Sherlock Holmes and the King’s Evil

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I am most grateful for information on Byron’s handwriting from Dr Linda Shakespeare and for Charles Schlessiger’s fellow enthusiasm for the Great Detective.

It was on a fine May morning in 1901 that Holmes and I first made the acquaintance of Raymond Ashley Savile, 3rd Earl of Blagdon. The Earl was in his mid-forties at the time of our meeting.

His grandfather, the 1st Earl of Blagdon, had gained a fortune and a title as the founder of Savile’s Commercial Bank in the City of London in 1839. In the heyday of Victoria ’s England, Savile’s Bank had been a name to conjure with. Plain old John Savile, before he acquired his earldom, made his first million in the railway boom of the 1840s. He then sold his shares in the Great North Eastern Railway and its rivals shortly before the bubble burst. Whatever his profit, he doubled it-and doubled it again-through his stake in Ocean Coal, as well as in several of the new “department” stores which graced London’s West End in the later decades of the nineteenth century.

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