CHAPTER 5
To be fair to Frederick Treves, Joseph Merrick could be remarkably vague about the details of his personal life. He was even uncertain over his year of birth, recording it as 1860 in the freakshop pamphlet The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick, which is reproduced as an appendix (pages 173–5). Throughout the pamphlet the chronology is haphazard and unreliable, but we have seen that he was ten years old when his mother died from pneumonia. It was an unfortunate time of life for him to be deprived of her love and affection, though he was always to carry her in his mind as an idealized but vivid memory. The memory was of someone who had seemed the source of all the warmth and comfort he ever knew. For Joseph, the disaster marked the end of his childhood. It was, he wrote, ‘the greatest misfortune of my life … peace be to her, she was a good mother to me’.
The widower Joseph Rockley Merrick now faced several difficulties. He was left with the task of raising two crippled children while combining his duties as engine driver at the factory with running a haberdashery shop. He could not turn to his family for help. His father had died in 1856 and his mother worked in the cotton factories to make ends meet. He therefore decided to break up his home and move his family into lodgings.
He found accommodation at 4 Wanslip Street, Leicester: a little street only a few hundred yards away from where they lived previously. The landlady, Mrs Emma Wood Antill, was a twenty-nine-year-old widow with children of her own. It was to her that he therefore entrusted the care of his own son and daughter, and after a short interval there came about what may be seen as a predictable conclusion: on 3 December 1874, Joseph Rockley Merrick and Emma Wood Antill were married in the Archdeacon Lane Baptist Chapel. Their marriage certificate describes Emma as the daughter of a gentleman.
For Joseph his father’s remarriage was a further calamity. Handicapped by his distressing condition and injured hip, he now found himself living in competition with stepbrothers and stepsisters who were, he said poignantly, more handsome than himself. It was a situation that condemned him to be the odd-one-out in the new family-grouping, and ultimately the family outcast. He could never succeed in gaining the affection of his stepmother, who made his life ‘a perfect misery’. Whatever emotional response his father may have managed to show him in the past, within his new marriage he became decisive in rejecting his lame, ugly and embarrassing son. Most probably his protective instincts came to be centred on his crippled daughter, though there were two occasions on which his sense of duty prompted him to go out and find Joseph and bring him home after he ran away.
Yet another change of address brought the family to live at 37 Russell Square, a house attached to the haberdasher’s. From here Joseph attended the newly built Board School in Syston Street until he left at the end of his twelfth year, the statutory school-leavingage established in Britain by the Education Act of 1870. His education was considered to be complete and the time to have arrived when it was expected he would find work and start contributing to the family economy. It was Emma who was particularly insistent that he should look for work, and it was on the face of it a sensible enough attitude. Given Joseph’s circumstances, however, it was to become a source of bitter and insoluble family conflict.
After a persistent search, Joseph eventually found employment at the factory of Messrs Freeman’s, cigar manufacturers, of 9 Lower Hill Street. He kept his job there for the best part of two years, but by the time he was in his fifteenth year the increasing weight and clumsiness of his deformed right arm and fingers made it impossible for him to carry out the finer movements necessary to the craft of hand-rolling cigars. He was forced to relinquish his post and to enter a long period of unemployment.
Each day, as Joseph tramped about the town in search of a job to replace the one he had lost, his appearance and crippled state went steadily against him. He was becoming ever more keenly aware of the financial burden he represented to his family; he was, indeed, never allowed to forget the fact, facing the endless accusations of his stepmother that he had been idling on the streets instead of searching for employment. Often enough Emma would set his plate before him with the remark that it was more than he had earned, though the plate might be only half full. He found himself the target of sneers and jibes which wounded him so sharply that he began to avoid taking meals at home. For preference, he would limp about the streets, stifling his hunger rather than face the acid tongue of his stepmother, who made no secret of how offensive she found his presence in her household.
