Introduction
My discovery of the papers of Dr Watson at the Public Record Office at Kew in the summer of 2015 created a frisson of excitement among historians of the exploits of Dr Watson’s companion, Sherlock Holmes, as well as among historians in the wider sense.
Here, as set out in the books published as The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, we learned of matters that were too scandalous to publish in the lifetime of the Great Baker Street Detective. For the first time the true and somewhat tawdry reason for the flight of Hitler’s deputy Rudolph Hess to Scotland in 1941 was revealed, as well as the Victorian response to incipient climate change, and the real killer of a famous Scottish king. Alongside many other personal details, we also learned of Sherlock Holmes’s musical French sister, the eminent French composer or composatrice Augusta Holmès, and of his famous German grandson, Gottfried von Cramm, one of the top tennis players in the world in the 1930s.
In Dr Watson’s papers, it was striking how often Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s brother, who only appears twice in the canonical accounts of Sherlock Holmes’s activities, figured when matters of state were involved. The process of editing and releasing Dr Watson’s papers, which has been continuing since 2015, is still far from complete, but, as a historical researcher, I cast my net widely, and I have been preoccupied with work in other areas.
One of these is 19th century sporting history. It was in the summer of 2023, while doing some research into Derbyshire County Cricket Club and, in particular, into two of the stalwarts of the Derbyshire team in the 1880s, the half-brothers Thomas and William Mycroft, that I made a life-changing discovery.
For, filed, or misfiled, amongst records of the cricketing exploits of the Mycroft brothers, were the private papers of Mycroft Holmes.
Further research revealed that they had been maintained by Dr Watson, who sometimes (but as we shall see, by no means always) acts as Mycroft’s narrator. They were passed to Orlando Pearson, Dr Watson’s successor as Sherlock Holmes’s assistant and chronicler, and then passed back to the Watson family, before being deposited at the Public Record Office in 1990 by the literary executors of Dr Watson’s son, Edward, after the latter’s death. The works behind the original Redacted Sherlock Holmes series have the same complex process of transmission although they had not suffered the same misfiling as these papers of Mycroft Holmes which the purest chance has brought to light after being for so long lost.
So what did we know of Mycroft Holmes before the dramatic rediscovery of these papers?
Most of it comes from the two canonical stories in which he appears – the undated though early Greek Interpreter and The Bruce Partington Plans of 1895. His brother Sherlock is more candid about his brother in the latter, and I make no apology for quoting at length from the latter work as he tells Watson about him.
One has to be discreet when one talks of high matters of state. You are right in thinking that he is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he IS the British government."
"My dear Holmes!"
"I thought I might surprise you. Mycroft draws four hundred and fifty pounds a year (Editorial note: about £45,000 or USD 55,000 in 2023’s money), remains a subordinate, has no ambitions of any kind, will receive neither honour nor title, but remains the most indispensable man in the country."
"But how?"
"Well, his position is unique. He has made it for himself. There has never been anything like it before, nor will be again. He has the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living. The same great powers which I have turned to the detection of crime he has used for this particular business. The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearing house, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience….In that great brain of his everything is pigeon-holed and can be handed out in an instant. Again and again his word has decided the national policy. He lives in it. He thinks of nothing else.”
In The Greek Interpreter we had learnt that Mycroft Holmes is seven years older than his brother which would mean he was born in 1847. As the Holmes family were country squires, it is likely that there was a brother older than Mycroft who looked after the family estate while the younger brothers, Mycroft and Sherlock, were expected to make their own ways in the world, and being a senior civil servant (although not being a consulting detective) was one of the standard ways of doing so. Other than that, we learn of his obese appearance in The Bruce Partington Plans – Mycroft’s bloated figure features also in A Modern Odysseus in this work – and of his skill as an observer and as a maker of inferences, where he is more acute than his brother. But beyond this we had known little about him before his papers were rediscovered.
