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this episode of i hear of sherlock everywhere is brought to you by mx publishing with the largest catalog of new sherlock holmes books in the world new novels biographies graphic novels and short story collections about sherlock holmes find them at mxpublishing.com and by the west express the premier publisher of books about sherlock holmes and his world find them online at westexpress.com i hear of sherlock everywhere episode 209 aboriginals i heard of sherlock everywhere since you became astronomical in a world where it's always 1895 comes i hear of sherlock everywhere a podcast for devotees of mr sherlock holmes the world's first unofficial consulting detective i've heard of you before your home's the [Music] the game's afoot as we discuss goings-on in the world of sherlock holmes enthusiasts the bigger streeter regulars and popular culture related to the great detective as we go to press sensational developments have been reported so join your hosts scott monty and bert walder as they talk about what's new in the world of sherlock holmes [Music] you couldn't have come in a time well hello and welcome to i hear of sherlock everywhere the first podcast for sherlock holmes devotees where it's always 18.95 i'm scott monty i'm bert walder and bert are you an original are you an aboriginal i an aboriginal actually it was discovered some years ago through i think one of those sites ancestry.com that i'm actually a carbon copy oh no well you are a carbon life form so there's that well that's questionable but i found out that i was a carbon copy when i took one of my shirts to the dry cleaners and she couldn't get that stain out that blue stain from one of the collars it was really a shock ah you and your your mimeographic memory well i am just happy that you are not an abnormal original well that's that i don't know that could be there are other opinions there about that well the opinion is we should probably move on here and this is episode 209 as we said in the intro you can find the show notes for this episode at ihoes.com ihos209 that's all lowercase you can find us on all of the social media channels as i hear of sherlock drop us a comment let us know what you think of the show you can also comment directly to us on the show notes for the page and that will be on ihearofsherlock.com which is where you can find all sorts of articles and contribute to the show whatever you choose to do we appreciate your support and if you can let other people know about the show and one of the best ways to do that is to leave us a rating or review on apple podcasts and you don't even have to own an iphone or a mac to do that [Music] well we are happy to welcome back terry hunt to the program if you recall terry was with us with his wife linda and andrew malek on episode 204 where we talked about frederick d'or steele just as a refresher terry hunt has been an enthusiastic sherlockian since reading the sherlock holmes stories when he was a boy and over that time he developed an interest in christopher morley and of course his circle as part of his job at the senior curator of history for the nassau county new york department of parks and that's where you can find one of the facilities that terry oversaw which was morley's writer's retreat called the knothole terry holds a bachelor's degree in history from hofstra and a master's degree in history museum studies from the cooperstown graduate program and this is his seventh book aboriginals the earliest baker street irregulars 1934 to 1940. terry welcome back to i hear of sherlock everywhere oh great to be here excellent now you know as i was going through your biography there i i wanted to settle on something that stood out to me that we didn't mention the last time you were on cooper's town well we all know there is a museum facility in cooperstown known as the baseball hall of fame was that tied up in any of your studies or your interests while you were there uh it wasn't uh when i was there the cooperstown graduate program is an adjunct program of the state university college in oneonta uh it's entirely separate we have our own student uh building dean staff and many of our classes were held at the other museums in town uh which were then they called the fennemore house and the farmers museum which were run by the new york state historical association so that the program was hand in glove with the association we had a lot of really practical experience in history museum work oh that's fantastic and i see what you did there with hand and glove so i didn't completely strike out sorry sorry for you for you folks at home that don't follow baseball my abject apologies so let's move on from uh baseball and talk about uh probably what we think is the other great american sport which is sherlock ianna um the aboriginals this is a publication from the baker street irregulars press biography series tell us a little bit about how you actually were got interested in the subject to begin with well linda and i as you mentioned we have interest in christopher morley and his circle and that comes different ways for both of us as you mentioned i was the site supervisor for morley's little writer studio the knothole and linda uh had done her library internship at the local library in rosalind and bryant library which has a substantial morally collection so we had an interest and and just started looking at some of these other people with whom he interacted and and uh had a curiosity about who these early irregulars were and how they uh how they came to come to the dinners how they knew each other uh so uh we uh propose this to the uh press and uh in so doing we we use the uh the term that morley and robert keith levitt did