The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  With Joe on top form, the house was in fits, not least Harris’s men, including an old deaf-mute who sat through the entire performance red-faced and rocking with silent laughter. Gag after gag left him doubled up until, finally looking fit to burst, he turned to one of his shipmates and, with tears trickling down his cheeks, said, ‘What a damned funny fellow.’

  ‘Why, Jack,’ said his thunderstruck comrade, ‘can you speak?’

  ‘Ay,’ said the sailor, suddenly aware of what he’d done, and equally astonished. ‘That I can, and hear, too.’

  Had Grimaldi been able to perform miracles off the stage, he might have been able to enjoy this period of unprecedented success. As it was, he found himself constantly fending off trouble, most urgently the business with Mackoull, which had taken a sinister turn. The visit paid by Mackoull’s solicitor, Mr Harmer, had been for the purpose of enlisting Joe in his client’s defence. Mackoull, he insisted, was innocent, and only Joe could save his neck. The coach he had supposedly robbed had been held up in the early hours of 13 March, when Mackoull was several hundred miles away in Woolwich, attending the benefit at which Joe had played. As a witness to that fact, it was imperative that he speak up. Joe agreed readily, but asked why, given how large the Woolwich party had been, the burden of an alibi fell to him alone. Harmer said nothing, and after taking down his testimony as well as Mary’s, promised to get back in touch the moment there was news.

  Harmer had been gone only a short while before a second visitor called, a young under-clerk from the Bow Street magistrate’s office, who stayed long enough to warn Grimaldi that if he valued his reputation, and that of his wife, he should drop Mackoull at once. The threat left Joe in a state of high anxiety that refused to settle until Mackoull made bail and presented himself at Baynes Row. Joe demanded an explanation, again putting the question that Harmer had so neatly avoided: why was his testimony so all-important when he had friends like Mr Farmer, men of rank and influence whose word alone would surely be enough to quash any charges? Mackoull blushed and hung his head, but not with shame. His shoulders were shaking as if he was trying to suppress a laugh.

  ‘Besides – the ladies,’ continued Joe. ‘Dear me … the appearance of those gentlemen’s wives would be almost enough to acquit you at once.’

  This was too much for Mackoull, who burst out laughing. ‘Mr Grimaldi,’ he said, ‘none of those women are married.’

  Joe stared incredulously as the truth came boiling out. The women, Mackoull confessed, were all prostitutes, expensive courtesans hired to escort six professional criminals, a gang that specialised in robbery and forged bills. Farmer, their leader, had already been sentenced to death at the Old Bailey, and each of the others was similarly notorious in his own line of work, be it as burglar, highwayman or counterfeiter. This certainly explained their wealth and why they kept their own company, but Joe was less prepared for the revelation that followed. The attack on the Edinburgh coach had been their handiwork, and the Woolwich excursion contrived to cover it up. With the money safely put away, they had framed Mackoull, a dispensable booby tolerated simply because he claimed to know the famous Grimaldi. Joe had been made an unwitting accessory and, with Mackoull’s nervous laughter ringing in his ears, he found his hands instinctively reaching for the man’s throat and slamming him against the wall.* How dare he abuse their friendship by bringing him into criminal company, he demanded, and, even worse, induce him to bring his wife? With Joe’s grip tightening, Mackoull turned from giggling idiot to beseeching wreck. A seasoned implorer, he fell to his knees, pouring forth sufficient ‘entreaties for mercy and protestations of regret’ to blunt his assailant’s rage. Released, he fled at once, but by letting him go, Grimaldi had already hinted at what Mackoull must have hoped: the Clown was as honest as one of Dibdin’s stage sailors and, however aggrieved, was incapable of abandoning a man when his life hung in the balance.

  The following week there was another visitor to Baynes Row, the courtesan who had posed as Mrs Farmer. She was past dissembling and, dispensing with the mask, addressed Joe as a man of the world who had understood the nature of his Fitzroy Square hosts from the start. Surely ‘Grim’ could see that this was simply business? ‘It’s everybody’s turn on time,’ she said, ‘and Jack’s had a very long string.’ The matter-of-factness with which she proposed Mackoull’s sacrifice was chilling, and with the queasy feeling of a conspiracy folding in about him, Joe showed Mrs Farmer the door.

