The days before the One week later

by Jane and Philip Weller of the Franco-Midland Hardware Company

The Canonical page references in this article are to the Doubleday/Penguin single-volume editions of The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Introduction

During our visit to Sesto Fiorentino for the ‘One Week Later’ Convention of Uno Studio in Holmes, we were extremely pleased and honoured to be able to share some of our experience of having organised hundreds of expeditions to locations around the world which are connected with both Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (ACD). With our own society in England we arrange at least 12 meetings each year at locations connected with Holmes or ACD, and these meetings last for a full day, or a full weekend, or (once every two years) for seven days. In addition, we have carried out personal visits to Holmesian societies and locations in many countries outside of England, travelling throughout most of Europe, and to Holmesian locations as far away as Tibet and Japan. It would be impossible for us to reproduce the two lectures which we gave in Sesto in this article, and not just because those lectures included the showing of 200 coloured slides of locations, but because those talks were primarily just in the form of discussing what was seen on the projector screens. We will, accordingly, concentrate here on just one excursion carried out by our own society, over the period of a week. It is, in fact, a very important journey, in that it was the one which started in London and concluded at Meiringen. It was, of course, from the termination point of this journey that Holmes began his own week-long journey which terminated in Firenze. This journey thus establishes a link between our two societies, in that it begins in England and ends at the point taken up by Enrico Solito at the Sesto Convention, with his account of Holmes’s journey into Italy.

Scholarly Aspects

As we mentioned at the Sesto Convention, our own society follows a Fundamentalist approach to studies of Holmes. We thus accept the primary source of information on Holmes as being the 60 accounts given in the Canon: in this case the account given in ‘The Final Problem’. There are those who constantly suggest that Dr Watson or Holmes misinformed us in the Canon, before giving some more-sensational explanation of what happened in the case they are discussing. We, however, accept that all of the accounts given in the Canon are very essentially true, and we resist all temptations to change anything which is recorded in the Canon, apart from the way in which Dr Watson or Holmes obviously had to change the names of some of the people involved, in order to protect the reputations of the innocent, and the way in which they sometimes had to change the names of locations (and especially the names of specific buildings) for the same reason. In following these principles, we have often found that, in spite of the way that location names may sometimes have been changed, we are able to uncover the exact locations because of the clues which Dr Watson and Holmes have inadvertently given us in the account. It is, after all, the accuracy of the locational descriptions and of the environmental atmosphere which help make the accounts so memorable. In having visited thousands of the locations described in the 60 cases of the Canon during the past decade, we have found no more than a handful of small details which cannot be verified as being accurately appropriate to the geography and history of the locations and times described. We have therefore never had to resort to any of the sensationalist , and usually ridiculous, explanations of those who would claim that Dr Watson and Holmes were, in essence, liars, when they claim that, for example, the journeys to Tibet, Persia, Arabia and the Sudan during the Great Hiatus between 1891 and 1894 did not take place, or that Holmes was, for example, a Frenchman. Those who want to reject much of what was written in the Canon as being lies, do not seem to realise that they are undermining everything which they do, in that once they start to reject parts of what Watson and Holmes wrote, then much of the other Canonical evidence which they use becomes equally suspect. Unlike those who would wish to change large parts of the Canon, we have been constrained by making sure that if we do try to change one part of the Canon such changes must not clash with the evidence given elsewhere in the Canon. With our locational investigations our guidelines have always been that if we can find that Dr Watson and Holmes could have travelled to the places which they say they visited, at the time that they say that they visited them, then, to paraphrase Holmes’s own words, having established the possible, what remains in the Canon might be the truth. We therefore return to the truth which exists in Dr Watson’s account of the journey which he described in ‘The Final Problem’. Firstly, however, we would point out that we must also accept the fact that Dr Watson’s literary agent, ACD, must have had an occasional influence upon the writings of Dr Watson and Holmes, since there are clear signs in the Canon of ACD’s own style of writing, and he therefore seems to have inserted elements of his own experiences of the locations and events which are recorded in the Canon, and we will accordingly attempt to identify these intrusions.