His father must by now have been in the uneasy and unenviable position of becoming hopelessly divided between whatever sense of duty remained towards his cruelly handicapped son, his wish to shelter his daughter and the shrill, strong-willed demands of his second wife. At least it may be said in Joseph Rockley Merrick’s favour that he made one more attempt to solve the problem of employment his son faced, even if it was to be his last such effort on the teenaged boy’s behalf. He obtained for him a hawker’s licence from the Commissioners of Hackney Carriages, and thus Joseph, equipped with a tray of stockings and gloves from his father’s shop, was sent out to peddle haberdashery from door to door.
It was by this stage too late for any such venture to succeed, if it could ever have done so. Each year that passed was seeing a steady amplification of Joseph’s deformities. The mass protruding from his mouth was making his speech virtually unintelligible to strangers, and he was now so distressing a spectacle that, as he limped slowly along the streets, people would stop to turn and gaze after him. Some of the more curious might even start to follow behind, staring at him whenever he paused. Any maid or housewife who came unsuspectingly to answer the door would invariably find the sight of Joseph standing on the threshold thoroughly unnerving. He soon came to realize that people avoided answering their doors if they knew it was he who sounded their bell or rapped their knocker.
To support himself, meanwhile, he was expected to sell a set quota of goods each day. It became increasingly difficult. According to the anonymous article in the Illustrated Leicester Chronicle, the day inevitably came which saw his failure to sell the required quantity. Joseph, malnourished as a matter of course, spent the little money he had taken on food for himself. When he eventually returned to Russell Square he received the severest thrashing he ever was given. The blows broke more than his skin; they destroyed the last slender bonds that bound him to his father. He left the house knowing this time he would never return.
As he dragged himself about the streets of Leicester, hawking on his own account and selling whatever goods he could, buying the small amounts of food he could afford, sleeping at night in the lowest of the town’s common lodging houses, he was on the verge of destitution and little more than a vagrant. His father sought him no more.
Joseph Merrick’s Uncle Charles was the only member of his immediate family of whom he kept a warm recollection from this period of his life. His other uncle, Henry Merrick, had left Leicester to make a career in the army that would lead him to serve in India and elevate him to the rank of troop sergeant-major before his retirement to become a publican at Poole in Dorset in the early 1880s. Charles, by contrast, remained in the city of his birth, having taken the prudent decision to become a barber’s apprentice.
An apprenticeship in barbering was a long and arduous commitment. There were the years as a lather boy, hands grown sore from rubbing lather on the sandpaper chins of customers who were shaved only every second or third day. The cut-throat razor was beyond the dexterity of many men to use on themselves and the services of a barber too expensive and time-consuming to be enjoyed more than two or three times a week.
Later, as a young assistant, he no doubt practised techniques on his brothers, besides learning the arts of hairdressing, singeing and beard-trimming. (The beard had returned to favour following a fashion set by soldiers in the Crimean War, when it had, during the winter months of the campaign, been too cold to shave.) Eventually, his apprenticeship completed, he married and in 1870, at the age of twenty-four, opened his first shop as hairdresser, tobacconist and umbrella-repairer at 144 Churchgate. It was to prove a stable soundly based business that brought security to his family and continued in Leicester for four generations.
The lives of Charles Merrick and his wife Jane had not been without their troubles. By 1877, the year in which Charles’s nephew Joseph found himself virtually destitute on the streets, they had seen three of their five children die before the age of eighteen months. As soon as Charles Merrick heard about Joseph’s plight he nevertheless responded directly and practically. He went out into the streets of the city to search till he found the boy, then persuaded him to return with him to the home in Churchgate above the hairdressing saloon. He and his wife would take his nephew into their home to be treated as one of their own.
Joseph continued to hawk haberdashery, but now he enjoyed at least the certainty of knowing he had a place to return to where he would receive understanding and practical support. It was a period of his life that lasted for two years which must have been years of relative happiness apart from there being no remission in the merciless advance of his symptoms. His peddling expeditions grew no easier. It became usual, whenever he ventured out, for a small crowd to collect and follow in his wake wherever he went. In the end his appearance attracted so much comment and attention that the Commissioners for Hackney Carriages, on the grounds of acting in the public good, felt obliged to take measures. When Joseph’s hawker’s licence came up for renewal it was withdrawn.
