The Shingle of Southsea Holmesian Society
Monthly Meeting Minutes
Date of Meeting: 1st June 2021
Location of Meeting:
The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK
Attendees:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)
Apologies:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) refused to apologise because it was someone else's fault.
The Toasts:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) provided the following toast to Victor Hatherley in the form of a haiku:
Victor Hatherley,
What did you go do that for?
No thumbs up for you.
Motions:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) yet again moved that we should advertise the fact that he has produced a free PDF download of a Chapter and Verse version of The Canon. The goal of it is to make it easier to reference passages and lines from the text. It is available here:
and you are encouraged to download it and share it anywhere and any way you like.
The motion was passed quickly and carefully but some still got on the carpet.
Presentation:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) gave the following presentation of an essay he wrote regarding the Holmes's retirement:
Holmes’s Bee Farm
By "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)
First a warning. I beg the reader to bear with me. This essay will appear (Study in Scarlet style) to jump from one topic to another wholly unrelated. However, all will make sense in the end. Also, the dates I use for the following are from my own chronology – Watson Does Not Lie. Other chronologies are available for the Canon. But, broadly speaking, they all concur enough to work with the following observations and theories.
The earliness of Holmes’s retirement has puzzled many a Holmesian – he was only 50 at the time. I have recently also become puzzled by the location he chose for his retirement. The Canon suggests in SECO 1:4 that he had retired expressly to study bees – a study which would lead to the publication of a book on the subject ten years later (see LAST 1:363-368). Yet he retired to a cliff top cottage overlooking the English Channel.
There are several reasons this does not make sense. An exposed coastal location would often cause his bees to be scattered by high winds. He would be likely to lose several swarms. It would also reduce foraging options for the bees. To the south of the hives would be nothing but ocean, no plants. And it is also believed that seaside flowers are affected by the salt water and yield less nectar. Finally, the hive would be hit by sea water whenever there was a storm, which is not ideal for producing nice honey.
None of these factors would prevent someone from keeping bees. Plenty of people do keep bees in seaside locations with some success. But they keep bees in seaside locations because they lived there first and kept bees second. Holmes retired expressly to study bees. He could retire anywhere he liked. Why would he choose the least favourable location?
Could it be that he did not really keep bees at all? Did the literary agent misread Watson’s accounts and make incorrect corrections? Consider Watson’s preface to the Last Bow collection of stories. We may presume that this preface was supplied directly from Watson to the publisher, without interference from Doyle. Watson does not mention bees at all. He simply states that Holmes lives in a small farm “where his time is divided between philosophy and agriculture.” Note he says “agriculture” not “apiculture” as he surely would have done had that been the case.
The first mention of bees comes in SECO 1:4 which states Holmes has “betaken himself to study and bee-farming”. My belief is Doyle incorrectly altered Watson’s original words. He thought he was correcting an error, but he wasn’t. Having made this mistake once, it was repeated a further five times when Doyle made such “corrections” to LION and LAST – the only other places Holmes’s hives are mentioned.
Let us now consider a different discrepancy in the Canon. That of Holmes’s arms. In SPEC 1:274 in 1883, we see Holmes has strong arms which are able to straighten a bent poker with ease. But in BLAC 1:393 in 1895, Holmes reports that he could not skewer a pig with a harpoon because the task requires a strong arm. What had changed in the years between the cases? Why were his arms no longer strong?
In an attempt to fathom this change, I went off looking for information about Holmes’s arms throughout the Canon. I made two interesting discoveries.
Firstly, before 4th May 1891, Holmes’s arms are only ever described as long. After 1st April 1894 they receive several other adjectives: “thin” (EMPT 1:95, PRIO 1:35, ILLU 1:7), “sinewy” (EMPT 1:95), “wiry” (3GAR 1:436) and “nervous” (ILLU 1:7).
Secondly, no other story mentions Holmes’s arms more than EMPT. It is as if, they were especially apparent to Watson in this case.
So what happened between 1891 and 1894 to occasion these differences? The Great Hiatus. It seems to me that some change had come over Holmes’s arms during his absence from Baker Street. A change Watson was especially aware of when Holmes returned in EMPT. Most likely this occurred during the battle at the edge of the Reichenbach Falls or during his subsequent accent of the sheer cliff face beside it. Maybe one of Moran’s boulders did do some damage after all.
Consider EMPT 1:85-87. Recovering from a faint, Watson grabs Holmes by the arm and, feeling it’s damaged condition is compelled to ask “Is it really you?” It must have felt considerably different to the arm he had known before.
So, what is the link between the bee-keeping error and Holmes’s arm? Simple. In SECO, Watson never wrote that Holmes was going to study bee farms on the Sussex Downs. He wrote that he was going to study beef arms. Doyle saw this, assumed it was an error and “corrected” it.
Holmes, as I have said, suffered some sort of injury to one or both of his arms during his escape from the Reichenbach Falls. He returned to Baker Street in 1894 and attempted to continue his work with his now weak, thin, sinewy, wiry, nervous arms. He did fairly well but over the next ten years the arms continued to get weaker. Finally Holmes could stand it no more and announced his retirement in 1904. He took himself to the seclusion of a small cattle farm on the Sussex Downs where he could begin experimenting with beef arms.
No doubt inspired by the works of Dr. Victor Frankenstein a hundred or so years before, it was his intention to build himself new arms out of cow meat. After all, what could be beefier than beef?
The references to bees and bee-keeping found in LAST and LION, then, are actually supposed to be references to beef and beef-keeping. Sadly, as they passed through Doyle’s hands, he mistook these for errors and changed them.
Most puzzling is the alteration Doyle made to Holmes’s magnum opus. LAST reports on a small blue book titled in gold – Practical Handbook of Bee Culture. No such book ever existed. What it should have been called was The Practical Handbook of Beef Suture, and the fact that Holmes wrote it is testament to the fact that he must have succeeded in replacing his broken limbs with highly satisfactory beef arms.
Any Other Business:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) shared the following "music":
