Sherlock Holmes and the secret of the Baja
Nigel Bruce, the quintessential bumbling Englishman of the movies, may have been a better actor than we give him credit for. One might expect the second son of Sir Michael William Selby Bruce, 11th Baronet of Stenhouse and Airt (and Lady Bruce, naturally) to have easily slid into the character of a slightly befuddled vaguely upper-crust Englishman, but Nigel Bruce was born in Mexico… Ensenada, Baja California to be exact: 4 February 1895.
So, how did Dr. Watson end up being born in Mexico? Elementary… his parents were on vacation. A-HA! The game’s afoot… a doctor, you say? And a Mexican? Perhaps we can use our deductive reasoning to determine how exactly Holmes acquired his cocaine connections.
A tip of the deerstalker to Maggie Drake, who in the spirit of the great consulting detective… caught something on PBS and checked the Wikipedia.
I say, this isn’t the normal typeface, but I was hounded into using Baskerville.
mexfiles.net 
There was a strong British presence in Baja California during the latter half of the nineteenth century. “La Compañía Inglesa” owned the rights to a great deal of land between Ensenada and San Quintín and attempted to sell off much of it to farmers. The company headquarters, the building for which is still standing, was in Ensenada while their sales effort was concentrated in San Quintín. The company built a flour mill and imported wheat by sea in order to show prospective buyers what appeared to be a, er, flourishing agricultural economy.
The English couldn’t make a go of it, sold their interest to a U.S. company, and went back home. A few stayed behind and have since become well-established, such as the Crosthwaite family.
Perhaps Sir Michael was really in Ensenada on business?