It is with a heavy heart that I turn to my keyboard to note the passing on 31 March of the actor who for many devotees of Sherlock Holmes, was Sherlock Holmes – Douglas Wilmer.
Wilmer portrayed Holmes on BBC television in 1964-65, with staunch support from Nigel Stock as Dr Watson.
While not so well known these days, Wilmer was a great character actor who featured in a number of very well-known films. Remember King Pelias in Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts? Or Moutamin in El Cid? Or Khalifa Abdullah in Khartoum? Or Major General Francis de Guingandin in Paton? Or, back with Ray Harryhausen again, the Vizier in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad?
As the Police Commissioner in The Revenge of the Pink Panther he even had to deal with Insp. Clouseau and with Fu Manchu when he portrayed Nayland Smith in the “Fu Manchu” series of films.
He appeared in numerous televisions plays and series over the years, including The Avengers and The Saint. Despite having retired from acting many years ago, he most recently appeared in a notable cameo role in Sherlock – as the old gentleman in The Diogenes Club who is horrified that Watson dares to speak in the club!
Born in 1920, Wilmer was educated at King’s School Canterbury and at the alma mater of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Stonyhurst. He went on to study at RADA, interrupting this to serve in West Africa during the War. Wilmer wrote his autobiography a few years ago, giving some fascinating insights into his career, Stage Whispers.
Everyone has their own favourite television Sherlock Holmes – you can read up on most of them in the Sherlock Holmes Collection:
On a happier note, the Sherlock Holmes Collection was honoured in late May by a visit from the star of a current television Sherlock Holmes series. No – not Benedict Cumberbatch – the puppet 15 year old schoolboy Holmes from the Japanese NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) series, which is sadly not yet commercially available in English. Written by Kōki Mitani, Holmes and Watson meet as boys at Beeton School, a school where James Moriarty is the deputy headmaster and Mrs Hudson is the housemother! Holmes was accompanied by Mr Bunta Inoue, the creator of the puppets, and his assistant and cameraman. Holmes spent some time looking at treasures from the Collection and discussing our 1951 Festival of Britain website.
[Catherine]
Irregular Observations is an occasional series of musings from the Sherlock Holmes Collection in Westminster Libraries. The Collection started life in 1951 and is now one of the most comprehensive in the world. If you enjoy Sherlock Holmes and want to learn more, have a look at our website or get in touch.
Happy 90th Birthday to broadcaster, naturalist and conservationist extraordinaire David Attenborough!
David Attenborough was born on 8 May 1926 (not long after the Queen) and must surely qualify as a ‘national treasure’, although it is a term he’d prefer us not to use. While those of us alive in 1979 probably have the groundbreaking TV series ‘Life on Earth’ imprinted on our brains, anyone looking to find out more about his life and work so far can find plenty to inform, amuse and intrigue them in Westminster Libraries.
Whether you’re interested in his days as a BBC senior manager (including being Controller of BBC Two and Director of Programming for BBC Television), as a natural history presenter and programme maker or his more recent conservation campaigns, you can find out more in the biographies available:
You can borrow DVDs of some of his many TV series and read the accompanying books, for example:
And if his work – along with that of the amazing BBC Natural History Unit – has awakened in you an interest in the natural world, which is of course his aim, you can explore your library for other great books (including ebooks – try the non-fiction Nature section):
You can also watch many of his TV documentaries, interviews (including his recent one with US President Obama) and lots of favourite clips on both YouTube and a special section of the BBC iPlayer – just search for ‘David Attenborough’, sit back and enjoy…
Well, 2015 is almost over, which means it’s time to look forward to 2016 and see what anniversaries we will be commemorating. It’s a particularly interesting year for them.
January
One of the great unsung heroes of medicine will be remembered on 1 January (or if he isn’t, he should be!). On that date in 1916, Oswald Hope Robertson, a British born research scientist from Harvard Medical School, then working in France, carried out the first successful blood transfusion using blood that had been stored and refrigerated.
