Key's Cupboard - Ayn Rand: Why She Liked Stamp Collecting

By Frank Key

She has been dead for nearly thirty years, but there's no stopping Ayn Rand. Both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged still sell in vast quantities in the United States, appealing as they always will to a certain stripe of libertarian individualist. (I hesitate to use the term "right wing", as I suspect that defining politics by a left / right divide is getting less and less useful.)

Should you decide to devote yourself to the philosophical system Rand dubbed "Objectivism", you will need a hobby, and clearly you ought to pursue the pastime recommended by the woman who started life in Russia as Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum. And no, I am not referring to chain smoking, of which she was a lifelong devotee. In a 1971 essay with the endearingly artless title Why I Like Stamp Collecting, Rand explains:

I started collecting stamps when I was ten years old, but had to give it up by the time I was twelve. In all the years since, I never thought of resuming the hobby. It left only one after-effect: I was unable to throw away an interesting-looking stamp. So, I kept saving odd stamps, all these years. I put them into random envelopes and never looked at them again.

Then, about a year-and-a-half ago, I met a bright little girl named Tammy, who asked me - somewhat timidly, but very resolutely - whether I received letters from foreign countries and, if I did, would I give her the stamps. I promised to send her my duplicates. She was eleven years old, and so intensely serious about her collection that she reminded me of myself at that age.

Once I started sorting out the stamps I had accumulated, I was hooked.

It was an astonishing experience to find my enthusiasm returning after more than fifty years, as if there had been no interruption. Only now the feeling had the eagerness of childhood combined with the full awareness, confidence and freedom of age.

My first step was to acquire a Minkus Master Global Stamp Album. In a year and a half, it has grown to four volumes, plus four special albums - and my collection is still growing, at an accelerating rate. No, I have not forgotten Tammy: I send her piles of duplicates every few months, and I feel very grateful to her.

In all those years, I had never found a remedy for mental fatigue. Now, if I feel tired after a whole day of writing, I spend an hour with my stamp albums and it makes me able to resume writing for the rest of the evening. A stamp album is a miraculous brain-restorer...

Stamp collecting is a hobby for busy, purposeful, ambitious people - because, in pattern, it has the essential elements of a career, but transposed to a clearly delimited, intensely private world.

A career requires the ability to sustain a purpose over a long period of time, through many separate steps, choices, decisions, adding up to a steady progression toward a goal. Purposeful people cannot rest by doing nothing nor can they feel at home in the role of passive spectators. They seldom find pleasure in single occasions, such as a party or a show or even a vacation, a pleasure that ends right then and there, with no further consequences.

The minds of such people require continuity, integration, a sense of moving forward...

But - it is asked - why not collect cigar bands, or coins, or old porcelain? Why stamps?

Because stamps are the concrete, visible symbols of an enormous abstraction: of the communications net embracing the world.

While the world politicians are doing their best to split the globe apart by means of iron curtains and brute force, the world postal services are demonstrating - in their quiet, unobtrusive way - what is required to bring mankind closer together: a specific purpose cooperatively carried out, serving individual goals and needs. It is the voices of individual men that stamps carry around the globe; it is individual men that need a postal service; kings, dictators and other rulers do not work by mail. In this sense, stamps are the world's ambassadors of good will.

So there you have it. First, get your Minkus Master Global Stamp Album, and you will be on your way with a proper Objectivist hobby. Just one warning: Ayn Rand's stamp collection grew to over fifty thousand stamps, but she would not, and did not, collect a single stamp from a communist country.

A stupefying work of painstaking bad taste and technical skill

In his second volume of autobiography, A Dubious Codicil, Michael Wharton describes the Shaftesbury Avenue studio of cartoonist Michael ffolkes, as “a strange room of narrow triangular shape crammed with an astounding assortment of treasures” and draws particular attention to:

...A huge photograph of a painting by the nineteenth-century French Salon painter Bouguereau was pasted on one wall, showing a crowd of naked nymphs, all identical, perfectly shaped, white-skinned, and of ideal nubility. This stupefying work of painstaking bad taste and technical skill amused Michael greatly; but it would be hypocritical to say that he – or any other man – did not enjoy looking at it.