An arbitrary fate thus once again deprived Joseph of the means to a livelihood, and he can have had few illusions about his chances of finding any other. In his uncle’s household, the extra unproductive mouth to feed that he unwittingly became placed considerable extra strains on the family finances. Besides, his Aunt Jane had in the meantime had another child who lived. Joseph could not expect to continue as such a burden in any circumstances, but this narrowed his choice of action in one direction only. He must seek the co-operation of the Poor Law authorities and apply for admission to the Leicester Union Workhouse, where his grandfather, Barnabas, had died twenty-three years before, not destitute but in one of the beds kept for terminal patients.
He spent the days over the Christmas period of 1879 with his Uncle Charles and family in the house above the shop in Churchgate. The heartache may easily be imagined. Then, during the last few days of the Old Year, still aged no more than seventeen, he parted from the only living members of his family to have treated him with charity and decency and threw himself on the mercy of the parish.
On the first Monday after Christmas 1879, a morning uncomfortable with showers of rain and a southerly wind, Joseph Merrick presented himself to William Cartwright, relieving officer for the No. 2 area of the city. The Board of Guardians responsible for administering the Poor Law in the parishes of the Leicester Union employed two relieving officers, and Mr Cartwright was the junior of them, but his work was nevertheless responsible and difficult. He was answerable for his actions not only to the Board of Guardians who were his paymasters, but also to the law. While expenditure on relief work was stringently supervised and regulated by the board, it was the relieving officer who remained liable to be summoned to court to face charges should he commit the misdemeanour of refusing relief in a case where legal entitlement existed. Should a destitute person be denied relief and subsequently die, the relieving officer concerned could even face an indictment of manslaughter. For carrying out his duties, William Cartwright received a salary of £45 a year.
When Joseph presented himself, demonstrating his deformities and pleading an inability to work, Mr Cartwright can have found little difficulty in reaching a decision. The order authorizing Joseph’s admission to the workhouse was issued. On that very same morning Joseph therefore dragged his lame leg and disconcerting body up the gentle rise of Swain Street, through the grey puddles of Sparkenhoe Street to the Leicester Union Workhouse.
The establishment stood on rising ground, on the south-eastern outskirts of the town. It consisted of a complex of large red-brick buildings, each having three or four storeys of closely spaced and small square windows. The design of the building was monotonous and nondescript in the way of the Victorian workhouse style. Only the main building, which stood immediately within the gates and was flanked by two gatehouses, possessed a touch of monolithic individuality. It presented a high façade of Victorian Gothic architecture, and its great central front door had square ornate headings. A relatively tiny, rather quaint oriel bow-window pushed itself out from the front of the building immediately above the door, while tall thin columns of brickwork, two on either side, ascended vertically to end in little mock turrets high up amid a cluster of graceful chimneys. But the overall effect remained heavy-going, and uncompromisingly authoritarian in intention.
We can be sure the routine of Joseph’s admission was a miserable enough business. Presenting his pass at the gates, he was escorted to the admission block for the ritual of registration. He gave up his clothes after the pockets had been searched, any money found in them being confiscated as a contribution to his keep. His own clothes were put away for when, if ever, he might be discharged. The workhouse clothes issued in their place were made of heavy serge or fustian, drab in colour and undistinguished in pattern so as to make it seem that the inmate wore a kind of uniform. Before he could dress in them, however, he had to undergo the ordeal of the ‘hot’ bath. (A Leicester journalist who once disguised himself as a tramp so as to sample the amenities of the Union ferociously recorded the bitterly cold water into which he was forced at this stage of his escapade.)
Finally an entry needed to be made in the workhouse register. This large brown book, with its list of admissions and discharges, has been preserved in the archives of the Leicester Museum, and faithfully records the admission of Joseph Merrick on Monday, 29 December 1879, giving his name and parish correctly. His year of birth is curiously given as 1861, but this, as has been seen, was a matter on which Joseph remained habitually vague throughout his life. His religion is described as ‘church’, his occupation as ‘hawker’; the reason for admission as being ‘unable to work’.