  That August, Mackoull’s trial took place in Stafford and, taking their leave of the Wells, Joe and Mary travelled north in the company of Harmer. In spite of everything, Joe helped the impoverished defence, even assisting a local clerk to transcribe the piles of documents that landed on Harmer daily. The unhappy picture that emerged from his schoolboy hand told the story of a troubled fantasist, a man with little sense of consequences or responsibility, in constant trouble with the law. The company he kept was insalubrious, he had indictments for keeping a disorderly house, and was known to frequent the theatre and pick pockets in the pit. Naturally, Mackoull denied everything, vigorously insisting that his ‘former irregularities’ had been renounced at least a decade before. He was, he claimed, the victim of a protracted campaign of police harassment, begun after he had refused to become an informer during a corruption case in 1800. Whatever the truth of it, his was a murky past, and when nine witnesses took the stand, each of them claiming to have seen him pass stolen bills in Cheshire, the jury had no trouble believing them. In actuality, the witnesses had been picked up off the streets only days before, and paid for their perjury by the prosecutor, himself in the pay of the Fitzroy Square gang. For most of them, it was the first time they had ever seen the man they identified, and by the time Grimaldi came to give his evidence, it seemed certain that justice would desert Mackoull.

  The snarling boy who had menaced him on his doorstep had made no idle threat. The prosecutor tore into him, hoping to discredit his testimony by destroying his reputation, calling him an inveterate deceiver, a strolling player, ‘a man reared in and ever accustomed to vice in its most repulsive and degrading forms – a man who was necessarily a systematic liar – and, in fine, a man upon whose word or oath no thinking person could place any reliance’. The abuse continued when it was Mary’s turn to take the stand. Vilified in the witness box, she was insulted from the gallery, and leered at by ruffians who followed her out of the court.

  Mackoull would surely have been destined for the gallows, were it not for the resourceful Constable Trott, the same dependable Hatton Garden officer who had delivered the Grimaldis and Lewises from murderous Pentonville burglars many years before. Trott had been recruited to the case by Harmer, who was convinced that the Bow Street office was corrupt. This was undoubtedly true, as the combined factors of low pay and a reward system for convicting felons not only provided officers with a financial incentive for framing people, but encouraged traffic in minor felons between the police and organised criminals, who were granted immunity in return for delivering a regular supply of decoys. Trott’s investigations unearthed a suspect called Treble, very likely the same man introduced to Joe in Fitzroy Square as Jones, the only one to have excused himself from the Woolwich excursion. Treble had held up the coach and passed the money to be laundered by an associate known only as ‘the Squire’. Treble, however, didn’t live to harvest the fruits of his crime as the following day he was found dead, believed to have run mad and killed himself, though more than likely disposed of by the gang.

  Trott turned his attentions to uncovering the identity of the Squire and eventually came to suspect a provincial actor named Robert Knight. Taking the stand in Stafford, he revealed that he had tracked Knight to a safe-house in Southend where he had arrested him in possession of banknotes stolen from the Edinburgh mail. With the real culprit dramatically pulled from thin air, the case against Mackoull collapsed, and the jury had no choice but to set him free.

  Yet Mackoull’s trials were far from over as even after his
acquittal his tormentors continued the transmission of falsehoods, among them that Grimaldi had been paid handsomely to lie. He moved from his mother’s pub to Worthing, where he found employment as a music-seller, but was still unable to outrun the rumours. Forced from town to town, into obscurer places and meaner professions, his arrivals were inevitably followed by anonymous letters that drew his neighbours into insinuating silences. Not even Knight’s trial served to clear his name as, thanks to the mischief of the Fitzroy Square gang and the obstructions of a well-placed banker who might well have been an instrument of the initial crime, the case failed.

  Driven to distraction by two years of whispers, Mackoull holed himself up to draft a long account of his case, spending whatever money he had to place his final plea before the public. It, too, fell on deaf ears, and Mackoull was never heard from again.