Wharton does not specify which of Bouguereau’s ‘stupefying’ works adorned ffolkes’s wall, but it seems a reasonable guess that it was Les Oreades, which fits the description perfectly.

The mallet slipped long since

The Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) is now somewhat undervalued I suspect. He was part of that generation that included Auden and Spender and a load of heroic literary alcoholics. Unlike many of his contemporaries he never fell for Communism, though he did for drink. By the end of his life he was ‘living on alcohol’ and regularly drinking himself to oblivion with Dominic Behan (brother of Brendan, the hellraiser's hellraiser of a playwright who famously described himself as "a drinker with a writing problem").

MacNeice's death was mildly tragicomic – having gone caving in Yorkshire to gather sound effects for his radio play Persons from Porlock he was caught in a storm and did not change out of his wet clothes until he was home in Hertfordshire, as a consequence of which he contracted bronchitis and then, fatally, pneumonia.

Many of his poems have a strong emotional force, very Irish, and ‘in-the-moment’, of a style popular amongst bad amateurs. But MacNeice does it well. The nostalgic (Proustian, you might say if you were that way inclined) Soap Suds is a good example. Most poems are about this, aren’t they?



Soap Suds

This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big
House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open
To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop
To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;
Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;
A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;
A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

To which he has now returned. The day of course is fine
And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,
Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball
Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn
And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!
But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands
Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.

Unsettled

I've seen two things in the last couple of weeks that have unsettled me. Not disturbed, just unsettled. One was the Cow Leg Trouser from our marvellous Retroprogressive feature. The other was this story about artisanal pencil sharpening:

"With an electric pencil sharpener, a pencil is meat," Rees said. "It's this thoughtless, Brutalist aesthetic. For me, it's almost a point of pride that I would be slower than an electric pencil sharpener."

This is how Rees' artisanal pencil sharpening works: You might send him your favorite pencil, but Rees more often selects and sharpens a classic No. 2 pencil for his clients, he promises, "carefully and lovingly." He slides the finished pencil's very sharp tip into a specially-sized segment of plastic tubing, then puts the whole pencil in a larger, firmer tube that looks like it belongs in a science experiment. Throw it at a wall, he says, and it won't break. The cost? $15.

[...]

So far, Rees is the leader in the field. "Nobody else is doing what I do," he said. "I guarantee an authentic interaction with your pencil. What mechanical pencil sharpener can say that? The X-ACTO XLR 1818? The Royal 16959T? Don't make me laugh."

"I'm going to have this nice, authentic, considered reaction with your pencil," Rees said. "I just want to treat it with respect..."

Both of these things - the Cow Leg Trouser and the artisanal pencil sharpening - may have been embarked upon in a mood of high seriousness or they may be elaborate jokes, but whatever the intention I like the note they hit: internally plausible but externally absurd. The closest analogous thing I can think of is Duchamp's Fountain. In which case perhaps they're both art? If so, they must be very good - contemporary art is always threatening to unsettle but, for me at least, it doesn't usually do half as good a job as these.

'Like a bomb at a tea-party' - P H Emerson versus Peach Robinson

Emerson - Gathering Waterlillies, East Anglia 1886 - Getty Museum

Dr. Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) was a Cuban-born, American-raised British surgeon, naturalist, meteorologist, bird-watcher, champion billiard player and, for which he is remembered, influential photographer.

At a time when photographers were going to enormous lengths to recreate paintings – staging very artificial scenes (see Henry Peach Robinson’s Fading Away for the archetype) – Emerson insisted that the camera should capture “people as they really are - do not dress them up.” Many of his works feature the rural labourers of the Norfolk Broads going about their arcane business, gathering water-lillies or harvesting reeds.

Though defending photography’s right to be classed as a proper art form, Emerson argued for a naturalistic approach: "The photographic technique is perfect and needs no… bungling”. He called the then-popular business of retouching “the process by which a good, bad, or indifferent photograph is converted into a bad drawing or painting", so one wonders what he would have made of Photoshop (which the Yard has described as Satan’s Snap Fixer).

