January of that year as generally accepted, has appeared in print (before).  The argument, as I present it, is slightly revised from what was presented in the Deal Table, #3, Autumn 1987.  I attempt to consolidate the material in previous articles and to add a little confirmation.

The Sherlockian world is indebted to Steven Lauria for calling attention, in an article entitled On the Birthday for Sherlock Holmes in the BSM #28, Winter 1981, to the fact that Maundy Thursday, the Thursday of Holy Week, was called Shear Thursday in England, from the custom of getting a haircut before Easter.  Although this was undoubtedly the popular understanding of the term, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary gives it as “Sheer Thursday.”  “Sheer” means “pure” (as in “sheer nonsense” or “sheer precipice”); Maundy Thursday was called “Sheer” or “Pure” Thursday from the custom of making one’s confession before Easter.  (The term “Shrove” applied to the day before the first day of Lent has a similar etymology.)  As Lauria properly points out, however, the popular mind in the nineteenth century had come to associate the Thursday of Holy Week with ridding of hair rather than guilt.

        Anglican custom was to give a name from the church calendar from the day of baptism, not from the day of birth.  Two causes had joined in making this custom.  One, was the rubric in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, still the official liturgy of the Church of England, that “The people are to be admonished, that it is most convenient that Baptism should not be administered but upon Sundays, and other Holy Days, when the most number of people come together.”  Ordinarily, then, baptisms were administered on Sundays or, perhaps more commonly, Holy Days that came during the week.  (Two), was the fact that a person was given his Christian name in baptism.  Although a child was born with a surname, he or she was not regarded as having a Christian name (what is now often called a given name or first name) until it was bestowed in baptism.  It was natural to note the day on which a person was named by giving a name of a saint or a name which otherwise indicated the day; thus, a person’s naming day was also his name day.  It is common in liturgical churches even today for a person to think of the day of the saint whose name he bears as his name day, although it not so common now for it also to be his naming or baptismal day.

        Sherlock Holmes later said of his ancestors that they were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class [Gree].  Such people might very well name him Sherlock if he were baptised on Shear Thursday.  “Sherlock” is, or course, “Shear-lock” and means “barber.”  When the priest took the infant Homes in his arms and directed the godparents, “Name this child,” they may very well have given the child a name which indicated the day, “William Sherlock Scott.”  [ASH I:47]  The other elements in his Christian name together with the initial of “Sherlock” give the name of William Escott, which he took in Chas.  The British often use three or more Christian names.  Once the “Sherlock” was decided upon, for the day, it was natural to add “William” before it, and thus get double-duty from it, with a reference to one who in 1854 was still a well-known theologian and writer, William Sherlock (1641-1707).  The “Scott” perhaps was added as giving a contemporary writer.  It would appear that the home of Siger Holmes had a well-used library.

        It was the custom in the Church of England to baptize on the eighth day of life.  Originally, this was counting by the method used in The Bible.  Today, we think of such an expression as “the eighth day” as the “the eighth day of,” counting the base point as the first day.  In church usage until recently, a major feast had an octave, which was eight days starting with the feast itself; the last day was called the octave day of the feast.  Thus, 1^st January is the octave of Christmas.  Baptism was to occur, according to this tradition, on the octave day of birth.

Most people – including country squires – not used to counting in the ancient or Biblical way, but knowing the tradition of baptism on the eighth day, often thought of it as meaning, not exactly a week after birth, but a week and a day – not on the eighth day of life, but when eight days old.

Baptism on the eighth day arose partly in imitation of a Jewish practice of circumcision on the octave day.  As that had been the initiation into the Old Covenant, so baptism was thought of as the initiation into the New Covenant.  It arose partly in pursuit of the admonition which another rubric in the Book of Common Prayer directed the clergy to give often to the people “That they defer not the Baptism of their Children longer than the first or second Sunday next after their birth, or other Holy-day falling between, unless upon a great and reasonable cause, to be approved by The Curate.”  (“The Curate” in those days meant the pastor; a parish might have assistants also known as curates, but The Curate was the rector or vicar.)

