The Cricketers in Sherlock Holmes
The Cricketers in Sherlock Holmes is an article written by Clifford Jiggens published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6, 1995).
This research article investigates the numerous cricketing surnames that appear in the Sherlock Holmes stories, analysing whether Arthur Conan Doyle consciously borrowed names from contemporary cricketers he knew or followed. Drawing on cricket archives, Wisden, and earlier scholarship (notably John I. Marder), it evaluates specific cases and distinguishes probable influences from mere coincidence.
The Cricketers in Sherlock Holmes
Frank Shacklock (Nottinghamshire)
M. Sherwin
Arthur Conan Doyle and his brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung, shared a passion for cricket and took the field together on many occasions. Hornung was not much of a player, but he left his mark in the literature of cricket as well as crime fiction with his creation of A.J. Raffles, the gentleman-crook. Raffles used his cricket-particularly country-house games, but at least once a Test match-as an ideal cover for his nefarious activities. Although there is little actual cricket in the Raffles stories, there are a good many allusions to the game, and occasional cricketing metaphors. (Hornung even managed to bring cricket into Raffles's death in the South African war: he was fatally wounded in an exchange of fire on the veldt with a Boer marksman he had spotted 'at deep long-on'.)
In contrast, the sixty stories which make up the Sherlock Holmes canon contain only three references to cricket, and those of the slightest. In 'The Three Students' the guilty party in a case of cheating is Gilchrist, who 'plays in the Rugby team and the cricket team for the college'. Then, in 'The Stockbroker's Clerk', Hall Pycroft, expressing surprise at being chosen from many applicants for a plum job, says that the position was his 'innings'. And in 'The Naval Treaty', Watson recalls that at school he and others used to chase one particular boy, Percy Phelps, now a Foreign Office clerk, and 'hit him over the shins with a wicket'. At that time an individual stump was sometimes also referred to as a wicket.
That would seem to be the total number of references to the game or its terms in the Holmes stories; a little surprising, perhaps, given Conan Doyle's great involvement in cricket and the fact that Holmes lived little more than round the corner from Lord's, and that the subtleties of the game might have been expected to appeal to him. After all, Conan Doyle even managed to introduce cricket into one of the Brigadier Gerard stories.
It was the following sentence in the short obituary of Conan Doyle in the 1931 edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack that first set me on the trail of the cricketers in Sherlock Holmes: 'It is said that Shacklock, the former Nottinghamshire player, inspired him with the Christian name of his famous character, Sherlock Holmes, and that of the latter's brother Mycroft was suggested by the Derbyshire cricketers'. We shall see in a moment how Shacklock could have become Sherlock, and also have a look at the Derbyshire brothers named Mycroft.
There had been a Patrick Sherlock at school with Conan Doyle, there was a police inspector named Sherlock at Southsea during his years there (see Geoffrey Stavert's A Study in Southsea); and there was a club cricketer named Sherlock in the Exeter district-all possible sources of the name. However, a syndicated obituary in provincial newspapers referred to Conan Doyle's cricketing days and to 'a famous bowler named Sherlock'. The obituary quoted Conan Doyle as having said 'a little while ago that "I cannot really be certain, but it is possible that the name of the bowler Sherlock stuck in my mind, and Holmes may also owe its origin to cricket"."
In fact there never was a 'famous' cricketer named Sherlock. It is just possible that the club cricketer in Devon was known to Conan Doyle during his short stay with Dr Budd in Plymouth in 1882, but he certainly does not qualify for fame. In his later years, as I have found several times, Conan Doyle's memory played him tricks. It had in 1921 when at the Stoll Convention dinner he recalled a match between the United Services and the M.C.C. He said:
- I don't know how we got the name of Holmes, but I think you can trace the Sherlock. If you will read the old Lillywhites (a cricketing year book that rivalled Wisden] and the old cricketing news, I think that is the most productive line to follow. I remember playing in a match between the United Services and the M.C.C. The M.C.C. brought down against us two fine bowlers in Attewell and Sherlock. I had the good fortune to scrape up twenty or thirty runs against them, and I think the name of Sherlock impressed itself on my mind. Through that small incident, when you remember his brother's name was Mycroft, I think you will see where the cricketing line runs.