Beyond the main admission block, pathways threaded their way between tall barrack-like buildings, passing workrooms, labour yards, kitchens, storerooms, laundries until, at the very back, they opened out into the workhouse yards. Here plain wooden benches stood in the shadows of the towering building and the high encircling wall shut out all but the grey wet sky and the wind. To step through any of the doorways was to step into a world of echoing stone corridors and draughty stairways which Joseph, with his lameness, must have found hard to negotiate. There were the communal dining halls, and there were high dormitories where the beds were lined up close together, thin cotton sheets and drab blankets covering straw-stuffed mattresses. When they brought Joseph to show him his bed space, with its small locker for personal belongings, he was looking down at the only corner in the vast complex of buildings that he might call his own.
To comprehend anything of Joseph’s life during his few years in the workhouse we have to understand something of the principles underlying the Poor Law administration. Workhouses were never intended to be pleasant or comfortable; they were meant to solve the problem of deciding which of those among numerous applicants for aid were genuinely in need, which were not. The Poor Law Amendment Act had proposed as an alternative to ‘outdoor relief’ – given as food or money and usually a matter of only a few shillings at a time – that an applicant for assistance should be offered the shelter of a workhouse. Here all his or her needs would be met, but life would be hard, regimented and in general discouraging to anyone not in a true state of destitution. For such a policy to work, the workhouse existence needed to be made at least one degree less attractive than the living conditions of the most lowly paid labourer. In many nineteenth-century parishes, rural as well as urban, such an ideal of harsh austerity must have taken some effort and application to achieve.
The Board of Guardians for the Leicester Union of Parishes first erected their workhouse in 1838, designing it to accommodate 400 paupers. Yet they remained reluctant to apply the so-called ‘workhouse test’ in all its severity and continued to give outdoor relief on a large scale. Unfortunately the hosiery trade on which the town depended then entered a series of depressions. Unemployment became widespread until, in one period during 1848, the board found themselves paying relief to 19,000 people out of a population of 60,000. To their horror they discovered they had disbursed over £19,000 in six months. Reluctantly the board decided to apply the ‘workhouse test’ more generally, but before this could come into force the workhouse itself needed to be enlarged. In 1851 it was rebuilt to accommodate 1,000 souls.
On the day when Joseph Merrick was admitted, there were 928 inmates. All were classed as paupers, but the circumstances which forced each of them into the workhouse varied greatly. Some were elderly, no longer able to fend for themselves; some were widows left without means of support; some were sick and infirm. Then there were the workmen, brought to poverty by unemployment or a sudden recession in their trade; the craftsmen forced to sell their tools before becoming eligible for admission; and the wives and children of these destitute men. Homeless unmarried mothers would also be admitted to the workhouse for their lying-in. Orphans and abandoned children, tramps and vagrants, improvident paupers, even the mentally retarded and unsound of mind also sought refuge there.
At the workhouse gates this unhappy tide of humanity was segregated into groups according to age and sex. Husbands were parted from wives, children from parents, boys from girls, toddlers from infants. Each group went into the separate blocks to live apart, work apart and exercise apart. Only at mealtimes or in chapel might there be the chance of a fleeting encounter or a few snatched words.
Joseph fell within Group No. 1, of adult males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. This was the group which most concerned the workhouse authorities: adult males who had somehow failed to support themselves. Joseph’s companions were thus the broken workmen, the drunkards and dissolute, the inadequate and handicapped, the crippled and retarded. Association with the outright demented he was spared since Leicester possessed its own separate system for the insane.
