The Society Of Sherlock Holmes In London

Review:Faysal

London , 1950. St Marylebone Borough Council was hard at work trying to decide how to celebrate the Festival of Britain the following year. The Public Libraries Committee suggested an exhibition about Sherlock Holmes. Others on the council were not impressed - 'is this character, associated with murky crime, the best we have to offer' someone demanded. Why not do something on slum clearance? Letters began appearing in The Times - from Dr Watson, Mycroft Holmes, Inspector Lestrade - seventeen of them in all. Some even said that they had some mementoes of Sherlock Holmes, and offered to lend them for exhibition. Bowed down by public opinion, the Council relented. A small group of enthusiasts got together to plan the exhibition. Eagerly they designed and collected - a Persian slipper for Holmes’s tobacco, a gasogene for Watson's soda, a jack-knife for Holmes to skewer his unanswered correspondence to the mantelpiece. On an upper floor of Abbey House, the Baker Street headquarters of Abbey National, a meticulously detailed recreation of the famous sitting room at 221B took shape. Fresh crumpets - bitten into by two different sets of teeth - were supplied every day by a local bakery. Over 54,000 people came to see it. It was a triumph.
For its creators, though, the job was over. Then they thought - why don't we resurrect the Sherlock Holmes Society? There had been a small Society in the 1930s, whose members had included such distinguished scholars as the leading cleric Mgr Ronald Knox and the crime writer Dorothy L Sayers. The war had brought an untimely end to its activities. On Tuesday 20 January 1951, the new society was formed - called the Sherlock Holmes Society of London to distinguish it from the pre-war ancestor from which it can nevertheless claim direct descent. The first Sherlock Holmes Journal appeared in May. It included articles on Holmes's personality and Watson's gambling habits, and a review of the films of The Hound of the Baskervilles . Its membership list included just over 130 names. There are more than 1,000 today.

The Society quickly established a pattern of activities which it continues to this day - a twice-yearly journal, regular meetings, an annual dinner in January. Its tone was witty, erudite, but always with a light touch. The writer Mollie Hardwick once described the Sherlockian game as a huge family joke, and a sort of family the Society indeed is, whose skills and responsibilities are passed down the generations.
One of the Society's greatest early triumphs was the celebrated pilgrimage to Switzerland in 1968 - forty members and least twice as many Press, all in full Victorian costume. High above the Reichenbach Falls, the Society's President Lord Gore-Booth shed his mantle as head of the Diplomatic Service to become Sherlock Holmes himself, locked in the death struggle with the evil Professor Moriarty, played by leading barrister Charles Scholefield. And when the BBC made the fight at the Falls the first item in its evening news bulletin, the Society knew that it had reached a new pinnacle of success.
Since then, there have been no fewer than five further pilgrimages to Switzerland. In 1993, the Society made its first visit to France. Full costume was again de rigeur as members visited Bordeaux and Cognac, concluding in Montpellier, where Holmes had spent part of his exile while all the world believed him to be dead, exactly one hundred years earlier. And in 2001, to celebrate its fiftieth birthday, the Society took a cruise in the Baltic, with visits to Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Tallinn, St Petersburg and Helsinki.
The Society Of Sherlock Holmes In London Originally published in Shvoong: http://www.shvoong.com/f/internet-and-technologies/181812-society-sherlock-holmes-london/