The famous bowler named Sherlock' was in fact Frank Shacklock, and although Conan Doyle probably never played against him until that match, after Holmes had first appeared in print-and may not even have seen him play, either-he most certainly would have known of him.
Shacklock, a professional cricketer, was a fast bowler who played for his native Derbyshire in 1884 and 1885, and was then much in the news in early 1886 when he decided in future to play for Nottinghamshire, a county his family had lived in. Cricket, a weekly periodical devoted to the game, opened its issue of 29 April 1886 with a feature on Shacklock, and referred to the animated controversy over the move in newspapers in previous weeks. Conan Doyle was completing his first Holmes story. A Study in Scarlet, that spring. He originally thought of calling his detective Sherringford Holmes. He became Sherlock, at the very time that Conan Doyle, like everyone else with an interest in cricket, was following the Shacklock controversy. Shacklock certainly qualifies as being a famous bowler'. He was indeed one of the top bowlers of his day, and once took four Somerset wickets in four balls. Later he emigrated to New Zealand, where he played more cricket, and died in 1937.
How did Shacklock become Sherlock? Did the Sher- come from Sherringford? Or does a glance at the Nottinghamshire scoresheets of the day provide an answer? Shacklock's new county had a wicketkeeper named Sherwin, and over the years many batsmen were to be dismissed thus: c Sherwin b Shacklock.
Mordecai Sherwin, also a professional, was the county's wicketkeeper from 1876 to 1896. Conan Doyle cannot have failed to have known of him. Sherwin played in Tests for England-the life and soul of a travelling party', according to W.G. Grace--and captained Nottinghamshire. Wisden remembered him as 'a very bulky man of great physical power' (he was under 6ft and weighed 17 stones). Perhaps it was to Sherwin that Mordecai Smith, the boat owner in The Sign of the Four, owes his first name.
Conan Doyle was quoted in the syndicated obituary: 'Holmes may also owe its origin to cricket'. But in his 1921 speech he said, 'I don't know how we got the name of Holmes', and explained that he had been looking for a 'simple' or 'ordinary' name to contrast with the extraordinary names authors often gave their characters.
Holmes is certainly an ordinary enough name. There were at least two or three medical Holmeses known to Conan Doyle. Green, in his book already mentioned, thinks the name came from Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American essayist admired by Conan Doyle who came to this country in that year, 1886. But cricket can produce a few claimants, too, notably a Henry Holmes, who played as a professional for Hampshire from 1861 to 1878; and there was the Revd Robert Stratten Holmes, a club cricketer in the 1880s who became an authority on cricket literature and himself wrote extensively about the game.
The Mycroft cricketing link mentioned by Conan Doyle in 1921 concerns the brothers or rather half-brothers-Thomas and William Mycroft., who played together for Derbyshire for several years until 1885. They, too, were very well known to cricket followers: Thomas was a wicketkeeper, and William a fast bowler. Conan Doyle played with at least one of them.
In that same speech, Conan Doyle mentioned another cricketer whose name he borrowed for a Holmesian character. 'I am afraid,' he said, 'even my villains have a taint of cricket, and when I think of Dr Grimesby Roylott I feel I owe an apology to that excellent fast bowler In The Speckled Band' the villain is Dr Roylott (so spelt in the story, but Rylott in the play). The 'excellent bowler' Conan Doyle was familiar with was Arnold Rylott, a professional who played for both Leicester and the M.C.C.. became head of the ground staff at Lord's, and, unusually, bowled left-handed and batted right-handed.
