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Gavin Brend was an ardent and unconventional Sherlockian. His book “My dear Holmes”, published to coincide with the Festival Year Exhibition in 1951, advanced many fascinating new theories and earned an immediate place on the shelf beside other major commentators.
The Society owes much to his tireless enthusiasm. Apart from his fine work in organising various meetings, he contributed light verse and original research to the Journal and other periodicals and regularly engaged in learned correspondence with Sherlockians in U.S.A. and elsewhere. His wholehearted thoroughness was quite exceptional. When, for example, the Clerihew competition was announced he weighed in with twenty-one sparkling entries. One is also reminded of his quietly determined pacing of the whole of the Blue Carbuncle route before contributing an article on the subject. This journey took him into five London boroughs, and he was doubtless correct in the assumption that this was a world record since it was unlikely that anyone else had ever covered precisely the same ground.
Gavin’s writing was as logical and knowledgeable as was to be expected from. one grounded in the law, but it was also informed by a robust humour and almost boyish exuberance which were all of a piece with his unruly hair and large round hand.
Nor were his Sherlockian activities more than a part of his many-sided interests. He kept up his association with Westminster School and the National Liberal Club. Another record he modestly claimed was that his membership of the Johnson Society, the Dickens Fellowship and the Richard III group possibly meant that he was unique in belonging to four separate bodies each dedicated to the study of a single person. In this connection, one of his aims was to stage a debate between the Sherlock Holmes Society and the Dickens Fellowship on the proposition that the Blue Carbuncle was a better Yuletide story than the Christmas Carol, an occasion on which as Chairman he would have maintained a cautiously neutral position.
With his gift for wide and instant friendships, Gavin was an ideal member of the Society.
This summary is based on the obituary written by Lord Donegall which appeared in the SHJ 3/4 Summer 1958