in talking about these these earliest members and they call them either aboriginal members or sherlockian aborigines and led to a little confusion um with with one of the first people to review the uh proposal because he got back to us and he said he didn't realize that there were so many australian members at the early days um but we explained what where the term came from and they obviously stuck with it and uh mike whalen uh decided to go with that for a title that's clever it's interesting it it is clever you know but it's interesting so many people get this attraction i think everybody does in one way or another to erase that have gone before and the 1930s you know is such an attractive period um but it's also attractive because of the people around the table you know you've got in morley in his circle um you know these literary types and the conversations and you tend to think of the algonquin roundtable and the quality of those conversations may was that an element and and of course you have this historical bent you know you're interested and you're a scholar you know when it comes to history but is that is that part of the attraction well it wasn't in in trying to figure out how how they meshed and what brought them to literally to the table to the to the dinners in in in 34 and 36 and 40. and some of them clearly were literary figures and many of them were friends of morley from the publishing world from the saturday review but then there were others who didn't fit that at all and um i mean one of them um demetrius was a a sculptor so some of them um you tried to try to figure out how they how they blended and um the quality of the conversation i think is as you mentioned uh must have been scintillating and uh fun and i think that's one of the that's my impression of a big difference between morley's groups is his three hours for lunch club and and the irregulars uh as opposed to the the round table is i i just i think that they uh morley's friends were not cutthroat and i think that they uh just just enjoyed having a good laugh um and enjoyed each other's company so so take us through the the book what is it what does it cover overall i mean i mentioned the original regulars from 34 to 40 but you know how how do you go about addressing that period and and how did you how did you package the idea basically when you uh when you pitched it to the bsi press all right well one of the major ways that we that we pitched it was to say that we're not going to be uh repeating what was in the the irregular history series that john lulenburg edited um or the uh the book about the crossword puzzle solvers that julian al rosenblatt wrote in 1985 that we were going to be taking taking those as starting points and going beyond that and and looking at the individuals and uh we broke it into four sections uh given that we had a very limited um page count we knew precisely how many pages we would have how many words we could use so uh the first section dealt with the really significant sherlockians of the period so you're you're looking at the morley brothers and vincent starrett and um uh uh elmer davis edgar smith and they they got more pages um then we looked at all of the people beyond those who attended the dinners so we're looking at the um the the the two dinners in 1934 the 36 and the 40 dinners and trying to and it not absolutely clear who was at each of those so um we had to do some some stifting there then we had a section that we call the irregular irregulars and that was fun that that was looking at people who either either supposedly at a dinner but not sure or were involved in the irregulars in one way or another but not actually members active members and i guess we can talk more about that uh later because there there was an interesting fun chapter to do and then the last section were people who weren't already in the book who had solved the sherlockian crossword puzzle in 1934 and this was written by christopher morley's brother frank it was something that morally published in the saturday review of literature in 1934 and he gave his readers a couple of weeks to solve it and and offered membership in the irregulars to anyone who solved it without an error uh eventually as the answers started coming in he did accept um a a a couple of minor errors you were still in so there were uh a very interesting group of men and women quite a few women who saw that uh but were never involved in the irregulars actively so this that that was the last section and they were they were some of the toughest ones to find yeah i would imagine so you know one thing uh sticks out to me there um you mentioned the morley brothers there were three morley brothers christopher frank and felix um intimately involved in the early days of the bsi and yet i think as we saw over the years the the other two morley's kind of faded away um did they did they not have the same level of enthusiasm as chris or what what's the story there well frank vigor morley uh spent most of his uh adult life in england uh after uh uh graduating uh from uh haverford or actually he graduated from johns hopkins um he started like all the three brothers he started at haverford but then he transferred to johns hopkins because it had a more intensive math program and that was his specialty at the time then um like the other two brothers was a rhodes scholar and went to a new college at oxford got his phd in math and um basically uh remained in in england except for world war ii years for his career and he wound up as an editor at faber and favor uh he had an interest he was one of the uh first uh one one of those who attended the first meeting of the sherlock holmes society uh in in england in london in 1934 and just it wasn't his his his