Free Holmes and Watson by June Thomson Page B

Street and Cranford Street. The section north to Marylebone Road was known as York Place. The numbering ran north from number 1 at the Portman Square end as far as number 42 at York Place on the east side before continuing south on the west side from number 44 to number 85. There was therefore no number 43. Nor, more significantly for students of the canon, was there a 221.
    Watson has therefore clearly changed the number in order that the house should not be identified in the same way as he changed Mrs Hudson’s * name, as no such person figures as a householder in any of the street directories of the period. However, he has given several clues which might help identify 221B Baker Street, although care should be taken over these. If Watson changed the number of the house and the name of his landlady, he may well have deliberately altered other details as well in order that the house should not be recognised. After his accounts were published and the address became well known, it would have been embarrassing to Holmes’ clients, someof whom were eminent men and women, if sightseers had gathered on the pavement to stare up at the windows.
    Readers are referred to Appendix Two for a more detailed account of the clues within the canon which might point to the possible siting of 221B Baker Street and of some of the theories put forward by Sherlockian scholars. Incidentally, the B of 221B refers to Bis , the French word meaning ‘twice’, signifying a subsidiary address, in this case the set of rooms occupied by Holmes and Watson.
    But wherever 221B was situated, certain facts can be established, particularly concerning the interior of the house, about which Watson had less reason to fabricate.
    There was a basement, where the kitchen, scullery and pantries were housed and where the servants, in this case a maid and possibly also a daily cleaning woman, would have taken their meals. Photographs of the period show areas with iron railings and steps leading down to a basement entrance. Billy the pageboy, whom Holmes later introduced into the household, would have eaten his meals here as well. These basement areas have since been paved over. The kitchen would have been equipped with a cast-iron, coal-burning stove, which needed daily black-leading, and almost certainly a deal kitchen table for the preparation of food, and a range of wooden dressers and cupboards.
    The front door opened into a passage from where the staircase rose to the upper floors and a narrower set of steps led down to the basement.
    The ground floor (American first floor) consisted oftwo main rooms, the original front and back parlours. As we shall see later in the chapter, Mrs Hudson probably received between £208 to £260 a year from letting off the three upper rooms, not a large income to cover household expenses which included grocery bills, the wages of at least one servant and the payment of ground rent, and she may have augmented this sum by letting out the front room to a commercial tenant, such as a dressmaker. If she did so, there is no reference to one in the canon. However, it would seem that she kept the back parlour for her own use as a sitting-room, which she also made available as a waiting-room for Holmes’ clients. There are several references to such a room and, according to the occupation of the rest the house, it was the only one which would have been free for such a purpose.
    It is unlikely there were any other private tenants. Watson never refers to any and the general impression he gives is of Holmes and himself being the only lodgers.
    From the hall, seventeen steps led up to the first or drawing-room floor which, like the ground floor, consisted of two rooms, a large one at the front and a smaller back room opening from it. When the houses were first built in the eighteenth century, these two rooms were connected by a pair of folding doors which, when opened back, would have made one large L-shaped area. When Holmes and Watson moved