His life was controlled by bells, from the waking bell as early as five or six in the morning. All other main events of the day – meals, work and rest periods – were signalled by bells. At ten in the evening the doors of dormitories were locked and gas-lamps extinguished. Inmates were forbidden to go outside the workhouse or receive visitors unless they had first obtained a written order from one of the overseers. They were allowed neither beer nor tobacco. Their food was basically nutritional, but plain and monotonous, and suffered from the usual hazards which afflict institutional cooking. There were even dishes that seemed to be inventions unique to the workhouses, such as the oatmeal gruel referred to in some establishments as ‘hell-broth’. Only at Christmas was the boredom of meals temporarily dispelled. To mark the festive season the Board of Guardians at Leicester customarily issued an instruction ‘that the usual Christmas dinner of beef, pork, plum pudding and beer be served to the inmates of the workhouse’.
Petty breaches of discipline were punished by restriction of diet or loss of privilege. The refractory offender, defined as one who transgressed twice within a week, might find himself confined alone for one day or two. Such serious offences as refusal to work or striking an officer of the institution could lead to an appearance before the magistrates’ court and a subsequent prison term. The workhouse, indeed, lived up to its name. None was allowed to remain idle. About its grounds stood the labour yards, sheds whose interiors were divided into stalls so a man might work undisturbed by his fellows. One of the most common among a range of thankless tasks was that of oakum-picking, the beating and unravelling of pieces of old rope and rag into a loose hemp to be reused. It was awkward tiring work, made more clumsy by the fact that many of the mallets provided at Leicester had lost their handles. At the end of each work period the beaten hemp would be carefully gathered and weighed, for there was always a work quota to be accomplished. Other inmates would have to meet a quota for wood-chopping, corn-grinding or the breaking of granite into chips for use on the roads. There was also digging to be done on the workhouse allotments.
For women there was perpetual washing and cleaning, and the hours of drudgery were long. Six and a half hours of washing was considered the equivalent of picking three and a half pounds of oakum. There was also the mending and making of workhouse linen and clothing, as well as work in the kitchens and dining-rooms. For the elderly there were the duties of supervising the infants or the boys and girls, acting as helpers in the lying-in rooms or as nurses for the sick, even taking charge of the mentally retarded. For the younger children there was the workhouse school, where epidemics of minor eye infection caused the Leicester authorities recurrent concern.
Only for the infants was nothing arranged, but then, as late as 1905, a Royal Commission inspecting workhouses was distressed by the provisions it found for the care of infants in many institutions. It spoke with concern of young babies lying unchanged in cold wet cots; of babies who had no hope of getting outside into the sunlight and fresh air, the only attendant present having no means of carrying them all down several flights of stairs from the nursery to the ground floor; of the helplessness of a single attendant faced with the task of feeding a roomful of toddlers from a bowl of rice pudding while armed with only one spoon.
Yet, hard as conditions were, they provided basic standards of shelter and as often as not were comparable with the conditions of home life many inmates had known. There were even families, ‘the ins and outs’, who caused consternation to the administrators by seeming to flout and even exploit the whole ‘workhouse test’ system and to thrive on the existence. These would sign themselves in during times of need, and out again whenever there was a race meeting, fair or market in the vicinity.
At the outset Joseph Merrick endured the workhouse routine for twelve weeks. Then, on Monday, 22 March 1880, he signed himself out, putting on his own clothes again and leaving shortly after breakfast. For two days he sought work, but discovered only that his circumstances remained unchanged. On the evening of the second day he was forced to turn again to the relieving officer for help. On this occasion it was the senior relieving officer, Mr George Weston, who interviewed him and heard his case sympathetically. He was granted a further order for admission, but it was too late to return to the workhouse that night. Only on the following morning did he present himself at the gates. The same ordeal of admission and registration awaited him, though now he managed to give the year of his birth correctly, and his religion as that of his mother, ‘Baptist’. The reason for admission was recorded as ‘No Work’.
It had been a last hopeless protest against the inevitability of his pauperism. Now he must resign himself to this existence, to a life he would later speak of with loathing and horror. On this occasion his workhouse term was to last unremittingly a full four years. There is no knowing what humiliations he suffered, what petty tauntings his condition attracted from both staff and fellow inmates in an institution never meant to be anything but heartless.