In fact, besides providing much welcome detail about Mycroft’s career, these papers confirm many of the things that his brother said of Mycroft in The Greek Interpreter. Mycroft had bachelor quarters in Pall Mall and was a member of the Diogenes Club, the peculiar club in St James’s Street where members were not permitted to take the least notice of each other and talking was banned except in the Stranger’s Room. These peculiarities of the Diogenes Club play an important role, as the reader will discover, in A Goat in the Government. There is no fellow lodger for Mycroft, unlike Sherlock, who, with intermissions, shared quarters with Dr Watson for many years. Mycroft mentions no outside interests, whereas his brother was a noted chemist and musician. There is not even a mention of a landlord or landlady for Mycroft, although it is hard to believe that a man of his social class should have had no servants at all and hence did his own chores.
I have arranged the matters I have chosen to set before the public in this volume in chronological order.
The first details his dealings with George Goschen, who was British Chancellor of Exchequer (the equivalent of Secretary to the Treasury in the United States) at the time of the disappearance of Sherlock Holmes, in 1891. By the time of the second story in 1914, Mycroft Holmes had gone up a level in seniority, as the main political figure he deals with is the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. Asquith was replaced as Prime Minister by David Lloyd George in December 1916, and in the third and fourth events covered, Mycroft Holmes is his chief advisor. As detailed at the conclusion of this fourth matter, Mycroft Holmes fell out of favour with Lloyd George, and took a less prominent role in the years that followed. But The Royal Bachelor (how appropriate that Sherlock Holmes should have had to make do with a bachelor from the British nobility in The Noble Bachelor while Mycroft gets to hobnob with royalty!) sees Mycroft Holmes back in service assisting Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in the Abdication Crisis of 1936. It is noticeable that while Goschen, Asquith, and Lloyd George all came from the Liberal Party, Baldwin was from the Conservatives, which suggests that politicians regardless of party had no reservation about making use of Mycroft’s unique political skills.
And what can we make of Mycroft Holmes from these newly unearthed documents?
As the only man who could go toe to toe with Sherlock Holmes when it came to observation and inference, Mycroft Holmes was in a unique position to comment on the much better-known detective work of his brother. There is an example of this in The Greek Interpreter where Mycroft Holmes said of his brother:
By the way, Sherlock, I expected to see you round last week, to consult me over that Manor House case. I thought you might be a little out of your depth.
In the episodes in this collection, Mycroft shows himself to be the equal of his brother at investigative work where such work does not require him “to run here and run there, to cross-question railway guards, and lie on my face with a lens to my eye” as he states in The Bruce-Partington Plans. Mycroft obviously likes this quotation about his own limitations as it appears at the head of the first episode of these memoirs and it is notable that in the matters presented here, Mycroft (writing in the confident expectation that what he wrote would not be read in his own lifetime) is often even more slighting of the abilities of his brother than he is in the quotation about the Manor House case above.
The events that follow have a mix of narrative voices.
An Individual of High Net Worth (May 1891) is largely recounted by Dr Watson at the time of the Great Hiatus (from April 1891 to April 1894), while A Modern Odysseus (June 1914) is told entirely by Mycroft although his brother Sherlock features. A Goat in the Government (May 1918) and The Art of the Possible (November 1918), have Mycroft and Watson each give part of the account of events, and Sherlock Holmes does some characteristically smart detective work in the former case. The Royal Bachelor of December 1936 has Mycroft act both as narrator and as prime mover although Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson appear in a brief scene retold by the latter.
And what of the statecraft which is presented here?
Mycroft makes it clear that his aim is to write a political handbook and these memoirs would probably not be associated with detective fiction at all if they had not been compiled by the brother of Sherlock Holmes. Mycroft is described in these memoirs as the Prime Minister’s Permanent Special Advisor, and his span in this role coincides with the time when the Almighty had made this land of hope and glory as mighty as it has ever been to date. As noted above, Mycroft Holmes’s eminence was at the disposal of politicians regardless of political allegiance and, as The Royal Bachelor points out, nearly a quarter of this planet’s population at the time covered by these memoirs had the good fortune to be governed by the British.
It is for the reader to decide whether it is a matter of chance that this apogee of British power and influence was at the same time as the apogee of the influence and power of Mycroft Holmes.
London 2023