primary interest and i think the same with felix felix did attend he attended some irregulars um dinners he was there in in 1940 and he gave a noteworthy paper on the second stain but he was somewhat disappointed in in as he put it um some of the members were were too far along and in drink to appreciate the fine points by the time that he he was put on the on the schedule so uh he did you come back a couple of times and then he came to uh speak about uh christopher morley a couple of years after after kitt's death but he insisted on being put early in the schedule uh so that the audience would be sober enough to appreciate his efforts it's probably worth noting too just a little aside in in what you were saying there that all three morley brothers were rhodes scholars yes the only threesome in in the history of the of the award that's that's astounding that's astounding must have had uh some proud parents in the in the morley family i know their father was uh was a mathematician a mathematics professor so obviously the world of academia flowed through their veins yes i had a um quite a good upbringing in at first on the campus of haverford and then in baltimore when uh when their father was teaching at johns hopkins and their mom was no slouch either a very intelligent woman and an almost um concert grade violinist she gave that up uh she found it rather frustrating not to not to be able to put as much time into practice as she would like uh as having a family to raise and so on but she did instill a love of music in into kit and um tr tried with uh felix didn't didn't quite go didn't quite work you know the interesting thing just to hear you talk about some of these people felix and frank morley and so on when you look at the book and it's a wonderful resource of biographical sketches around i haven't counted but how many people are in this book it looks like something like over a hundred do you know off hand how many entries you have here i think it's more like 60 some odd but i i i don't remember i don't remember off hand well it's a good number but how did you go about finding you know it's so it's so challenging some of these people you know and you've described them in these great categories the stalwarts who were always part of the circle the people who attended the dinners the irregular people the crossword puzzle solvers how did you how did you find out about some of these well we we started with what was already written so we you know of course we did look at uh john ellenberg's uh history series and um some of the other things written about the uh irregulars and um the the essays that uh steve rothman had in the standard doyle company uh and we started the the digging that linda and i are uh trained to do and she she is a trained archivist and has been a librarian uh in charge of a historical society library uh scott as you mentioned i i was the history curator for a county museum system so we used a lot of ancestry.com once we were able to link someone get get a proper death date and so on uh we looked at census records travel records passports we got some of them the only photos we could get were from uh old passports there were um newspapers.com was it was a important source to be able to find uh biographical details uh we also have an online subscription to new york times and as the organization was largely centered in new york we were able to get articles about the people and and follow up some of their careers just googling googling people finding obscure magazine references book references uh find a grave was helpful so that was that was uh a big part of what we did and then there were there was archival research and we were working on this book for over two and a half years and involved two trips to austin texas to the ransom center at the university of texas there and that's the archive and they have uh the biggest collection of christopher morley material and that's because they they bought his basically everything that that that he had uh left they bought from the family after uh kit morley's death in 1957. so his personal diaries um uh related correspondence we we we had two trips uh there sifting through uh that material and it had things not only with him but people like robert keith levitt and uh warren force and and um a number of the other uh people bill hall of course uh we did the same type of research in the morley collection at haverford college and made made a couple of trips to there over the years uh as well as the bryant library in roslyn and you know it's a local uh community library they have an excellent local history collection and a substantial morley collection including a lot of manuscript items and typescript letters and it was very very useful and the staff there was was was a big help it it sounds like you left no stone unturned in um in in undertaking this exercise i mean that's pretty comprehensive and you know over the course of two and a half years that's that's a long time you know as as you were as you were working on this terry um how do i put this um you're working on it hand in hand with linda talk a little bit about what a what a team approach to this kind of thing uh is like because i'm sure there were some things that some ideas that you brought to the table on how to uncover information i'm sure that linda uh has a whole wealth of information about this kind of research as well talk to us about the the collaboration we have different different strengths linda does not consider herself a sherlockian um the the fine points of the cannon are are are my department and recognizing that the sherlockian uh connections uh in in and references in uh some of these items that that's that was my job so she uh was particularly good at finding the