The Borough Mystery - Samuel Langham (coroner)

[Paul Slade]

That's fascinating, Mayerling - thanks so much for digging it out. I can quite see why the Kirwan case would have appealed to a dramatist like Pinero, particularly in his pre-comedy career. It's good to see he was as as curious about Kirwan's motives as I was.

I live quite close to the British Library, and I have a reader's card there, so I'm going to see if I can consult both Griffin's book and the play's full text there later in the week. I shall report back when I've read them.

Pinero's work seems to be quite in vogue here in London at the moment, with The Magistrate recently completing a run at the National Theatre, and Trelawny of The Wells filling seats at the Donmar right now. Maybe Dr Harmer's Holidays will get a staging too!

[Paul Slade]

The British Library has copies of both Griffin’s book and the play’s full text, which I’ve now had a chance to read. Pinero describes the real Kirwan killing and the trial in great detail, both in his foreward to the play and in the text itself, suggesting either that he’d kept some newspaper clippings from the trial all that time, or that he went to a good deal of trouble in researching it again before he started writing. The play’s plot boils down to this:

Dr Walter Harmer lodges in Balham (near Kirwan's Stockwell) with his landlady Mrs Nethercliff and her niece Elsie. He’s a saintly doctor for 49 weeks of the year, but every August he disappears for a mysterious three-week holiday, laying a false trail to suggest an innocent seaside break.

In fact, he spends that three weeks every year in the same neighbourhood of Southwark where Kirwan was killed, staying with a whore called Lilian Dipple and drinking himself stupid in her squalid surroundings. It’s during one of these trips that he meets three thugs called Gorham, Kelk and Crickway, who sponge drinks off him every chance they get.

Harmer is consumed by guilt at these episodes, but thinks he sees a way out when Elsie is jilted by her selfish young fiance Birkett. Harmer asks Elsie to marry him instead, she accepts, and he looks forward to spending that August on a Swiss honeymoon with her rather than slumming it in Southwark as usual. At last, he thinks, he’s found a way to break the Borough’s terrible spell over him.

At the last moment, however – July 31 as it happens – Elsie and Birkett get back together, plunging Harmer into despair and sending him off to Southwark again for the biggest bender yet. We know he’s lost for good this time, because his final visit has him speaking in the same phonetic low-class accent Pinero’s used for the Southwark characters all along.

Harmer is in Lilian’s room when Gorham sees him flashing some money, and decides to pounce. Lilian leaves the two men alone there while she helps a sick friend get to Guy’s Hospital, and the scene closes with Gorham beckoning his two friends in to help him subdue the already confused and weakened Harmer. Next time we see him, he’s lying dead on the floor of that same room, amid signs of what Pinero calls “a desperate struggle”. Curtain.

Pinero slips several details of Kirwan’s real case into his story. He has Harmer buy some roses for Lilian in Great Dover Street, for example, and describes him taking up with with a woman named Roberts in the One Distillery, where the three thugs are already following him. But Kirwan’s own death, which Lilian describes in great detail, is said to be something which happened nearby some time ago. “Theer was a re-spectable bloke murdered close by ‘ere years ago,” she warns Harmer. “Gen’leman jes’ like yew – an’ by igsac’ly th’ same clarss as Alf Gorham an’ ‘is pals”.

The closest Pinero comes to explaining Harmer’s compulsion about Southwark comes in a conversation with his friend MacGill in the play’s first scene. Harmer claims at first that he’s simply relating what an anonymous patient has told him, but later confesses its his own behaviour he’s describing.

“At intervals – once a year perhaps – he’ll slink away from his wholesome surroundings – where he’s regarded as a model of rectitude – and abandon himself to a course of utter depravity,” Harmer tells MacGill. ‘The individual I speak of dives into the foulest quarter of London he can find – the heart of the Borough or east of Aldgate Pump, among the Chinks; and there for a term he’ll swelter and soak, living, as I say, the most bestial life conceivable. My dear MacGill, he favoured me with details that would have revolted even a Thames-side police magistrate.”