Another radical Emerson argument was the notion that pictures should be slightly out-of-focus, to replicate the reality of human vision: "Nothing in nature has a hard outline, but everything is seen against something else, and its outlines fade gently into something else, often so subtly that you cannot quite distinguish where one ends and the other begins. In this mingled decision and indecision, this lost and found, lies all the charm and mystery of nature.”

These arguments were laid out in an 1889 book called Naturalistic Photography for Students of Art, the effect of which one reviewer described as “"like dropping a bomb at a tea-party.” Certainly Peach Robinson objected, declaring: “Healthy human eyes never saw any part of a scene out of focus”.

Emerson’s retort? “I have yet to learn that any one statement of photography of Mr. Robinson has ever had the slightest effect on me except as a warning of what not to do…”

During the Reed Harvest, 1886 - Gordon Fraser Gallery Limited

Snipe Shooting, 1886 - Joseph Bellows gallery

6 Clicks for the Endless Voyage: Gaw

In Anthony Burgess’ short story The Endless Voyager, a businessman throws away his passport and wallet mid-transit and, unable to enter any country, spends the rest of his life shuttling from airport to airport. He eventually goes mad. Today, of course, such a traveller might stave off purgatorial insanity by dabbling on his iPhone or netbook. 

In this post, The Dabbler's own Gaw selects six cultural links that might sustain him in an interminable succession of departure lounges.

Being still a good Welsh boy at heart I can get homesick at the best of times. So this really would be a trial. I shall resist making one of my clicks my wife's Facebook page as it might be more tantalising torment than home comfort (and it's also hardly something that's going to be added to Dabbler readers' bookmarks).

I will be needing some pretty strong distractions, then. So what's called for? Boredom is surely going to be the chief enemy, followed by despair (the latter tending to follow on from the former). So I think I'll be looking for clicks that are either able to retain an element of freshness or alternatively present some sort of ongoing challenge. More generally, we'll want them to impart some indefatigable optimism.


Click 1

I know that my first click will fit the bill. I've been listening to John Coltrane's My Favourite Things for over twenty years now and still find it absorbing, still discover new things in it, and still find my mood lifting when I hear it. It's the most beautiful piece of music I know and it's also the most intelligent. Beautiful doesn't need explaining but intelligent does: MFTs seems to be having an engrossing conversation with itself and with the listener; and each time I hear it there's something new being said. The conversation has many moods and inflections, enough to fit any frame of mind. I can see its attractions lasting another twenty years, at least.




Click 2

One of the many things I've learnt through two years of illness - sometimes requiring me to stay at home for days at a time - is that consumption isn't enough. I mean consumption of books, blogs, news and so on. Being passive is fine for a while but it gets boring and is ultimately dissatisfying. After a while, you need to direct some mental energy outwards, you need to produce, and I've found the best outlet to be writing. I was mildly surprised to find myself blogging after about six months of hanging around the sofa. But I was utterly shocked to find myself writing a novel less than a year later and then starting another shortly after that. I'd never seen myself as someone who'd write a novel; indeed, I really couldn't see how it might be at all possible.

Theory tells us that if you present an infinite number of chimps with an infinite number of typewriters and allow them an infinite amount of time the complete works of Shakespeare might get written. But I can confirm empirically that presenting me with a laptop and nothing much to do for about a year can produce a novel. I wonder what would be produced if I embarked on our endless voyage? It certainly wouldn't be equivalent to the complete works of Shakespeare but I'd have a real crack at writing something worthwhile.

My second click is therefore Google Docs, a fantastically useful bit of software that allows your documents to be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection and which processes your words perfectly adequately; it also reassuringly backs them up safe and sound in a place far, far away. It even has a spreadsheet function should I get the urge to do some graphs.


Click 3

My next click is the original 1611 version of the King James Bible. This isn't primarily for religious reasons - though I'm somewhere between being an agnostic and a very occasional communicant of the CofE (a distinction without a difference some would say). It's more because I love the language of the KJB and would find it tremendously satisfying to really immerse myself in it for a long time. This work (and its predecessors) is surely, along with Shakespeare, one of the foundations of English literature, especially its poetry. I'd like to see what would happen to my appreciation of language following such an immersion. It also happens to be very long and very complicated, both helpful in whiling away the hours.


