The Birthplace of Sherlock Holmes

 In 1886, a bored GP in Southsea who was a fan of Edgar Allen Poe, decided he could create a better detective character than the bumbling cop created by his hero.  With nothing better to do, since this seaside suburb of Portsmouth was over-subscribed with doctors, Dr Doyle started scribbling in his notebook.  He thought about his favourite tutor at Edinburgh University Medical School - Dr Joseph Bell, an eminent surgeon from a long line of famous medics; Doyle had been Bell's clerk, mainly to earn a bit of extra cash, but had learned so much from this amazing man who could tell so much about a patient's condition, lifestyle and recent whereabouts, the students thought he was a magician.  But Dr Bell warned them "You see but you don't observe!" By careful observation and an imagination borne from a vast knowledge of the world and its doings, 'Old Joe' taught his would-be doctors to apply empirical, scientific methods to diagnosis.

Sidney Paget's version of
Sherlock Holmes

Ah-ha, thought Dr Doyle, I bet, if old Joe Bell had been a detective, he would have applied his scientific methods to solving crimes just as effectively as he did diagnosing patients in his surgery! And thus, the world's first 'consulting detective' was born.  But what to call this man? Something exotic, something out of the ordinary... give him a friend, a doctor, who could be a foil for his adventures, and ask the obvious questions that the reader would be thinking... Doyle's friend James Watson, another GP, was also a member of the local Scientific and Literary Society; he had intrigued the group with his wonderful lecture about China; he had been well-travelled himself, perhaps he would be an ideal model for the detective's friend? So Dr John Watson was created.  But it was Sherrinford Holmes to begin with in the first draft of what would become the first novel A Study in Scarlet.  It didn't ring right somehow; Dr Doyle thought back to his school days at the harsh Jesuit institution in Lancashire, he remembered a boy with the surname Sherlock.  That sounded good! Perhaps it reminded him of Shylock the Jew in the Bard's Merchant of Venice? Many folk would claim they knew where he'd got his inspiration, but Sherlock Holmes, bohemian, obsessive, untidy, drug addict, had the mind of a steel trap - he knew everything about Watson the minute the doctor's student friend, young Stamford, introduced them.

from 'The Man with the Twisted Lip'
illustrated by Sidney Paget

The address wasn't 221b Baker Street, it was 1 Bush Villas, Elm Grove.  Doyle had never been in London that he could remember, despite his maternal uncle, Michael Foley taking him on artistic jaunts to the theatre and galleries; no the street that the detective lived in, though set in London was actually the author's home in Southsea.  The tiny surgery was sandwiched between a hotel and a tall-spired Baptist Church... less than a hundred years later, the Luftwaffe's bombs would have decimated them all, and Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were firmly associated with the Capital.  But the truth was there in the stories, Watson extoled the virtues of the south coast, the Downs, the New Forest, Winchester, as he recounted the doings of his detective friend, and Arthur Conan Doyle realised he'd created a "monstrous growth" from a "small acorn" (the author's own words).

But the world's most famous amateur detective was born in Southsea, Hampshire... all the clues are there!

Sherlock Holmes - illustration by Frank Wiles