The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  The fortunes of war were about to come much closer to the Grimaldi home when, on a quiet night in November, Joe received an unexpected visitor. He was appearing at Drury Lane, playing the servant Aminadab in Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife, when the old doorkeeper came to his dressing room with news that two men ‘of gentlemanly appearance’ wished to speak with him downstairs. He ran down between scenes and found two young strangers waiting at the stage door. It was dark, and they greeted him with laughter and familiarity. Certain he was being mocked, Grimaldi turned to leave, but before he could go, the man who had been first to speak spoke again. According to the Memoirs, he stood with his shirt open, pointing to a scar on his chest, and said, ‘Don’t you know me now?’, at which point Joe immediately understood that the stranger was his brother, John. Having neither seen nor heard from him for almost sixteen years, and assumed he was dead, Joe naturally clung to his brother and burst into tears.

  At that moment, the call-boy brought word that Joe was needed on stage, so he invited both men up to wait. Only John agreed, his companion excusing himself after first soliciting a firm arrangement to meet his friend at ten the following morning. Excitedly leading his brother up the narrow back stairs, Joe sought out Richard Wroughton, the patron whose generosity had first allowed John to go to sea. He found him in the green room, and the amazed Wroughton was delighted to see that John had fulfilled his promise with interest. In return, John was keen to show off. Tanned, fit and wearing fashionable evening dress he accessorised with a gold-topped cane, he looked the model of a prosperous colonist, proudly slapping his breast pocket and announcing that he was carrying six hundred pounds in cash. He was anxious to see his mother, and Joe promised to take him to her as soon as he’d finished his scenes and had time to change. He left John chatting with Wroughton, the comedian John Bannister and William Powell, the prompter, saw to his business and went straight to his dressing room to get ready to take John to Baynes Row.

  When he emerged, however, his brother was already gone. No one in the green room was sure when he’d left, though Powell said he’d seen him walking about on the stage a short while previously. There was no sign of him there either, and while the carpenters couldn’t help, the doorman was certain he’d left through the stage door just a minute before. Perhaps Drury Lane held too many bad memories, but Joe was certain he’d catch up with him in Russell Street, but after he had run its length several times, there was still no sign. Perhaps he’d gone to call on his boyhood friend Bowley, who lived nearby. Indeed he had – Bowley had received the shock of his life – but he’d already gone off in the direction of Great Wild Street, where the family had lodged with Mrs Bailey before John had left for sea. Joe knocked and rang the bell, but was shooed off by a housemaid who didn’t like people calling after dark, and returned to the theatre, assuming John had found his way back there. He hadn’t.

  Starting to worry now, Joe knocked up old neighbours at random to ask if they’d seen John Grimaldi, but those he called out of their beds at midnight and questioned about a boy everyone knew to have long disappeared assumed that Joe had finally gone mad. At last he ran back to Baynes Row, but John was not there either. When Joe told his mother what had happened, she fainted.

  John didn’t arrive that night, or the next day or, indeed, ever again. In the weeks that followed, numberless enquiries and searches were made around the vicinity of the theatre and their old family homes. Newspapers and ship lists were scoured for information on passengers and crew. The Hatton Garden police were paid for a special search and, through connections at Drury Lane, an investigation was put into motion at the Admiralty. Still no information was forthcoming.

  After a month of fruitless labour, it was time for Joe to face his fears. The Admiralty suggested that he might have fallen victim to a press-gang, perhaps even a gang to whom John was known, but as he had admitted to entering the service under a false name, there was no telling which of the hundreds of thousands of conscripted sailors he was. The police, on the other hand, suspected he had been lured into ‘some low infamous den’ and been murdered somewhere in St Giles, the eight-acre slum behind the theatres known as ‘the Holy Land’. Their principal suspect was the man who had accompanied John to the stage door, and who had so punctiliously arranged to meet him the following day. This was the solution to which the family themselves inclined, although no body was ever found – not in itself particularly mysterious or unusual, as most of the many bodies pulled from the Thames were unidentifiable.