About half-way through his workhouse years, probably in 1882, though the precise date is uncertain, an episode did occur to disrupt the institutional monotony into which his life had fallen. His deformities were still advancing and were causing him increasing distress. By the standards even of the workhouse he must have presented a remarkable sight. The mass of flesh that grew from his upper jaw, and which so resembled the trunk of an elephant, was still literally growing. It was now eight to nine inches long and forcing back his lips so that he found it difficult to eat without losing the food from his mouth. His speech was almost incomprehensible, and of all his deformities it was the mass from the upper jaw which caused him most distress. In due course he was referred to the surgeons of the Leicester Infirmary.
There were at that time three surgeons associated with the infirmary (known today as the Royal Infirmary, Leicester), the eldest of whom was Thomas Warburton Benfield, who had come to Leicester as a young man after qualifying in London in 1843. He then held various appointments and won several distinctions, working mainly for the poor in voluntary Poor Law establishments. By the early 1880s he was in semi-retirement, his successor as senior surgeon at the infirmary being Charles Marriott, whose younger colleague was Julian St Thomas Clarke. All three had distinguished themselves during their training and subsequent careers, and they were beyond question highly qualified and capable in their field.
The Leicester Infirmary was itself a good provincial hospital; its results compared respectably enough with those of other hospitals about the country, though they were still depressing enough. As the hospital records for 1882 show, for the 587 operations performed there was a loss of only twenty-three lives – but the operations listed include many such minor procedures as avulsions of toenails, incisions of abscesses, circumcisions, and amputations of fingers. By contrast, of eighteen hernias treated surgically, three died. Two years later, in 1884, there were nine cases that required the abdomen to be opened, and only five of these survived. Mr Benfield, in an address to the Midlands Branch of the British Medical Association, of which he was president, could speak proudly of a mortality rate as low as one in fourteen for operations to remove stones from the bladder, but the most routine operation still tended to be a perilous venture once the risks of haemorrhage, shock or hospital sepsis were taken into account.
It is possible that Joseph was seen by all three surgeons at the Leicester Infirmary, but no records survive to tell us which of them undertook responsibility for treating him. It was most probably Mr Marriott, since Mr Benfield was by now associated only as a consultant. At all events, Joseph was advised that something might be done to help the swelling from his mouth, provided he was willing to risk an operation. It cannot have been an easy choice given the existing hazards. At the best of times, the average expectationof life in the 1880s was still only forty-one years. Yet Joseph placed himself in the hands of the surgeons, ready to take the risks for any relief their knives might bring him. Arrangements were made for his admission.
By that time the long dark wards of the Leicester Infirmary had witnessed a century of suffering. With its 189 beds it differed little from other voluntary hospitals of the day. For support it depended on the contributions of a host of benefactors, whose names and subscriptions were carefully recorded each year in the annual hospital report. It was administered by a Board of Governors selected from among the more generous of the benefactors. Apart from accident or emergency cases, or private patients, admission could only be obtained by a letter of recommendation from a benefactor. The number of cases a benefactor might nominate in any one year was in proportion to the scale of his subscription.
The hospital wards were noisome places, with lines of low beds, each with its neat cotton counterpane. Pictures hung on the walls and the serpentine pipes feeding overhead gas-lamps ran across the ceilings. There were open fireplaces in each ward, involving the inevitable accumulations of coal dust in the hospital corridors. The centre of each ward was dominated by the ward table with bulbous brown legs and, on its surface, large Winchester jars of medicine. There was the ever-present unresolved problem of fleas and bugs in the wards and cockroaches in the kitchens.
The nurses, in long dresses and starchy white aprons, stiff collars and white caps, worked long hours: as many as fourteen hours on day duty or twelve hours on nights; though two hours were free once a week, and they enjoyed one half-day and one Sunday off a month. In their first year of employment, they were paid £1 a month. Some received training, but most, particularly those of the older generation who occupied the more senior posts, had learnt their professions in a hard experience that seemed to scar their personalities with characteristic emotional toughness and cynicism.
