The year 1894 was a busy one for Sherlock Holmes, indeed
Watson records that the accounts of their activities for that year filled ‘..three massive manuscript volumes...'
(GOLD). This is all the more remarkable since Holmes was only active for about
three-quarters of the year, the Great Hiatus did not end until the early
spring. Cases we have on record from this time include EMPT, NORW and GOLD. In
addition to these Watson mentions, but does not record a number of other cases.
In GOLD we have the '… repulsive story of
the Red Leech and the terrible death of Crosby the banker...'; '...the famous Smith-Mortimer succession
case...' and '...the tracking and
arrest of Hunt, the Boulevard assassin...' (which earned Holmes the Legion
of Honour from the French government). In NORW we find mentioned the case of
the '...papers of ex-President Murillo...'
and the '..shocking affair of the Dutch
steamship Friesland..’. An active year for the newly returned detective
indeed.
A recent visit to Woking has, however, stimulated some
thought on one other case from 1894 which Watson notes but does not record the
fill details of. In GOLD we are told of the '...Addleton tragedy and the singular contents of the ancient British
barrow ...'. Although it is possible that Addleton is a family name, it is
more likely in this context to be the name of a place; a town or village. Not
surprisingly, an examination of the atlas will show that there is no place in
Britain with the name of Addleton, once again we are dealing with one of
Watson's disguised locations. Given the high proportion of Holmes' cases that
take place in the home counties the most suitable candidate for the place would
seem to be the Surrey town of Addlestone, which lies some five miles to the
north-west of Woking.
But what of the '...ancient
British barrow...'? Just across the Basingstoke Canal from Woking, in the
direction of Addlestone, lie two Bronze age burial mounds. Although there are a
number of Pre-Roman sites around Addlestone, these are the closest that have
been positively identified as barrows. This of course assumes that the barrow
in question is in the same area as 'Addleton', but we have no reason to think
otherwise. Very little information exists on these harrows. The Surrey
archaeological guide merely lists them as Bronze Age with no date or further
indication of their age. From their size and shape it is unlikely that they
contain a discrete burial chamber, bodies would have been buried in graves dug
into the sides. No record exists of any formal investigation of either of the
harrows. They were both dug into unofficially in the early years of this
century but nothing of note was found in them.
Although we have no further record of the Addleton tragedy
it is possible that there may be a tale by another author that is loosely based
on it. The ghost story 'A Warning to the Curious' by M.R. James was published
some thirty years after the Addleton tragedy, and is set in the fictional town
of Seaburgh, which James states is based on Aldeburgh in Suffolk. In it a young
man called Paxton hears a local legend of a buried Saxon crown and sets out to
find it. He does so and removes it from its hiding place but is then haunted by
the ghost of a man who was its guardian in life and continued to guard it in
death. Despite returning the crown to where he found it, he is eventually
hounded to death by the vengeful ghost. The structure of the story rather than
its plot is what interests us however. The tale is related by an unnamed
narrator, who is holidaying in Seaburgh with his companion Henry Long and
starts with them seated in their private sitting room in their hotel. At this
point Paxton rushes in and proceeds to tell the tale of the crown and of its
ghostly guardian. After hearing his statement, Long and the narrator set out to
help him return the crown to its hiding place, and are later involved in
trying, unsuccessfully, to prevent Paxton's death. The whole style of the story
is that of a Holmes adventure. Although the characters of the narrator and Long
are not those of Holmes and Watson, the style of the story, with its cosy
sitting room start and the two companions helping a distressed client is purely
canonical. Remove the ghost from the tale and substitute a mysterious mortal
guardian, and we have a plot that would not be out of place in the canon.
Remove the whole tale westwards to Baker Street, Addlestone and Woking and we
have a convincing sequence of events for The Addleton Tragedy.
How did MR. James come to use the events of the case for one
of his tales? James lived and worked in Cambridge, where he was Director of the
Fiwilliam Museum and successively Dean, Tutor and Provost of King's. Whether or
not you have Holmes as a Cambridge man it is known that he visited the town on
more than one occasion. It is not inconceivable therefore that Holmes and James
could have met. A number of their fields of interest overlapped; James is
described as a linguist, palaeographer, medievalist and biblical scholar.
Holmes knowledge of the bible was rusty, but he too spoke and researched into
several languages, and studied several aspects of the medieval era; its mystery
plays, charters and music for example. Indeed, Holmes may have spent several weeks
in Cambridge researching into old English charters during the Spring of 1895
(3STtJ). Given their common pursuits, James and Holmes would have had much to
discuss, and it is probably during one of these discussions that the tale of
the Addleton tragedy, a case with a background firmly rooted in antiquity would
have come up. Like all good authors James would have no doubt stored a nugget
like this away, eventually to be used in a modified form as the basis for a
story, Holmes would have found it somewhat ironic that when the account
eventually appeared it was as a ghost story.
As a theory this is all rather tenuous, but it is difficult
to read 'A Warning to the Curious' without seeing it as a tale of the master
detective and his biographer friend hot on the trail of another mystery. If you
doubt this, then read it for yourself!
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