the tracking down people and finding the the biographical details in the sources that that i mentioned and um we would take turns i i have to say that at the time that we were working on this we only had one computer and we didn't have we've since you know gotten an ipad and that but we only had one so we had to take turns uh getting on and looking at the ancestry account and and so on so we would uh we would alternate that way but she was really uh very very uh skilled at beating the bushes and finding obscure uh references uh when we went to places like haverford and uh the ransom center we would um each take a file we would do work on different things and um if she saw something that she thought i should would be interested in seeing or something that specifically had to do with a sherlockian topic then uh you know i'd look at that and the same thing if i were looking at at uh something and it was had material that i knew that she would be interested in seeing somebody that she particularly uh was interested in then i'd pass that along and um of course to move things as quickly as we could and on these trips and we you know we wanted to maximize the efficiency we took pictures of lots of stuff so again we i'd have the camera and she would find something she's like would take a picture of this and uh then we would look that over uh maybe that evening or certainly when we got home and exchanged exchanged notes fascinating well we are going to pick up on some of the juicy details in some of the minutia the stories behind the people in aboriginals when we come back with terry hunt in just one moment stay tuned wait a minute wait a minute are you telling me you built a time machine out of a delorean the way i see it if you're gonna build a time machine into a car why not do it some style well that's exactly what the wes express has done built a time machine in style to take you back to 1986 in the first issues of the sherlock holmes review groundbreaking interviews with jeremy brett and peter cushing rare reprints from the strand magazine like a day with dr conan doyle and a profile of william gillette as sherlock holmes all four issues of volume one almost impossible to find today can be yours reprinted in a handsome 7 by 10 volume take a trip back to the sherlockian fever of the 1980s with the sherlock holmes review anthology volume one available right now at westexpress.com [Music] okay we are back talking about aboriginals from the bsi press with one of the authors editors terry hunt uh terry you were talking about the the wonderful research that you and linda undertook there um and and uncovering some of these people what are what are some of the the stories that stood out to you the the people or the um you know their association with the irregulars what are what are some some kind of standout stories well one of the most significant and one of the biggest surprises that uh we got had to do with the date of sherlock's birthday and that's something that has been embraced as january 6th and and this uh initially proposed by christopher morley himself and so this is where the the annual uh dinners focused as the gatherings in london and in new york this is um this is the root of of of our fellowship in many ways and we were stunned to find uh in the saturday review of literature and that was one of the the sources that that we also used quite a bit that in 1933 christopher morley proposed it as the date of today's issue which was january 7th and later in the year morley uh putting in a letter uh with someone else's name on it um said well earlier earlier this year it was suggested that january 6th was the the birthday of sherlock holmes so i think that there should be a dinner or some some gathering to celebrate that and that was what led up to the original uh luncheon uh for the birthday which was held at the the hotel duane in manhattan on january 6 1934 but what was apparently the the the impetus behind it is that afterwards christopher morley always wrote that he he felt gratified that holmes happened to be born on the same day as his brother felix which was january 6th so so we don't have absolute proof but it's certainly something made that change from the seventh to the sixth and uh we think it was that that initially was that tie with christopher's brother felix i can only imagine the power of suggestion at some of those morley brother dinners it you know it may be discounting the effect of uh the christopher morley environment noted earlier by his brother frank which it could be that a little alcohol had something to do with the confusion here well it was more than a little at that uh those initial gatherings uh there were that uh let's just mention that that initial gathering at the hotel duane was co-ed uh it was really more of a uh it was a gathering of his uh uh grill parts are club um so as it was uh some of his his publishing cronies and uh some of their gals as they would put it um coming along and they played sardines in the closet and and uh and had drinks and and and lunch there's there's way too much to unpack there um sardine joke aside um so i want to know about sardines but i also want to know what what's uh what's a grill partzer for our listeners ah um christopher morley had a few different clubs that that he organized and um there was one uh in in the 20s into the 30s called the three hours for lunch club which was uh just that it was he would call friends on a short-term basis and just let's get together and um that was all men but then in the uh 30s he the an offshoot of that was something he called the grill partzer club and a similar group but this one also included women and uh it was uh so named because he grabbed a book in a nickel book lot uh on on his way