HELEN HEINRICH, ASH
Remembering Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope
by Kate Karlson, ASH
I met Helen Heinrich, our own “Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope” in the middle 1970s, when we were both becoming active in The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes.
The initial meeting was similar to Alice falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. After seeing some of my Sherlockian writing in various publications, most notably The Serpentine Muse, Helen asked me to lecture on Sherlock Holmes at an academic conference she was holding on eastern Long Island. The fact that I had no credentials to justify putting me on the program didn’t faze her in the least: she had faith in some aspect of my green-as-grass scholarship, and I tried to rise to her expectations. It is more to her credit than my intellect that the theory I postulated that summer remains the core of any public lecture I give today.
Helen also loved to attend Sherlockian events as well as host them. In July 1980, she risked life and limb in a small prop airplane to fly to Kingston, Ontario, where a weekend with Holmes was taking place at the Queen’s University conference center. I recall her dramatic arrival from the airport, her wig precariously askew, but her spirits were high and she was more than ready to join in the good fellowship and discussion of The Master.
I think her most important contribution to our society was showing us “kids” – the younger Adventuresses as we then were – that age cannot wither, nor custom stale our enthusiasm and zest for the Sherlockian game. Although a generation older than the Founding Mothers, Helen would have fit right in at the famous BSI Dinner picket of 1968, because she shared their irreverent spirit of tongue-in-cheek defiance. She certainly fit in perfectly at many of our early annual ASH dinners and other events, where much of the evening’s enjoyment came from the impromptu toasts, learned and libation-aided discussions and private conversations with one’s dinner companions. Helen Heinrich was warm-hearted and wise, an excellent combination in anyone, but most especially, a true Adventuress.
This note from Warren Randall, June 16, 2005
It is with true sadness that I convey the news that our dear Helen Heinrich, Lady Hilda herself, has passed beyond the Reichenbach. She suffered a broken hip last week while visiting family in Montana, and died on Sunday from kidney failure. She was cremated; as she often told me, “I plan on being an ASH to the end.”
