249. Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes Smokes a Peterson Churchwarden
I am honored this week to proffer R. Dixon Smith’s short memoir documenting the Peterson churchwarden Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes smoked in the acclaimed Granada Television series (1984-94). I’m an American, but I lived in England—in Cambridge—for a number of years, and Jeremy Brett and I were good friends. I have some information about the Peterson churchwarden Jeremy smoked in the Granada Television Sherlock Holmes series, which aired between 1984 and 1994. Much of the information concerning Jeremy’s pipes I picked up not from Jeremy but from David Round, Granada’s props buyer. JB was left-handed, by the way. Sherlock Holmes was not—all the major illustrators, starting with Sidney Paget, depicted Holmes as being right-handed. As a result, Jeremy had to learn to smoke his pipes and cigarettes right-handed. Jeremy had never smoked a pipe before he became Holmes. His older brother, John Huggins, a clergyman, was a lifelong pipe smoker. When Jeremy was named Pipe Smoker of the Year in 1989 and appeared on the cover of Pipe Smokers Welcome! magazine, his brother teased him mercilessly for being a non-pipe-smoker who wound up on the cover of Pipe Smokers Welcome! Michael Cox offered Jeremy the role of Sherlock Holmes in 1982. After some hesitation, Jeremy finally accepted the part later that year. The series went into production in mid-1983, before which time Jeremy and David Round, Granada’s property buyer, went out shopping for pipes. David bought several, and Jeremy, who’d never before smoked a pipe, was immediately drawn by the Peterson churchwarden. (This shot from “A Scandal in Bohemia” shows Sherlock Holmes’s pipe collection to advantage: the gourd calabash he will smoke in “The Final Problem,” the 124 churchwarden (with oxidized stem and new bend), and in the pipe rack a second Peterson 124 Calabash with unmodified black stem (bowl and stem taken apart), a Peterson XL315 Calabash System, a long white clay and a straight pipe that might be a Dunmore Classic Range. And let's not forget the persian slipper tobacco pouch hanging from the mantelpiece!) Neither Jeremy nor David ever told me precisely which churchwarden they found. What we know now is that Jeremy began the series smoking a slender canted Peterson Dublin (the 124) just as it was, but very soon was rebent by the property department. This was the smooth Dublin calabash offered at the time of the series, from the 1979-80 Peterson-Glass catalog. David bought two identical Peterson churchwardens that day, the second a back-up in case the first was dropped and broken. It wasn’t, but they eventually began using the second pipe after the first disappeared. Jeremy told me that two groups had toured the set the week the first churchwarden went missing, one of which was the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. He felt certain that it was not one of their members who nicked it. Some years later, David Round told me that “we aged both of them,” the “we” implying that it was the props department that performed the magic. The…