  Thanks to Constable Trott’s diligence, Joe returned to London earlier than expected, discovering to his great annoyance that he would not be required at the Wells because Dibdin had engaged a man called Robert Bradbury in his stead. Bradbury had first appeared at the Wells in 1803, performing an act with a pig. He was an excellent animal trainer, even travelling for a while with a bear he kept as a pet, one of several flamboyant habits he maintained as a way of attracting attention. According to those who knew him, Bradbury was ‘ambitious of the society of gentlemen’ and to that end kept a tandem, cultivated his speech (his letters show that he wrote well) and sported dandy fashions to the extent that he was dubbed the ‘Brummell of Clowns’. But beneath the veneer lay a reputation for brawling and bullying that had followed him from his native Manchester, and a latent aggression that persistently appeared in his clowning. Henry Downes Miles was not a fan, calling him ‘a man of great strength’ but ‘very dreary merriment’, who relied too heavily on stunts and danger that amounted to ‘an intense anxiety to meet with some severe, if not fatal accident’. Even by the deranged standards of the brotherhood of clowns, Bradbury was considered something of a loony although, to be fair, he wasn’t entirely suicidal as he always went on stage protected by eight thick horse-hair pads, which he strapped to his knees, elbows, heels and hips, and a specially reinforced hat.

  Bradbury had done well in his short stint at the Wells, entertaining the audience with routines that included leaping from the fly-tower to the stage, balancing on ten-foot crutches at the top of an unsupported ladder, and resting a sixteen-stone anvil on his chest while three burly blacksmiths set to it with hammers. The pure, exhilarating brutality of his showmanship was miles away from the carefully crafted clown-world Joe had built around Joey, and the positive reception he was getting served to convince the uncertain Joe that his own success had been just another fad. Believing that Bradbury ‘had thrown him completely out of favour with the public’, he despaired of ever winning back his place, confiding to his friend Richard Lawrence that ‘it was all up with him’.

  Dibdin did nothing to allay these fears, preferring to capitalise on his sudden clown surplus by proposing that Joe and Bradbury perform together, just as Joe and Dubois had done years before. Joe agreed because he needed the money, though the Memoirs confess that he ‘yielded his consent with very ill grace’, convinced that he would be heckled from the stage. In fact, the opposite was true. The Wells faithful were as pleased as ever to see him and, energised by their applause, Joe doubled his efforts. This in turn brought out the competitor in Bradbury, who in his zeal overstepped the mark, thus upsetting the audience, who hissed him off the stage ‘in great disorder’, leaving Joe to finish the piece alone.

  Secure in the public’s favour, Joe’s summer season nevertheless came to an abrupt end on the night of 15 October. Having performed his service in the pantomime, he was already in bed when a volley of fists was heard hammering at his door. Downstairs he found a pale and breathless group. There had been an accident at the theatre, they said, and so much confusion and so many bodies that they were worried he was among them. Joe went immediately up to the Wells to find an enormous crowd outside, hordes of people in states of horrid anticipation, those pushing to get in met with equal force by those hoping to get out. With no chance of getting through, Joe ran around to the opposite bank of the New River, swam across to the back of Richard Hughes’s house and jumped in through his parlour window. There, according to the Memoirs, he found himself surrounded by corpses. The parlour door was locked and, panicking, he began banging and shouting to be let out, thus terrifying Hughes’s daughters, who were using the room as a mortuary. This detail, though, would appear to be a piece of Gothic embellishment, as by the time Joe arrived, the scene was still too chaotic for a tally of the dead to have been made.

  Be that as it may, once inside the theatre proper he would have come across a scene that resembled the aftermath of battle. Men and women with broken limbs and bleeding heads lay wailing all around, nursed by their traumatised friends. Among them was Joe’s old friend Bob Fairbrother, who explained that he had been in the treasury office at around a quarter past ten when he had heard a terrific noise in the auditorium. Running to the stage to see what the matter was, he heard a cry of ‘Fire! Fire!’ that spread throughout the house, causing panic in the galleries and a sudden rush for the doors. Yet with no evidence of smoke or flames, and with a tankful of water on stage, it was clearly a mistake.