  The mystery remained unsolved for the rest of Joe’s life, and if not for Bowley and the witnesses in the green room, it might be explained as an apparition caused by stress or dementia. As it was, the family tried hard to console themselves with the fact that although John had left as a boy, he had never forgotten them.*

  * It was not the end of John Grimaldi’s story. In 1877, half a century after Joe had died, the Louisville Courier Journal reported the death in Knoxville, Tennessee, of an ‘old English sailor’ called Thomas Grimaldi, who, despite being a prodigious consumer of tobacco, had attained the grand age of 106. Intrigued by a name that was so famous and so unlikely in the American south, the story was taken up by Joseph Pulitzer’s paper, the World. Believing they had found the long-lost brother of the famous English clown, reporters were dispatched to Tennessee to discover that, like John Grimaldi, Thomas had entered the Royal Navy as a child, holding the rank of warrant carpenter through the Napoleonic wars and the American conflict of 1812, in which he was wounded during an engagement with a privateer. After leaving the navy, he spent time in the West Indies before returning to Britain, where he married and settled in Cornwall, working as a greengrocer until he emigrated to Lynchburg, Virginia, as a widower in 1856. It was a tantalising find, for the parallels with John’s life were undeniable, though there were several details that refused to add up. Chief among these were Thomas Grimaldi’s age and parentage. Claiming to have been born in Falmouth in 1771, Thomas would have been John’s senior by ten years. Given that ages were often recorded inaccurately at this time, this needn’t have proved too much of an obstacle, yet more importantly, he claimed his father was not the Signor, but a wealthy Genoan named Fidele who owned two large plantations in Grenada and several hundred slaves. When Fidele passed away, Thomas had travelled to the West Indies to claim his inheritance, but finding himself beaten to it by an older brother, he retreated to Cornwall with a small patrimony. With little evidence to suggest a relation, the story would have surely ended there, were it not for the contribution of Sir Charles Stewart, MP for Penryn, one of the founders of the Carlton Club and a frequent visitor to London theatres. It was Stewart who suggested to Thomas Grimaldi that he bore a remarkable similarity to the famous clown, and following his suggestion, Thomas supposedly began a correspondence with Joe, although this is unrecorded anywhere, including the Memoirs, in which the two apparently agreed that the Signor and Fidele were both the sons of Iron Legs. If this indeed happened, as the World reported, then Joe had lost a brother but discovered a cousin.

  6

  THE SPIRIT OF THE WATERS

  Under the patronage of His Royal Highness the Duke of Clarence – The proprietors respectfully inform the Public, that, notwithstanding the new additional duty on Wine, they pledge themselves to continue selling the best Unadulterated Foreign Wines at only 2s. 6d. the bottle, and challenge any one to produce a single proof of the Wine being otherwise than as above stated.

  Advertisement for Sadler’s Wells (1803)

  IN 1803 THE MOST FAMOUS man in Britain was a sailor. Admiral Lord Nelson couldn’t set foot on land without attracting huge crowds and lengthy ovations. It wasn’t just that he had achieved magnificent victories at Cape St Vincent, Copenhagen and the Nile, battering the French and easing the threat of invasion, it was that he’d done it with such tremendous éclat. That the quarterdeck of a 104-gun ship was not unlike a stage was a fact not lost on the Admiral, who led with a flamboyant theatricality that marr
ied unrivalled courage and improvisational genius to a sincere regard for the welfare of his men and a popular disdain for the upper command. Nelson’s dash knitted the public to the war effort with a passion that had been left unmoved by the vapid exhortations of William Pitt or the mentally unstable King. Even his body was an image of heroic sacrifice, his missing arm and blind eye visual mnemonics reminding every man of his duty.

