Non-dramatic acts, like the ‘Fantoccini’ – ingenious mechanical puppets – or the Catawba Indian chiefs newly arrived from America, were little more than staged versions of the many curiosities and raree-shows that could be found about London on any given day of the week. Others were more lavish, in particular what Wordsworth referred to as ‘recent things yet warm with life’, the dramatisations of current affairs on which Sadler’s Wells was starting to build a reputation. This could mean something as simple and hasty as songs mocking modern follies, like James Graham’s ‘Celestial Bed’, a mattress on which infertile couples were ‘guaranteed’ to conceive (the Duchess of Devonshire had been a customer), or an acrobatic display in which Paulo Redigé leapt through ‘an Air Balloon all on Fire’ a mere two days after Vicenzo Lunardi had mounted London’s first-ever manned balloon flight from the artillery fields in City Road.
At its most ambitious, Sadler’s Wells staged full military re-enactments like The Battle of Fockschau, which replayed Hungary’s recent defeat of the Turks using every device at the theatre’s disposal to give the audience a window on to world affairs. Recasting the conflict in suitably melodramatic shades of good and evil, the whole company did battle among gun-smoke and cannon-blasts to the accompaniment of a thundering score. A variation on this theme had the soldiers played by dogs, ‘dog dramas’ having become popular following the 1784 phenomenon of Moustache, a dog whose performance in a play called The Deserter required him and his platoon of hounds to mount an attack on an enemy position. Frederick Reynolds fondly recalled seeing the dog ‘in his little uniform, military boots, with smart musket and helmet, cheering and inspiring his fellow soldiers to follow him up the scaling ladders, and storm the fort’. It was such a hit with the fashionable set, he said, that the Wells ‘resembled the Opera House on a Saturday night’.
Not unsurprisingly, the season following Moustache’s triumph was a veritable menagerie: a hare beating a drum, bulldogs lifted twenty feet into the air on a balloon by their teeth (to demonstrate British tenacity), a singing duck, two horses dancing a minuet, and a pig, much admired by Samuel Johnson, that could read and tell the time.
With engagements at both theatres, Joe was working non-stop from the start of the Drury Lane pantomime on Boxing Day through to the end of the Wells season in late summer. Compared to most of the working-class children living around Clare Market, he was well-off, with opportunities and good pay. Yet even by eighteenth-century standards, the theatre was a poor environment for a child, peopled by a dissolute crowd who, according to Sir Walter Scott, prosecuted ‘their debaucheries so openly that it would degrade a bagnio’. Actors could be charming, brilliant and philanthropic, but they were also fickle, vexatious and capable of taking vanity and dissipation to extremes. The air backstage was as thick with feuds and adultery as it was with mould and patchouli, encouraged by a prurient public who loved theatrical gossip and the frisson it added to performances. The green room was a constantly shifting terrain of jealous factions plotting to have their enemies disgraced or paying footmen to have their rivals jeered. Endemic alcoholism and the temptations of a celebrity lifestyle inspired habits that led frequently to an early grave. In this hard-drinking age, in which the Prime Minister regularly downed a bottle of port before attending Parliament, and the Prince of Wales drank six bottles of claret after dinner, which ‘scarce made a perceptible change in his countenance’, actors habitually outdid civilians from the moment they were dressed, reeling through rehearsals and delivering slurred performances before going on extended sprees that ended in run-ins with the Watch.
Sheridan led by example, along with his good friend, Drury Lane’s star singer, Michael Kelly, who, looking back on his time at the theatre, admitted, ‘My wine bills were very large; the purple tide flowed by day and night; and I never stopped it, for then “I took the DRUNKARD for a GOD”.’ (Kelly’s nickname was ‘Composer of Wines and Importer of Music’.) Even the ascetic Kemble had problems controlling the opium and alcohol he took for asthma brought on by the stress of constant performing, and which sometimes caused major lapses in judgement, such as when he appeared in Maria de Camp’s dressing room and attempted to molest her (she went on to marry his brother, Charles).