John Wesley, preaching as an Anglican priest, made a passing reference to baptism at the age of eight days:  “Was you devoted to God at eight days old, and have you been all these years devoting yourself to the devil?”  [The reference is in Sermon 39, III, 4, in Sugden’s edition of Wesley’s sermons.  A singular “you” took the verb “was” during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.]  The sermon apparently was first preached on 29^th May 1743, and was used many times later.  Wesley preached it three times in 1760.  The custom it referred to might very well have still prevailed in rural England a century later.  The number eight is associated with baptism in other way (the mention of eight persons in the ark in the baptismal passage in I Peter 3:20-21 has something to do with this); baptismal fonts are generally eight-sided.

Consequently, Holmes’ birthday should be about eight days earlier than 13^th April, which was Maundy Thursday or Shear Thursday in 1854.  [This can be easily checked in many places.  The authority I use was the 1928 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church, page liii, which gives Easter Day of 1854 as 16^th April.  Maundy Thursday, of course, is just three days earlier.]  If the birthday had been 5^th April, the parents, used to the modern way of counting, might very well have asked for the baptism on Maundy Thursday.

So far, I think that I have established some small probability for the date of 5^th April.  It needs, however, confirmation, to be taken seriously.  Such confirmation appears, it seems to me, in three stories in The Canon.  Any one of these by itself, like the original argument, is weak; taken together, it seems to me that they corroborate each other with considerable force.

The murder of Ronald Adair is dated 30^th March 1894 [Empt 3:F], and Baring-Gould points out that the inquest cannot have been before, or long after, Monday, 2^nd April 1894 [ASH: II, page 330, note 5].  Holmes returned on the day of the inquest.  The night was bleak and boisterous:  Baring-Gould says that the only day in early April, 1894, of which this is true in London was Thursday, 5^th April.  [ASH: II, page 341, note 35]  It was very like Holmes to indulge his flair for the dramatic gesture by returning from The Hiatus on his birthday, and on the fortieth birthday at that, widely recognized as the beginning of middle age and an appropriate time for a new beginning of his career.  [I owe that last sentence to Stephen Lauria, who made that comment on my revision of his suggestion that 13^th April had been Holmes’ birthday.

Baring-Gould’s chronology was published in 1955.  A table of the first day of each of Sherlock Homes’ recorded cases by month and day of month, following the Baring-Gould chronology, is worthy of some attention.  Two cases are not dated precisely (Veil is simply some day in October, and Maza is sometime in summer).  Five days have two cases each.  5^th April alone has three cases.  Not only does no other date have that many, but no other date has any more.

It is not necessarily very odd that out of sixty dates, three should happen to be the same.  That these three, however, should also happen to be the date that other evidence, first gathered 28 years after Baring-Gould’s chronology was published, indicates this may have been the birthday of the principal person involved in the chronology – that is unusual.  I suggest that there is a good reason for 5^th April to begin more cases in The Canon than any other date.  If, as I suggest, Homes returned precisely on his fortieth birthday to begin middle age and his second career on the same day, he planned for Empt to begin on 5^th April.  The other two may have been recalled by Watson because of associations with the birthday of The Master.  Though he did not record the fact that they came on Holmes’ birthday, that very fact may be partly responsible for nudging them into the front of his mind so that he did record them.  The fact that a case was recorded might depend to some extent upon there being something to make it stand out in Watson’s thought.

The first of these is Copp, the beginning of which is dated 5^th April 1889.  H B Williams and Robert Schutz have conjectured [ASH: II, page 119, note 19] that Violet Hunter was Sherlock Holmes’ half-sister.  (This appears to be contradicted by the text:  Holmes responds to Watson’s question, “Do you know the young lady?” with “Not I,” and she said, “I have no parents or relations of any sort from whom I could ask advice.”  Possibly one could argue that Watson put this in to conceal the fact that she was indeed Holmes’ half-sister.)  If this were the case, then she might have gone to her half-brother on what she knew was his birthday, appealing, as does the Declaration of Independence, with the voice of consanguinity to the ties of common kindred.  My argument does not demand that Violet Hunter be Sherlock’s half-sister, but if that is the case, it adds force to the argument.  At the very least, the fact that Watson included this story with two others, which occur on 5th April, argues that the date held some significance for him.  Here is a second point of confirmation, establishing a greater probability for 5^th April as The Master’s birthday.