to his first meeting there was chella's restaurant and it was by uh it was an account of the or austrian uh poet and playwright france grillparzer and uh he would have them sign the book and uh uh if you came to your first meeting you you there was an initiation and you you got to sign the book and uh and were on a quote that you that you chose at random and sardines at some of these gatherings uh you you uh where they were mixed group um one would would be picked and she would go hide someplace and it might be in a coat closet or or uh um in in a little nook someplace uh behind a curtain and then it was a hide-and-seek but then the next person who found her would just squeeze in and then somebody else would go and and and so on so you you alternated uh men and women and eventually uh everybody was happily happily squeezed in like sardines and the the first few uh i i guess were particularly happy wow um i cannot well in those post-prohibition days people must have been you know just had so many reasons to celebrate that things got silly so now you mentioned chrisella uh who or what was chris sella uh chris was the um guy who ran christopher morley's favorite speakeasy and restaurant um this is uh where they they they settle on he was on on east 45th street in uh in a brownstone and it seemed like a perfect location to deflect suspicion because he had uh the ywca's uh ho tell for women on the nurses on one side and he had the children's aid society headquarters a couple doors down on the other side was known for very fine food and available drinks during prohibition afterwards he went legit and he and he had a very popular restaurant uh unfortunately that's where the first dinners were held the the the two in 1934 and then the one in 1936 then the business became a little bit too good he expanded the prices went up and um the morley and the irregulars stopped going there but he's in the book is there's a um in an appendix there is a little profile of him because he was so important in the early days of the irregulars and we'll have a link excuse me we'll have a link in the show notes to um an article about chris sellers from the new york times in 1985 kind of looking back on it so you can check that out in the show notes um interestingly enough as i look in the in the lineup here in the um in the appendix as you list the dinner attendees by dinner um there were three bsi dinners in 1934 and then none in 35 one in 1936 and none then none again until 1940. it seems like a rather scattered and haphazard approach to the irregulars in those early years uh well that's because it was what do you attribute that to um well the first one uh as you look in 1934 was uh they had the the birthday lunch at at the dwayne then they had their first official meeting in june and uh morley of course was uh planning this is something that he had been working on and then he got word that in london the sherlock holmes society there was going to be having its first meeting on june 6th so uh christopher morley wanted to be the first in the world to have a sherlock holmes society scheduled his dinner on june 5th he had to shoehorn that in so that's that's why that happened in the middle of the year and uh then the the big dinner he had on december 7th which is seen seen as the first birthday dinner and uh uh that's the one where where so many of the seminal sherlockians attended um people people like william gillette and um morally uh uh uh um vincent starrett that's the one dinner that uh that he attended frederictor steele was there uh that was scheduled for december 7th but that actually was meant to take the place of the birthday dinner in january 35 so that's why there was none in 35. that makes sense um the the gap between 37 and and 40 uh it's just morley didn't schedule it and he was not very good it was really uh in 40 when uh edgar smith became involved and was really the the one who is best at organizing that's when the dinners really continued uninterrupted got it well that december 7th meeting must have been a fascinating one because we had you know some of the heavy hitters like h.w bell grey chandler briggs elmer davis you know some some big names in in the irregular and sherlockian history but we also had well and i should say um frederictor steele and um william gillette i mean obviously it doesn't get much bigger than that of course vincent starrett you mentioned um gene tunney the boxer was there that's fascinating and then one of the um most vilified names in early irregular history and an irregular irregular alexander wolcott tell us a little bit about alexander wolcott well he was um part of the the the center of the the um roundtable of the algonquin he was a newspaper theater critic and he had a radio show and he and and morley were were not buds uh they they didn't approach things the same way um and the the problem with the the 34 dinner is that walcott wasn't invited by christopher morley he uh he was a friend uh from boyhood of uh great briggs and he heard about this uh either through through him or through vincent starrett and um managed to get an invitation from uh from one of those but one of them but but morley was not aware of this so uh he just showed up and and entered and and and uh he came with vincent starrett the two of them arrived together uh in in a handsome cab and it made a grand entrance but you know morley was was not pleased uh because he he hadn't actually extended the invitation and um walcott monopolized gillette's time he uh later wrote an account of this which which uh was was published and it's largely fictitious it's it's you know it was just embroidered so um didn't uh was not uh well uh well thought of by by many of the the earlier regulars robert keith levitt