ATTENTA: This post is about an early news report on the first official Baker Street Irregulars dinner in 1934. It shows the value of the media reporting on the Irregulars and their activities. You can learn much more about the relationship between the media and the BSI on September 21, when Mattias Boström will be the 2024 speaker for The Baker Street Irregulars Trust. For more information go to this link.

Just hours after the Baker Street Irregulars held their first “official” dinner on December 7, 1934, the ever-noisy Associated Press wire machines in newsrooms around the country received a story with the following “lede” (That’s newspaper talk for “first paragraph.”) and second graph.

New York, Dec. 7 (AP) — Sherlock Holmes was perpetuated, in fact dissected, by his “constant readers” tonight.

Over roast goose “a la Henry Baker,” Alexander Woollcott, Gene Tunney and other “Sherlock” fans digested points in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries that may be obscure to the average “thriller” fan, but are meat and drink to the devotees of the peak-capped sleuth.

There was more, a lot more, to follow.

In our last post, we looked at a long-lost account of the first BSI dinner, published on December 12, 1934 in The New York World-Telegram. It made me wonder: What was the first account of the dinner published in the news? I suggested that Starrett was the source of that Dec. 12 column. Was he involved in other accounts too?

Let’s dig about and see what we can uncover.

Let me say at the outset that it’s hard to be definitive about such things, since there are many newspapers that are not online. and many decades have intervened. Other news accounts could turn up, but it’s hard to believe any were produced the same night as the event itself. Through the resources of the Master Magician of Online News, Mattias Boström, here is a transcription of that AP story, with a few observations scattered around.

We don’t have the story as it would have been torn off the AP machine late on the 7th, (that version might have carried the reporter’s name), but we do have what appeared on page 2 of the morning Salt Lake Tribune on the following day.

And before my transcription goes on, I need to warn you that there is some rather offensive language used in the story’s fourth graph. We will pick it up from the third graph.

It was the convention of the “Baker Street Irregulars,” numbering perhaps 20, meeting in a brownstone-front restaurant in the East Forties.

Christopher Morley, the writer, and president of the “Irregulars” started it, diners said, with a crossword puzzle in a weekly magazine that is to the literati what fat pork and chittlings are to the southern negro.

Ugh.

One candidate for the reporter who wrote this story is Charles Honce, an editor at the Associated Press. Honce wrote a lot about the BSI over the decades, and became a member himself in 1944. I’ve read dozens of his news stories and many of his letters to Starrett, and I can’t find anything that approaches the language used above.

On with the transcripition.

The answers to the puzzle were obscure points in Sherlock Holmes stories, and the winners automatically became members of the “Irregulars.”

Woollcott, described by Morley and some of the other more serious Conan Doylers as a scoffer, arrived a half hour late in a hansom cab, flaunting a typical “Sherlock” hat in violent plaid and a huge magnifying glass.

Tunney preceded him, and entered immediately into a spirited discussion dealing with Sherlock’s behavior and hisbehavior (sic).

Let’s pause for a few thoughts.

• I wonder who told the reporter that Morley described Woollcott as a “scoffer”? It has the ring of truth.

• Woollcott’s arriving late seems to be in several accounts. Of course, he had been making late entrances into theaters for years just as the lights were going down. For Woollcott, the party didn’t start until he came in.

• Again, Woollcott is described as walking in wearing a deerstalker. This is the third such account, when you include Starrett’s (in his bio, Born in a Bookshop) and Hansen’s column. If that’s the case, why did he need to steal Bill Hall’s hat as Robert Keith Leavitt asserts?

• Gene Tunney was a renowned heavyweight boxer and a friend of Christopher Morley. The well-read pugilist retired in 1928 and married an heir to the United States Steel Corporation. While he did not show a lasting interest in Holmes, he does seem to have been able to hold his own when discussing the Sherlockian canon.