Click 4

Next, poems. I've gone for these as they can bear a lot of re-reading unlike the vast majority of novels, at least in my experience. There are a number of 'poem a day' sites around but I've gone for the Transport for London poetry archive, a sort of sidings for Poems on the Underground. It's suitably middlebrow and middle of the road; old favourites with a modest amount of the new or off-the-wall. Also I like the idea of being comforted by Poems on the Underground whilst in interminable transit. It's what they're for.


Click 5

Now, I hesitate to choose this click. It's something that's made the web notorious amongst some; it's something that's kept some boys and men - singles mostly - confined to their bedrooms, making them all pale and grey-eyed; too much of it can even leave your wrists aching from RSI. Confessing my choice is something that's likely to severely embarrass me, particularly in the eyes of women. But I have to be honest.

My next click is a fantasy role-playing game. I've never actually had a go at one yet, partly because I know I'd become addicted and partly because I'd feel a bit foolish, as if I'd reverted to my twelve year-old self. Back then I loved Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons, moving on from them for the usual reasons: girls, pop music, smoking, etc. But given I'd be deprived (or no longer interested) in a few items on that post-rites of passage list it might be an idea to go back to something from a more innocent age.

Not having a wallet on me, I'd have to choose something free and most of them aren't. Fortuitously, I've learnt that an official, 'free-to-play' Warner Bros Lord of the Rings Online role-playing game is coming out this Autumn. I can't think of many better venues for escapist fantasy than a departure lounge so that seems just perfect.

Click 6

At first, I thought this last click didn't really fit my criteria: I chose Welsh Rugby - the '80s for sentimental reasons.

For a start, the '80s? Why not the '70s, the golden age of Welsh rugby? Well, mainly because I was at a lot of these matches and being able to say, along with Max, that "I was there" does make a difference.

But it's also worth pointing out that Wales in the '80s had some extravagantly talented players: J Davies, M Ring, R Collins, S Evans, J Devereux, A Hadley, R Jones, T Holmes, R Norster, P Moriarty, etc. etc. It's just a shame that a lot of them 'went North' as it was known, i.e. turned professional to play Rugby League. Half of those I just mentioned - scientifically selected off the top of my head - did so. No home international team could have coped with those losses. So the third place in the inaugural 1987 World Cup (their highest ever ranking) and the subsequent Triple Crown and Championship of 1988 turned out to be a couple of minor peaks preceding another trough rather than foothills on the way to a new era of success.

I've ended up thinking that this wasn't a wholly sentimental selection, something that would soon bore me. Rugby is one of the great enthusiasms of my life and this compilation has some of the best that I've seen. I think it could bear a lot of reliving.




This has been an interesting exercise: a reduction of everything I like into a sustaining essence. One thing that's struck me is how little I've changed since my youth: I can imagine having made these or similar selections any time over the last twenty years. Funny, that - I could have sworn I'd developed a bit over that period.

Dabbler Country - The Perfect Bedside Book?

Dabbler Country is The Dabbler's outdoorsy column.

Today, Nige finds the nature-noter's perfect book...

---

I think I've found the perfect bedside book, at least for those of us of an outdoor-loving disposition. It came to me via my Derbyshire cousin, who found it - of course - on the shelves of the Magic Bookshop. It is Country Matters: Selected writings 1974-1999 by Richard Mabey, a collection of short pieces of a perfect length for the day's last dose of literary pleasure and - what? - 'natural philosophy' is perhaps the best term. Mabey ranges over subjects and places as diverse as Yarmouth (in winter) and the Yorkshire Dales, the Camargue and the Burren, Don McCullin's photos and Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, the TV series Living In The Past and Madeleine Pinault's The Painter as Naturalist - but always the strongest thing is Mabey's quietly observant, thoughtful, appreciative sense of place. Always he has something interesting to say, some unexpected insight that is entirely his, and always he writes well, though never in any way drawing attention to himself in a 'literary' manner. This is by origin journalism, not literature - but (as is often the way with the best journalism) it is a whole heap better than much writing that passes itself of as literature.