was was very very negative he also walcott also stole bill hall's deer stoker cap took it off his head put it on and just you know kept it on the rest of the night and left with it and uh we have it uh in the book we we kind of deal with that story because in some versions he and and starrett came with uh dear stalkers uh and yet it's clear that that he he took this other one uh and so it it and this and this is some of the more interesting research that we did um got into period sporting goods catalogs trying to find out what was a deer stalker what what what kind of a cap was considered a deer stalker in that time period and uh um wrote to the l.l bean archives um and uh they didn't have an answer but we found a uh a copy of an abercrombie and fitch catalog from the period and found from the illustrations in the description that at that time uh a hunter's type cap with ear flaps and a and a brim in the front only was referred to as a deer stalker so uh whereas the thing he took from bill hall was called a four and a half so obviously had brim or bill on uh front and back so our thought is that uh walcott came in with basically a plaid hunting cap and he saw another one that was more authentic and uh so took it by divine right wow well i i can see why morley hadn't invited him i mean i i think that the nature of uh christopher morley's gatherings uh certainly in those days and not just the irregulars was uh to to assemble a group of like-minded people people who could uh have much to talk about uh could uh feel at ease in each other's company and just enjoy themselves and it it sounds like the hairs on the backs of people's necks uh stood up and perhaps shoulders tightened when walcott made his entrance i think you're right about that and you're right about describing the group we we don't think of it the earlier regulars as a literary society i know that that the group has has developed into that over the years and uh we don't think that that the people who the men who were attending would have thought of it as a literary society but it absolutely was a society of highly literate men who enjoyed each other's company and and and talk and and gene tony is a good example now he was part of morley's lunch groups and and best known as as a boxer but he was uh an authority on shakespeare and and and highly literate and highly well-read and and he would on training uh you know he always brought uh books with him and so he he absolutely fit in he was not necessarily a sherlockian but uh he was uh he could hold his own so terry tell us a little bit about uh some of the well let's call it a mystery people people who um maybe we we don't have photographs of or we don't we don't have biographical information on i know there were there were names associated with the 1940 dinner and they've kind of faded from irregular history although some of them haven't faded from um you know popular culture you talk about that a little thank you yeah there are there were some real mysteries uh um there was one john connelly who attended the dinner and and we're not absolutely certain that we've nailed who he is um he appears to have been a um uh businessman amateur magician who was up in westchester county but we're not certain we we have his signature though uh in in many cases at these dinners they would pass menus around um or 1940 books around and the people who attended would sign and this is one way that we know uh who was actually at the dinners and john jay connolly had a very distinctive signature so uh we will uh be looking someday to to see if we can find some document a deed or um something of that sort that that has that particular signature in and we'll be be sure to match him up um then there was another uh warren jones who was supposed to have been at the 1940 dinner no information on him whatsoever and uh john lulenberg may have correctly i identified that he didn't exist that the attendance in 1940 was done by uh edgar smith and he didn't know everybody at that point and it may just be uh an error uh there may not have been a warren jones there but we we had to put it in the book because uh if we didn't someone would say oh well you left out someone here you know it's on this list so we had to explain uh why well maybe he doesn't really belong there and then we had another one who certainly didn't belong there and he's in in the irregulars section a fellow by the name of henry watson kent and he was um old school new englander he was the first head of education for the metropolitan museum of art um very prim and proper apparently and yet um his name was in [Music] on one of the books in 1940 dinner and it just seemed odd it just seemed odd well uh again this was finally uncovered uh the story when um the regulars found that uh ronald mansbridge uh up in his 90's was still alive he had he had fallen out of the the sphere of the irregulars they went to interview him and he revealed that for some reason he couldn't remember he just signed henry watson kent's name in the book so for years it was assumed he was he was actually there uh turned out he wasn't so that that was that was a story we had to explain as well well there's uh no lack of sense of humor amid some of these some of these irregulars um you know i noticed some of the the names in the appendix of uh additional men who were on the invitation list or necessarily at the dinner um are names that are familiar to certainly to sherlockians but perhaps to people in broader spheres as well clifton fatiman for one and asw rosenbach good old dr rosenbach from philadelphia um are these are these names that appeared in irregular dinners after 1940 uh a couple did uh most didn't and um some you know we're we're just we're morally buddies i mean one of