There had been blood transfusions before (the soon-to-be-more-famous-as-an-architect Christopher Wren experimented on injecting fluids into dogs as early as 1857) but the donor and the recipient had both needed to be present as there was no way of storing the blood for later use. Robertson is usually credited with setting up the first blood bank and thus being instrumental in saving thousands of lives. So think about him if you donate blood or if you are someone who needs a transfusion. And of course, with any reference to blood donation, a mention of Tony Hancock becomes compulsory: “A pint! That’s very nearly an armful!”
February
February brings with it the 90th anniversary of Black History Month. Yes, we know that this is commemorated in October in Britain but in the USA it’s in February. The first events were in the second week of February (chosen because it coincided with the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and the great abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglass) when the historian Carter G Woodson of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History announced the first Negro History Week.
This was taken up by school boards in North Carolina, Delaware and West Virginia and was soon successful enough that other states followed. By the 1970s, the week had become a month and had renamed itself as Black History Month. In Britain it has been celebrated since 1987 and is now a national institution.
March
There’s no doubt that one of the biggest anniversaries next year will be in July when football fans will be celebrating 50 years since England last won a major tournament. All very tedious for those of us not in thrall to the beautiful game but even non-footie fans will want to remember an associated story from 19 March 1966 when the World Cup was stolen from Westminster Central Hall where it was on display at a stamp exhibition. A £4,500 reward (about £70,00 in today’s money according to the excellent Measuring Worth site) was offered. A ransom note asking for £15,000 was received (the thief probably should have gone for the stamps which were worth £3 million) and the chap who posted it was soon arrested but the real thieves were never found.
However the cup was found, by the hero of the hour – Pickles, a border collie who spotted a newspaper wrapped package next to a car in South Norwood and soon uncovered the missing trophy. Read more about the story in the Guardian:
“Now Pickles began the life of a celebrity. He starred in a feature film, The Spy with the Cold Nose, and appeared on Magpie, Blue Peter and many other TV shows. He was made Dog of the Year, awarded a year’s free supply of food from Spillers and there were offers to visit Chile, Czechoslovakia and Germany.”
Pickles received an appropriate reward and British Pathé was there to capture the moment:
April
April is going to be Bardtastic as the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare will be remembered on 23 April (Miguel Cervantes, author of Don Quixote died on the same day so expect to hear plenty about him). Shakespeare’s Globe will be projecting 23 short films on the South Bank of the Thames, one for each of the plays. They’ll probably being putting on some theatre too.
A more lowbrow commemoration will be on 11 April, 80 years after the first Butlins holiday camp opened in Skegness (which as we all know, is ‘so bracing’) in 1936. The camp was opened by Amy Johnson, the pioneer aviator and was an instant success. A week’s holiday with three meals a day and all the knobbly knees competitions you could eat would have set you back 36 shillings and people flocked there, though three years later the camp was requisitioned for use as a naval training camp. Read about the history of Butlins in Sylvia Endacott’s Butlin’s: 75 years of fun!
May
Five years later on 9 May 1941, an event took place that got little publicity at the time but which literally changed the course of the war. On that day the German submarine U-110 was captured by the Royal Navy, and with it an Enigma machine complete with code books. Fortunately the Germans didn’t realise that the machine had been retrieved (the submarine commander tried to scuttle it rather than allow it to be captured and he himself drowned) and so it became a vital part of the code breaking activities at Bletchley Park led by Alan Turing.
There are plenty of books about Bletchley available in Westminster Libraries – find out lots more in a previous blog post on the subject – or you could borrow and watch the recent film The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
June
Moving back in time, 12 June sees the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Rebecca Rolfe from Virginia with her husband and baby son Thomas. She stayed at the Bell Savage Inn in Ludgate Hill (which itself had a very interesting history, being a former theatre) and soon became the toast of the town, being presented to King James I, attending a masque by Ben Jonson and having her portrait painted by the Dutch artist Simon de Passe. Sadly though, London didn’t suit her health and she planned to return to Virginia the following year, but tragically died at Gravesend without seeing her homeland again.
Why am I telling you all this? Because Rebecca Rolfe, better known by her Algonquian name of Pocahontas was one of the first native born Americans to visit this country. You may have seen the Disney film but the reality is much more interesting. You can read about how Pocahontas saved the life of Captain John Smith and ensured peace between her people and the English settlers in A man most driven: Captain John Smith, Pocahontas and the founding of America.
