Annual dinner, The Five Orange Pips, October 6, 1993 According to the late Richard W. Clarke, “The Five Orange Pips, the oldest of all the scions, was established . . . a few months after the founding of the Baker Street Irregulars.” In one important way, I submit, this is a misleading statement. As I have dug into the history of the BSI, I have become convinced that The Five Orange Pips did not consider itself a chapter of the BSI for the first ten years of its existence, not until it finally saw fit to defer to the larger and slightly older body. For one thing, there is no trace of any contact between the Pips and the BSI in those early years. No Pips show up in Christopher Morley’s Grillparzer book. None of them solved the Sherlock Holmes Crossword in the Saturday Review of Literature in May 1934, or attended the early BSI dinners in December 1934 and January 1936. None of the original five Pips attended a BSI dinner until 1945, in fact — although for several years before, they provided an annual quiz which Edgar W. Smith administered to the BSI at the January dinner at the Murray Hill Hotel. Edgar Smith is the earliest known link between the Pips and the BSI, but this was not until 1938, four years after the Pips’ founding — the October afternoon when he rendezvoused with the Pips at the Plaza Hotel, and accompanied them by carriage to Gordon Knox Bell’s home on East 66th Street for their dinner. We do not know how Smith and the Pips first met. At that time, however, Edgar Smith was a member of the BSI by osmosis at best. Two years earlier, in October 1936, he had sent a letter of appreciation to the author of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. But this did not mark an Irregular debut for him, for Vincent Starrett was away in China at the time. It was not until August 1937 that Starrett returned home and found Smith’s letter. Smith learned of the BSI for the first time during the correspondence that followed, and he finally wrote to Chris Morley in August 1938. Morley in the subsequent correspondence which survives never specifically declares Smith an Irregular. In his August 12, 1938, reply to Smith’s first letter, Morley alluded to the possibility of a BSI dinner that winter, and the need to induct Smith “handsomely” at that time. But the BSI did not meet again until January 1940. Well before then, though, I think, Smith came to consider himself a Baker Street Irregular. I would put that around the beginning of 1939. Smith was still addressing the founder of the BSI as “Mr. Morley” in letters as late as December 27, 1938, but by January 7, 1939, less than two weeks later, his letters to Morley open with the salutation “Dear Porky” — a liberty referring to Morley’s favorite canonical alias, Shinwell Johnson. But by that time, Smith had already attended the Pips dinner of October 1938. So I think one would be justified in contending that Edgar W. Smith, the best and wisest Irregular the BSI has ever known, was a member of the Five Orange Pips before he belonged to the Baker Street Irregulars. Of course, just who were members of the BSI in those days has long been rather murky. We know, plus or minus a few fellows, who were at the 1934, 1936, and 1940 dinners, and we have an incomplete list that Chris Morley prepared in 1935. What we have lacked is one of the membership lists that we know Edgar Smith, with his thoroughness and attention to organizational detail, prepared periodically during the ‘Forties. Until now. Last June, I found Edgar W. Smith’s first BSI membership list at the University of Minnesota, in a file of Smith’s letters to Vincent Starrett. Dated December 5, 1940, it lists 48 names and addresses under the heading “Members ‑ Baker Street Irregulars.” We can tell that it was the first list that Smith compiled from a letter he wrote to Chris Morley three days later: “I have added two names to the official membership list which I inherited from you and which governed attendance at the [1940 BSI] dinner,” he said: “that of H. W. Bell, who was unaccountably omitted from the list of those invited to last January’s celebration; and that of Dr. Julian Wolff, whose notable Sherlockian maps qualify him, I think, beyond any suspicion of a doubt for membership.” Two names on this list were unknown to me: B. J. R. Stolper and Howard Swiggett. They turn out to be, respectively, an English Professor at Columbia who once scandalized his colleagues by suggesting that literature should be taught by writers, and a well-known novelist of his day who had links to the New York Police Commissioner, and later to certain cryptic wartime British missions in New York. But I have no idea what their Irregular connections were. The other names on this list are all familiar ones, though some of them were surprises to see on this list. They can be classified by a number of categories: The Morley Boys: Christopher, Felix, and Frank. The Three Hours for Lunch Club and Grillparzer Sittenpolizei Verein: Elmer Davis, Charles Goodman, Frank Henry, W. S. Hall, Malcolm Johnson, Mitchell Kennerley, Robert K. Leavitt, and Gene Tunney, plus several others