them was william rose binay um he wasn't active but his brother stephen attended one of the dinners um we hope uh we we may be exploring that in the future i don't know whether we will be uh their second edition [Music] that well maybe we can drum up some interest for it because i mean you can certainly go beyond 1940 right i mean what what would be the if if you had to do another volume and let's say you had all of the assets at your uh disposal what would be the cut-off year for you where you said you know we we know enough about these people now that we can um we can go like after a certain year and and not have to worry about it what would be the cut-off year for you well i i you know we probably would go into the 40s through the 40s not necessarily in in one volume because you've got more dinners you've got more people involved and that that's increasing quite a bit um but others uh i think uh julie mccurris and and others have been working on the 1950s i know she's done a lot of work on identifying the people in the pictures uh the dinner pictures in the 50s and has done a wonderful job and i think some others are looking at other aspects um like the women who were involved in in the irregulars in in those years who would not of course would not have been at the dinners um but well we we will we will see and uh we actually have been uh asked to do a uh an expanded uh second edition of it it was it sold out almost immediately and uh they've reprinted a couple of a few copies to have available currently but um if it weren't for the covid crisis uh linda and i would have been on the road uh this past summer and and getting more material and more photographs and uh we were we were going to be allowed to expand some of the profiles we're going to be giving more pages good well we will look forward to that now as you think about this work in total terry and and you've familiarized yourselves with these 60 odd individuals or should i say 60 odd individuals um [Music] who who of this list other than other than you know your your hero christopher morley who who on this list would you have liked to have met yeah i would have enjoyed i think meeting his friend bill hall william hall um had uh was involved with the irregulars from the very beginning uh was uh in publishing as a publisher's rep um but also an artist um serious sherlockian and just judging from his correspondence um very good sense of humor uh i i i think uh i think i will i i would have liked to have um uh spent time with him well anyone who had enough restraint to keep from going after alexander wolcott for stealing his hat has my vote well terry you and linda have our vote as well the book is aboriginals the earliest baker street irregulars 1934-1940 it is available from the bsi press which you can find at bakerstreetirregulars.com uh terry we wish you and linda much health and um much further uh research to get us to the second edition of aboriginals thanks so much for being here oh thank you very much for for having me scott bert always a [Music] pleasure [Music] i don't know one of the things we didn't really touch on is how much fun this is i mean it's interesting to look at this as a resource for information about the early days of the baker street irregulars but i meant to tell terry i just had an opportunity to really use the book i you know every so often you go through your library and i happen to have a book on my shelf the private life of henry maitland by morley roberts and i haven't read this in a long time and i took it down and i said you know do i really need this and i opened it up and someone not me has written on the fly leaf this is generally accepted to be the life of george gissing and i said to myself oh sure i remember reading this gissing was one of these 19th century early 20th century novelists that morally was very fond of and he's got a classic essay about george gissing and i read this book and i read gissing's books but on the fly leaf this fellow or woman whoever had this book before also wrote generally accepted to be the life of george kissing the novelist cross-referenced earl waldbridge literary characters drawn from life circa 1936 and i hadn't paid any attention to that before and i said to myself earl walbridge boy there's an there's a name and i pulled down aboriginals and i read in in aboriginals earl walbridge who uh was a librarian at the harvard club and also a librarian at new york university and the author of literary characters drawn from life so i hop over to abe books and i get myself a copy of literary characters drawn from life and it turns out to be really fascinating you know how people in real life according to walbridge's extensive research pop up in various literary uh efforts over the centuries it's just amazing going back to 1634 dutch drama he's got an entry here you go groceries third and last latin drama so fompinaeus was translated by vandal into dutch in 1635 and it goes on about you go groceries i mean it's just it's just absolutely amazing and so walbridge turns out to have been a character uh who i would know nothing about without having my copy of aboriginals nearby that's fantastic well they say aboriginals is like a box of chocolates you never know what you're gonna get [Music] well i think we got to the point here where we need you to check out a word from our sponsor um we will bring you a word from mx publishing they have a program now called books to books you heard of their books to trees program where they would plant a tree for every book that's purchased well now uh with books to books they are actually funding not only the thousand trees but they're turning it into donations to the happy life schools in kenya where they are helping kids to read with the