That’s not so much an explanation of Harmer’s behaviour as a simple description of it. Even if Pinero had given us any further hint of Harmer’s motivation, there’s no reason to think it would have matched Kirwan’s own, but I can’t help being a little disappointed anyway. If one of the leading dramatists of his age had any particular insight into Kirwan’s behaviour which escaped the rest of us, I'm afraid he chose not to share it here. His play's a great little footnote to the case, though.

[Mayerling]

The British Library has copies of both Griffin’s book and the play’s full text, which I’ve now had a chance to read. Pinero describes the real Kirwan killing and the trial in great detail, both in his foreward to the play and in the text itself, suggesting either that he’d kept some newspaper clippings from the trial all that time, or that he went to a good deal of trouble in researching it again before he started writing.

That’s not so much an explanation of Harmer’s behaviour as a simple description of it. Even if Pinero had given us any further hint of Harmer’s motivation, there’s no reason to think it would have matched Kirwan’s own, but I can’t help being a little disappointed anyway. If one of the leading dramatists of his age had any particular insight into Kirwan’s behaviour which escaped the rest of us, I'm afraid he chose not to share it here. His play's a great little footnote to the case, though.

Hi Paul,

Thanks for double checking and elucidating the information I found. Pinero was a pretty good dramatist (although his friend Shaw and critic Max Beerbohm found much to criticize about his works - Beerbohm disliking his writing style which his contemporaries found very eloquent, although admitting Pinero knew how to write a last act well). This appears to have been the only time he based a drama on an actual crime. Interestingly enough, his contemporary Sir William Gilbert wrote a final one act play, "The Hooligan" in 1911 about a wife killer. Gilbert, interested in crime (he had been a barrister) attended the trial of Dr. Crippen in 1910.

Jeff

[Paul Slade]

I just chanced across a reference to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short story The Adventure of the Reigate Squire, which features a murder victim called ... William Kirwan.

In this case, Kirwan is not a doctor, but a Surrey coachman, killed by his employers after an attempt to blackmail them. There's no resemblance between the plot of the story and the real Kirwan's death, but the timing is interesting.

Our William Kirwan was murdered in October 1892, and his killers brought to trial that November, so all the newspaper coverage was concentrated into those two months. Reigate Squire first appeared in the June 1893 issue of The Strand magazine, which suggests Conan Doyle may well of been working on it - or at least planning it out - as the real Kirwan's murder was dominating the headlines.

This could just be a coincidence, of course, but the timing's so neat it suggests another explanation. Casting about for a name to give the victim in his latest Holmes story, Conan Doyle picks up the morning newspaper and decides to borrow the name of a real murder victim whose colourful case is all over the news. As a crime writer, Conan Doyle would surely have been intrigued by the real Kirwan's behaviour, so perhaps this was his own little tribute to the case's fascination?

[Mayerling]

I just chanced across a reference to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short story The Adventure of the Reigate Squire, which features a murder victim called ... William Kirwan.

In this case, Kirwan is not a doctor, but a Surrey coachman, killed by his employers after an attempt to blackmail them. There's no resemblance between the plot of the story and the real Kirwan's death, but the timing is interesting.

Our William Kirwan was murdered in October 1892, and his killers brought to trial that November, so all the newspaper coverage was concentrated into those two months. Reigate Squire first appeared in the June 1893 issue of The Strand magazine, which suggests Conan Doyle may well of been working on it - or at least planning it out - as the real Kirwan's murder was dominating the headlines.

This could just be a coincidence, of course, but the timing's so neat it suggests another explanation. Casting about for a name to give the victim in his latest Holmes story, Conan Doyle picks up the morning newspaper and decides to borrow the name of a real murder victim whose colourful case is all over the news. As a crime writer, Conan Doyle would surely have been intrigued by the real Kirwan's behaviour, so perhaps this was his own little tribute to the case's fascination?

