BSJ 2006 Christmas Annual

The BSJ 2006 Christmas Annual cover

Quartering in the Fifties:
The Sherlockian Correspondence of Colin Prestige

by Nicholas Utechin, BSI.

“It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a Minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.” [‘The Noble Bachelor’]

This year’s BSJ Christmas Annual takes great pleasure in showing how that idea was put into action almost half a century ago. Nicholas Utechin (“The Ancient British Barrow”), editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal, has had unique access to the correspondence of the late Colin Prestige—a founding member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London—with a distinguished quartet of American Holmesians: Nathan L. Bengis, Jay Finley Christ, James Montgomery, and Edgar W. Smith. Their letters show a sometimes bewildering enthusiasm for selling, collecting and, above all, sharing when a trans-Atlantic Sherlockian camaraderie was being formed in the mid-1950s. Prestige left his Sherlockian collection to his alma mater—Oriel College, Oxford—and it is with their permission that these letters have been made available for both this publication and eventual bedding-down in the BSI Archives at Harvard’s Houghton Library.

Quartering in the Fifties provides a rare glimpse back to the years when, despite the fewer participants, the hobby of Sherlock Holmes was just as vibrant as it is today, with truly archival baggage attached.

68 pages, December 2006

The full 2006 Christmas Annual is also part of the eBSJ PDF archive.