Happy Birthday Sherlock Holmes

There’s something deep inside people that responds to Holmes. He has a genuine sense of natural justice. A sense of honor. People wish that he did exist. They feel somehow that society would be a safer place if he did. He is what we would like our leaders to be. Someone whom you trust who will never have feet of clay. Never going to be caught out. Whatever else changed in the world we would feel he would always remain as the fixed point.” Michael Cox, Producer of Granada TV’s Sherlock Holmes.

Happy birthday Mr Holmes! What’s in a birthday? In this case, a role model whose being so far touches three centuries. After learning of the many police departments worldwide that had adopted the teachings of his ‘paper detective’, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, “Many of the great lessons of life are to be learned in the pages of the novelist.”

Sherlock Holmes has also taught so many of we Baker Street dwellers how to be the hero in our own lives. Our admiration and our attempts to emulate the way he filters his cultivated deductive abilities through his many gifts leads us on. Because Sherlock is a genius at it, he makes it look easy. Yet, how many of us would or could spend those long years perfecting that cultivation which supports each of his deductions? We all take our own paths toward the fulfilment of our singular gifts. Knowing in the surety that Sherlock holds the lantern that lights the way. And as he does Watson, he congratulates us through each step we take towards our own awakenings. For me, this friendship is why I write. And why I write Sherlock Holmes. Happy Birthday! The toast is Mr Sherlock Holmes!

Where did this date come from? Watson was very careful to create a degree of anonymity for his famous friend. He never divulged Holmes’s birthday in his stories. Yet, he is toasted around the world on 6 January.

Conan Doyle did give us the year 1854. In one of his greatest Holmes stories, “The Last Bow”, which is set in 1914, and represents Sherlock Holmes’s, Dr Watson’s, and part of Arthur Conan Doyle’s service in the War to end all wars. Doyle declares Holmes is 60 during an adventure that would hard press a twenty-year-old man.

But 6 January? Four years after Dr Doyle’s death, in 1934, Christopher Morley founded the Baker Street Irregulars in New York City and began celebrating Sherlock Holmes’s birthday. At the same time, in London, the Sherlock Holmes Society was preparing their own toasts to the Great Detective. Morley rushed to place the BSI’s birthday party ahead of the SHS by one week, thereby winning for the Irregulars the distinction as the first Sherlock Holmes Society. Today, both societies share the joyous celebration as friends across the pond.

In The Saturday Review of Literature, Morley wrote that he had consulted an astrologer and combined this with his own knowledge of Sherlock Holmes to find 6 January 1854 as his birthday. Part of his reasoning was that Sherlock Holmes quoted Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in the canon of Doyle’s stories. Possibly the fact that Morley’s brother shared the same birthdate might have had something to do with his quick decision. The whole thing was rather rushed and tied to the instatement of the Baker Street Irregulars as the premier Sherlockian organisation.

There are some interesting parallels between the traditions of Twelfth Night and the character of Sherlock Holmes. As we know, this date commemorates Epiphany, the visit of the Wise Men. Who were learned men, counsellors, astrologers, and scientists. Celebrations at this time were often distinguished by a temporary suspension of rules and social orders, the final party of the Holiday Season. Something much less temporary in Holmes’s Bohemian character and in the literary societies who revere him.

In 1957, Nathan Bengis, BSI, put forth another theory. In Conan Doyle’s novel The Valley of Fear, on the morning of 7 January, Watson says severely, “Really, Holmes, you are a little trying at times.” The reason for this Mr Bengis puts forth is they were generously toasting Holmes’s birthday the night before. It is slim proof, but it is our inalienable right as Sherlockians and Holmesians to find meaning in obscure references.

We have been celebrating Sherlock Holmes every 6 January since. And we do so know how to hold a rollicking good birthday party!

Now, don’t get me started on Dr John Watson’s date of birth!

Gretchen Altabef is an award-winning author of new Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Her books brim with imagination and a news reporter’s excitement for the true history of the day. THESE SCATTERED HOUSES brings Holmes to New York during his ‘great hiatus’. REMARKABLE POWER OF STIMULUS follows in London. During the investigation of a gruesome murder, Sherlock seizes a second chance with the woman, and they marry in anarchist-ridden Paris. The trilogy continues with FIVE MILES OF COUNTRY. Holmes is called in to solve a murder in Thomas Edison’s premier film studio, and Mrs Irene Adler-Holmes triumphs on Broadway. THE KEYS OF DEATH is a genesis story of 221B Baker Street and its inhabitants, as told by Mrs Hudson. Sherlock Holmes FAR & WIDE is a unique Sherlockian compilation of stories, parody, and one play.  

To forestall confusion: Jeremy Brett’s birthday is 3 November 1933.