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3 - Bush Villas

SHERLOCK: MADE IN PORTSMOUTH - 'Walking In The Footsteps Of Doyle'
A ‘talking pictures’ exhibition by the Southsea Visual Impairment (VI) Social Group

Part 3 - Bush Villas

Transcript:

Timecode	Content
0:00:00	Emma: Here we are. So here we are. We're on Elm Grove in Portsmouth, and we're looking at – I would describe it as a fairly drab 1960s building, quite angular with a tiled... [Fade out]
0:00:18	V/O Doyle: I spent a week in marking down the unoccupied houses, and finally settled at £40 a year into Bush Villa, which a kindly landlord has now called Doyle House. I was terrified lest the agent should ask for a deposit, but the name of my C.B. uncle as reference turned the scale in my favour. Having secured the empty house and its key, I went down to a sale in Portsea and for about £4 secured quite a lot of second-hand-possibly tenth-hand- furniture.
0:00:44	Emma: So he arrived, and he didn't have much money, and he set up his home and his little surgery. How do you think he would have felt, Anne, when he arrived here? Anne: A bit apprehensive because he didn't know the city. He was hoping it was a bit like Plymouth, where he was living before, but it's quite an exciting area along here, because it was an up-and-coming middle class... you've got the Lamport and Portsea, the slums going to the west. To the north, you've got the city centre that has become now, but it wasn't then. And lots of little shops going in Elm Grove, small ones, like little Draper shops, tailors, apothecaries, which he might use, cobblers, just different things, small businesses like that. So it would be thriving.... [Fades out]
0:01:48	V/O Doyle: The days passed pleasantly enough, for it was a lovely warm autumn, and I sat in the window of my consulting-room, screened by the rather dingy curtain which I had put up, and watched the passing crowd or read my book, for I had spent part of my scanty funds on joining a circulating library”.
0:02:12	Anne: But the other thing that he would have had, he would have had people ride-... When he got up in the morning, he would have seen people on their bicycles or walking to go to work in the dockyard, because this would have been sort of a thoroughfare as well. Part of it, on the edge off. Emma: And of course, he couldn't advertise. Doctors weren't allowed to advertise. Anne: No, he had to, had to be word of mouth, or just find something that happens, or use... He was intelligent, so he would have noticed if anything happened, to try and go and see if he could help. Phil: There was a.... was an occasion when he was here that there's an accident, an accident. Someone was knocked over by horse along here. And of course, he went out to help, being a doctor. So that would have been a way of publicising his services, because it was then got... made the paper, so it was covered in the paper. So that will have been a way of him getting his name known, you know, so if anything happened in the street, he will have been there and able to act on it [Fades out].

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