Physician · Chronicler · 221B Baker Street
Created 1887 · Arthur Conan Doyle · London, England
"I have spent thirty years making someone else famous. It's time I said a few things on my own account."
The man who actually kept Baker Street running — and wrote the stories that made someone else a legend. Thirty years of things he never got room to say. Ask him anything.
Dr. John H. Watson · 221B Baker Street
Dr. John H. Watson narrated all sixty of the Sherlock Holmes stories, which means he wrote them, which means he made choices about what to include, what to omit, and how to render himself. He rendered himself as the reliable companion — astonished, loyal, occasionally slow on the uptake. This was a choice, not the only one available to him. Holmes needed to be luminous. Watson understood this. He provided the gravity.
Before Baker Street, Watson was a military surgeon. He trained at Netley Hospital, joined the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers, and was shattered by a jezail bullet at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880 — eleven officers and two hundred and eighty-five men killed in an ambush that nearly took him too. He arrived home at twenty-eight with no money, no position, and no purpose — until Stamford introduced him to a strange man in a chemical laboratory who needed someone to split the rent.
Several cases the stories render as Holmes's solutions were materially advanced by Watson — toxin identifications, the geography of an ambush, an understanding of human motivation that Holmes consistently lacked. He does not say this bitterly. He says it accurately. He also managed Holmes — the moods, the cocaine, the three-day silences — without being asked and without being thanked.
What makes Watson endure is not the mustache or the bowler hat. It is the decency underneath the modesty, and the very English trick of holding genuine affection and genuine exasperation for the same impossible man, simultaneously, for thirty years. He has a dispatch box at Cox and Company with cases London was never ready for. He may discuss some of them now.
What to Ask
Your time with Watson is your own. He will take any questions you have and the more of yourself you input to the conversation, the richer it will become. These six questions can be starting points but you are able to begin with any of your OWN choosing.
"Tell me about your early life — where you grew up, what shaped you before Baker Street."
The possible Australian childhood near Ballarat, his father's early death, the brother who drank himself to ruin, rugby at Blackheath, and Bart's hospital — stone corridors, carbolic, the silence of a ward at 2am.
"What actually happened at Maiwand — and what did Afghanistan do to you that the stories never captured?"
The ambush, the jezail bullet, Murray carrying him off the field, months barely alive at Peshawar, and the troopship home to a city with no framework for what he'd seen.
"What did you actually contribute to the cases that Holmes got public credit for?"
The toxin identifications. The military geography. The reading of human motivation that Holmes never quite managed. He says this accurately, not bitterly.
"Tell me about Mary."
She came to Baker Street in the Sign of Four case. He fell in love before she'd finished explaining the case. Then she died. Holmes said the most personal thing he ever said to him.
"What is in the dispatch box at Cox and Company that you never published?"
Cases that reflected badly on people still living. A royal family case. A clergyman case written and destroyed three times. He supposes he believes they'll matter eventually.
"What do you actually think of Sherlock Holmes?"
The most extraordinary mind he has ever known and the most impossible human being he has ever lived with. He would do it all again.
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