The other night I happened on a short piece from 1988 called A Walk Around The Block (it first appeared in John Hillaby's Walking In Britain). A defence of walking - purposeless 'sauntering' - for its own sake, it quite took the words out of my mouth. Complaining of how walking has been hijacked by the sponsored hike, the mass marathon, the therapeutic claims of the health industry and the needless elaborations of consumerised hobbyism, he laments that 'Going for a stroll, one of the most civilised of pleasures precisely because it can be indulged in for its own sake, is now expected to do something, either for you or the world.' Mabey goes on to mount a pithy heartfelt defence of strolling for its own sake, enlisting along the way Samuel Johnson, George Borrow, Hazlitt and Thoreau - who always found himself sauntering towards the Southwest 'where the earth seems more unexhausted and richer' - with experiences of his own first strolls in places newly arrived at (always the most magical). He then considers the importance of the 'home patch', taking us briefly through the healing 'ritualistic' walks that root him where he is. Do styles of walking, he wonders, find their way directly into the style of written accounts? A thought which takes him off via W.H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, John Clare, John Cowper Powys and Bunyan, before arriving at 'the patron poet of strollers', William Cowper, with whom (and with ten lines from The Task) Mabey ends this richly rewarding essay - just one of the many treasures in this satisfyingly large bedside book. If you spot it anywhere, buy it.


The Dabbler alas can't seem to find 'Country Matters' on Amazon for a penny or any other amount, but there are other Mabey works to be had. If you know where to find it, do let us know in the comments.

Lazy Sunday Afternoon - Four letters

Being a retroprogressive site, The Dabbler approves of Youtube music videos about snail mail. For this week's music feature, here are four songs about letter-writing to help while away your Sunday afternoon...

The Young/Heyman standard Love Letters is an unavoidable choice. It’s been rendered by scores of artists, notably Elvis in 1966 and Alison Moyet in 1987, who respectively took it to numbers 6 and 4 in the UK charts. Ketty Lester, below, also managed number 4 in 1962 and I've gone for her - even though once Elvis has sung a song, it sort of stays sung - because I never knew what she looked like (rather stunning).

Alex Chiltern, who died earlier this year, had one of the 1960s' great black soul voices - which was quite surprising given that he was a skinny white boy. A suspiciously odd (ie. stoned) performance here from his first band The Box Tops of their most memorable hit, observe in particular the keyboardist's weirdness from about 1m15s.

The White Stripes, meanwhile, are eminently ‘retroprogressive’ with their raw blues played at an earsplitting, 21st century volume and an attention span-deficient speed.

Finally, Please Read the Letter is one of the best songs from one of the best albums of last few years, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s Raising Sand. Enjoy.

RetroProgressive - Gregory's winning style

Every Saturday, Susan Muncey - blogger, trend forecaster and founder-curator of the online curiosity shop, ShopCurious.com - brings you The Dabbler's style column RetroProgressive...


Post recession shoppers do not wish to appear ostentatious, so luxury designer brands are paring down their logos and replacing them with more subtle designs, as part of a move towards ‘anti-bling’ fashion.

I wonder if that goes for Wags too? I accidentally stumbled upon some on the Internet the other day, posing naked (in body paint bikinis) for Sports Illustrated, and I’m curious to know what sort of people look at this stuff. Presumably young men who are impressed by pneumatic breasts, glow-in-the-dark teeth, designer shoes and oversized handbags?

In the days of Gregory’s Girl, it was the football that mattered. Wistful schoolboy and dabbler extraordinaire, Gregory, manfully dabbled at the drums, mastered curious snippets of Italian, learned cookery with his budding chef friend, and took on board style tips from little sister Madeline in order to win Dorothy’s affection. And all because, in addition to her long flowing locks and buttock skimming shorts, Gregory’s Girl, Dorothy, was also admired for having a skill – her ‘natural ability’ on the football field.

As it turned out, the results of Gregory’s efforts weren’t quite as intended, but in the meantime he learned an awful lot about girls, and all manner of life-affirming things. He also ditched his ill-fitting school jumper for an oversized 1980s style cream jacket, but still managed to maintain his endearing adolescent awkwardness.