Many had been horrified by the very public decline of the beautiful Sophia Baddeley, a singer and actress captured in her prime by Zoffany. Revelling in her popularity, she took a succession of rich and aristocratic lovers, squandered her money and damaged her health with extravagant living. Debts forced her out of London, and she died in Edinburgh an emaciated wreck on the verge of starvation and driven insane by an addiction to laudanum. Ironically, Baddeley lived in fear of her five-year-old son being corrupted by the theatre and begged Sheridan to petition his powerful friends for charity so that she might send him away to school. She was wary, no doubt, of the many sexual predators that lurked both before and behind the curtain.
Joe would also have been familiar with this type, as his father was one of them, although the exploitation of children in the theatre ran far deeper than individual cases of sexual abuse. Implicit in the very idea of eighteenth-century theatre, and central to its mission to entertain, was the display of children for the sexual titillation of older men. This was the real motivation behind Charles Dibdin’s attempts to found a company at the Royal Circus in which no performer was older than fourteen. It was not just the Signor whose morals were being investigated by the Surrey magistrates, for, as the London Chronicle observed darkly, ‘horsemanship … was only intended to be served up as a dessert’.
The trend lasted far enough into the nineteenth century to be condemned by Dickens in the character of Nicholas Nickleby’s Ninetta Crummles, a fifteen-year-old ‘infant phenomenon’, fed an ‘unlimited allowance of gin-and-water’ to keep her looking ten. It was not without reason that Sheridan called his theatre ‘the greatest Nursery of Misery and Vice on the Face of the Earth’.
Irrespective of the hazards, children were everywhere – as performers, in the corps de ballet, as house servants and assistants to the prompters, stage-hands, call-boys and seamstresses, or being nursed during rehearsals by actresses who refused to let pregnancy slow their careers.* All the Grimaldi children were made to perform, though none of them relished it like Joe.* Not only was Joe a natural, but life at the theatre was far preferable to life outside it, and provided him with a ready-made gang of like-minded children as friends. The best of these were Richard Lawrence and Robert Fairbrother, two talented boys who had also been performing since infancy. Richard was the son of a Sadler’s Wells tumbler and swordsman, Joseph Lawrence, who was sometimes billed as ‘the Great Devil’ and sometimes as ‘Le Grand Saut du Trampolin’. Richard had initially followed in his father’s footsteps but eventually chose music over acrobatics to become a good composer and band leader, a decision that was probably influenced by a near-death experience at Astley’s Amphitheatre when a flying chariot he was riding in fell from the fly-tower and plummeted to the stage. Fairbrother, ‘friend Bob’, as he was known, was another slum child employed for a pittance in supernumerary roles. He was friendly, industrious and quick, and while he would soon outgrow the ranks of extras to become a decent pantomimist, he had keen entrepreneurial instincts that led him first to become a fur wholesaler and then an undertaker, before eventually becoming Sheridan’s confidential secretary at Drury Lane.
With so many of them and so little supervision, the children frequently ran wild, even while performances were taking place. ‘There was no keeping the little boys in order … they made such a terrible noise behind the scenes,’ complained Michael Kelly, of a flock of sprites summoned to appear in Macbeth. Intended as a whimsical atmospheric interlude, they had burst on to the scene like a riotous mob, breaking the set and scaring the actors, egged on by their mischievous ringleader, a boy called Edmund Carey, who would later become the most famous tragic actor in Britain under the name of Edmund Kean.
But their exuberance was more than outweighed by the ha
rdship they were forced to endure. As an adult, Kean would claim that he had had to wear callipers at the age of four due to the severity of the acrobatic training he’d received at Drury Lane. True or not, child performers were certainly expected to risk illness and injury, working sixteen-hour days in buildings that were cold, dark and leaky, hazardous concatenations of dingy workshops, greasy corners, trapdoors and lethal machinery that gave one observer the impression ‘of being in an unfinished house before the floors are laid’. Most of their time was spent in the Stygian gloom of communal dressing rooms heated by one small wood-burning stove, or in the enormous, dripping cellars where they rehearsed among long-forgotten props and fraying scenery.
