The Montague Street Incorrigibles

 With the Dangling Prussian Pub Night coming January 14th of 2022, you might have noticed the subtitle, "The Montague Street Incorrigibles Non-Annual Non-Dinner." It's plainly a take-off on the Baker Street Irregulars Annual Dinner, which will be happening at exactly the same time on exactly the same night. But was this "MSI" club created just for this event?

Not at all. It's the return of a group that originated in 1985.

While the most enthusiastic of Sherlockians have long gathered for the New York Sherlock Holmes birthday weekend in January, or at various weekend events, that has never been enough for us, has it? And after a particularly fun weekend with some great Sherlockians in 1984, one young Sherlockian thought a virtual gathering of such great folks would be a wonderful thing. But it was still 1984, with no way of even bringing such a group together on the same phone call, much less a video chat. The only solution?

Meeting in a fictional place as fictional versions of ourselves.

And thus, the Dangling Prussian was born, named by Sherlock Holmes himself and fictionally created with a bit of inspiration from Callahan's Cross-time Saloon by Spider Robinson, and the main stuff of Sherlockian lore. A pub where it was, literally, always 1895, and Colonel Moran took a shot at someone at the very first meeting.

How did this happen? Well, the members of the club that gathered in the pages of the Prussian wrote their comments for the meeting and sent it to the club editor. That poor chap took out his electric typewriter and combined all of the members' words into the dialogue of a fictional meeting, doing a whole lot of retyping with the very low words-per-minute speed of one who got a "D" in his high school typing class. The publication that came to the members three times a year always had some little very real item from the fictional story in the envelope, such as the Victorian penny in the first issue that caused one to bend over and pick it up, and be missed by Moran's ill-timed bullet.

Nine members attended that first meeting on February 21, 1985 (or 1895, depending upon your perspective). Three of those nine appeared on a Zoom I attended just this week, so the founding members of that fictional/factual group, the Montague Street Incorrigibles still walk among us.

The Montague Street Incorrigibles eventually morphed into the Dangling Prussian Amateur Press Association, when the slow typist got tired of typing. (An amateur press association was a sort of fanzine where every member sent in their own copied pages and the club secretary assembled all those individual pages between two covers and stapled them together.) And in that form, the Incorrigibles and the Prussian went on until 1998. And after that, many of them went on to do regular writings in The Holmes & Watson Report.

The Montague Street Incorrigibles was created in 1985 as a society for Sherlockians who couldn't gather together in person and had to resort to the only technology available at the time. It's now 2021, and we have better technology for doing that very thing, as many Sherlockian societies have done well using. A few new Zoom-only groups have also grown up around the technology, like "Theatre-Goers, Homeward Bound" and "Five Miles From Anywhere." The John H. Watson Society, a formerly journal-based society, was glad to finally have a means to gather in person without actually being in person. After all that, it only made sense, when a gathering theme was needed for a Friday night Zoom on January 14th, to bring back that group from 1980s with a new spin.

And the name works just fine for our current needs as well. If you can't afford to travel, still can't risk the viruses of travel, or just didn't get an invitation to the Baker Street Irregulars dinner in New York, and you're a Sherlockian incorrigible enough to still want a social gathering that night, well . . . .

The Montague Street Incorrigibles is back, and we're taking new members for one night only. Well, one night only so far . . . let's see how this goes. Pub nights at the Dangling Prussian are back!

Here again is the registration link, if you have yet to sign up:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMsd-mspzosGNWrY5QEPzpJIR0YFCGCQMfL