An Irishman’s Diary about the London of Arthur Conan Doyle, Gerry Rafferty, and WB Yeats

Sunday was gorgeous in London – a stark contrast with Dublin, I gathered. So as I left my hotel on Baker Street around noon, strolling northwards in autumn sunshine, I decided that a visit to the Sherlock Holmes Museum could await another day, and headed instead to Regent’s Park.

In passing, I noted that the museum’s address is doubly fictional. After all, when Arthur Conan Doyle arranged for Sherlock Holmes to live at 221B, he had to avoid identifying someone’s actual home. And there was no 221B in the 1880s, since the street numbers didn’t yet reach that high.

When, after an extension, they did, the detective’s notional address (and several others around it) became the accidental inheritance of an office block, housing a building society, which used to have a full-time secretary assigned to dealing with Holmes’s mail.

Museum

But despite being several doors away, at No 239, the museum had the advantage of being in a terraced townhouse just like the one Holmes was supposed to have lived in.

So in the 1990s, it acquired both the historic blue plaque and the official number 221B, out of sequence, leading to a lengthy dispute over who had rights to the detective’s post, until the building society closed down and settled the issue.

Conan Doyle, by the way, was the Scottish-born son of Irish emigrants. And so, in a odd coincidence, was the other man who immortalised Baker Street.

In fact, as I passed the address where the fictional Sherlock Holmes didn’t live, I must also have passed the flat where the real-life Gerry Rafferty did, back in the mid-1970s when he wrote his most famous song.

The song was inspired by disillusionment with the London music scene, and specifically by the break-up of his band Stealer’s Wheel, after which “everybody was suing each other”. While living on Baker Street, Rafferty was catching overnight trains up and down to Glasgow regularly to consult lawyers.

But the mess was resolved eventually, allowing him to move on. Hence the lyrics’ upbeat ending: “When you wake up it’s a new morning/The Sun is shining, it’s a new morning/And you’re going, you’re going home”. Which perfectly matched both the weather there on Sunday, and Raphael Ravenscroft’s glorious saxophone solo – by now playing on a loop in my head all the way to Regent’s Park.

From Regent’s Park, in fact, I continued on up the steep incline of Primrose Hill, where a crowd had gathered to enjoy the panorama of London. There, among other things, I was following the childhood footsteps of WB Yeats, who lived nearby at 23 Fitzroy Road (where Sylvia Plath would also one day stay), between the ages of about two and eight.

‘Melancholy London’

He was an unhappy child in London, it is said. And despite returning there a lot in adult life, he never quite bonded with the city. “This melancholy London,” he once wrote; “I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually.”

A worse insult to the great metropolis, arguably, is his most famous poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Yes, the words are mainly about wanting to be in Sligo, but they're also about not wanting to be in London, where he was when the idea struck him.

In that respect, at least, the theme is similar to Rafferty’s song. But unlike Rafferty, Yeats didn’t even name-check the place of his homesickness (Fleet Street, apparently, on a Sunday morning in 1888), dismissing it merely as an anonymous set of “pavements grey”. The precise trigger for the poem, according to the man himself, was the sound of water in a shop-window fountain. It reminded him of an old daydream whereby, like Henry Thoreau in Walden, he would one day give up “women and love” and retreat to an island in Lough Gill, seeking wisdom.

As we now know, he never succeeded in conquering the woman addiction. But the memory of the plan did at least inspire one his best works.

I didn’t get to follow Yeats’s steps to Fleet Street on Sunday, alas, because by now I too sensed the trickling of water, calling me home. As I soon realised, it was the raindrops in Croke Park, not the waves of Innisfree, that were lapping in my brain. Either way, it was 3pm, time to interrupt my literary and musical tours of London and jump on a Tube to Leicester Square, where I had an urgent appointment with a television set in Waxy O’Connor’s pub.

@FrankmcnallyIT