Anyway, on the basis of Madeline’s advice, perhaps Wags should think less about love and more about football? In which case, innovative young Scottish designer, Emma Cowie, has come up with the perfect solution: designer clothing made from recycled footballs.

A-List Mugshots - Music

Jim Morrison



A 19-year old Morrison was arrested in 1963 for drunkenness and for the Bertie Woosterish theft of a policeman’s hat.


Frank Sinatra

In 1938, a 23-year-old Sinatra was arrested on charges of ‘seduction’ and ‘adultery’. His initial charge stated that: 'On the second and ninth days of November 1938 at the Borough of Lodi' and 'under the promise of marriage' Sinatra 'did then and there have sexual intercourse with the said complainant, who was then and there a single female of good repute.' Sinatra was released on $1,500 bond, but when it was determined that the lady in question was married a complaint of adultery was substituted, with Sinatra's bond being lowered to $500. That charge, too, was dismissed, and neither crime exists today.


Billie Holiday

In May 1947 the jazz legend, then 32, was locked up for eight months on a drug conviction.


David Bowie

Bowie, then 29, was arrested along with Iggy Pop in upstate New York in March 1976 on a cannabis possession charge following a concert. He was held for a few hours then released. His mugshot is as cool as hell, isn’t it, but it was taken a few days after the arrest when he appeared in court for arraignment.

Key's Cupboard: The Glimpsed Cases of Sherlock Holmes

By Frank Key

Now the BBC's trio of Sherlock dramas has come to a close, and the critics have had their say, it is appropriate to note that it missed an opportunity. Why do writers feel they need to come up with entirely new stories when Conan Doyle – or rather his narrator Dr Watson – left us so many tantalising glimpses of cases he never got round to recording in full?

Instead of concocting new plots, would it not be better to flesh out the details of Von Bischoff of Frankfurt, Mason of Bradford, the notorious Muller, Lefevre and Leturier of Montpellier, Samson of New Orleans, Van Jansen of Utrecht, the Ratcliff Highway murders, Dolsky of Odessa, the wills in Riga in 1857 and St Louis in 1871, Mrs Cecil Forrester's domestic complication, the woman who poisoned three children for their insurance money, similar cases in India and Senegambia, the Bishopsgate jewels, the Trepoff murder, the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee, the mission for the Dutch royal family, the Darlington substitution scandal, the business at Arnsworth castle, the Dundas separation case, that intricate matter in Marseilles, the disappearance of Mr Etheredge, the similar cases in Andover and The Hague, the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, the Amateur Mendicant Society, the loss of the barque Sophie Anderson, the Grice Patersons on Uffa, the Camberwell poisoning, the Tankerville Club scandal, two murders, the throwing of vitriol, suicide and a number of robberies associated with the Blue Carbuncle, Mrs Farintosh and the opal tiara, the madness of Colonel Warburton, the Grosvenor Square furniture van, the King of Scandinavia and similar cases in Aberdeen and Munich, the affair of the bogus laundry, the Tarleton murders, Vamberry the wine merchant, the old Russian woman, the singular affair of the aluminium crutch, the club-footed Ricoletti and his abominable wife, Baron Maupertuis and the Netherland-Sumatra Company, the Worthingdon bank robbery, Adams and the Manor House, the tired captain, the French Government case in Nîmes and Narbonne, the Scandinavian royal family, the Vatican cameos, Wilson of the district messenger office, the Grodno blackmail and others, Little Russia, the Anderson murders in North Carolina, the Colonel Upwood card scandal at the Nonpareil Club, Madame Montpensier's murder charge against her daughter, the Molesey Mystery, Morgan the poisoner, Merridew of abominable memory, Matthews who knocked out Holmes's left canine in the waiting room at Charing Cross, the murder of Mrs Stewart in Lauder, the papers of ex-President Murillo, the Dutch steamship Friesland, Bert Stevens the murderer, the persecution of tobacco millionaire John Vincent Harden, Archie Stamford the forger, the Ferrers documents, the Abergavenny murder, the death of Cardinal Tosca, Wilson the canary trainer, the dreadful business of the Abernetty family, the Conk-Singleton forgery, Crosby the banker and the red leech, the contents of the Addleton barrow, the Smith-Mortimer succession case, Huret the Boulevard Assassin, Arthur H Staunton the forger and Henry Staunton, the Randall burglars of Lewisham, the Margate woman, Colonel Carruthers, Brooks, Woodhouse, Fairdale Hobbs, the Long Island cave mystery, Abrahams in mortal terror, Rotherhithe, old Baron Dowson, the disappearances of James Phillimore and of the cutter Alicia, the madness of Isadora Persano, the ship Matilda Briggs and the giant rat of Sumatra, the forger Victor Lynch, Vittoria the circus belle, Vanderbilt and the Yeggman, Vigor the Hammersmith Wonder, Sir George Lewis and the Hammerford Will, Wainwright, the Duke of Greyminster and Abbey School, the Sultan of Turkey's commission, two Coptic patriarchs, the St Pancras picture-frame maker, and a coiner?

