Monthly Meeting Minutes – 9th September 2019

The Shingle of Southsea Holmesian Society

Monthly Meeting Minutes

Date of Meeting: 9th September 2019

Location of Meeting:
The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

Attendees:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

Apologies:
Sorry.

Presentation:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) presented his new degree course which he has created.
Full details can be found HERE.
Everyone present was enchanted and immediately set about getting themselves degrees. All agreed it was the best degree they had ever managed to not drop out of in the first term.

Any Other Business:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) wanted to mention his latest "song": "Silver Blaze of Glory" but no one wanted to listen because it doesn't quite work. Instead they all listened to the audio version of last month's "I Can Count on Holmes".

Monthly Meeting Minutes – 16th August 2019

The Shingle of Southsea Holmesian Society

Monthly Meeting Minutes

Date of Meeting: 16th August 2019

Location of Meeting:
The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

Attendees:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

Apologies:
No apologies. No surrender.

Presentation:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) presented his counting book for children entitled "Canonical Numeronical or I Can Count on Sherlock Holmes":

Any Other Business:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) wanted to mention his song "Hatherley's Thumb" but it had all ready been mentioned elsewhere so it was not allowed.

Monthly Meeting Minutes – 31st July 2019

The Shingle of Southsea Holmesian Society

Monthly Meeting Minutes

Date of Meeting: 31st July 2019

Location of Meeting:
The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

Attendees:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

Apologies:
Apologies were made for "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) by "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) who was trying to be funny. He was disregarded.

Presentation:
"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) presented his discussion of the Staff of 221b:

The Staff of 221b

By “The Entire Canon” (Paul Thomas Miller)

We know of several of the household staff at 221b and can infer the presence of several others. There follows a discussion of them here:

Mrs Hudson
Many people are unsure whether Mrs Hudson was Holmes’s landlady or his housekeeper. It is certain that Mrs Hudson managed to keep her house from 1881 until at least 1903, whereas we have no idea whether she ever laid some land. Therefore, she was a housekeeper.

Mrs Turner
Mrs Turner pops up briefly in A Scandal in Bohemia serving the tea. It is my belief that she was temporarily performing the duties of the page boy. Therefore she would be more aptly titled Page Turner.

Billy the Page
Billy appears in The Valley of Fear and The Mazarin Stone. As a page boy it was his job to tear the pages out of old telephone directories to make toilet paper. Such home-made botty wipes were known in the 18th century as buttock-torns. Hence his other title – the boy in butt-torns.

Peterson the Commissionaire
Baker Street’s very own commissionaire was employed specifically to hang around the streets in the early hours of the morning watching drunks break windows and stealing their hats. The word commissionaire comes from the Greek for “comb’s his own hair.”

Gibletty Jenny
Many middle-class Victorian homes employed a Gibletty Jenny. It was her job to check through all the offal for anything worth keeping before feeding it to the other staff. After the events of Blue Carbuncle, Sherlock Holmes would have been certain to engage the assistance of a Gibletty Jenny.

Corner Monk
With little time to spare for his spiritual life, Holmes would have been likely to employ a corner monk. Favoured by aristocratic bachelors, the corner monk could be easily stored in a corner, due to its diminutive size, but was always ready to perform marriages, confessions or exorcisms as need and time permitted.

Dirt Orphan
A house like 221b would be incomplete without a dirt orphan. It was their job to go around the house licking the dirt and dust from furniture and carpets. A combination of unhygienic work practices and malnutrition meant that most dirt orphans died within a week of service. Fortunately, there was an ever-growing supply of new recruits to take their place.

This was followed by "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)presenting his music video he made for a cover version of the Muppet’s song “Rainbow Connection” in which he had clumsily changed the words to “Sherlock Connection”. The video can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/I7aljS95_1A

Any Other Business:
There’s no business like any other business, no business I know. Everything about it is appealing. And so forth.

Monthly Meeting Minutes - 30th June 2019

The Shingle of Southsea Holmesian Society

Monthly Meeting Minutes

Date of Meeting: 30th June 2019

Location of Meeting:

The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

Attendees:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

Apologies:

Apologies were interrupted by "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) asking if The Sherloft window could be opened. "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) informed "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) that this sort of interruption should be kept until Any Other Business. "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) rudely asked again pointing out that it was unpleasantly hot in The Sherloft. "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) once again reminded "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) to restrain himself until Any Other Business or else leave the meeting. "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) apologised.

Presentation:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) presented his discovery of a Sherlockian Ten Commandments.

Any Other Business:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) asked if The Sherloft window could be opened. "The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) pointed out that there was no point as the meeting had finished.

Monthly Meeting Minutes - 16th May 2019

The Shingle of Southsea Holmesian Society

Monthly Meeting Minutes

Date of Meeting: 16^th May 2019

Location of Meeting:

The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

Attendees:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

Apologies:

Invisible Tony apologised and was ejected from The Sherloft.

