Monthly Meeting Minutes – 25th July 2025

Date of Meeting: 25th July 2025

Location of Meeting:

The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

 

Attendees:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

 

Apologies:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) apologised for leaving this so late in the month that he had nothing decent to present.

 

Toast:

Paul Thomas Miller (The Entire Canon) gave the following toast:

Dr Watson

Had a large

Throbbing

Bright red

Wound.

Somewhere.

 

Presentation:

Paul Thomas Miller (The Entire Canon) led a discussion about Arthur Conan Doyle's Portsmouth and Southsea:

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Portsmouth and Southsea

In 1882, Arthur Conan Doyle left Plymouth on a packet steamer and disembarked at a headland 150 miles along the coast. Here he decided to invent Portsmouth and Southsea as a sort of practical joke.

Doyle had spent a few months in Plymouth living with Dr George Turnavine Budd. He couldn’t believe such a hellscape existed in the real world. Low wages and high unemployment in the city had led to criminal tendencies and poor education among the masses. It was a boring, run-down miserable place to be.

Upon arriving at Portsea Island, Doyle set about making somewhere worse – just to see if it was possible. He would call this new city Portsmouth and, purely for the fun of confusing people, he would arbitrarily separate a chunk of the city and call it Southsea and tell everyone this was, in fact, a separate town, even though no one knew where the borders between them lay.

He populated it by using his secret Scotch doctor powers to breed a race of Unter-Mench. These homunculi would swagger about the new city spitting on everything. Just for the lols, he gave them the ability to speak, but not the ability to form real words. In order to make up for a lack of diction or anything to say, these wizened savages shouted their meaningless angry little noises at each other twenty-four hours a day. A tradition which continues to this day.

In order to establish it as one of Britain’s worst seaside resorts, Doyle spent five years removing all the sand from the beach and replacing it with uncomfortable shingle. This did nothing to dissuade the local vulgarites from descending upon it en masse any time the sun came out. Much to Doyle’s amusement, they would spend the whole of the summer crammed on the stony shoreline, packed shoulder to shoulder, where they would get drunk, smash beer bottles into the shingle, defecate upon everything and then lay there turning red in the sunburny goodness of the day.

In order to complete the experience, Doyle provided the locals with a sewage treatment works at one end of the beach which, even today, sees Southsea beach as one of the few places on the south coast where “bathing is not advised” and the water classification is “poor”.

At this point, Doyle thought the denizens of Shithole-On-Sea may require a hobby, so he gave them the highest density of pubs per square mile anywhere in the UK – 12 per square mile.

At this point Doyle felt he had gone too far, so he established a naval base large enough to make it a good target for the Germans in the two upcoming world wars. Sadly, Germany was rubbish at wars and completely failed to wipe Portsmouth off the map.

It’s not all bad news, though. In 1902 Doyle was knighted by King Eddy Seven for services to Pranks that Get Out of Hand. At which point Doyle decided to lend his services to the Boer War and ghosties.

 

Any Other Business:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) has no dignity left.