by Aubrey B. Watson LDS, FDS, D. Orth.
Those of you who are already familiar with the four earlier collections1 of hitherto unpublished accounts of cases which Sherlock Holmes and Dr John H. Watson investigated will not need reminding of the curious circumstances under which they came into my possession.
However, for the benefit of new readers, I give this brief summary of how I acquired them through the Will of my late uncle Dr John F. Watson, a Doctor of Philosophy at All Saints College, Oxford.
Despite the similarity of the names, my late uncle was not in any way connected with Dr John H. Watson, Sherlock Holmes’ friend and chronicler, although it was because of this resemblance that he had made a study of his namesake’s life and background and had become, in consequence, something of an authority on the subject. For these reasons, a certain Miss Adelina McWhirter approached my late uncle in September 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, with a proposition which she thought might interest him.
An elderly and apparently respectable spinster, she claimed to be related to Mr Holmes’ Dr Watson on the maternal side of the family and had inherited a battered tin despatch box with the words ‘John H. Watson, M.D., Late Indian Army’ painted on its lid. It was this box, she said, which had belonged to Mr Holmes’ Dr Watson and contained the papers relating to those cases which had not been published and which Dr Watson had placed for safe-keeping in the vaults of his bank Cox and Co. at Charing Cross.2
Finding herself in straitened circumstances, Miss McWhirter wished to sell both the box and its contents and approached my late uncle, who agreed to buy them.
However, soon after his purchase of the Watson archive, war was declared and my late uncle, fearful for their safety during the coming conflict, copied out the papers and, taking a leaf out of Dr John H. Watson’s book, deposited the original manuscripts, still in the despatch box, in the main branch of his bank in London. Unfortunately, the bank suffered a direct hit during the bombing of 1942 and although the despatch box was recovered from the rubble, it was so badly damaged as to be unrecognisable while its contents had been reduced to a mass of burnt paper.
My uncle was placed in a quandary. While he still had his own copies of the Watson manuscripts, he had nothing to prove the existence of the originals except for the damaged box and its charred contents, which hardly amounted to proof. Nor could he trace Miss Adelina McWhirter. She had, it seemed, moved out of the residential hotel in South Kensington where she had been living without leaving a forwarding address.
Therefore, having no means of proving the authenticity of the Watson archives, and fearful of his reputation as a scholar, my late uncle decided not to publish and, on his death at the age of ninety-eight on 2nd June 1982, his copies of the originals were left to me, his only living relative, in his Will. As for the despatch box and its contents, no trace of them remained and I can only assume that, when he passed away at the Eventide Nursing Home in Carshalton, Surrey, the staff threw them out as so much rubbish.
I, too, have hesitated for a long time over the question of whether or not to publish these accounts but, having no one to whom I can bequeath them and having no academic reputation to protect, being an orthodontist by profession, I have decided to risk rousing the obloquy of serious Sherlockians by placing these accounts before the public, together with the footnotes which my late uncle added to his original manuscript copies.
However, I must point out that I accept no responsibility for their authenticity.
1 These are: The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes (1990); The Secret Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes (1992); The Secret Journals of Sherlock Holmes (1993); The Secret Documents of Sherlock Holmes (1997); and The Secret Archives of Sherlock Holmes (2012). Aubrey B. Watson.
2 In ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’, Dr Watson writes: ‘Somewhere in the vaults of the bank Cox and Co., at Charing Cross, there is a travel-worn and battered tin despatch box with my name, John H. Watson, M.D., Late Indian Army, painted upon the lid.’ Strictly speaking, Dr Watson never served in the Indian Army but in the British Army serving in India. The despatch box was presumably army issue. Aubrey B. Watson.