Presentation:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) presented his fascinating findings about beards in the canon:

Beards

By Paul Thomas Miller

There are 96 uses of the word "beard" in The Canon. A study of them can prove most illuminating. I conducted some research and discovered how the beards are distributed across the stories. Of course, we should expect some bias in the long stories compared to the short stories. The more words there are, the more chance there is that one of those words will be "beard". Therefore, a simple tally means very little. More interesting is the rate of beards per ten-thousand words.

Story	Number of Beards	Rate of Beards per 10K Words
A Study In Scarlet	5	1.15
The Sign of the Four	6	1.39
A Scandal in Bohemia	0	0.00
The Red-Headed League	0	0.00
A Case of Identity	0	0.00
The Boscombe Valley Mystery	1	1.04
The Five Orange Pips	0	0.00
The Man with the Twisted Lip	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle	1	1.28
The Adventure of the Speckled Band	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb	1	1.21
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches	1	1.00
Silver Blaze	1	1.04
The Yellow Face	0	0.00
The Stock-Broker's Clerk	1	1.47
The “Gloria Scott”	0	0.00
The Musgrave Ritual	0	0.00
The Reigate Squires	0	0.00
The Crooked Man	0	0.00
The Resident Patient	0	0.00
The Greek Interpreter	2	2.85
The Naval Treaty	0	0.00
The Final Problem	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Cardboard Box	0	0.00
The Hound of the Baskervilles	18	3.04
The Adventure of the Empty House	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Norwood Builder	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Dancing Men	1	1.03
The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist	10	12.74
The Adventure of the Priory School	5	4.35
The Adventure of Black Peter	5	6.15
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton	1	1.49
The Adventure of the Six Napoleons	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Three Students	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez	1	1.12
The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter	4	4.98
The Adventure of the Abbey Grange	2	2.18
The Adventure of the Second Stain	0	0.00
The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Devil's Foot	3	3.00
The Adventure of the Red Circle	3	4.09
The Adventure of the Dying Detective	0	0.00
The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax	5	6.50
The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans	1	0.93
The Valley Of Fear	6	1.04
His Last Bow	1	1.65
The Adventure Of The Mazarin Stone	0	0.00
The Problem of Thor Bridge	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Creeping Man	0	0.00
The Illustrious Client	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Three Garridebs	3	4.83
The Blanched Soldier	7	9.05
The Adventure of the Three Gables	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Lion's Mane	1	1.39
The Adventure of the Retired Colourman	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger	0	0.00
The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place	0	0.00

On their own, I think we can all agree that these figures are fascinating. But they become even more interesting when we look at the rate of beards by year. There are two types of year to consider: the year of publication and the year when the adventures took place.

By adding word counts and beard counts for each year I arrived at the following rates of beard mentions. (Where no data is given, there is no data for that year. Where a zero is given, there is data for that year but no mention of beards.)

Year	Beard Rate for Chronological Years	Beard Rate for Publication Years
1875	0
1877	0
1881	1.39
1883	0
1884	0.61
1886	0.61
1887	0.64	1.15
1888	0.93
1889	1.86
1890	0.42	1.39
1891	0.71	0.2
1892	0	0.63
1893		0.35
1894	1.73
1895	4.83
1896	0
1897	2.71
1898	1.03
1899	0
1900	0
1901	4.35	3.04
1902	2.04
1903	3.32	3.1
1904		2.34
1907	1.39
1908		0.45
1910		3
1911		5.32
1913		0
1914	1.65	1.04
1917		1.65
1921		0
1922		0
1923		0
1924		1.37
1926		3.01
1927		0

Perhaps the full impact of this information is not made clear until it is seen in graph form (click on it for a bigger version):

As you can see, peak beard rates are seen around and after 1910 in the publication dates. However, this data is skewed towards the 1890s in the dates of when the stories took place. Which is telling.

You see, beard popularity in the UK was high from 1850 to 1900 (more or less). After the turn of the century, though, beards went out of fashion. They were replaced for a time by moustaches and eventually by being clean shaven.

The chronology data reflects these trends, whereas the publication data is quite contrary.

Now, if we are to believe that the stories are fabrications of the infamous Arthur Conan Doyle, would it not be reasonable to expect his contemporary writing to reflect the contemporary facial fashions? We are told by Doyleites that he churned out the Holmes stories with nary a thought of accuracy or anachronism. How likely is it that such a man would bother to get the beards right? His characters would reflect the people around him.

But if the stories are real accounts of real events, we see a different story. Although Watson is writing the stories much later, he is writing them accurately and remembers how people looked at the time.

(Incidentally, the chronology I used when compiling this data was Watson Does Not Lie – an excellent book which will be published by Wildside Press later this year. It is by a Holmesian genius named Paul Thomas Miller.)

Any Other Business:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) suggested making use of his new Sherlock Holmes bottle-opener. All were in favour and set about the assembled beer bottles with an undignified fervour.