• Harrison “Terry” Hunt (who has studied this period with a large magnifying glass), speculates that it was Frank Henry was the source for this story. Henry worked at Doubleday, Doran, was friends with Morley and had the services of a publicity person who could call information in to the AP.

On with the transcription:

One of the main points of the issue was Dr. Watson’s wound, variously described, the members said, as in the shoulder and in the left leg.

The “Irregulars” have set up a headquarters at the scene of tonight’s festivities, with busts of Sir Arthur and critical works of “Sherlock” here and there.

Bullet holes shot in the wall and other cryptic symbols made up the “stage” for tonight’s dinner.

The Baker Street Boys, as “Sherlock” readers know, were urchins called in by the detective from time to time on major cases.

A few more reflections:

• A discussion of Watson’s Wandering War Wound sounds right for this type of gathering. Indeed it’s a topic that still comes up for debate 90 years later.

• This is the second time we hear about a bust of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hansen mentioned it in his column too. Who brought it? And where is it now? BSJ Editor Emeritus Steven Rothman has suggested it was a small copy of this bust by artist Jo Davidson. (Scroll down after clicking the link in his name.) Steve notes George Doran of Doubleday had copies of the bust made and that someone with the publishing company could have contributed it to the dinner. (You can read a bit about Doubleday, Doyle and Davidson here. Thanks to Peter Blau and Steve for the pointer. That same blogger, Ray Wilcockson, has another post on Doyle busts too.)

• Bullet holes? Surely no one shot holes in the walls of Christ Cella’s restaurant. And what were the “other cryptic symbols”? The writer leaves out a lot of detail.

It is now time to call for the question: I believe Vincent Starrett was the source of the Harry Hansen column we looked at last time. Was Starrett the source of this story?

I doubt it.

There are too many variances with the Hansen column and Starrett’s own recollections of the dinner. Consider:

• Starrett is never mentioned. Frankly, I can’t imagine that he would have been happy being left out of the story. He clearly was proud of his attendance, his association with Morley, Woollcott and Gillette. Starrett wanted to be known as a founding member of the Irregulars and would have wanted to be part of the story.

• The source of this story was, as Terry Hunt has pointed out to me, looking for the popular names that general readers would know, like Morley, Woollcott and Tunney. Sherlockians like Starrett, H.W. Bell, et al would likely have meant nothing to most readers.

• But what of William Gillette? Why was he left out? He was certainly famous enough. Was this account written (or dictated) before the great actor arrived? We know he came in about an hour late to the dinner. Having Gillette at the dinner was a major source of pride for Starrett. Again, that’s a point against him being the source.

• If Starrett wasn’t the source, who was? Is Terry right in suggesting Frank Henry? That is a point which requires additional investigation.

To sum up—and to state the obvious, which is my chief talent—this Associated Press account is a valuable piece of Irregular history. It also raises far more questions than it answers.

Mattias was able to identify a few other newspapers that ran the December 7 Associated Press story, like The Spokesman Review out of Spokane, Washington. As you can see here, the story was cut a bit from the one above.

Cutting the length of a wire story was (and is, for those papers that still produce a print edition) a common practice. Local stories tend to take precedence over stories from outside the area, and feature stories were often cut to fit the space that was available on the page.

The tradition among news writers of the era was to start the story with the most important information, and then flesh it out as the story went on. It was known as the inverted pyramid style.

The least important information would be at the bottom. That way, if the story needed to be cut to fit the space, it was easiest to simply slice off a few paragraphs from the bottom. That is what you see here, with the last two graphs of the story cut off.

The San Antonio Express also published a shortened version of the December 7 AP story the next day, December 8, on page 4.

NOTE: The Associated Press sent out a briefer version of the same story dated December 8. It left out the offensive comparisons, Morley’s comments about Woollcott and a few other details. The shorter form was also published in various newspapers around the country.

There is one more news story from these early days that deserves our attention. We’ll review the Associated Press feature by Charles Honce next time.