What about Watson? Like Holmes, it is a not uncommon name. Various people have been suggested as the original, and two are medical men with the same surname: Dr Patrick Heron Watson, a noted surgeon, and Dr James Watson, one of Conan Doyle's fellow members of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society. Two other medical men-though neither a Watson — for whom claims have also been made are worth mentioning, since they played cricket with Conan Doyle. One was Dr David George Thomson, superintendent of the County Mental Hospital, Norwich from 1886, and already a good friend (Green mentions that Conan Doyle, a frequent visitor, was with Thomson a stalwart of the hospital cricket team). The other was Dr R. A. Weston, a fellow cricketer at Southsea in the 1880s. The latter told patients, according to Stavert in his A Study in Southsea, 'Did you know I was the original of Conan Doyle's Watson?'
There was just one Watson in first-class cricket at the time A Study in Scarlet was written. Alec Watson, a Scotsman. was a professional who played for Lancashire for two decades, and was one of the best slow bowlers of the day. The scoresheet of the Lancashire v Derbyshire match at Manchester in 1884 is interesting. Shacklock, Mycroft, and Watson all took part; and Watson was dismissed by a catch by Mycroft! Shacklock and Mycroft batted together at 10 and 11. We can also find a Dr Watson playing cricket at the time, although he is a less likely candidate: Dr Joseph Watson had one or two first-class games for Cambridge University in 1882 and was in an All-England XI in 1888.
Were there other cricketers in Sherlock Holmes? I wondered. One or two famous names came to mind. There was a Hobbs on the opening page of "The Red Circle', a reminder of Jack Hobbs, one of the greatest batsmen of all; and two great England captains, Archie MacLaren and Plum' Warner had namesakes as, respectively, a student in 'The Three Student' and a gardener in 'Wisteria Lodge'.
Then started a search for more, using the Who's Who of Cricketers (1984), which lists all players who have appeared in English first-class cricket (including, of course, Conan Doyle himself). An essential qualification, needless to say, was that a candidate must have played cricket at the time, or not long before, Conan Doyle used the surname in a story. In Conan Doyle and his Cricketers' (The Cricketer, July 1986), I wrote:
- It must be said, of course, that many of the names are common ones and doubtless there are many coincidences. But the sheer number of resemblances suggests that there is more than just chance here, and that Doyle, faced with the problem confronting many fiction writers of finding names for his characters, often borrowed those of cricketers he played with or knew of from his keen interest in the game.
An example I quoted was 'The Missing Three-Quarter' (1904), in which (apart from Holmes and Watson) there are ten characters. Their names, in alphabetical order, are: Armstrong, Dixon, Hopkins, Johnson, Moorhouse, Morton, Mount-James, Overton, Staunton, and Stevenson.
All but Mount-James can be matched with contemporary cricketers. Two members of the 1902 Australian tourist party were Warwick Armstrong, one of the greatest cricketers from 'down under', and A.J.Y. Hopkins. There was more than one Dixon, including J. A. Dixon, who captained Nottinghamshire in the 1890s. P. R. Johnson, a stylish opening batsman, played for Somerset from 1901. There were three players named Moorhouse, including brothers Fred and Robert, who appeared for Warwickshire and Yorkshire respectively. Another professional was Arthur Morton (Derbyshire), an all-rounder who after many years in county cricket became a Test umpire. William Overton was a slow bowler who played for the M.C.C., very likely alongside Conan Doyle. The Revd Harvey Staunton began a short career with Nottinghamshire as a batsman when 'The Missing Three-Quarter' was being written. There were also a couple of Stevensons in the game then: Henry (M.C.C.) and George (Derbyshire).
Nottinghamshire is a county which can boast more than enough players whose names appear in the Holmes stories to make up a formidable team. Another cricketer from the same club may have even provided the name for a fictitious county. 'The Priory School' is set in Hallamshire, neighbouring Nottinghamshire, and at the time Conan Doyle wrote this an outstanding bowler in the county team was Bert Hallam, who took over 1,000 wickets in first-class cricket. There was also another cricketing Hallam Conan Doyle would have remembered well: playing for Norwood against Dulwich, he shared a stand of 180 with Frank Hallam.