expansion of happy life schools mx tells us that the team are providing education not just for the 150 kids at happy life but hundreds more in the local communities and the books to books project they want to fund 1 000 school books by the end of 2021 so every 50 dollars that you spend on the mx publishing website will go towards a five dollar donation the average cost of the school book to happy life so when you get to enjoy the fine books from mx publishing and believe me there are quite a few to choose from the kids at the happy life village in kenya will also benefit from what it is that you're enjoying so thank you to mx publishing for expanding reading beyond our borders and beyond the usual and helping kids become literate [Music] well the sound of that music means you know what you're about to get that's right it's everybody's favorite sherlockian quiz show canonical couplets where we give you two lines of poetry and you give us an answer which is the story in question that time around now if you remember in the last episode we gave you the following couplet you arouse my curiosity watson said at the enigmatic message with which left an old man dead bert do you know which sherlock holmes story that couplet refers to oh yes that's the story of the united states senator and his brazilian wife and a murderous dentist that was the problem of the sore bridge oh there's something sore here but it's not a bridge i hate to tell you you are you are oh so close but not it's uh the glorious scot is what we're looking for um and we we did have our a regular contribution from eric deckers who said at first i thought the canonical couplet this week was about a high-end luxury portable sleeping platform the glorious cot but that seemed too easy and then i thought it might be about the highly prized and very well done method of tying a rope that was the glorious knot and then my nose began to itch and i sneezed mightily and thought of another option but decided against that [Music] i think we all know which direction that was going rare case of eric's judgment yes [Music] but of course he he concluded properly with the gloria scott so let's uh let's get the big prize wheel out here and give it a big spin as it goes around and lands on number 19 number 19. this looks good it looks like it landed on hey tim collins kim congratulations uh we will be sending you a copy of the dvd uh which is the many faces of sherlock holmes hosted by christopher lee i should also note that tim got on the eric bandwagon and originally guessed the adventure of the glorious scotch but he rescued himself there with gloria scott so this time around we're going to do something a little bit different we've decided that due to well our creative bent taking us in a different direction we we told you at the top of the year we were going to mix things up this year we have a series of alternative titles of sherlock holmes stories and we're going to give you what could have been perhaps a popular or otherwise mysterious title to a sherlock holmes story and you need to figure out which story we're referring to so the prize this time around is a magazine a theater magazine from the center theater group from the abramson theater it's called performing arts and it contains this is from january 1981 it uh concerns the crucifer of blood which was being performed at the abramson theater there in january of 1981 starring charlton heston at sherlock holmes and jeremy brett as dr watson we have a copy of this lovely performing arts magazine for you and this is courtesy of tony quatro who sent us in a number of pieces from his collection that he has donated to us to give away his prizes so thank you for that tony and now here is the clue [Music] the barber of hampshire the barber of hampshire if you know which sherlock holmes story that refers to send it in an email to comment that i hear of sherlock.com with canonical couplet in the title and we will select from all the correct answers a winner good luck and if you're wondering why i told you to put canonical couplet in the title in the subject line it's um not because this is still the canonical couplet it's a quiz program but our email filters rely on canonical couplet to pick it up and to send it into a folder so we're just shortcutting there it is still canonical couplets as far as we're concerned even though it's not an actual couplet is that is that clear as mud bert excuse me get the mud i'm sorry i wasn't paying attention would you mind repeating everything you said since we met uh 30 years ago yes i would very much mine i i would even mind repeating myself from the last 30 seconds why because i can't i can't remember no no it's clear everyone knows that well uh stay tuned uh in the next episode we will have another exciting guest we actually have gotten many great recommendations from folks as to who we might put on our internet interview list the list is growing we will be interviewing some authors and editors from recent bsi press books there has been a delay in getting those out so there will be a delay in the interviews until we get our grubby little hands on the books so we can well ostensibly ask intelligent questions as opposed to what we normally ask i guess in the meantime i am the intelligently questioning scott monty and i am the completely obscure bert walder and together we say the the games the games of foot i'm afraid that in the pleasure of this conversation i am neglecting business of importance which awaits me thank you for listening please be sure to join us again for the next episode of i hear of sherlock everywhere the first podcast dedicated to sherlock holmes [Music] goodbye and good luck and believe me to be my dear fellow very sincerely yours sherlock holmes