July
Readers of cinema trade journals in the 1920s would have noticed adverts for Castleton Knight (a producer and distributor) who claimed he could ‘show a perfect picture through any fog’. This boast seems rather baffling now but anyone who attended the cinema before 1956 would have known exactly what the problem was – smog. This didn’t just affect the streets of London and other cities – it found its way into buildings too.
In 1952 an opera at Sadlers Wells had to be cancelled and the leading lady was treated for smoke damage. It has been calculated that 4000 people died in just a few days in 1952 as a direct consequence of the London smog.
On 5 July 1956 the Clean Air Act was passed, which introduced smoke control areas in which only smokeless fuels could be used and which ensured the removal of power stations from cities among other measures. Smog, in Britain at least, is a thing of the past though other countries certainly have a way to go to reduce air pollution.
If this article had been published by Westminster Libraries 25 years ago, it would have been typed on an electric typewriter or perhaps a PC with a basic word processing programme and then sent out in a paper newsletter rather than being researched and published online. Not that many of us would have known what the word online meant. There were online databases but it was a laborious process logging on to each one individually and then printing out search results and few but academics had access to the right computers and modems anyway.
However all this changed thanks to Tim Berners Lee, the father of the World Wide Web. While the first website went live in December 1990, it was on 6 August 1991 that Berners-Lee posted a summary of the World Wide Web project on several internet newsgroups, which marked the debut of the web as a publicly available service on the internet.
The World Wide Web has certainly changed all our lives. A smaller, but no less important event – for the people of London anyway – took place on 2 September 1666, 350 years ago when a fire broke out in Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane and raged for 5 days. Over 400 acres of London were destroyed including approximately 13,000 houses and 67 of the 109 city churches as well as St Pauls Cathedral. A witness to the Great Fire of London was the diarist Samuel Pepys, who ‘saw a lamentable fire’ with
“Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the River or bringing them into lighters that lay off. Poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons I perceive were loath to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.”
It took nearly half a century to rebuild the City, with St Pauls not completed until 1711.
For a first hand account of the city before the Fire, have a look at John Stow’s Survey of London, published in 1603, which describes in detail many of the churches and other buildings that were destroyed in 1666. For more on the Fire itself, you could listen to the podcast on the subject from Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time or you could read Adrian Tinniswood’s By Permission of Heaven: the story of the Great Fire of London.
October
In October 1941, 75 years ago, a magazine called Liliput published a cartoon of a group of schoolgirls reading a notice with the caption “Owing to the international situation, the match with St Trinian’s has been postponed.” The cartoonist, Ronald Searle, was to spend most of the war as a prisoner of the Japanese, though he continued drawing even in the terrible conditions of Changi. On his return home he began to submit cartoons to Punch, The Strand, Radio Times and other magazines and his first book, Hurrah for St Trinian’s and other lapses was published in 1948.
The ghastly schoolgirls were soon followed by their schoolboy equivalent, eternal prep school cynic Nigel Molesworth but it was St Trinians which remained Searle’s greatest success. The school, with its pupils more interested in the racing results than their education and disreputable staff soon inspired a series of successful films along with several more books, and the cartoons were collected together as St Trinian’s : the entire appalling business.
One anniversary that will definitely not go unmarked, by the BBC at least, falls on 2 November 1936 when the television service officially opened (though there had been experimental transmissions since 1932). Until the war put an end to television (the engineers were need for more important work), programmes were only broadcast within a 40 mile radius of Alexandra Palace and by 1939, 23,000 licences had been sold. The Times was impressed with the first day’s transmission
“As seen on the small screen of a receiver in Broadcasting House, the inaugural ceremony was more successful than those previously unacquainted with the achievements of television had expected… the very successful transmissions of the male television announcer suggested that there is a technique to be learned by those who wish to be well-televised.”
December
The final anniversary of the year is, appropriately enough, a festive one. For Christmas 1616 King James I requested a masque (a courtly entertainment involving singing, dancing and general razzamatazz) from the poet Ben Jonson. Christmas, his masquebegins
Enter Christmas, with two or three of the Guard.
