OXFORD. CAMBRIDGE OR . . . ?

-- THE FINAL ANSWER

by Brad Keefauver

(From Afghanistanzas, Volume 6, Number 5, Issue 49, November 1982)

To most educated, men and women, the alma mater is remembered fondly, nostalgically.  Sherlock Holmes, it seems, could hardly have felt that way about his college.  He mentions it's name so very infrequently that Watson apparently doesn't know what it is. His avoidance of naming the college, even when speaking of life there, would indicate some hard feelings toward the school, feelings that did not wane as the years passed.

Obviously, Holmes did not enjoy his college days.  In fact, he seemed to be set to make his later school days miserable from the start.  The young Holmes made no attempts to make friends there, as is evidenced In the strange way Victor Trevor, his only friend at college, was forced upon him by fate.  In “The Gloria Scott,” he tells Watson he spent much of his time “moping In my rooms.” Holmes' dislike of the school was so great that he left college after only two years, leaving his college education incomplete. For a man whose craving for Intellectual activity was as fierce as Holmes' was, his reaction to college seems very odd, to say the least.

But there was a reason for iIt all, a very simple reason that starts with his father, the Squire.  Throughout the 1800’s the industrial revolution had been gaining momentum.  As a landed squire, the senior Holmes had to have had an interest in agriculture, and agriculture, like all around it, was changing immensely due to the effects of science.  Such changes demanded that the landed folk of the future be educated in the newest technology of the field.  Being a man of vision, as we can see reflected in his sons, Squire Holmes saw this and took steps to make his offspring ready for the days ahead.  One of these steps was sending his son Sherlock to an agricultural school to learn the management of farmlands.  The school he finally chose was a new school, small, but in the heart of vast farmlands. The college’s foreign location helped decide the matter, for life in another country would give young Sherlock an added education. That school, where the senior Holmes sent a reluctant son, was the Illinois Industrial University, now known as the University of Illinois.

Preposterous?  Not really.  The American influences that surfaced in Holmes’ later life have never been pinned down. Schooling in the colonies could easily have been one of them,

It is entirely probable that Holmes’ first case, “The Gloria Scott,” took place not only in America, but In Illinois, in southeast Champaign County.

Many Canonical critics have pointed, out that it is strange that Victor Trevor Sr., a convicted criminal in England, would return to England, become a prominent landowner, and then further risk his past catching up to him by taking a public office like Justice of the Peace.  This problem, like many others of the story, is simply solved.

Dr. Watson, writing up the story, was writing from memory of hearing it second-hand, from Holmes.  He obviously embellished it with details from his own imagination, shoring up any weak spots in his memory.  The doctor also made a false assumption in thinking that the story took place in England, when Holmes made only an unfamiliar reference to the actual place.

Watson tells us Holmes said “The Gloria Scott” occurred in Donnithorpe, a hamlet in Norfolk, north of Langmere, in the country of the Broads.  Neither Donnithorpe nor Langmere exist on the map, as The Annotated Sherlock Holmes points out.  The towns, as well as their Norfolk location, were just products of Watson's imagination. The only true clue is given us is “the country of the Broads,” which appears to be Watson’s misunderstanding of the town of Broadlands, Illinois.  It was very easy for Holmes to make the trip to the Trevor home, as Broadlands is less than 20 miles southeast of Champaign-Urbana.

The visit was a pleasant respite from the agricultural school routine, but eventually Holmes would return to his “London rooms” in Urbana, so-called because of the London atmosphere young Holmes tried to create in them.

Very little can be told about Holmes’ life at Illinois Industrial University.  He did not go out for sports, shunning the American baseball and football.  As he tells Watson, he spent some time boxing and fencing.  The boxing was undoubtedly spur-of-the-moment bouts with rowdy class mattes who picked on the reclusive Englishman, because he was so different from the norm. The fencing, sadly enough, had to have been of the barbed-wire-and-post variety.

There is a hint in a later Canonical tale that Holmes had something to do with hogs.  As “The Adventure of Black Peter” begins, Holmes had spent some time that morning in the back shop at Allardyce’s stabbing at a dead pig with a harpoon.  True, it was an important fact-finding venture for the case he was involved in, but the reason such a bizarre method of fact-finding occurred to him to begin with is something else entirely.  The vigor with which he attacked the swine carcass could have been fueled by a long-term hatred of the beast, a hatred that began during his college days.

But whatever went on during his time at I.I.U., Holmes finally escaped after two long years.  He made his way back to London, certainly without his father's financial aid, and established himself

In a career that made him a legend.  In 1885, the Illinois Industrial University changed its name to the University of Illinois and has not quite become a legend.  A little over a hundred years after Holmes’ happy departure from the campus, however, three students at the former I.I.U., now U. of I., formed Champaign-Urbana's first Sherlocklan Society, the Double-Barrelled Tiger Cubs.  Thanks to them, and those who have and will come after, the spirit of Sherlock Holmes remains alive at his alma mater . . . whether he likes It or not.