It was only some years after my article in The Cricketer that I discovered that another cricket-loving Holmes devotee had already researched on similar lines, although in more detail, and discovered other cricketers in the stories.
John I. Marder was born in Nottingham and emigrated to North America as a young man, making his home there and serving in the U.S. Army in the 1939-45 war. He was the founder and president of the U.S. Cricket Association, arranged a U.S. cricket tour of England a few years before his death in 1976, and was a tireless worker for cricket in the States.
During an enforced convalescence, he passed his time matching the names of cricketers with Holmesian characters, and in the Journal of the Cricket Society, (vol.6, no. 1. Autumn 1972) advanced the hypothesis that 'Sir Arthur drew most of his characters from cricketers of his period'. His article. Cricket and Sherlock Holmes', was reprinted in The Sherlock Holmes Journal the following summer. It was in later issues of the Cricket Society's Journal (vol.6, no.3, Autumn 1973, and vol.6. no.4, Spring 1974) that he set out his evidence in the form of lists of the names of the characters, the stories and dates, and the names of cricketers with their club or team. The characters he listed totalled 407. Of these he eliminated 42 foreign names (e.g., Adler, Lestrade) and 19 titled persons (e.g., Lord Balmoral), leaving 346. Of these he provided the name or names of cricketers (or, in two or three cases, a personality in the game, such as a long-serving M.C.C. secretary) in 294 cases.
Marder cast his net widely, not restricting himself to first-class cricketers. He included many club players, and cricketers who appeared for the M.C.C., Canada, Scotland, Ireland, public schools, and the Services-all names Conan Doyle would have come across in his reading of the cricket reports in The Times and elsewhere, and a good many of whom he would have played with in his hundreds of matches. Many he would have met often enough for them to have qualified as acquaintances. He may well have subscribed to the weekly Cricket, which carried reports of club games as well as first-class ones. His own name appears in it many times.
It must be said at once that Marder's enthusiasm sometimes led him to try too hard to match cricketers and characters. For example, he includes one or two cricketers of no great note who ceased playing long before Conan Doyle created characters of the same or similar name. A glaring example is the 'match' of Kirwin with the Revd J.H. Kirwan. The former appeared in 'The Reigate Squire' in 1893, when Kirwan was an old man, having played cricket (with distinction) for Cambridge University half-a-century before. Sometimes the names do not match sufficiently. And sometimes the combination of parts of two names to form one are rather forced: as in The Hound of the Baskervilles, where we have the cricketers Frank Silcock and Monkland being given by Marder as a 'match' for Frankland, and, in the same story, L. E. Upcott and W. Underwood as the source of the character Upwood.
Many cricketers have common names which can be found not only among cricketers but among Conan Doyle's fellow students, medical colleagues, and acquaintances in other fields. On the other hand, it must be remembered that most of his stories were written at a time when he was playing cricket--in some years, a great deal of cricket-and not studying or practising medicine. But if a character bears the name of both a contemporary cricketer and a medical colleague or fellow student, we cannot know (unless there is other evidence) which Conan Doyle was remembering. Perhaps even both; or perhaps neither!
Marder did not find matches for 52 characters he researched; but his (and my) research has been far from exhaustive. For example, neither of us looked at the names of the 150 or so cricketers Conan Doyle played against in his tours of Devon and Cornwall with the M.C.C. in 1902-04, a time when he was planning or writing more Holmes stories. Perhaps there are more 'matches' here.
Marder found plenty of less common names which match exactly. In 'The Adventure of Black Peter' there is John Hopley Neligan. At the time, C. E. Neligan was a member of Epsom C.C., against which Conan Doyle played; and F. J. V. Hopley was playing for Harrow.