The other case is 3Stu, starting 5^th April 1895, just one year after Holmes’ return from The Hiatus.  Watson warns us at the beginning of the story that he will use due discretion to prevent an exact identification.  In details about one of the three students, which, due to this due discretion, probably are quite unlike anything in the real incident, he makes references to the card-playing Colonel Moran of Empt.  The third student is Miles McLaren, who was nearly expelled after a card scandal in his first year.  “Miles”, of course, means “soldier”, and together with the card scandal points to the old shikari.  The surname of McLaren is not without interest.  There was another well-known writer at the time with the name John Watson, but he did not write under his own name, but used the pen name of Ian McLaren.  Watson may very well have been pointing back to the Moran case, exactly one year earlier, when Holmes, Watson, and Colonel Moran met in that room in the empty house.  Here is a third point of confirmation, establishing greater probability for 5^th April as The Master’s birthday.

I might suggest that we have here a rope woven of four strands.  The primary one is form the name “Sherlock”, indicating baptism on Shear Thursday.  The other three actually were in the Strand magazine – Copp in the Strand of June 1892, Empt in the Strand of October 1903, and 3Stu in the Strand of June 1904.  These three Strands with the primary strand make a stout rope.  Koheleth wisely pointed out that a threefold cord is not quickly broken [Ecclesiastes 4:12]; we have one that is even stronger, of four strands, three of which are Strands.

The first time that 6^th January was suggested as the birthday of Sherlock Holmes was in an astrological speculation at the first BSI dinner on 5^th June 1933, and Christopher Morley adopted it because his brother Felix was born on 6^th January 1894, which would then have been Holmes’ fortieth birthday.  [Little mention is given that 6^th January was the first weekend in which the repeal of the prohibition acts was effective, a good reason for the clubbable Christopher Morley to schedule a party.  Ed.]  In 1957, a very little Canonical evidence was fitted to the theory when the passage from Vall to the effect that on 7^th January Holmes “leaned upon his hand with his untested breakfast before him” was adduced by Nathan Bengis as evidence of “some small jollification the night before.”  In the story, of course, it is a sign of Holmes’ interest in the message from Porlock before him, not of jollification on the previous evening.  This, together wit the fact which William S Baring-Gould appeals to – that Holmes quotes twice from Twelfth Night, the only Shakespearean (Oxfordian) play he quotes more than once – is the Canonical evidence.  (The term “twelfth night” is commonly applied to 6^th January or Epiphany, although, strictly speaking, it means the evening of 5^th January, the twelfth day of Christmas.  As pointed out earlier, it depends on how you count.  5^th January is the twelfth day of Christmas, and 6^th January is the twelfth day after Christmas.)  This is the Canonical evidence for 6^th January, and it seems to me to be meagre, in comparison with the probability of 5^th April, which has three points of confirmation.  The date of 6^th January has associations with the history of the Baker Street Irregulars, and probably with always be the time of the annual BSI dinner, but that it means anything in the life of Sherlock Holmes has not been established with anything like the force of the evidence for 5^th April. 

For those who are interested, if the date of 5^th April is correct, Sherlock Holmes’ astrological sign is Aries, the first sign in the zodiac and the sign under which many leaders are claimed to be born.  The first sign of the zodiac for the first consulting detective is, I suggest, another interesting astrological speculation, with which he can give a protective wrapping to our stout rope of four strands.

I submit that Sherlock Holmes was born on 5^th April 1854, and baptized a week and a day later, on Maundy (or Shear) Thursday, 13^th April 1854; that he returned from The Hiatus on his fortieth birthday, 5^th April 1894; and that nudged by the fact that they took place on The Master’s birthday, Watson reported two other cases that started on 5^th April 1889 and 5^th April 1895 (which it IS – always.  Ed.)

 

(The Late Rev Raymond L ‘Vic’ Holly, OEH, HSU, was the Unseen Mover for the OEH since the position’s creation.  He died this past summer after a long illness.  Many of you have asked why the OEH and HSU celebrate Holmes’ date of birth on 5^th April and not on Felix Morley’s date of birth of 6^th January, as many other scions do.  We thought since there was no paper for last month’s meeting, that we would reprint his article on the subject this month.  Very enlightening.)