Sherlock Holmes and Clan Cunningham

Few in clan Cunningham know that our clan appeared in the very first Sherlock Holmes TV episode, which introduced Dr. John Watson as the assistant of master sleuth Sherlock Holmes. This occurred in 1954 in The Case of the Cunningham Heritage.

Though not the first time that Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson had appeared together on film, Paramount pictures ran a series of 12 films in the 1940s, The Cunningham Heritage was the first to show how the ended up living together and how the two became friends. In the TV episode it revealed Dr. Watson was an army doctor, who had just returned to London after being injured in Afghanistan. At that time, he did not know Sherlock Holmes, and he was only introduced to Sherlock through a common friend called Stanford, who suggested that he might consider sharing an apartment with Sherlock as a way to reduce the high cost of living in London.

The plot was very basic and it revolved around Mr. Cunningham being murdered by his brother, who then tried to frame his brother’s new wife, who he knew had a criminal record.

Throughout the episode Dr. Watson, who was played by Howard Marion-Crawford, added both light humour and an intelligent counterpart for Sherlock. The episode is also notable in that Dr. Watson was intrigued by the fact that Sherlock Holmes did not know, nor did he care that the Earth orbited the sun, because it was considered to be not important, and did not affect his life in any way. This lack of interest in secondary things obviously changed over time, perhaps due to Dr. Watson’s influence on Sherlock.

The first TV series was shot in Paris, and it written by Sheldon Reynolds for the American market, and was not televised in Britain, which is the reason why the first mystery solved together by Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes is linked to Clan Cunningham is not well known in Britain.

The TV episodes from 1954 are inconsistent with some of the earlier films, in that the first episode occurs in the late 19th century (1878 to 1880), whereas the Scarlet Claw, which was filmed in 1944, directly references a quote made by Sir Winston Churchill, thus placing the time of movie Sherlock Holmes to the mid 20th century. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first wrote the story surrounding Sherlock Holmes in 1887, which was prior to the Zulu wars in South Africa, the events surrounding Afghanistan were still well known.

The earliest film of Sherlock Holmes, Copper Beeches, was made in 1912.

The Cunningham Heritage can be found on Youtube, and at archive.org. at https://archive.org/details/SherlockHolmes-TheCaseoftheCunninghamHeritage