The Journey in England

Jane is only one of many chronologists who have agreed that the journey began on Saturday 25 April 1891, which allows us to look up the exact railway timetables involved. Watson informs us that he and Holmes left London from Victoria railway station, and this was, indeed, the main London terminus for reaching their planned port of departure, Dover, and the line to that port did, indeed, pass through Canterbury, which is where they alighted in order to avoid Moriarty catching them at Dover. We know that Watson reached the Lowther Arcade in The Strand at precisely 9.15 am on his way to Victoria station. It would have taken about 20 to 30 minutes to reach Victoria from there in a carriage, so Watson would have arrived at the station at between 9.33 and 9.45 am. Holmes would not have wanted Watson waiting for a long period at Victoria, and the Bradshaw timetable informs us that there was an express boat train to Dover which left Victoria at 10.00 am on that day, and that train’s first stop was at Canterbury, which seems to confirm that this was the train involved. There were, actually, two stations at Canterbury, Canterbury East, where the Dover train stopped at 11.39 am, and Canterbury West, from which trains left which could reach Newhaven. The time of arrival of this Dover train at Canterbury also fits nicely with Watson’s quandary: "The question now is whether we should take a premature lunch here (at Canterbury) or run the chance of starving before we reach the buffet at Newhaven." [FINA 476].

Several changes of train would have been necessary to reach Newhaven from Canterbury, and Bradshaw reveals that the shortest journey would have taken about four hours, whereas the longer routing would have taken about seven hours, which explains Watson’s concern about starving. The changes would, however, all have helped to confuse any of Moriarty’s henchmen, and would have delayed Holmes’s arrival until closer to the time when the night ferry departed from Newhaven for Dieppe, at 11.00 pm, with this being the only scheduled ferry on that date. If one accepts the Moriarty-avoidance advantages of the longer journey, then Holmes could have left Canterbury West at 12.08 am, to reach Ashford Junction at 2.15 pm. They would have changed there and departed at 4.05 pm to reach Tunbridge Wells at 4.15 pm. They would have changed trains once again and caught the 4.40 pm to arrive at Lewes at 5.36 pm. A final change would have been made here with the train departing at 6.35 pm to arrive at Newhaven Harbour railway station at 6.53 pm. It is possible, in fact, that Holmes and Watson would have waited in Lewes, away from prying eyes at the Newhaven ferry port, and taken dinner there, to allow time for the meal to settle before the sea voyage, and to allow them to buy essential items to replace their lost baggage, and they could then have caught the 10.18 pm train from Lewes to arrive at Newhaven Harbour at 10.32, just 18 minutes before the ferry departed.

The Journey to Brussels

On the Continent, Watson will have switched from his trusty Bradshaw to Thomas Cook’s Continental Guide for 1891. Holmes and Watson would almost certainly have sailed upon one of the four main ferry boats used by the London and Brighton Railway Company’s ferry service: Paris III, Rouen II, Normandy or Brittany, all of which were fitted with sleeping accommodation, although Holmes and Watson may have had to sit up all night, as the accommodation was very limited and they had obviously not booked in advance for their journey. The ferry from Newhaven arrived at Dieppe at 4.23 am, and the Continental Guide shows that the first train onwards towards Brussels left Dieppe at 6.43 am, allowing time for breakfast in the port. Holmes may, in fact, have waited a little longer than this, for there were many other trains, as there was the possibility that he could secretly have contacted his brother Mycroft from Dieppe, and this may well have been the reason why he chose to cross to that French port. Dieppe lies on what is almost the shortest line which can be drawn between Paris and London, and because of this fact the British and French governments decided to lay a telegraphic cable for passing diplomatic messages between Paris and London which went into the English Channel (or La Manche as the French would call it) a kilometre or so outside of the town of Dieppe. A telegraphic relay station was built on the cliff overlooking the sea, which was not open to public use, but Holmes might have been provided with special authorisation by his brother to enable him to use such facilities, for we know that Holmes did remain in contact with his brother during The Great Hiatus of 1891-1894. One can, in fact, still see a small remnant of this secret telegraph station, in the form of an arch, in the garden of the modern house which now stands on the site of the former telegraph station. The earliest time at which Holmes could have reached Brussels from Dieppe, without passing through Paris where Moriarty might be waiting for him, was at 6.05 pm, with Holmes and Watson having to change at Rouen and Amiens, and then travel via Mons to Brussels.