whose only known connection to the BSI is their presence on this 1940 list of Smith’s. Sherlock Holmes Crossword winners: Basil Davenport, Laurence Dodge, Harry Hazard, Harvey Officer, Earle Walbridge, and some others who turned in successful solutions to Frank Morley’s crossword puzzle in 1934. Notables from the 1934 BSI dinner: Bell, Starrett, and Frederic Dorr Steele. Members by 1935, according to Morley’s list that year: Ronald Mansbridge, Harrison Martland, John Sterling, Lawrence Williams. A few names on Morley’s 1935 list are not on Smith’s in 1940 — sometimes due to death, like Don Marquis, others for reasons unknown. By the time of the 1936 BSI dinner: Pierson Underwood. Ones who came into the BSI at the 1940 dinner: Edgar Smith himself, John Connolly, Peter Greig, Howard Haycraft, James Keddie Sr., and David Randall. And who were added after the ’40 dinner: Julian Wolff. Of other names on Edgar Smith’s December 5, 1940, list: Harold S. Latham was a mystery to me when I first encountered his name a few years ago, when I was doing Irregular Memories of the ’Thirties. In a November 1939 letter to Chris Morley, Smith discussed plans for the January 1940 dinner with the comment “I should be very happy to join the Morley‑Latham Committee to help in the arrangements.” Latham’s identity defied me; but a year ago, thanks to The Cardboard Box here, Ronald Mansbridge was found living in Connecticut, and the mystery was solved. Mansbridge had been the Cambridge University Press representative in the United States, and had his office at its U.S. distributor, Macmillan, where Harold Latham was Trade Editor in 1940. Latham, bless him, turns out to have been the man responsible for publishing Starrett’s 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes, for which the 1940 BSI dinner was a publication party, and perhaps also for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes back in 1933. It was a Macmillan title too. Simeon Strunsky, “dean of grammarians” (as Chris Morley liked to call him), was on Morley’s 1935 BSI list as well, but he never came to a BSI dinner. And the great book collector A. S. W. Rosenbach on Edgar Smith’s 1940 list was another literate whom Morley admired. Clifton Fadiman was on the 1940 BSI membership list, but might be surprised today to learn that. He came to the “Trilogy” dinner in March 1944, but so did literary figures who were not Irregulars. When I corresponded with him about that dinner two years ago, he attributed his presence there merely to his friendship with Morley as fellow Book of the Month Club judges at the time. Most surprising of all, Alexander Woollcott is on this list. Since Smith was working from an earlier list supplied by Morley, one must wonder about the legend of Woollcott cast out into utter darkness after the 1934 BSI dinner, the version to which Robert Leavitt swore in his famous 1961 BSJ memoir of the BSI’s early years. But Edgar Smith clearly considered Woollcott an Irregular both before and after preparing this 1940 list: the inscription in the copy of Appointment in Baker Street that he sent to Woollcott in January 1939 read “To Alexander Woollcott in appreciation for loyal work as a Baker Street Irregular.” And in 1944 he referred to Woollcott as a founder of the BSI in Profile in Gaslight (to Bob Leavitt’s lasting annoyance). Would Edgar Smith, the soul of tact, have added someone like Alexander Woollcott to the BSI’s membership list without consulting Chris Morley, who according to Leavitt would have said not only no, but Hell No? I doubt it. I think the odds are greater by far that Woollcott was already on the list that Morley had provided to Smith before the 1940 dinner. There are also some missing names which demonstrate that even Edgar Smith had his organizational lapses: missing, for example, is P. M. Stone of Waltham, Massachusetts, who had been in Sherlockian circles since the late ’Thirties, and had attended the 1940 BSI dinner — as he would the 1941 dinner a mere month after this list was compiled, and many others after that. Other veteran BSIs-to-be not on the list, but at the 1941 dinner nonetheless one month later, were Philip Duschnes the bookseller, Charles Honce the A.P. editor whose Sherlock Holmes birthday dispatch caught Edgar Smith’s eye, and Jim Nelson, a publishing executive at the time. Now, there is a dog in the night-time to this story. I trust you have all observed that except for Edgar Smith himself, none of The Five Orange Pips were listed as members of the BSI in 1940. No, it was on a separate sheet of paper, under the heading “Membership - Five Orange Pips,” that Smith recorded the names, addresses, and Pips investitures of Gordon Knox Bell, Richard W. Clarke, Owen P. Frisbie, Norman Ward, Frank Waters, Benjamin S. Clark, and himself. To me, these facts are conclusive proof that the Five Orange Pips thought of themselves as a separate and equal Sherlock Holmes society in those days. Here are facsimiles of Edgar W. Smith’s lists of members of the Baker Street Irregulars and the Five Orange Pips, which I am happy to have put on the sundial before you tonight.