  When Dibdin emerged with a speaking trumpet to try to calm the audience and get them to return to their seats, it was already too late. The first to take flight had been the ladies in the boxes, followed by the people in the gallery, the throng becoming a stampede, knocking over those at the front and trampling them under the feet of those who came behind. The people nearest the rails decided to jump for it, breaking down the sides of the gallery and either leaping directly into the pit or on to the chandeliers, which came crashing down with their weight. Two children were caught, but another severely damaged her spine. Most of those who died either fell from the galleries or were killed on the stairs.

  The first doctor on the scene was Mr Sharp, who lived just three hundred yards away on Islington Road. He set about doing what he could, bleeding some corpses in the hope of reviving them, assisted by the heroic Constable Trott, so often in the background of Grimaldi’s story – later he received special press attention as ‘by his exertions, many lives were saved that night’. Soon, a stream of doctors arrived from St Bartholomew’s Hospital, setting about the bodies with ‘electricity, tracheotomy, and inflation of the lungs’. Largely, it was to no avail, although one man believed dead was revived when a vein was opened, only to become hysterical at finding himself beside his wife’s corpse.

  As word of the accident spread, many people hurried to the theatre, anxious for their loved ones. The building, meanwhile, was sealed to allow treatment of the injured and a count of the dead, and the Clerkenwell Volunteers had to be called to hold back those outside. One of the distraught onlookers was the mother of eleven-year-old Benjamin Price. He had been given permission to attend the theatre with neighbours, though his parents became concerned when his sister reported seeing him in their kitchen. When she called to him, he disappeared and, certain that she had seen his ghost, his mother flew to the Wells to discover that he was indeed dead.

  The eventual tally was miraculously low, given that it had been standing-room only in the Wells that night. Eighteen had been killed, the details of the victims presenting a vivid picture of those who inhabited the galleries of Sadler’s Wells. With an average age of less than nineteen, the eldest, James Phillipson, was thirty, while the youngest was a nine-year-old nursery-maid attending the theatre in the company of her employer and her employer’s baby. Uniformly of the working classes, some held trades, one was a ‘woman of the town’, and another an unemployed errand-boy. None of them carried money or watches, although it was supposed that their bodies had been robbed.

  The following day, the public were admitted into the Hugheses’ parlour to identify the victims. As distraught mothers let out anguished groans, uns
ightly scenes were played out in the adjacent rooms, where lost property had been left out to be claimed, causing brawls among corvine opportunists and ghoulish fashion hunters. By this time, further details of the accident had come to light. It seemed that the trouble had been caused by two men and two women, belligerent drunks who had spent the night in the pit trying to provoke the people around them with threatening behaviour and foul language. One of the women had slapped another’s face. The constables on duty warned them to stop three times, until eventually, with the help of some men from the audience, they were forcibly removed. During the scuffle, a shout of ‘Fight! Fight!’ came from the pit, which was interpreted in the boxes as ‘Fire! Fire!’ The misapprehension ‘passed through the whole house in an instant, like an electric shock’.

  The following day, the four accused were brought before a coroner’s court set up in the bar of the Sir Hugh Myddleton. They were Sarah Luker, an old milk-woman with three children; Mary Vyne, her young, unemployed neighbour; and two brothers, John Pearce, a Wiltshire farm labourer, and Vincent Pearce, a servant who worked for the famous brewer, Samuel Whitbread. The evidence against them contradicted itself in places, and it was difficult to tell whether they had been fighting among themselves or, as Dibdin suspected, deliberately trying to provoke their neighbours in order to rob them in the confusion. The magistrate was unable to find them guilty of having ‘wilfully occasioned the fatal and lamentable catastrophe’ and ruled that the deceased had died ‘casually, accidentally, and by misfortune’. This displeased Dibdin immensely, and when a report appeared in The Times suggesting that the management could have done more to save the victims, he pressed hard for the prosecution to prove their culpability. In time, Dibdin got his wish, and the sorry quartet appeared at Hatton Garden, charged with causing a commotion. Vincent Pearce received six months in Coldbath gaol, and his brother four months; three years later he was hanged for a theft at Salisbury. Sarah Luker got fourteen days, and Mary Vyne absconded.