Hi Paul,

I have read that story (which in the United States was retitled "The Adventure of the Reigate Puzzle", which is a puzzle to me - apparently the term "Squires" was considered offensive to Americans who were such super democracy lovers supposedly). It isn't unusual for a real name to pop up in a Conan Doyle story. In "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", one of the two step-daughters of Dr. Roylott is Julia Stoner. Julia Stoner was a lady in waiting at Queen Victoria's court. In the novel "The Sign of Four", the Scotland Yard inspector is "Althelney Jones". It turns out that there was a member of Parliament with that name.

In a later story, "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" written in the 1890s, but not published until the last collection, "The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes" came out, there is a reference to a ship named the "Mathilda Briggs". This gets complicated. Doyle loved to reweave material into his sense of realism. The fictional ship is involved in an unpublished story involving "the Giant Rat of Sumatra, for which the world is not prepared." Now it turns out that the baby who was lost with the Captain and his wife (her parents) on the ill-fated Mary Celeste, was "Sophia Mathilda Briggs". That's part one. Part two is that one of the chief witnesses against Florence Maybrick in her 1889 trial for the murder of James Maybrick (her husband) was a maid named "Mathilda Briggs", who was ripped apart on the witness stand by Florence's barrister Sir Charles Russell. Told you it was complicated.

[Regarding the Mary Celeste, Conan Doyle wrote an early successfully received story supposedly telling what happened on that ship to it's crew, entitled, "J. Habbakuk Jephson's Statement". The story is full of errors (it renames the ship "Marie Celeste") but it was so well written that Her Majesty's Proctor (legal head) at Gibraltar, Solly Flood - who handled the 1871-72 investigation - claimed the story was an impudent set of lies. He was right, but it helped establish Conan Doyle as a highly interesting fiction writer. The "Habbakuk Jephson" story does not mention anyone named Mathilda Briggs.]

Jeff

[Paul Slade]

Thanks very much for that, Jeff. Even my own very brief investigation of The Reigate Squire revealed several different titles for it - some with the "Adventure of" prefix, some not, some with a singular squire, some with plural ones and so on. I hadn't come across the American title before, but I shall add it to the list.

I love the sort of literary trivia you've set out here from other Conan Doyle stories, It's good to know that he did pluck names from the newspaper in this way, as that lends a bit of extra credibility to my William Kirwan theory.

I've posted my original note about the William Kirwan/Reigate Squire link on a couple of Sherlock Holmes forums, so maybe they'll turn up some interesting stuff too. If they do, I'll be sure to pass it along.

[Mayerling]

Thanks very much for that, Jeff. Even my own very brief investigation of The Reigate Squire revealed several different titles for it - some with the "Adventure of" prefix, some not, some with a singular squire, some with plural ones and so on. I hadn't come across the American title before, but I shall add it to the list.

I love the sort of literary trivia you've set out here from other Conan Doyle stories, It's good to know that he did pluck names from the newspaper in this way, as that lends a bit of extra credibility to my William Kirwan theory.

I've posted my original note about the William Kirwan/Reigate Squire link on a couple of Sherlock Holmes forums, so maybe they'll turn up some interesting stuff too. If they do, I'll be sure to pass it along.

Hi Paul,

Thanks for keeping me up-dated on anything further.

Jeff

[Stephen Thomas]

American friends

Just a linguistic note here for what it's worth. On a George Chapman thread a while ago someone asked how the place name Southwark is pronounced in Britain and I was able to tell them it is rather like 'Sutherk'. I forgot to mention then that Borough is pronounced 'Burrer' and not 'Burrow'.

[Paul Slade]

I've been trying to think how to describe the pronunciation of "Southwark" too. The best bet for non-Brits, I think, is to stick a "k" on the end of "mother" and pronounce it to rhyme with that. Put a slight emphasis on the first syllable, and remember the "w" is silent: Suhth-erk.

[Paul Slade]

Jeff - could you drop me a line at the address below, please. Something's come up with the Kirwan story which I'd like to discuss with you via e-mail. Thank you.

paul (at) planetslade (dot) com