Windibank in 'A Case of Identity'; Crowder in 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery';
Fairbairn in 'The Cardboard Box'; Pycroft in 'The Stockbroker's Clerk'; Hargreave and Slancy in 'The Dancing Men'; and Vibart in 'The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax' are not common names. A cricketer, R. Windibank, played for Goldsmith's Institute; A. J. Crowder for Teddington; R. Fairbairn for the M.C.C.; the Revd J. Pycroft, who had played for Oxford University, was a well-known writer on the game; Sam Hargreave was a noted Warwickshire slow bowler; Col W. S. Kenyon-Slaney was another M.C.C. player; and R. F. Vibart appeared for Harrow and Cornwall.
Recently I have taken a closer look at Marder's findings for characters in Conan Doyle's best-known Holmes adventure, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Apart from Holmes and Watson, he lists 17 names and matches 11 with cricketers and two with cricket administrators. Of the remaining four, two are foreign names (Vandeleur, an alias of the Stapletons, and Lestrade); and he fails to find any 'match' for the other two, Oldmore and Desmond.
In alphabetical order, the 13 matches' claimed by Marder are:
| Character | Cricketer |
| Barrymore | 1st Baron Barrymore (Ireland) |
| Baskerville | Capt. Baskerville (Plymouth Garrison) |
| Cartwright | V. H. Cartwright (Nottinghamshire) |
| Clayton | R. Clayton (Yorkshire) |
| Frankland | Frank Silcock (Essex) and Monkland (United South) |
| Johnson | P. R. Johnson (Somerset) |
| Lyons | J. J. Lyons (Australia) |
| Mortimer | H. Mortimer (Surrey C.C.C. Treasurer) |
| Perkins | H. Perkins (M.C.C. Secretary) |
| Selden | H. Seldon (Norbury Park) |
| Stapleton | J. Stapleton (Nottinghamshire) |
| Upwood | L. E. Upcott (Sherborne) and W. Underwood (Nottinghamshire) |
| Wilson G. L. | Wilson (Sussex) |
As already noted, the combinations of names to produce Frankland and Upcott seem somewhat forced, apart from the fact that Silcock's and Underwood's cricketing days were long over. Although Clayton's first-class cricket was also over by some years, Conan Doyle very likely knew him as a member of the M.C.C. ground staff at Lord's.
There are in fact another five names in The Hound of the Baskervilles which Marder has overlooked: Anthony, Bradley, Morland, Murphy, and Stanford. Two can be linked with cricketers. The Anthony family had provided three professionals for Nottinghamshire, two of whom, George and Henry, were still playing at the time Conan Doyle wrote the book. And Bradley is a name Conan Doyle had good reason to remember. The Kent fast bowler, Walter Bradley, once set him on fire (as W. G. Grace jokingly put it) when the ball hit the author's pocket and ignited a box of matches which he had in it.
Marder is wrong in one 'match' — that of Henry Baskerville with an officer who played cricket for the Plymouth Garrison. Sir Henry was in fact named after one Harry Baskerville. a fact I owe to an Exeter journalistic colleague, the late Paul Rorke, who interviewed Harry nearly forty years ago. Conan Doyle had been given the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles by a prominent London journalist, Bertram Fletcher Robinson. Conan Doyle stayed at the latter's country home in Devon while researching the story and gathering local colour (without doubt discussing the plot with his host). He was driven around Dartmoor by Fletcher Robinson's coachman. Harry Baskerville. When the book was published, Harry received a copy inscribed: To Harry Baskerville from B. Fletcher Robinson, with apologies for using your name'.
Now Harry also happened to be a cricketer of some local repute, a founder member of Ipplepen C.C. An obituary in the Western Morning News refers to him as a keen cricketer'. It would certainly seem probable that during their journeys on Dartmoor the famous author and the coachman might have discussed the game they both enjoyed so much.