He is attir’d in round Hose, long Stockings, a close Doublet, a high crownd Hat with a Broach, a long thin beard, a Truncheon, little Ruffes, white Shoes, his Scarffes, and Garters tyed crosse, and his Drum beaten before him.
While he’s not actually *called* Father Christmas, he is soon followed by his 10 children – Carol, Misrule, Gambol, Offering, Wassail, Mumming, New-Year’s-Gift, Post and Pair, Minced-Pie and Baby-Cake, each followed by a torch-bearer carrying marchpane, cakes and wine. It seems that this was the first time Christmas had been personified so 2016 can really be considered his 400th birthday. Find out more about the history of Father Christmas.
We’ve mentioned lots of books and online resources above, but if you want to find out more about these or any other anniversaries throughout the year, there’s much more to be found using both the 24/7 Library and of course the libraries themselves – search the catalogue and see where it takes you!
Fans of the BBC’s ‘Great Interior Design Challenge’ will know that the series reaches its final tomorrow, 2 December. The original field of 27 designers has reduced to just two finalists, who will be working on three rooms each within a converted stately home.
Earlier in the series, a lovely ‘Cote d’Azur’ style bedroom was created in a seaside cottage in Brixham by one of our very own library staff, Lacey.
I wondered if working amidst the library’s wide range of source material had been useful to her in her interior design exploits:
“Working in libraries has definitely played a big part in helping me with my journey in interior design (educational and personal), due to the flexible nature of the job and the wide variety of resources to choose from. I practically used all of the amazing collections of DIY, art and design books to help me – whether I was taking inspiration from the books and resources (including magazines available in the library or e-magazines such as House and Garden, Ideal Home etc) or finding a book on the returns trolley or on the new book stand – it’s definitely been a real goldmine!”
Set in Yorkshire, the strength of both novels and TV series was the interplay between the two contrasting characters. As an avid reader of crime novels it has struck me that crime novelists usually either go with the ‘antisocial loner’ or create a partnership between two main characters. The setup of a lead character and sidekick worked for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – why change a winning formula?
Reginald Hill died fairly recently and I thought it would be interesting to find out more about the author using the library. My first step was to read the blurb printed in his novels. Westminster Libraries stock a large number of his books so this information was not hard to find. If you are searching the Westminster library catalogue, many entries include the heading ‘Author Notes’ beneath the item’s details. This contains a brief biographical outline.
The next step was to use Westminster Libraries 24/7 library resources to obtain further information. I consulted Who’s Who / Who Was Who and drew a blank (plenty of other Reginald Hills feature, but not this one). His absence was not due to the compilers’ aversion to crime and thriller writers. Anthony Price, a contemporary of Reginald Hill, has been listed for many years, and other crime writers such as Ian Rankin are also included. I can only conclude that Mr Hill did not wish to be included in this directory as potential subjects are approached by the editors and the entry is compiled from information received.
The other major 24/7 biographical resource used to check for deceased authors is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but currently people have to have died before 31 December 2010 to be included – Reginald Hill died in 2012.
As my subject was an author the obvious resource to check within the 24/7 library is Contemporary Authors which includes dead and living authors. Author entries include not only a list of their published titles (these lists also helpfully includes any US alternative titles) but also includes any author pseudonyms and their titles. The main part of an entry is a discussion of the author’s work including citations of reviews and links to relevant websites relating to the author and their work.
Reginald Hill died on 12 January 2012. Several newspaper obituaries were published immediately after his death. These can be read using Newsbankor other online newspaper archives. Several references to the author and the Dalziel & Pascoe series can also be found using Newsbank. Note however that many of the search hits refer to the TV listings of the Dalziel & Pascoe series rather than articles about the author and his books. One interesting article, found in the Guardian & Observer Archive was a discussion of television adaptations of crime novels and their authors’ feelings about them. Reginald Hill hated the ITV pilot episode which starred the comedians Hale and Pace. [Observer 16 April 2000. Tina Ogle – “Even the Gumshoes”]. Later the BBC successfully re-launched the Dalziel & Pascoe series and cast Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan in the title roles.
This brief investigation of one crime author gave me plenty of leads to follow, and the combination of hard copy evidence and online resources can help you to build up a profile of an individual too, whether you’re a detective, a fan, or both.