From what is known of the hospital routine, we may reconstruct the course of events from the moment Joseph entered the operating theatre. This was a large room where everything seemed centred on the wooden table in the middle, its hinged flaps capable of being folded away from beneath any limb to be amputated. Underneath the table rested a convenient box of sawdust. There was also a black metal box in which the surgeons’ instruments were stored, white china jugs to hold hot water, and the pervasive, irritating smell of carbolic spray. While the nurses continued to wear their everyday uniforms, the surgeons stood waiting in waistcoats, sleeves rolled up as they prepared to scrub hands with soap and lysol before soaking them in, first, carbolic lotion, and secondly a solution of bioiodide of mercury. It was their practice to work bare-handed.
Also awaiting Joseph was an enveloping mask of cotton gauze to cover his mouth and nose, a towel to be laid over his eyes, and then the sweet enveloping smell of chloroform and a continuing but distant sense of pain and panic.
The operation seems to have been a success, for the larger proportion of the ‘trunk’ on Joseph’s face was removed. It can only have been a terrifying and dangerous experience, but remembering it afterwards he was able to dismiss it with the words: ‘I then went into the Infirmary at Leicester when I had to undergo an operation on my face, having three or four ounces of flesh cut away …’
On the corner of Wharf Street and Gladstone Street, close to the Lee Street house in which Joseph was born, there stood a hotel known as the Gladstone Vaults. Its proprietor was Mr Sam Torr, whose official business was listed in the Leicester Directory as ‘Wines and Spirits Merchant and Manufacturer of Aerated Water’. In fact he was already far better known as a star of some magnitude in the British music hall, being a figure of great popularity on the London halls, including Wilton’s, where he presented his song material in the style of the lion comique – the song defining the character role, whether comic or sentimental, and interspersed with patter. After he had made his first fortune working the London music halls, he went to Leicester, not far from his home town of Nottingham, where his father had been a tailor, and at first became licensee of the Green Man in Wharf Street.
When he took over the Gladstone Vaults, Sam Torr certainly had his eye on its possibilities for conversion into a premises with music hall attached. His ambitions were fulfilled with the grand opening there, on 3 September 1883, of the Gaiety Palace of Varieties. Top of the bill for the opening night was Vesta Tilley, ‘The Masher King … The London Idol’, and among supporting acts were Mrs John Wood, ‘Nightingale of the Midlands’, Mr Wilfred Roxby, ‘Legitimate Character Comedian’, and Messrs Young & Sandy, ‘Negro Comedians’.
The hall, reported the Nottingham Journal on the day of the opening,
has been converted into a spacious and excellently appointed saloon for the purpose of furnishing amusement to its frequenters. A select area near the orchestra and the chairman’s seat is reserved for about fifty persons. There are seats for about 200 in the body of the hall, while a promenade gallery will accommodate a similar number. The stage is admirably arranged, and in point of tasteful decoration is scarcely surpassed by the other places of amusement in the town … evidently no expense has been spared to render the hall as attractive as possible.
It was Sam Torr’s declared intention to run his establishment along ‘high class lines’, seeking to cater for the ‘better class society of the hosiery metropolis’. Prices for admission ranged between 6d. and one guinea. The Gaiety had as chairman Mr Will Till, himself a baritone soloist, who introduced the turns and generally presided. It also had a resident orchestra coerced into performing by a lady conductor, Mademoiselle Banvard, who rejoiced in the title of ‘Leader of the Band’. Its proprietor would also not infrequently appear on his own stage to sing an item from his repertoire of comic ditties, the greatest success and constantly demanded favourite being ‘On the Back of Daddy-O’. This he would perform dressed in an ingeniously devised life-size dummy with a wickerwork frame, on whose back he appeared to be sitting while it cavorted to the music. It was a droll effect that never failed.
There were six verses to the song, the first of which ran:
Here I am, friends, how do you do,
They call me Sam the silly-o.
This is my old Dad you see,
Happy, good old Billy-o.
Each verse was followed by the chorus, sung ‘in quick time whilst galloping around stage’:
Gee up, gee whoa, and away we go,
Mind yourself old laddie-o,
Gee up, gee whoa, and away we go,
On the back of Daddy-o.