Under the stern eye of the Signor, the children would start the day lined up facing the wall with their soles pressed flat against the skirting and their heels together to ‘set’ their feet. The very youngest would then be given lessons in posturing – holding dramatic poses representing historical or classical subjects – while around them the older ones progressed through a series of exercises in balancing, gymnastics, walking on stilts, slack-wire and tightrope walking, singing, dancing, fencing, and performing on musical instruments (Joe, like his father, was a competent violinist).
The Signor was not the only martinet. If anything, the equestrian prodigy Andrew Ducrow’s father was even worse. John Ducrow, the ‘Flemish Hercules’, known for balancing coach wheels on his chin, made his son sit under his chair like a dog while he drank himself senseless, horsewhipped him if he fell or made mistakes while training, and was once so enraged when the boy dislocated a wrist and an ankle that he set fire to their house, forcing Andrew to douse the flames while hobbling around on his crutches. Another time, he beat him for breaking a leg during a performance. Joe, older than Andrew, couldn’t bear to see it, and once intervened to stop one of the beatings becoming something far worse. Such random interventions were the only form of appeal the children had. Occasionally a dissenting voice might be heard, such as that of Robert Paulet, a visitor to the Wells, who asked, ‘Whence can arise the pleasure of seeing children suspended in the air, or tossed about, at the utmost hazard of their lives, to gratify the avarice of unnatural parents?’ To the vast majority of theatregoers, this was the view of a crank minority.
By six years old, Joe was already established as a professional, catching the eye of a critic from the Gazetteer at a benefit for Covent Garden’s recently arrived Continental dancer Augustin Bithmere, who wrote that ‘the infant son of Grimaldi performs in an astonishing manner’. By seven, he confirmed his status through the accumulation of regular injuries, the first acquired at Sadler’s Wells playing the Signor’s monkey, led by a chain attached to his waist that the Signor would use to swing him around his head ‘with the utmost velocity’. One night it broke, hurling Joe into the lap of a gentleman seated way back in the pit. Another time, playing a cat in Hurly Burly, the Drury Lane pantomime for Boxing Day 1785, Joe ran onstage in costume only to fall thirty feet through an open trap because someone had forgotten to cut eye-holes in his suit. He was lucky to break only his collarbone, but was unable to perform again until the Sadler’s Wells season opened the following Easter. On these occasions, the Signor would mix a soothing embrocation to a recipe he had inherited from the Paris fairs. Made from ‘two new-laid eggs, half a pint of verjuice, two ounces each of camphorated oil and spirits of turpentine’, it was to be rubbed into the muscles two or three times a day and accompanied by an edifying cocktail of vinegar and gin.
Though the theatre took up almost all of Joe’s time in these early years, there was a period between the end of the Sadler’s Wells season and the beginning of the Drury Lane pantomime when he was unemployed. During these three-or four-month breaks, the Signor enrolled him in Mr Ford’s Academy, a boarding-school in Putney, where he learnt to read and write alongside a number of other theatrical children who included Henry Harris, son of the manager of Covent Garden and Joe’s future boss. Joe liked school well enough, though he had no great talent as a scholar, admitting as an adult that he had always been a poor reader who found it especially difficult to learn his lines. The Monthly Magazine recalled that, even in his prime, Joe was ‘like Bottom the Weaver, “slow of study”’, taking five or six weeks to mellow himself into one of his songs. Until he had done so, he used to bring in a large sheet, on which the words were inscribed, and, to use his own phrase, ‘ax their leave to sing it to paper’.
Neither did he speak well, particularly conscious of his unusual voice, an Italian–Cockney hybrid described as ‘laugh, scream, and speech’ all at once. It was ideal for buffoonery, but it made him uncomfortable when called upon to read aloud in class. His struggles with literacy were unsurprising given the patchy nature of his schooling, but there is also a strong possibility when we consider the disproportionate instance of dyslexia among performers in general, and comedians in particular, that his difficulties with reading were more significant, in turn reinforcing his commitment to humour as a means of masking social embarrassment.
