Bedfordshire

Bedfordshire featured in “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” which takes place in January 1903 and was published in The Strand Magazine in November 1926.

It is distinguished as one of the few stories in the Canon where Holmes is the narrator and Watson is not present. It is centred around the attempt by James Dodd, formerly of the Imperial Yeomanry, to contact his friend Godfrey Emsworth with whom he served in The Boer War and who resided with his parents Colonel and Mrs Emsworth at Tuxbury Old Park “near Bedford” but also “inaccessible- five miles away from anywhere.”

Bernard Davies, a previous Chairman of the Sherlock Holmes Society, by using contemporary railway timetables and clues in the story stated that the railway station which Dodd and Holmes used was Woburn Sands and that “Tuxbury Old Park” was Cranfield Court situated on the outskirts of the village of that name.