Annual dinner, The Five Orange Pips, October 6, 1993

According to the late Richard W. Clarke, “The Five Orange Pips, the oldest of all the scions, was established . . . a few months after the founding of the Baker Street Irregulars.” In one important way, I submit, this is a misleading statement. As I have dug into the history of the BSI, I have become convinced that The Five Orange Pips did not consider itself a chapter of the BSI for the first ten years of its existence, not until it finally saw fit to defer to the larger and slightly older body.

For one thing, there is no trace of any contact between the Pips and the BSI in those early years. No Pips show up in Christopher Morley’s Grillparzer book. None of them solved the Sherlock Holmes Crossword in the Saturday Review of Literature in May 1934, or attended the early BSI dinners in December 1934 and January 1936. None of the original five Pips attended a BSI dinner until 1945, in fact — although for several years before, they provided an annual quiz which Edgar W. Smith administered to the BSI at the January dinner at the Murray Hill Hotel.

Edgar Smith is the earliest known link between the Pips and the BSI, but this was not until 1938, four years after the Pips’ founding — the October afternoon when he rendezvoused with the Pips at the Plaza Hotel, and accompanied them by carriage to Gordon Knox Bell’s home on East 66th Street for their dinner. We do not know how Smith and the Pips first met. At that time, however, Edgar Smith was a member of the BSI by osmosis at best. Two years earlier, in October 1936, he had sent a letter of appreciation to the author of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. But this did not mark an Irregular debut for him, for Vincent Starrett was away in China at the time. It was not until August 1937 that Starrett returned home and found Smith’s letter. Smith learned of the BSI for the first time during the correspondence that followed, and he finally wrote to Chris Morley in August 1938.

Morley in the subsequent correspondence which survives never specifically declares Smith an Irregular. In his August 12, 1938, reply to Smith’s first letter, Morley alluded to the possibility of a BSI dinner that winter, and the need to induct Smith “handsomely” at that time. But the BSI did not meet again until January 1940. Well before then, though, I think, Smith came to consider himself a Baker Street Irregular. I would put that around the beginning of 1939. Smith was still addressing the founder of the BSI as “Mr. Morley” in letters as late as December 27, 1938, but by January 7, 1939, less than two weeks later, his letters to Morley open with the salutation “Dear Porky” — a liberty referring to Morley’s favorite canonical alias, Shinwell Johnson. But by that time, Smith had already attended the Pips dinner of October 1938. So I think one would be justified in contending that Edgar W. Smith, the best and wisest Irregular the BSI has ever known, was a member of the Five Orange Pips before he belonged to the Baker Street Irregulars.

Of course, just who were members of the BSI in those days has long been rather murky. We know, plus or minus a few fellows, who were at the 1934, 1936, and 1940 dinners, and we have an incomplete list that Chris Morley prepared in 1935. What we have lacked is one of the membership lists that we know Edgar Smith, with his thoroughness and attention to organizational detail, prepared periodically during the ‘Forties.

Until now. Last June, I found Edgar W. Smith’s first BSI membership list at the University of Minnesota, in a file of Smith’s letters to Vincent Starrett. Dated December 5, 1940, it lists 48 names and addresses under the heading “Members ‑ Baker Street Irregulars.” We can tell that it was the first list that Smith compiled from a letter he wrote to Chris Morley three days later: “I have added two names to the official membership list which I inherited from you and which governed attendance at the [1940 BSI] dinner,” he said: “that of H. W. Bell, who was unaccountably omitted from the list of those invited to last January’s celebration; and that of Dr. Julian Wolff, whose notable Sherlockian maps qualify him, I think, beyond any suspicion of a doubt for membership.”

Two names on this list were unknown to me: B. J. R. Stolper and Howard Swiggett. They turn out to be, respectively, an English Professor at Columbia who once scandalized his colleagues by suggesting that literature should be taught by writers, and a well-known novelist of his day who had links to the New York Police Commissioner, and later to certain cryptic wartime British missions in New York. But I have no idea what their Irregular connections were.

The other names on this list are all familiar ones, though some of them were surprises to see on this list. They can be classified by a number of categories:

The Morley Boys: Christopher, Felix, and Frank.

The Three Hours for Lunch Club and Grillparzer Sittenpolizei Verein: Elmer Davis, Charles Goodman, Frank Henry, W. S. Hall, Malcolm Johnson, Mitchell Kennerley, Robert K. Leavitt, and Gene Tunney, plus several others whose only known connection to the BSI is their presence on this 1940 list of Smith’s.

Sherlock Holmes Crossword winners: Basil Davenport, Laurence Dodge, Harry Hazard, Harvey Officer, Earle Walbridge, and some others who turned in successful solutions to Frank Morley’s crossword puzzle in 1934.

