#allegedlyhist

[stephensmithuk]

The Man with the Watches

Originally written in 1898 as part of a series of short stories called Round the Fire. Doyle needed money to complete a house he was building in Surrey. Insert your own jokes about actors, bad movies and extensions here.

Rugby is a town in Warwickshire, 83 miles north of London. Yes, it is where the sport of rugby is named after - more specifically Rugby School, a famous private school.

Smoking areas in British trains were gradually abolished from the 1980s, the final ones going in 2005 (GNER and Caledonian Sleeper). I have a 2000 GB-wide timetable showing where smoking was still permitted. In some cases, the trigger for the ban was the move to air-conditioned stock that would result in the smoke circulating in the rest of the train.

A Gladstone bag was a rigid-framed small suitcase that could be opened into two equal halves, named as such due to its used by William Gladstone, four-time British Prime Minister, who would start his final ministry later in 1892.

The guard's van on passenger trains was generally a specific section of a carriage that also had a caged area for carrying luggage, parcels and caged small animals.

Willesden Junction is located in Harlesden, NW London. It no longer has any platforms on the West Coast Main Line, with Avanti and London Northwestern Railway trains going straight past it. Its passenger service today is made up of London Overground Lioness line services from Euston to Watford Junction, Overground Mildmay line services from Stratford to Richmond or Clapham Junction and the Underground's Bakerloo Line from Harrow and Wealdstone to Elephant & Castle. The first and third share the same tracks, while the second operates, on lines shared with freight trains, on separate "High Level" platforms. There is a depot for Overground trains nearby.

Non-gangwayed stock i.e. carriages with no connection between them even for emergency use, continued to be built into the British Railways, with quite a few of the "first generation" of diesel and electric multiple units being built this way. Most got gangways in later refurbishments, but the Class 205 DEMU, bar one example (205205) altered in a refurbishment trial, would carry on without them until final withdrawal in 2004. Most of the survivors then promptly ended up in the hands of heritage railways.

The Bible Society of London was founded in 1804 with the aim of providing affordable Bibles in people's own languages, after the 1800 case of a woman called Mary Jones, who saved up for six years then walked 26 miles to buy a Bible in Welsh. It is still active today.

The London to Rugby line had been widened to four tracks in the 1870s. From west to east, the tracks go: Down (Northbound) Fast - Up (Southbound) Fast - Down Slow - Up Slow. Ergo, you cannot move between two Down trains without a big leap. (https://www.opentraintimes.com/maps/signalling/lec2#LINK_1)

A bunco-steerer is a swindler.

Green goodsmen operated a scam in which people were offered purportedly counterfeit notes printed using stolen plates (so appearing genuine) at a cheap price, being shown actually genuine notes in a bag. During negotiation, the bag was switched for one containing worthless goods, like sawdust or green paper. Having been duped out of real money, the victims were reluctant to report this to police as attempting to purchase fake money was illegal.

Card-sharping is cheating at cards using various means, including cutting bits of cards to mark the ones you would want. Vegas casinos frequently deliberately cut corners off used cards being sold to tourists to prevent them being snuck into their games.

Tammany refers to Tammany Hall, the corrupt political machine that had ran New York City, for much of the 19th century, leveraging support from Irish immigrants by providing them with jobs for example. It had been temporarily ousted from power after the Lexow Commission of 1894-95 into police corruption; to wit, promotions were being sold for large sums of money and officers got that through extracting protection money from brothels etc. However, it would come back in the 1898 elections and retain control with occasional breaks until 1961, when Carmine DeSapio was ousted as its leader. It then lost power and had gone by 1967.

Travelling salespeople would carry samples or models of their products on their trips, sometimes in branded containers. This has largely become a thing of the past, but is still around.

Northumberland Avenue used to have a lot of high-class hotels, but these have mostly gone. Some were taken over for government use for a while, including by the War Office.

"Mary Jane" appears to have been a slang term for a male prostitute; Mary Jane Kelly was the final victim of Jack the Ripper.