I'm working on a summary for last night's December 2025 Watson's Tin Box meeting, but wanted to put a brief separate post together. Last night, Debbie Clark shared with those present that as she has moved out of her home and into new accommodation, a new home for Paul Churchill's Evidence Boxes was needed. This is important, because as I've described before, each month we discuss a story and examine the evidence, which Debbie Clark walks the group through.
A few weeks ago I met up at Debbie's home with her enthusiastic Sherlockian helpers: Denny Dobry and Jeff Decker who came down from PA to help box up the boxes, and gather up the larger items to move to my home. We had help, you see, because it's a little more than sixty boxes: some stories have two boxes, some have a really large box, and some have items associated with them such as a harpoon, a plaster skull, a jellyfish in a jar, bee-keeping equipment, a replica gramophone, a poker, a horse riding crop, a bicycle tire, and many framed pictures, and so on.
It took two trips with my car, and then some frantic time putting together two large shelving units to house it all. For now, that shelving unit is in my thankfully not cluttered basement storage area, and in the coming months it will move to my finished basement area (which may morph into a 221B sitting room - that's the dream!).
I'm honored to be responsible for the Evidence Boxes, until the next person becomes the steward of these unique items.
Recognize any of the stories? In time, I'll be happy to have people visit them, and of course, once set up. I'm also open to displaying a box at a scion meeting.
So along with the evidence boxes came two extra boxes, full of catalog cards. These two boxes were the first effort to create a photographic record and catalog of all the items in all the boxes. They were created by Beth Austin, and after her sad passing in 2020, the boxes were handed to Debbie for safe keeping.
Let's peek inside. These boxes are an amazing archival creation in their own right.
Yes, there's a tab for each story, and each catalog card contains a photograph of an item, and a handwritten quote from the stories. Beth had taken photos of each item between 2010 and 2020, and been printing and arranging these cards. From what I can tell, the index was almost complete. I'll evaluate the catalog cards each time I take a box to the WTB meeting, and work out the best way to complete the small number of stories where there is a little work to finish up - a good project for the WTB scion.
These are so amazing - I haven't counted but there must be over 1,000 cards easily... easily! :
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