Notables from the 1934 BSI dinner: Bell, Starrett, and Frederic Dorr Steele.

Members by 1935, according to Morley’s list that year: Ronald Mansbridge, Harrison Martland, John Sterling, Lawrence Williams. A few names on Morley’s 1935 list are not on Smith’s in 1940 — sometimes due to death, like Don Marquis, others for reasons unknown.

By the time of the 1936 BSI dinner: Pierson Underwood.

Ones who came into the BSI at the 1940 dinner: Edgar Smith himself, John Connolly, Peter Greig, Howard Haycraft, James Keddie Sr., and David Randall.

And who were added after the ’40 dinner: Julian Wolff.

Of other names on Edgar Smith’s December 5, 1940, list:

Harold S. Latham was a mystery to me when I first encountered his name a few years ago, when I was doing Irregular Memories of the ’Thirties. In a November 1939 letter to Chris Morley, Smith discussed plans for the January 1940 dinner with the comment “I should be very happy to join the Morley‑Latham Committee to help in the arrangements.” Latham’s identity defied me; but a year ago, thanks to The Cardboard Box here, Ronald Mansbridge was found living in Connecticut, and the mystery was solved. Mansbridge had been the Cambridge University Press representative in the United States, and had his office at its U.S. distributor, Macmillan, where Harold Latham was Trade Editor in 1940. Latham, bless him, turns out to have been the man responsible for publishing Starrett’s 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes, for which the 1940 BSI dinner was a publication party, and perhaps also for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes back in 1933. It was a Macmillan title too.

Simeon Strunsky, “dean of grammarians” (as Chris Morley liked to call him), was on Morley’s 1935 BSI list as well, but he never came to a BSI dinner. And the great book collector A. S. W. Rosenbach on Edgar Smith’s 1940 list was another literate whom Morley admired.

Clifton Fadiman was on the 1940 BSI membership list, but might be surprised today to learn that. He came to the “Trilogy” dinner in March 1944, but so did literary figures who were not Irregulars. When I corresponded with him about that dinner two years ago, he attributed his presence there merely to his friendship with Morley as fellow Book of the Month Club judges at the time.

Most surprising of all, Alexander Woollcott is on this list. Since Smith was working from an earlier list supplied by Morley, one must wonder about the legend of Woollcott cast out into utter darkness after the 1934 BSI dinner, the version to which Robert Leavitt swore in his famous 1961 BSJ memoir of the BSI’s early years. But Edgar Smith clearly considered Woollcott an Irregular both before and after preparing this 1940 list: the inscription in the copy of Appointment in Baker Street that he sent to Woollcott in January 1939 read “To Alexander Woollcott in appreciation for loyal work as a Baker Street Irregular.” And in 1944 he referred to Woollcott as a founder of the BSI in Profile in Gaslight (to Bob Leavitt’s lasting annoyance). Would Edgar Smith, the soul of tact, have added someone like Alexander Woollcott to the BSI’s membership list without consulting Chris Morley, who according to Leavitt would have said not only no, but Hell No? I doubt it. I think the odds are greater by far that Woollcott was already on the list that Morley had provided to Smith before the 1940 dinner.

There are also some missing names which demonstrate that even Edgar Smith had his organizational lapses: missing, for example, is P. M. Stone of Waltham, Massachusetts, who had been in Sherlockian circles since the late ’Thirties, and had attended the 1940 BSI dinner — as he would the 1941 dinner a mere month after this list was compiled, and many others after that. Other veteran BSIs-to-be not on the list, but at the 1941 dinner nonetheless one month later, were Philip Duschnes the bookseller, Charles Honce the A.P. editor whose Sherlock Holmes birthday dispatch caught Edgar Smith’s eye, and Jim Nelson, a publishing executive at the time.

Now, there is a dog in the night-time to this story. I trust you have all observed that except for Edgar Smith himself, none of The Five Orange Pips were listed as members of the BSI in 1940. No, it was on a separate sheet of paper, under the heading “Membership - Five Orange Pips,” that Smith recorded the names, addresses, and Pips investitures of Gordon Knox Bell, Richard W. Clarke, Owen P. Frisbie, Norman Ward, Frank Waters, Benjamin S. Clark, and himself.

To me, these facts are conclusive proof that the Five Orange Pips thought of themselves as a separate and equal Sherlock Holmes society in those days. Here are facsimiles of Edgar W. Smith’s lists of members of the Baker Street Irregulars and the Five Orange Pips, which I am happy to have put on the sundial before you tonight.