There is a problem with the Canonical account, in that Watson says that they reached Brussels "… that night …" [FINA 476], which suggests that they reached the Belgian capital on the night of the day that they left London, but this is impossible, and Watson must be referring to the day when they reached the Continent as being the day when they also reached Brussels, which was the Sunday. Watson causes further confusion when he mentions Holmes sending a telegram to the London police on the Monday, which suggests that he must have sent that telegram from Brussels, since he says that they stayed in Brussels for "… two days …" [FINA 476]. However, he mentions the sending of this telegram and receiving the answer after saying that they had moved on to Strasbourg on the "… third day …" [FINA 476], and he clearly indicates that he and Holmes discussed the contents of the reply to the telegram in the salle-à-manger in Strasbourg [FINA 477]. One possible explanation for all this confusion, given the constraints of the railway and ferry timetables, is as follows: Holmes and Watson arrived in Dieppe, and then in Brussels, on the Sunday; they stayed in Brussels for part of the two days of Sunday and Monday, with only one night being spent there; Holmes sent his telegram on the Monday morning (the ‘third day’) from Brussels; Holmes and Watson travelled on to Strasbourg on the Monday (still the ‘third day’); and Holmes received the reply to his telegram at their hotel in Strasbourg, and discussed its contents with Watson in the salle-à-manger. Holmes and Watson then decided not to stay overnight at their hotel in Strasbourg, since Watson states that: "… the same night we had resumed our journey and were well on our way to Geneva." [FINA 477] Holmes and Watson could easily have travelled on to Strasbourg on the third day to arrive in time for all this to happen, in that there was, for example, a train which left Brussels at 7.34 am which arrived in Strasbourg at 4.23 pm. Unlike the situation in England, where there were very few overnight trains, there were overnight trains which Holmes and Watson could have taken from Strasbourg to Switzerland.

The Journey to Switzerland

From Strasbourg, Holmes and Watson could most easily have travelled to Geneva via Basel and Lausanne. Given that they subsequently travelled up the Rhône Valley, if they did travel to Geneva they would have had to travel back around what the English refer to as Lake Geneva, but which the Swiss call Lac Leman, to reach the point where that River Rhône runs into the lake. They could have done this by train or, to make a change, by boat, with the boat calling in at Lausanne and Montreux. From the latter one could soon walk into the Rhône Valley, but from either one could catch a train part way up the valley, and Holmes and Watson may well have done this, since Watson’s suggestion that they spent a week in travelling up the valley is clearly mis-remembered, as they can have spent no more than four days on this part of the journey in order to arrive at Meiringen on 3 May [FINA 477]. The more interesting part of this valley is certainly its upper section, but the scenery improves dramatically once one turns out of the valley at Leuk and heads up towards the mountains at Leukerbad. There was no cable car at Leukerbad in 1891, with the climb up to the Gemmi Pass being up a very steep gully, and in the first week in May that gully would have been part-filled with snow and ice. Half-way up one comes across a memorial to a mountaineer killed by a rock fall in the gully in 1885. The path across the Pass is a relatively easy one in early May, provided that the snow is hard enough to bare ones weight, but there is always the danger of falling through the snow and ice cover into hidden gullies, although these are generally not deep, if one sticks to the route of the buried path, which remains obvious even in deep snow. The descent from the Pass to Kandersteg is less steep than the climb from Leukerbad, although there are some spectacular sections where the path is cut into the sheer cliff face. In Kandersteg Holmes might have been torn between being patriotic in staying at the Hotel Victoria, or he might have preferred to have been reminded of another lady, with a more-dubious moral reputation, by staying at the Hotel Adler.

In 1891 there was no railway from Kandersteg to Spiez, with the latter being located on the Thunsee, but our travellers could have used the donkeys, horses or carriages which were available for hire. From Spiez they could not have caught the ferries which normally travel along the lake, as these did not run before 1 June in 1891, but they could easily have reached Darlingen by road, and there was a railway from there to Interlaken. Another carriage journey would have taken them to Brienz, along the shore of the Briensee, and they could then have taken the train to Meiringen.

