WHO is the world’s greatest detective? Elementary, my dear Watson!
Sherlock Holmes, famous for making dazzling deductions from the smallest observations, was the central character in dozens of novels and short stories penned by his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle.
Holmes and Dr Watson solved countless crimes in fog-filled Victorian London after analysing clues at their lodgings at 221B Baker Street.
The legendary crime-busters may be inextricably linked with the capital, but Conan Doyle spent much of his life in Hampshire, including the New Forest.
He and his second wife Jean had a holiday home at Bignell Wood, near Brook, and are buried in the graveyard at All Saints Church, Minstead.
Villagers are staging a series of events to celebrate the 150th anniversary on Friday of Conan Doyle’s birth.
Members of the Sherlock Holmes Society have travelled from London to lay a wreath on the author’s grave.
The church will be back in the spotlight on Friday when the Minstead Players will don period costume and perform a reading of a Conan Doyle play.
On the same evening the Trusty Servant pub will hold a Sherlock Holmes evening. People attending the event are being invited to enter into the spirit of the occasion by wearing deerstalker hats and even whalebone corsets.
Conan Doyle studied medicine at Edinburgh University and set up his own practice in Elm Grove, Southsea, in 1882.
He turned to writing to supplement his income and discovered the New Forest while researching The White Company, said to have been his favourite novel.
He and his wife bought Bignell Wood after deciding that they needed a rural retreat.
The house was difficult to see from the road and provided the couple with the privacy they desired to conduct their Spiritualist activities.
According to local legend seances held at the property resulted in postmen refusing to deliver letters to the door.
However, the stories angered their daughter, Dame Jean Conan Doyle. Interviewed in 1990, seven years before her death, she denied that the secluded house was a Spiritualists’ retreat.
“Bignell Wood was a birthday present from my father to my mother because they both loved the New Forest so much,” she said.
“It’s true that mediums did come and stay but that was fairly rare.”
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