Having celebrated Charles Dickens (though I’m sure we’ll be returning to him throughout the year), it’s time to look at the career of a more recent writer, less prolific than Dickens, whose works have also entered our collective subconscious… or at any rate the collective subconscious of those of us of a certain age: the great Douglas Adams, one of the few scriptwriters to become a household name, who was born 60 years ago last weekend.
First the basics, which can be found at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (linked from the Biography section of the Westminster Libraries Gateway). After boarding school, a stint in the Cambridge Footlights and an introduction to Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, Adams was introduced to Simon Brett, now a brilliant crime writer but then a brilliant and innovative radio comedy producer, who commissioned a comic science fiction series, despite this being an idea that must have seemed completely barking to most people.
The result, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, was like nothing that had been heard before, being the story of dressing-gown clad everyman Arthur Dent, who travels the world with his alien friend Ford Prefect after the Earth is destroyed to make room for an inter-galactic bypass. They meet with a motley selection of travellers on the way, notably the two-headed Betelgeusian Zaphod Beeblebrox, and are guided on their journey by the eponymous book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a sort of proto-tablet computer, memorably voiced by the actor Peter Jones. Remember, this was written in 1978, more than a decade before the World Wide Web was invented. A television version soon beckoned along with the start of Adams’ near legendary writer’s block.
There was also a memorable stint script-writing for Doctor Who, then being played by Tom Baker. Adams scripted City of Death, in which a time-travelling alien tries to steal the Mona Lisa, and comedian John Cleese and Eleanor Bron feature as art critics not at all put out by the sudden appearance of the TARDIS in the Louvre. Check out Leonardo and the gallery for yourself (though don’t steal the paintings – they really don’t like that…) at the Art & Design section of the Gateway. Oxford Art Online (one of our Exclusive Resources that you can access at home if you have a Westminster library card) now includes the famous French art encyclopaedia – Benezit Dictionary of Artistswhich, among other useful features contains auction records. Apparently the last Leonardo to go on sale was in a three inch silverpoint which fetched £7,400,000 in 2001.
No doubt some of you will be watching the excellent Dirk Gently on BBC4 (if not, there’s still time to catch up via the iPlayer) a quirky series about a self-described Holistic Detective with a particularly bad-tempered (and unpaid) assistant) Why not check out the Dirk Gently books and see what Adamsian themes you can spot?
Adams was a long-time pioneer of the computing industry (as mentioned, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was really an iPhone with attitude) and spent years working on his own company developing a real, virtual Guide named h2g2which was eventually taken over by the BBC and which still exists as a quirky, interactive alternative to Wikipedia.
Adams later developed an interest in, and concern for, endangered species which lead to a book, radio series and television series (since followed up by Cawardine and Stephen Fry) in which Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine travelled around the world, following a method pioneered by Dr Dolittle. According to Cawardine,
“We put a big map of the world on a wall, Douglas stuck a pin in everywhere he fancied going, I stuck a pin in where all the endangered animals were, and we made a journey out of every place that had two pins.”
Check out the Science & Technology section of the Gateway for more information about endangered animals, especially the excellent Arkive.
Sadly Douglas Adams died tragically early at the age of 49 in 2001 but his legacy lives on with a film of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy released in 2005. His books have been reissued and guides to the Guide published. Here’s a clip of the man himself, talking about Life, the Universe and… Parrots.
Viewers of last Friday’s episode of ‘Celebrity Come Dine With Me’ may have been surprised to see the St John’s Wood Library’s fiction section on their screens. The Soap Star Special included Brian Capron of Coronation Street fame who had asked to be surrounded by books for his ‘menu reveal’.
Who knows whether the food was any good but the books looked lovely!
It is with a heavy heart that I turn to my keyboard to note the passing on 31 March of the actor who for many devotees of Sherlock Holmes, was Sherlock Holmes – Douglas Wilmer.
One of the great unsung heroes of medicine will be remembered on 1 January (or if he isn’t, he should be!). On that date in 1916, 
Viewers of last Friday’s episode of ‘Celebrity Come Dine With Me’ may have been surprised to see the St John’s Wood Library’s fiction section on their screens. The 
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