The Hotel Sauvage in Meiringen now has a plaque claiming that it was the Englischer Hof where Holmes stayed in 1891, but this claim is not only false but also extremely unlikely, given that it was such a large and prominent hotel, when Holmes was obviously not wanting to attract the attention of Moriarty’s assistants. There are, in fact, very few buildings in the present-day Meiringen where Holmes could have stayed, since most of the town was destroyed by a massive fire shortly after Holmes’s visit. One building which might be a good candidate for Holmes’s temporary residence, however, is the Bellevue Hotel, which is in the classical Swiss chalet style. This building is still a small, family-run hotel, but its lower part is now a cakeshop with large displays of Meiringen’s greatest invention - the meringue.

Many of the celebrations of Holmes’s fight with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls have been carried out in entirely the wrong location, because those staging these events have primarily catered only for those who cannot be bothered with making the extra effort involved in climbing the steep footpath which winds its way up the left-hand side of the falls (when looking at them from below), with this clearly being the path which Holmes and Watson followed, and which Sidney Paget accurately illustrated in The Strand Magazine. The majority of celebrations have actually been confined to the ‘wrong’ side of the falls, because of the convenience of the rack railway which climbs most of that side of the falls to reach a viewing platform.

After visiting the Falls, Holmes and Watson were meant to travel on to visit the tiny hamlet of Rosenlaui, and the extra walk up the valley of the Reichenbach River is certainly rewarding. The fairly large hotel which dominates the hamlet is the one which was there in 1891, and one can still obtain refreshments there before returning to Meiringen or continuing up the valley to the Grosse Sheidegge, where there are some spectacular views. If Holmes followed this latter route after escaping Moriarty’s clutches, then he would have had no problems in either following the winding road, or in following the more-direct, but nonetheless clear, footpath which leads through the woods, even in the dark, for it would have been dark soon after he set out. There are, however, other paths in the woods above the Reichenbach falls which provide easier routes towards Italy. The consideration of these routes must, given the limited space available here, remain a topic for future discussion.

Later Journeys

In the Spring of 1991, coinciding exactly with the centenary of the fateful journey of Holmes and Watson, we set out from London to re-create the original journey, using, for the most part, the same forms of transport used by our original travellers. Because of the destruction of parts of the Victorian railway system, it is no longer possible to travel via the same route as Holmes and Watson from London to Newhaven, but we managed to travel to Canterbury and then take a taxi to Lewes to rejoin the original route. Although under threat, the ferry service between Newhaven and Dieppe still operates, and the ferry arrived in Dieppe at 4.20 am, just three minutes earlier than Holmes’s ferry had arrived exactly one hundred years before. We did, in fact, delay long enough to visit the remains of Mycroft’s secret telegraph station on the cliffs. We then boarded the early-morning Paris train to travel as far as Rouen, where we changed onto the Amiens train, and then onto the Brussels train. We stayed for only one day in the Belgian capital, rather than the two days spent there by Holmes and Watson, before boarding the ‘Edelweiss Express’ for Switzerland. We did disembark for a short break at Luxembourg, in order to be able to claim, like Watson, that we had been there, and we stayed for the night at Strasbourg, so that we could have breakfast at the salle-à-manger at the railway station the next day before travelling on towards Geneva. We stayed at Lausanne before travelling up the Rhône Valley (mostly by train, as we did not have a week to spend on that part of the journey) and turning off at Leuk to stay the night at Leukerbad. One occurrence at this resort which did not echo the experiences of Holmes and Watson was the fact that the town was hosting the annual, world-wide Elvis Presley impersonator competition that night, and the hills were alive with the sound of The Pelvis until the early hours of the following morning!

