Hat that’s deer to Sherlock
QUESTION Did Sherlock Holmes wear a deerstalker in any of the stories?
ARTHUR Conan Doyle (18591930) wrote 56 short stories including four novels of the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. In his entire canon Conan Doyle never mentions the deerstalker explicitly. In Silver Blaze (December 1892) we do get: ‘Sherlock Holmes, with his sharp, eager face framed in his ear-flapped travelling-cap...’
The iconic image of Holmes wearing his deerstalker cap and Inverness cape came from the illustrations of artist Sidney Paget (1860-1908). In 1891 the short tale A Scandal In Bohemia became the first of 24 stories published in The Strand magazine and illustrated by Paget. These would later be collected in book form as The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs Of Sherlock Holmes.
The deerstalker first featured in an illustration from The Boscombe Valley Mystery (1891) with Holmes and Watson travelling by train, with the caption: ‘We had the carriage to ourselves.’
The inspiration for Holmes was physician Dr Joseph Bell, who often donned the deerstalker, and Paget himself wore the hat. As the name suggests, deerstalkers are worn for hunting and shooting.
Paget thought it was fitting that Holmes wore a hunting cap while he was ‘on the hunt’ for the solution to a mystery.
Originating in Scotland, it is a cloth cap made in the traditional tweed with a brim at the front and back as well as large ear flaps.
The iconic image of Holmes in a deerstalker was cemented in the series of 14 films released between 1939 and 1946 featuring British actors Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson.
Ever since, the actors portraying Sherlock Holmes continue to wear this hat. Notable wearers include Douglas Wilmer, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Jeremy Brett, Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey Jr and even Michael Caine – in the spoof film Without A Clue.
Michael Brooks, Kendal, Cumbria.
QUESTION Who are the leastdeserving Nobel Prize winners in history?
IN 1949, the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine ‘for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses’. The leucotomy is better known today as a lobotomy, an operation involving an incision into the prefrontal lobe to mitigate severe symptoms of mental illnesses.
In 1935, at the Hospital Santa Marta in Lisbon, Moniz initiated the first of a series of psychosurgical operations on the brains of people with mental illnesses. He drilled holes in the person’s skull and injected pure alcohol into the frontal lobe to destroy the tissue and nerves.
The following year, American neurologist Walter Jackson Freeman adopted the procedure and renamed it the lobotomy. By 1945, Freeman modified the procedure again and created the transorbital lobotomy, which he could perform quickly without leaving any scars.
This highly traumatic brain procedure was picked up as a miracle cure for mental illness, and more than 60,000 surgeries were performed globally, leaving many patients with permanent brain damage – including personality changes, emotional blunting and cognitive impairments.
Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his role in negotiating a ceasefire during the Vietnam War. The Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Kissinger along with Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese negotiator. Le Duc Tho declined his half of the award, and two members of the committee, who had voted against Kissinger’s selection, resigned in protest.
According to his detractors, Kissinger helped prolong the Vietnam War and expand the conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East
Timor and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported military coups throughout Latin America. According to Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow, Kissinger had the blood of at least three million people on his hands.
In 2009 Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize ‘for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’. It drew widespread criticism as it was just nine months into his presidency. Detractors point out the dramatic increase in the use of drone strikes during his tenure, targeting Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.
German scientist Fritz Haber has been described as the ‘man who fed billions and killed millions’. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918 ‘for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements’, having developed a method for producing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, used to manufacture artificial fertiliser.
He was also the originator of gas warfare during World War I. He came up with the idea of releasing toxic chlorine gas into enemy trenches. In April 1915, the first gas attack of World War I was carried out in Flanders. Haber went on to create mustard gas and phosgene gas.
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