No Shit Sherlock

Apparently the Abbey Road Building Society (later the Abbey National Building Society), began receiving the fan mail for Sherlock Holmes in the 1930's.

221b Baker Street London.

Mr Holmes was supposed to have resided at 221b Baker Street in London, between 1881 and 1904, according to Doyle’s original stories.

There was of course no such address as 221b Baker Street in London, when Conan Doyle was writing his detective mysteries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Baker Street itself existed, but house numbers only ranged in to the hundreds. But by March 18, 1932, London’s street numbers had changed, and the new Abbey Road Building Society headquarters were located at the detective’s fictional address ... well actually at 221 Baker Street.

Almost immediately, mail addressed to 221b Baker Street began arriving at their headquarters, courtesy of the Royal Mail, and the building society decided that for publicity purposes, they would respond to it. So they hired someone to answer Holmes’s mail in the guise of being his 'personal secretary'. They continued this practise until the 2000's, when as a bank now, they moved headquarters. 

Most of the dozens of letters addressed to Holmes that they received, were basically just fan mail from around the globe, or messages simply wishing the great consulting detective well, but the building society were also surprised to find that a fair number of the letters, were from people who’d written to ask for Holmes help in some international, or personal matter or other.

These secretaries used to respond to fans letters by letting them know that Mr Holmes had retired to the countryside to raise bees on a farm on the South Downs in Sussex. This location being where Arthur Conan Doyle himself claims the detective went in his twilight years, in the short stories. But some of the more creative secretaries even replied occasionally as in the guise of Sherlock Holmes himself, by using quotes from Doyle’s books. Saying that he had “given myself up entirely to that soothing life of Nature for which I had so often yearned during the long years spent amid the gloom of London.”

In 1989, the then Holmes personal secretary Nikki Caparn, told The New York Times that ''Mr. Holmes has been asked to help with Watergate and Irangate, to solve the murder of Olaf Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, and find lost homework to prove to the teacher that the student really did it.” ... apparently “Many people know he's not real and write tongue in cheek. But some people haven't worked it out. The stories were written in the late 1800's and early 1900's and Mr. Holmes would be 136 years old now, so it's unlikely that he'd still be living here.''

The publicity this engendered the building society was so good, that the Abbey National Building Society even had a small plaque commissioned to sit outside their headquarters building, and on their 150th anniversary, they even paid for the creation of the bronze statue of Sherlock Holmes, that currently sits outside the Baker Street entrance to the London tube station.

Matters soured a little, when in 1990, the Sherlock Holmes museum opened between 237 and 241 Baker Street, and they argued that as 'an authority' on Sherlock Holmes, they should now deal with his correspondence in future. This despite the fact that the building society had been doing a very good job of it for six decades. The whole matter went to the courts, where the building society won (they occupied 221 Baker Street, and possession is nine tenths of the law). The museum kept agitating over their claim, but got nowhere until 2002, when the now bank left 221.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum - Baker Street.

So what happened when the Abbey National Bank moved out of 221 Baker Street? Well apparently the Westminster City council, which had seemingly grown pretty sick and tired of dealing with the museums claims, decided to grant the museum exclusive rights to use the address 221b Baker Street, not withstanding the fact that the museum itself still resided between 237 and 241 Baker Street.

So now letters to 221b are diverted to the Sherlock Holmes Museum, and they presumably respond to all Sherlock Holmes’s fan mail ... sadly therefore, the post of Sherlock Holmes personal secretary is no longer on the banks payroll.