We did cheat slightly in scaling the cliff to reach the Gemmi Pass, in that the footpath up through the gully was, as in Holmes’s time, part-filled with snow and ice, so Jane took the cable car whilst Philip scaled the cliff, kicking hand and foot holds in the ice and snow. The view across the Pass was staggering, but the dangers which Holmes and Watson would have experienced were revealed when Philip broke through the ice cover and fell into a small gully, and we had to break the ice on the lake to get water to make tea for the breakfast which we cooked on our small stove. We spent the night at Kandersteg and heard later that we had been the only people to cross the Gemmi Pass that day, which meant that our re-creation of Holmes’s journey on the exact centenary of the original journey was unique. We travelled down to the two lakes of Thunsee and Briensee, stopping off at Interlaken to replenish supplies. At Meiringen we were greeted by the owners of the small Bellevue Hotel, who informed us that they had to leave immediately to deal with a family emergency elsewhere, but they left us with the keys to the hotel and arranged for someone to call in on the following morning and cook breakfast for us, which is a trusting arrangement which one would find in very few other hotels. We explored every approach to the Reichenbach Falls and then travelled on up the valley of the Reichenbach River to complete the journey which Holmes and Watson had planned, by reaching the hamlet of Rosenlaui. As it was out of the normal tourist season we were offered the choice of all of the rooms at the large hotel there, and we were invited to share dinner with the owners in the evening. During a subsequent visit, Philip climbed over the intervening mountain ranges, bivouacking out for three nights, to reach the Rhône Valley at Visp. There he joined up with Jane, who had travelled around the valleys by train and coach. From there we travelled to Zermatt to climb up onto the shoulder of the Matterhorn and look over into Italy, with the glaciers below being a possible route across the Swiss-Italian border, towards the railways which would have taken Holmes to Firenze.

In 1996, 50 members of our society joined us in following most of the route of Holmes and Watson by coach and on foot, although some parts of the journey, such as the railway and ferry routing to Newhaven, Dieppe, Rouen and Brussels, were visited on other expeditions, including a visit to the preserved steam railway part of the English journey. On most days we all wore Victorian costume, and at Meiringen we re-created the famous fight on the ledge where Moriarty met his well-deserved fate. Those who were unable to climb to this ledge were able to watch the spectacle from the viewing platform just above the rack-railway station on the other side of the Falls. A smaller group of the mountaineering members of our society returned to Switzerland the following year, when they not only crossed the Gemmi Pass in the direction followed by ACD, from Kandersteg to Leuk, but they also climbed high above the tourist path over the Pass to locate the spot from which Moriarty or his henchmen may have rolled the boulders down towards Holmes. They later crossed the Grosse Sheidegge in the same direction as ACD did, in walking from Grindelwald to Meiringen via Rosenlaui, which gives a different perspective to the approach to the Reichenbach Falls. They also climbed the Findelen Glacier where ACD discussed the possible fate of Holmes, and stayed in part of the hotel where he stayed during his 1893 visit to the Zermatt region, and crossed all of the main passes between Meiringen and Visp, which were visited by ACD during that tour. This expedition revealed that there was no problem for someone who was even a moderate mountaineer in reaching Italy from Meiringen during Springtime, although one must accept that the conditions were harsher in 1891, and Holmes did not have the advantages of the equipment available to our modern mountaineers, which can only increase our admiration for him. Holmes, however, was to prove that he was an even greater mountaineer, in reaching Lhasa, and in crossing passes which were more than twice as high as any in Switzerland and Italy, later that year.

Conclusion

By exploring this route using only the methods of travel available to Holmes, the clues given in the Canon, and the timetables available to Holmes in 1891, and especially by walking parts of the route during the actual season when Holmes and Watson were there, we were able to see that the journey described by Dr Watson was perfectly feasible, although there is still room for the discussion of the confusing elements of Watson’s account in connection with Brussels and Strasbourg, and with the duration of the journey up the Rhône Valley. There is much else still to be done, with the most important missing link being that involving the journey across the Swiss-Italian border, and Philip certainly intends walking across this border at several points to explore the practical problems involved. It is the researches of Uno Studio in Holmes and of The Franco-Midland Hardware Company which have made a better understanding of this part of this particular Holmesian journey available to the wider Holmesian world, and which have made them the leading authorities on this subject, and we can all look forward to the further development of such joint-studies in the future.