There have been several suggestions for a real person on whom Arthur Conan Doyle might have based his character of Sherlock Holmes - the three most often suggested being Joseph Bell (1837–1911), Joseph Caminada (1854-1914), and Sir Henry Duncan Littlejohn (1826-1914) - but were there also any real cases or events that he borrowed from in creating the plots for his Sherlock Holmes stories? I am aware of only one but I suspect there may be many more.
On the dark, foggy night of Friday 1st December 1882, police sergeant Frederick Cobb and PC George Cole, while on routine patrol, came upon a young thief attempting to break into a chapel in Dalston, East London. When they tried to apprehend him, the villain produced a pistol and fired several shots at close range, one hitting PC Cole in the head and killing him almost immediately. The villain then ran off into the darkness. A search of the area produced a chisel that had "ROCK" inscribed on it, presumably dropped by the would-be thief, while the shooting and the gunman's flight had been witnessed by two local women. Accordingly a number of local lads were immediately rounded-up and brought in for an identity parade, including one who Sergeant Cobb had seen in the vicinity a little earlier that evening, Thomas Henry Orrock. But the two witnesses failed to pick out the man responsible and the "ROCK" clue on the dropped chisel was not immediately pursued, and so all the suspects were released.
Many months later the chisel was finally re-examined and this time under a powerful microscope at the Institute of Chemistry. It was then discovered that there were faint traces of an "O" and "r" before the more visible letters on the chisel (the visible "ROCK", in upper case, appeared to be an over-stamping of a much-worn earlier stamp of "Orrock", in lower case, underneath). This clearly pointed to Orrock as the culprit but by then he'd long-since disappeared from the area.
From, 'The Illustrated Police News', Saturday 6th September 1884.
Over a year after PC Cole's death, Sergeant Cobb learned from some local lads that Orrock had been seen showing-off with a pistol and practising shooting on Tottenham Marshes just a few weeks before the fatal incident. Cobb was taken to a tree that had apparently been used for target practice and there he was able to recover several bullets. A gunsmith matched them to the two bullets recovered from PC Cole's body (one extracted from his head by the hospital that confirmed his death, the other that had been found lodged in the leather belt of his uniform) and moreover was able to identify the likely type of pistol used as being a six-chambered, pin-fire revolver (it was perhaps the very first case using this sort of detailed ballistics evidence). Further enquiries revealed that just such a weapon had been sold privately (via the Exchange and Mart magazine, the advert appearing in the October 1882 issue) to a man matching Orrock's description. Meanwhile one of Orrock's work colleagues at the cabinet-maker's business where he had been employed, confirmed that the dropped chisel was indeed Orrock's, while the knife-grinder who regularly sharpened the men's tools said it was he that had originally stamped - and then re-stamped as needed - Orrock's name onto the chisel, simply to mark it as his property. A search eventually located Orrock in Coldbath prison where he was doing time for burglary. By the time he was brought to court other witnesses had been found who testified that he had possessed a revolver matching the description, that he had returned home on the night in question with a torn coat and without his hat - the missing hat, like the revolver, was never found - and that he'd made some strange but subsequently significant and rather incriminating comments to close friends at the time and later to fellow convicts when he was in prison.
Convicted of PC Cole's murder at the Old Bailey on 17 September, he was sentenced to death and duly hanged at Newgate prison on 6th October 1884. Before his execution Orrock made a full confession that he had shot PC Cole but claimed he had armed himself only to frighten and so avoid capture - it had never been his intention, he said, to kill anyone - and in a message conveyed through the minister who had attended on him during his last hours he earnestly implored the forgiveness of PC Cole's widow.
From 'The Illustrated Police News', Saturday 30th August 1884.
Arthur Conan Doyle's 'A Study in Scarlet' first appeared in 'Beeton's Christmas Annual' published in December 1887. At one point in the story Holmes, Watson and inspectors Gregson and Lestrange, examine the clue of a word written on a wall adjacent to a dead body (subsequently identified as Enoch Drebber). The word, written in blood, is "RACHE" and Lestrange thinks this is an incomplete name indicating that the mysterious woman at the back of the murder is called Rachel, and from then on he refers to her as "Miss Rachel". Holmes however points out that the word is German for revenge, and of course it is Holmes that is eventually proved right. A friend of Doyle's, Arthur Lambton, wrote in his book 'Echoes of Causes Celebres' (1931) that Doyle had told him that the Rache/Rachel clue was based on the Rock/Orrock case. Lambton doesn't say so but the name Rachel may also have come from a particularly notorious London con-artist, fraudster and blackmailer, known in the popular press of the time as "Madame Rachel" (otherwise known as Sarah Rachel Russell or Leverson or Levison) who had died in Woking prison in 1880 two years into a five year stretch for fraud.
The only reason I am acquainted with the case of Thomas Henry Orrock and its link to 'A Study in Scarlet' is because he's my 2nd cousin, seven times (I think) removed: he is my GGGG-grandfather's nephew. Apart from being the family's bad 'un, for a few years in the late 1880s he also had the rather dubious distinction of having his waxwork featured in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors as "The Dalston Murderer". Madame Tussaud's, like Holmes of course, had their address in Baker Street, London.
But if anyone is interested in this or similar cases, perhaps concerning your own 'black sheep in the family', or just because you want to know how police investigations and trials were conducted in the late 19th century at around Sherlock Holmes' time - when logical, scientific, analytical, forensic investigations really started to become the norm - all such court details are available on-line through the trial records of the Old Bailey (and other criminal courts). Newspapers of the time are also readily available on-line, although be aware that the papers, then as now, were often more interested in sensationalising the gory details and airing the juicy background stories, than in getting the basic facts correct.
Anyway I wonder what other real criminal cases Arthur Conan Doyle might have alluded to in his Sherlock Holmes stories.
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