Joe much preferred sketching and drawing to reading and writing, and the quality of his drawings preserved in the Harvard Theatre Collection show him to have been an able draughtsman. He also began to develop his life-long passion for making scale models of scenery, a hobby he’d learnt from Delpini. Possessed of an amazing memory for detail, he would rebuild entire sets in miniature and make improvements to misfiring tricks and unwieldy changes. His collection of models eventually grew so large that he ended up giving most of them away.
Mr Ford’s also gave him the opportunity to experience at first hand the most notable privation of any eighteenth-century education – school dinners. Gruesome meals of milk porridge, stewed shins of beef and ‘scanty mutton scrags’ were served up daily, indigestible treats washed down with each boy’s weekly allowance of two and a half gallons of small beer. These horrors made such a lasting impression on Joe that even fifteen years later he was still playing through the miseries of the table, animating his clown with a scouring hunger that caused him to raid butchers’ shops in search of a paradisaical pie or the perfect string of sausages with which to stuff his capacious clown pockets.
Thus the pattern of Joe’s childhood became fixed around the twin orbits of school and the theatre. When not spending long days backstage and performing at night, he struggled over grammar, played with his brother John and their friends outside Drury Lane or swam in the New River before tracking home, tired, to their house in Little Russell Street and the love and serenity of his mother. It was a demanding life, physically challenging and subject to strict discipline, but full of excitement and the thrill of laughter. All that, however, was about to change.
* Dora Jordan had played a fifteen-year-old boy while heavily pregnant, and Madame Mercerot, one of the Signor’s apprentices, continued her sword fights until a month before she was due. Both were outdone by Sarah Siddons, who went into labour while performing in As You Like It.
* A possible exception was Mary, the Signor’s eldest daughter with Mary Blagden, who had married one of his apprentices, the gangling underdog Lascelles Williamson, whose best turn was the ‘Elizabethan egg dance’, a sort of blindfold Highland fling in which he bobbed in and out of a circle of eggs without breaking them.
3
HARLEQUIN’S FROLICS
We ought not therefore be surpriz’d at the seemingly whimsical Precaution of some Persons, who have in their Wills ordered, that they should not be put in their Coffins till at least forty-eight Hours after their apparent Death, and till all the different Methods of Incision, Puncture, and Burning have been tried upon them, in order to acquire a greater Certainty of their Deaths.
Jacques-Bénigne Winslow, The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death (1746)
JOE’S FATHER FIRST SHOWED signs of failing health on 13 January 1784, midway through a performance of Fortunatus, in which he was appearing as Clown. The exertion of clowning in his early seventies had finally caught up with him, and reports
from the theatre claimed that he was ‘extremely ill’. Within three weeks, however, he had rallied, his legendary strength allowing him to reprise the role eighteen times in a new pantomime called Harlequin Junior before the close of the Drury Lane season and the resumption of duties at Sadler’s Wells. When Drury Lane reopened for the 1784–5 season, the Signor was there again, playing Clown in a ‘pantomime olio’, a compilation of favourite scenes, ‘partly new and partly selected from old and approved pantomimes’, called The Caldron, that ran through the end of one season and the beginning of the next, right up until the début of Hurly Burly, the new Christmas show, in which he played Clodpate, one of Clown’s many guises.
That Boxing Day was a bad one for both father and son, as the performance in which Joe broke his collarbone also proved to be the Signor’s final appearance at Drury Lane. At some stage during the performance he was unable to continue, and the management had to pull the entire production and replace it with an old favourite called The Romp, a substitution that the Morning Chronicle, even as it noted Grimaldi’s absence, found much better than the original fare. The change was good for two nights, but the managers couldn’t wait. Eager to unveil their new production with its expensive new scenery and tricks, they replaced the Signor with his son-in-law, Lascelles Williamson. Laid up and sensing a mortal shift, on 25 February he made a will, yet by the summer the whole family, if not the entire theatrical world, must have wondered if the old bastard was ever going to die. July saw him back and in fine form, recording his first ever appearance at the Haymarket in a pantomime produced by Carlo Delpini called Here, There, and Everywhere.
The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Page 6