  The people’s love of Nelson represented the fullest realisation of an infatuation with the navy that the Dibdins had been fuelling for years. The elder Charles Dibdin in particular had a great fondness for seamen, and his vast catalogue of seafaring songs had been one of the principal conduits through which the image of the jolly Jack Tar had been introduced to the popular imagination. Presenting the sailor’s life as a lonely voyage of pathos and peril, his ballads were so popular that Napoleon supposedly credited them with more influence on British naval victories than the tactical supremacy of its fleet. Dibdin’s children happily took up the theme. It was the success of Naval Pillars, Thomas Dibdin’s piece based on Nelson’s exploits at the Nile, that had landed him a job at Covent Garden, and his brother Charles was producing so many maritime pieces at the Wells that one reviewer suggested the Admiralty should have him decorated for patriotism. Sensing that Nelson’s popularity was about to explode, Dibdin kept them coming, yet found himself increasingly frustrated by the intractable difficulties of replicating the foam and swell of the sea on stage. In order to maximise the opportunity before him, he sought to transcend those limitations by introducing the boldest novelty at Sadler’s Wells to date: a lake of real water.

  One of the many rumours surrounding Siddons’s sale of the Wells the previous year had suggested that if Frederick Reynolds and John Fawcett were successful in their bid to buy the theatre, they would exploit its proximity to the New River by making use of its waters on stage. The idea was inspired by the success of Carlo the Wonder Dog, the canine star of Reynolds’s Drury Lane play, The Caravan, who leapt nightly into a vat of seawater to save a child from drowning – a little trick that netted him a neat profit of £350. If so much could be made from just one scene, reasoned Dibdin, imagine the rewards if the entire stage was replaced with water. However, there was a huge difference between wheeling a tank out at Drury Lane and actually diverting a river.

  Fortunately, Dibdin had the backing of the ever-practical Richard Hughes, who saw immediately how the Wells’s cellars might be converted into an enormous reservoir. Work began in the utmost secrecy at the end of the 1803 season. The workmen were locked into the theatre during the day, and at night the gates were guarded by an eccentric watchman called Richard Wheeler, who, according to Dibdin, ‘walked more like an automaton than a living being, something in the manner one would imagine that a pair of Tongs would walk’. As stiff-legged Wheeler paraded outside, the stage was ripped up to expose the cellar and make way for the enormous vat that would replace the playing space, essentially a huge wooden bathtub that rested on a grid of dwarf walls erected on the basement floor. At ninety feet from the back of the stage to the front, and twenty-four feet across from wing to wing, the tank was built with tributary channels either side that would allow performers to float gracefully on and off and, when filled, held almost sixty-five thousand gallons of water. A second tank, fifteen feet square and five feet deep, was placed in the flies to provide real waterfalls.

  The cost was enormous – close to a thousand pounds – but the proprietors were bullish. Dibdin justified the outlay by claiming it was not merely ‘throwing a sprat to catch a herring’ but ‘baiting with a whale to catch a Leviathan’. Officially renamed the Royal Aquatic Theatre, the opening performance was to be a re-creation of the 1782 Franco-Spanish siege of Gibraltar. Convinced that the endeavour’s success rested on its veracity, Dibdin took a trip to the Woolwich dockyards, commissioning shipwrights and riggers to build replica navy vessels on a scale of one inch to one foot. A fleet of ships was created, exact in every detail, down to the working miniature cannons that were cast in brass and complete with sails and rigging. To complete the illusion of perspective, Dibdin turned recruiting sergeant, going into the streets of Islington in search of children and small men to man his flotilla, ‘water-boys’ to whom he paid 2s. 6d. on top of the usual supernumerary fee to compensate them for their nightly dunking, also providing them with thick duffel trousers, a large fire in the dressing room, burly men to towel them down and a glass of brandy before and after they went in. In spite of these provisions, two still died of consumption brought on by submersion in the water, although, as Dibdin made clear, they had only themselves to blame, as after their performances the boys would ‘run to the Public houses, half dry, and sit so for an hour or two, drinking and smoking (for they were generally of the lower orders) and hence catch cold’.

  A carpenter’s strike two days before opening almost sank the entire venture, but on Easter Monday 1804, the proprietors advertised a ‘Grand Naval Spectacle on Real Water’, banking on the public’s curiosity to generate a full house. It did, and the audience were rewarded with one of the most extraordinary sights in all Georgian theatre. Greeted first by a magnificent painted curtain that depicted the English fleet drawn up in battle line against the combined fleets of France and Spain, they spontaneously burst into applause, yet when it was lifted, the sheet of water before them and the model of Gibraltar behind ‘acted like electricity; a pause of breathless wonder was succeeded by stunning peals of continued acclamation’.