It has been suggested that the figure of ‘Daddy-o’ was an early version of the ventriloquist’s dummy of the later variety stage tradition, but while Sam Torr addressed remarks to it, he never made it speak in its own right. ‘Daddy-o!’, however, became a well-known catch-phrase of the day, and is said to have been as popular as ‘By Jingo!’ for a time in Victorian London.
In the meantime, the idea was taking root in Joseph Merrick’s mind that the one escape route out of the workhouse open to him – the one hope he could ever have of paying his way in the world – could be to place himself on exhibition as a freak. He had heard that Sam Torr was interested in exhibiting specialities and novelties that might make a turn or display for the Gaiety. It was therefore Mr Torr to whom he wrote. The comedian responded by paying Joseph a visit in the workhouse and summing up his possibilities.
The prospect of taking on Joseph as a property certainly caught his attention, but he was too good a showman to under-estimate the complications. No exhibition featuring Joseph could hope to remain for more than a week or so in any one place before its novelty began to fade. For such a plan to succeed it was essential that arrangements be made to travel to a succession of towns. It all needed a degree of thought and organization.
Sam Torr’s solution was to set about bringing together a group of businessmen with interests and establishments similar to his own. Within a short while he was able to tell Joseph that he had managed to persuade three fellow managers to come in with him to form a syndicate to organize Joseph’s exhibition. As a result, on Sunday, 3 August 1884, Joseph was able to eat his last institutional breakfast, reclaim his clothes, go through the formality of obtaining a release form and turn his back on the Leicester Union and all Poor Law institutions for ever.
It was an interesting group that Sam Torr brought together to manage the promotion of Joseph’s new career. Besides himself there was one other music hall proprietor: Mr J. Ellis, who styled himself ‘the Caterer of Public Novelties’ and owned The Living, a Palace of Varieties at the Bee-Hive Vaults, Beck Street, St Anne’s Well Road, Nottingham. Another member of the group was a travelling showman who specialized in the exhibition of novelties (this rather more delicate term being preferred to ‘freaks’). He was Mr George Hitchcock, known familiarly in the circles in which he moved as ‘Little George’. And last though not least there was ‘Professor’ Sam Roper, a licensed victualler of Belgrave Gate, Leicester, who was also founder of Sam Roper’s Fair, which toured regularly out of Nottingham, across into Lincolnshire and eventually to north Norfolk and King’s Lynn.
Immediately after his release from the workhouse Joseph came under the care of Mr Torr and Mr Ellis. They prepared him for his first exhibition, suggesting he be presented as ‘The Elephant Man, Half-a-Man and Half-an-Elephant’. So far as is known, Joseph’s début before the public was at Nottingham in The Living, Mr Ellis’s music hall. He was also shown in at least two other towns, including his home town of Leicester, according to one account. The time came, however, for the partnership to cast its eyes on the possibilities of London, the great metropolis, especially with the winter season approaching.
By now they were into the autumn, and George Hitchcock undertook to write to his acquaintance Tom Norman, a quick-witted young showman who was just at that time making a name for himself in the novelty display trade. Mr Norman was currently operating two show shops in the East End of London: one in Whitechapel and the other in the East India Docks Road. He replied promptly and agreed to take over the management of Mr Merrick (though in the workhouse release form he was shown he read the name as ‘Meyrick’). It became Mr Hitchcock’s responsibility to escort their client up to London from Leicester.
It is all too easy to see nothing but degradation in Joseph being obliged to uncover his bizarre body to public gaze and ill-informed wondering. Yet, short of a miracle, there had been no other conceivable line of escape from the grinding limbo of workhouse life in which he could only have spiralled ever downwards to an end in the unmarked shadow of a pauper’s grave. Whatever humiliations fate still had in store for him, it must have been for Joseph a time of hope such as he cannot have known for many years as he took the road south to join Tom Norman in Whitechapel. It boded well to hold the key to his financial independence, the one condition that could be in harmony with his natural interior dignity. For the moment Tom Norman looked like the closest Joseph Merrick came to having a fairy godfather.