Not to forget the finest case Watson never bothered to record, that of the politician, the lighthouse and the trained cormorant (mentioned in The Adventure Of The Veiled Lodger).




Frank has assured The Dabbler that every single one of the above cases is genuinely mentioned in the canon - Ed

The Tyburn

“Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reach’d the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean”.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The "secret river" has long been an obsession of dabblers, perhaps since the times when we lived in caves, and our ancestors listened to the murmer of distant torrents tumbling through unseen chambers below. Of course there must be underground confluences everywhere we walk, but in London, the ever-layered city, these hidden places can be accessed.

map of london's smaller and 'lost' rivers. click to enlarge

Numerous 'lost' rivers flow beneath the city's streets, the most famous of which is The Fleet. Less well known is The Tyburn, which runs under a large part of the more valuable bits of the West End (including, sewer dwelling terrorists please note, Buckingham Palace) before trickling out into the Thames at Pimlico.

The Tyburn outfall at Vauxhall Bridge, pic courtesy of The Londonist

The course does not fully discharge here. The water pools and creeps beneath the city. Culverts carry the main flow eastwards under the embankment all the way to Barking Creek, along the elaborate subterranean arteries of Bazalgette, surely one of London's noblest achitects.

En route, the river's gurgle can be heard. On Tachbrook street in Pimlico, the sound of the river is clearly audible, rising up through the blank eyed manhole covers, allowing you to hear what the poet Glyn Maxwell called 'the city-licking sound of water moving slowly through the Thames like years in thought.'And in one special place, the mysterious brook is claimed to resurface and be visible - in the basement of Grey's Antiques in Mayfair.



This is such a lovely prospect and a fine sight that one wishes it to be true. Unfortunately, when you consider that the entire underground course is no longer really a river at all, but one of London's most noisome sewers (Officially The King's Scholars' Pond Sewer), the provenance of the crystal clear waters babbling through the antique shop begins to look a little muddied.

But the true pulse of the Tyburn is too strong to be contained in a chi-chi drinking trough. Tendrils curl outwards, luring the curious to unearth it's obscurity. Certainly, The Tyburn has admirers, foremost of which are the members of The Tyburn Angling Society.

Run by a property developer with tiresomely predictable faux-eccentricity, the society claims a royal charter of 959, has a Latin motto, traditions, and even a Nicholas Soames. So far, so forgettable. But their secretary, James Bowdidge, has managed to come up with a plan that, whilst whimsical and unrealistic, is also rather intriguing. Bowdidge suggests that we lay waste to great swathes of the most valuable parts of London, demolishing the buildings standing above the river's old course, and opening the poisoned Tyburn up to the air.

Berkeley Square, as reimagined by Bowdidge

Who would miss the great grey lumps of Mayfair, when we could be reconnecting the inland with the sea, irrigating the concrete deserts and opening up the scleroid arteries of the great river, letting light and air and crisp clear water run freely through the streets?

South Molton Street, by Bowdidge. Abandoned shopping trolleys and bags full of drowned puppies not pictured.