  From downstage, the miniature fleet floated to the front, its sails and pennants shifting in the wind, processed before the orchestra and fired a salute to the audience that put them ‘in an extacy’. Having thus presented themselves, the ships readied for battle. Deafening volleys were fired on both sides, as custom-built fireworks (dubbed by Dibdin ‘red hot balls’) rained down from the fortress, puncturing sails, dismasting the ships and punching holes in enemy hulls. Shipwrecked children struggled in the waves, mimicking drowning with their feet planted firmly on the bottom of the tank (the water was only three feet deep), until the merciful boats of Sir Roger Curtis, the British officer who had saved many shipwrecked Spanish sailors, bobbed into view. Smoke then rolled out into the auditorium, partly to obscure the disparity of scale between Curtis’s men-o’-war and the floundering boys in the water, which when it cleared revealed Dibdin’s coup de théâtre: the calm sea bobbing with flotsam and the Franco-Spanish fleet smashed and beaten. It was an extraordinary night at the theatre. ‘There are no persons who witnessed in 1804, The Siege of Gibraltar,’ wrote Dibdin many years later, ‘will assert other than that it was one of the most novel, imposing and nationally interesting Exhibitions they ever saw.’

  Of course, working with a large tank of water was not without its problems. Getting the water into the theatre was a major task, and the tank took twelve men twelve hours to fill, using a specially-built Archimedes’ pump. Once inside, it had the benefit of nicely cooling the auditorium, which in July and August approached ‘the heat of Bengal’, but it also required constant attention to keep it fresh. At its cleanest, the company would use it as a communal bath, floating on their backs after strenuous rehearsals, soothing their muscles and practising songs. It didn’t take long to turn brackish, the scum of repeated performances turning it an inauspicious shade of black. Dibdin claimed to refresh the tank every couple of weeks, although Wheeler, the doorman, who years later wrote a bitchy commentary on the internal politics of Sadler’s Wells from the Clerkenwell workhouse, insisted that it was allowed to stand for upwards of two months.

  There was also the problem of what to do with it when it wasn’t in use. Generally, the water was reserved for grand finales, final combats and ultimate tableaux, while for the rest of the show it was covered with fitted planks that served as a conventional stage. Not only did the conversion from one to the other take much longer than the management would have liked, it also robbed the pantomime of the traps and cellarwork it relied on, and wasn’t always s
afe. Dibdin assured the company that the planks were capable of bearing any weight, but was proven wrong by Signor Belzoni, the six-foot-six ‘Patagonian Sampson’, who crashed right through them having attached an iron girdle to his body and invited eleven men to climb on board. He wasn’t the only one to take a dip. The first week of the display was plagued by the antics of sailors who refused to believe the water was real and kept diving in, until Dibdin threatened to have the next one who did so arrested by the Watch. He himself fell in frequently during the first season, usually after rushing on stage to adjust a bit of scenery and forgetting there were no longer any boards.

  Teething troubles aside, the water was such a draw that Sadler’s Wells’s first aquatic season saw profits increase five-fold over previous years. Yet if Dibdin thought he had delivered the most extravagant spectacle of the season, he was wrong. That honour went to a thirteen-year-old boy named William Betty, whose brief but phosphorescent fame compromised one of the most surreal episodes in the history of British drama.

  Betty’s infatuation with theatre had begun several years before in Belfast, where he had seen Sarah Siddons on one of her regional tours. Struck by her magnificence, he supposedly told his father that if he wasn’t allowed to become a player he would die. Henry Betty, an adventurer alleged to have squandered his wife’s inheritance along with his own, saw reason to believe his small, willowy son and apprenticed him to the prompter of the Belfast playhouse, William Hough, who shaped the boy’s enthusiasm and coached him in a series of popular tragic roles. Within two years Betty was being lauded as an infant wonder, appearing on the same stage where Mrs Siddons had made her powerful impression to astonishment and acclaim, publicity his shrewd father used to secure a series of appearances in the English provinces.