Not So Simple - Sherlock Holmes, God, Time, Steam and Speed

Well, I think we can all agree that none of the elaborate formulae proposed to work out the speed of the Paddington-Exeter train from the telegraph poles could possibly be described as *simple*. Whereas Watson’s suggestion, that Holmes could have worked it out by counting the quarter-mile posts (dismissed superciliously by the Great Detective) *would* have been simple. I think Holmes is showing off that this cumbersome, messy and time-consuming brainteaser is *simple* for him.

 

Some British railway lines still have quarter-mile posts, though I find that more and more they are being replaced by posts every tenth of a mile, or 176 yards or eight chains, an attempt to decimalise tradition (which actually works in this case, because you can cut a mile into tenths if you really want to). On some stretches, notably just outside Paddington station, the distance to the buffers is confusingly measured by two sets of posts, one in foreign metres and the other in English miles and chains.

 

To my great joy, railways in this country still mark bridges by their distance apart in miles and chains (a chain is the length of a cricket pitch, by the way - 22 yards). I wonder how this has survived the metric fanatics . Note for those who enjoy these things, which I know isn’t everyone - the Radio 4 Today programme on Tuesday morning, in a delightful item about a flood-encircled village in the Somerset levels,  filled me with unexpected joy when not only did they give the depth of the flood in feet, but a farmer talked of delivering ‘several hundredweight’ of sausages. The hundredweight is one of my very favourite customary measurements because it sounds as heavy as it is, and utterly English. I used to hump half-hundredweight bags of barley (56 pounds) when (back in the late 1960s) I did a summer job at the lamented Morrell’s brewery in Oxford, now turned into desirable residences. I also rolled barrels, slung crates, stood for smelly,  hamstring-straining hours at the (half-pint) bottle-washing machine and learned how to skive, and how long you could get away with it before being noticed (earlier work, mainly on farms, had been constantly under the eye of the employer, and so skive-free) . Some of the smaller clubs still took deliveries in Firkins (the measure used in the Authorised Version of the Bible, when it described how much water Jesus transforms into wine at Cana, six waterpots containing two or three firkins apiece, or ‘twenty or thirty gallons’ apiece in modern translations). How long before we have a metric Bible in which we are required to walk two kilometres with a man who asks us to accompany him for one, Noah’s Ark is measured in metres and centimetres, and the miracle of Cana is measured in litres?

 

However you measure it, that’s a lot of wine. Though I believe a wine firkin (the word means a quarter and apparently comes from the Dutch) was different from and perhaps smaller than an ale firkin.

 

 

As for Holmes’s atheism I need slightly to revise that view. He may well have been a Deist, and therfeore a theist, though not, I think, a Christian. I would draw the attention of the reader to this passage from ‘the Sign of Four’ ( Chapter 2) in which Holmes abruptly stalks out, having airily dismissed Watson’s remark that Mary Morstan (Watson's future wife) is a very attractive woman. Holmes declares: ‘I am going out now. I have some few references to make. Let me recommend this book,—one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade's "Martyrdom of Man". I shall be back in an hour.’

 

 

Reade is mentioned again later in the story. Reade was , if not the Dawkins of his time, rather close to it (and was actually denounced by W.E.Gladstone at one point).  Alert readers of the stories, at the time they were published, would certainly have taken the reference as a sign of a rather aggressive anti-religious position on Holmes’s part.

 

 

Though he was a secularist rather than an actual atheist, Reade was strongly hostile to traditional religion. Those interested in Holmes’s religious opinions would do well to look at a web article by Mr Drew Thomas, ‘Sherlock Holmes on Religion’, which adduces several quotations (including the thoughts on the rose in ‘The  Naval Treaty’) to show that Holmes had some Biblical knowledge, a wide literary knowledge (including of foreign sources) and sometimes contradicted himself.

 

How interesting that this character, invented as an entertainment for weekly magazine readers, should have become such an abiding and interesting figure, though he never lived, that we speculate to this day on what he might really have been like, and would all (I think) wish to sit at a dinner table with him, if he existed, and also fear to do so in case we were humiliated.

 

And yet when Conan Doyle sought to create lasting literature, he failed. It is as if, 100 years from now, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher were to survive in the public mind, while every Booker Prize winner for the past 25 years was utterly forgotten.

 

‘Bert’ , one of our contributors who professes to know all (but who still hasn’t explained what, apart from the EU Landfill directive, lies behind the widespread and accelerating abolition of normal weekly rubbish collections in Britain, though he professes to know that it isn't that) now doubts that the EU decides when our clocks go backwards and forwards. Why does he keep walking into these things without checking?

The details of the directive involved (and its history) are to be found here http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2007:0739:FIN:EN:PDF

 

One small but (to me) highly significant result of this has been that the former British law, which prevented the introduction of Summer Time on Easter Sunday itself out of consideration for churchgoers, has been over-ridden, so that the clocks now quite frequently go forward on Easter Day, making the most important single service of the year awkwardly early for many believers, especially those with young families. I doubt whether a similar inconvenience could or would be imposed by EU directive upon followers of Islam.

 

Bert also opines that he likes the later sunsets brought about by jamming the clocks further forward than real time (which must be and can be defined by the relation between our planet and the Sun). Whereas he notes that people such as me dislike the dark winter mornings which are the inevitable price for this. He seems to think that this means we should compromise with the silly mess we have now. I disagree.

 

Left to me, time would simply stay the same all year round. Since larks and owls will never agree, why not let the planet, and the position in which it stands in relation to the sun, decide the matter impartially?  

 

If ‘Bert’ wants to feel as if he more light at the end of the day, he has an easy remedy which doesn't involvemessing about with anyone else's life. This remedy, as it happens, is not available to those (such as me)  who are compelled to be early-risers.

 

Let him get up earlier in the morning, so ensuring (I promise) that sunset will *feel* later, when it eventually arrives. I, like many people, cannot by contrast get up later, as if I did I wouldn’t get to work on time, and many other important tasks and duties, dependent on the agreed legal time, couldn’t be done. Time may be a human, subjective measure, but it measures a cosmic, objective fact. Noon should coincide, as closely as possible within each nation, with the time at which the Sun is at its zenith. Where nations are too big for this, they should have agreed time zones. Without any such arrangement,  the clocks lie. What other measure of objective reality do we treat in this way?  

 

What would we think of car speedometers which agve a deliberately false reading of speed, petrol pumps which deliebrately falsified the flow of fuel, electricity or water meters, or butcher's scales,  set to give inaccurate readings?  We'd prosecute, most ofthe time. So why is it permissible to set the clocks to a false measure?

 

I am complexly unconvinced by the arguments for clock-switching, a silly faddish nuisance from the age of rational dress, sandals and fruitarianism, which somehow caught on during wartime, but whose alleged benefits seem to me to remain wholly unproven by any careful, unbiased objective study of measurable facts. People such as me have already been forced to undergo absurdly late sunsets in summer, again a great nuisance to parents of young children,  or to people who for any reason need to rise early for work. And I might add that recent work showing how badly shift-work affects the body, seems to me to provide an argument against messing round with body clocks at all, unless strictly necessary during long-distance travel. I suffer from a malaise similar to jetlag for some weeks after the clocks go forward each spring (and by contrast feel an enhanced sense of physical wellbeing when they return to their proper time in October).