Superintendent Barratt

DESCRIPTION: "O, Sherlock Holmes is deid lang syne In some forgotten garrett, But aa o youse hae heard the news O' Superintendant Barratt." Barratt comes north to seek the Stone, dislikes the weather, gives up, and goes home
AUTHOR: Words: Maurice Blythman ("Thurso Berwick")
EARLIEST DATE: 1962 (MacColl-PersonalChoice)
KEYWORDS: humorous travel
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Dec 25, 1950 - Four Scottish students break into Westminster Abbey and steal the Stone of Scone
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
MacColl-PersonalChoice, p. 15, "Superintendent Barratt" (1 text)
DT, BARRETT
NOTES [403 words]: Obviously not traditional; I'm not sure why MacColl included this in what is otherwise a book of traditional songs. Maybe he just wanted to poke John Bull about the seizure of the Stone of Scone -- "the Stone of Destiny," the rock on which Kings of Scotland were crowned, which was stolen at Christmas 1950. Some people still think the "official" stone was hidden away (Magnuson, pp. 679-680), but a stone that was accepted as the original was returned to Westminster in 1951 (OxfordCompanion, p. 842) after being placed in Arbroath Abbey wrapped in a Scottish flag, a symbolic protest since it was there that the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath declares Scotland independent of England (Keay/Keay, p. 847). Still, the first attempts to find it were unsuccessful, which would explain this song.
Contrary to the implication of the song, the theft was not particularly smooth and the pursuit not entirely inept. "In the event, [the theft] only succeeded after a series of errors, narrow squeaks and almost unbelievable coincidences worthy of an Ealing comedy" (Magnusson, p. 675). Among other things, the robbers broke the stone, and were caught in the act by a policeman who was fooled into thinking two of the thieves were lovers making our (Magnusson, p. 676). And while this fellow Barratt may have been unable to find a clue, a certain Inspector Willie Kerr had interviewed the leading thief based on library records (Magnusson, pp. 678-679), so the investigation did involve some original thinking.
The tune is said to be "Barbara Allen." Pick your favorite version....
Incidentally, it cannot be said with absolute certainty that Sherlock Holmes would have been dead in 1950, although the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1930 obviously meant that there were no more true Holmes stories, and the last Holmes story by internal chronology, "His Last Bow," is set in 1914. Doyle never gave an absolute date for Holmes's birth (and probably never decided on one), but "The speculations of scholars have placed this important event variously in the years 1852, 1853, 1854, 1855, 1857-58, and even in 1867" (AnnotatedHolmes, volume I, p. 47). The latter date is not really possible, since Holmes was an adult at the time of "A Study in Scarlet" in 1881, but a date in the mid- to late-1850s is reasonable and, indeed, almost necessary. So he could have still been around, although perhaps not of sound mind, in 1950. - RBW
Bibliography

AnnotatedHolmes: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by William S. Baring-Gould, in two volumes, 1967 (I use the 1992 Wings Books single-volume reprint)
Keay/Keay: John Keay and Julia Keay, editors, Collins Encyclopedia of Scotland, HarperCollins, 1994
Magnusson: Magnus Magnusson, Scotland: The Story of a Nation, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000
OxfordCompanion: John Cannon, editor, The Oxford Companion to British History, 1997; revised edition, Oxford, 2002

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