To sum up, The Hound of the Baskervilles contains twenty-two surnames other than Holmes and Watson. Two can be discarded as foreign. Of the remaining twenty, six can be matched with first-class cricketers (Anthony, Cartwright, Clayton, Johnson, Lyons, and Stapleton); two are rather dubious combinations (Frankland and Upwood); two are prominent administrators (Mortimer and Perkins); and three others also played cricket (Baskerville, Barrymore, and Seldon). Thirteen out of twenty, and if we forget about Frankland and Upcott and one or two others with the more common names, that still leaves several possible cricketing links.
Donald A. Redmond, author of Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources (1982), has spent much time in searching out the origin of characters and names. I am grateful for the opportunity to have seen the typescript of his recent thoughts on the subject of cricketers' names, in particular his review of Marder's list. He regards only seventeen characters as 'almost certain' to have derived their names from cricketers, and another fifty-eight of Marder's 'matches' he classes as 'dubious'. He points out that Conan Doyle had many sources to draw on, and that it is possible to find many 'matches' with Holmesian names in almost any given body with typical English names: and that there has to be more of a link with Conan Doyle to increase the probability.
It is Conan Doyle's great interest and involvement in cricket — hitherto not sufficiently recognised — that provides a link and suggests that he did use cricketers' names on a good number of occasions. Not in 'most' cases as Marder tried to show, but in rather more than just seventeen. Perhaps in the M.C.C. records, or in the club matches in the cricketing press of Conan Doyle's day, there are some of the more unusual names of characters waiting to be found.
In his M.C.C. matches alone, Conan Doyle must have played with over one thousand cricketers, and this total can be multiplied two or three times for all the others he took the field with. He may have played often enough with perhaps ten per cent for them to have counted at least as much as acquaintances as most of his fellow students and graduates. On his various cricket tours he would have got to know some of his companions quite well. Cricket, I believe, could probably have offered more names for him to draw on than any other body of people in his life. Certainly the number of cricketers he played with far exceeded the combined total of about 1,500 Stonyhurst students and Edinburgh medical graduates who were with him during his years at the two establishments.
As I say, there is room for more research. Marder not only did not find 'matches' always. but he did not even look at some one hundred or so names-mostly 'referrals', people referred to in the stories but who did not actually appear. Plenty of cricketers, perhaps, in Sherlock Holmes, but no cricket... that is, unless we venture beyond the sixty stories. (Though we have to venture beyond Conan Doyle to find an entertaining novel with a cricket background: Stanley Shaw's Sherlock Holmes at the 1902 Fifth Test (1985).) However, there are two slight pieces by Conan Doyle referring to the game.
The first, The Field Bazaar', was written for the Edinburgh University Student in 1896. In this Holmes amazes Watson at the breakfast table by deducing that a letter received by the doctor was an appeal to help a bazaar to raise funds for the Edinburgh University C.C., of which Watson had been a playing member. Holmes observed, 'My small experience of cricket clubs has taught me that next to churches and cavalry ensigns they are the most debt-ridden things upon earth'. The second, 'How Watson Learned the Trick', was written by Conan Doyle for a miniature volume produced for Queen Mary's Dolls' House in 1923. He was one of several leading authors asked to contribute such a volume. In this Watson tries his hand at deduction at the breakfast table. He wrongly assumes that Holmes is interested in the financial news in his morning newspaper. Holmes point out: The cricket page is beside the financial one, and I turned to it to find if Surrey was holding its own against Kent'. From this it would seem that, after all, Holmes did have some interest in cricket. Indeed, may we deduce that he was a Surrey supporter?
Author's Note: Most sources are mentioned in the text. Many volumes of Wisden and weekly issues of Cricket have been consulted; and Richard Lancelyn Green's The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes has been invaluable. The interview with Harry Baskerville appeared in the Western Times (Exeter) on 1 November 1957, and his obituary in the Western Morning News (Plymouth) on 30 August 1962. My account of Conan Doyle's cricket career appeared in ACD, Vol.5 (1994), and a further instalment is in this volume.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
