The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  Lucy Hughes agreed to Joe’s condition, and he purchased an eighth share in the theatre for an unknown price, though given that Charles and Thomas Dibdin had paid William Siddons £1,400 for their eighth share in 1803, it would have easily consumed his provincial profits and then some. In addition to this agreement, he was re-employed as a performer on the terms he had previously proposed, twelve guineas a week, and the liberty to work for the highest bidder in July. Though his return ‘was hailed with shouts of applause; and all, before and behind the curtain, appeared happy at seeing him “at home”’, the theatre Joe was buying into bore only a few traces of its former glory.

  In-fighting, financial depletion and a chronic lack of imagination had left the Wells without obvious direction, a lack of appeal that was reflected in the quality of the houses. The regular crowd seemed bored and was becoming decidedly rougher. Concomitantly, the titled dignitaries and ladies of quality who had been legion during Joe’s ascendancy were travelling to Islington less and less often. There was evidence of this on the first night of the 1818 season. The house was filled to capacity for Joe’s return, dangerously so – the rush for seats in the galleries caused a surge from the back that pushed some of the front row over the railings, and knocked a young man down between two benches where he was trampled to death. Fearing a repeat of the 1807 accident, Joe mounted the slips of the boxes and managed to be heard. This time, with their hero standing before them, the audience responded to the appeal for calm and, notwithstanding the fatality, the curtain went up at the advertised time.

  The evening barely improved. Two women started fighting in the interval, while the performances themselves were thought so dismal as to be ‘beneath the notice of criticism’. It was with some relief, therefore, that Joe took to the road for his summer excursion, clearing £682. On his return he was greeted with the news that the houses had been ‘dead failures’ that had left each proprietor owing £333.

  Given the parlous state of British drama, it took Joe a surprisingly long time to realise that being a proprietor meant working doubly hard to subsidise a losing concern, though as soon as he did, he wanted out. His shares proved impossible to sell, and as his resentment grew, he joined with the other proprietors in blaming Dibdin for the Wells’s ills, rejecting his talk of a routine slump and demanding change. A furious encounter followed that resulted in Dibdin throwing it all in ten days before the start of the 1819 season, and only with the greatest difficulty was he persuaded to come back for long enough to finalise the arrangements for the opening week. It was then that he gave Joe his most famous song, ‘Hot Codlins’, an audience-participation ditty about an apple-seller who gets disastrously drunk on gin. Dibdin never worked at Sadler’s Wells again, although this was the least of his worries: following his resignation, he was imprisoned for debt and spent the next three years confined within the rules of the King’s Bench prison. He was joined shortly thereafter by Thomas Barfoot, a boon companion and fellow Wells shareholder who had succumbed to penury after marrying one of the many actresses he pursued. She ended her days at the Clerkenwell workhouse where, according to Wheeler, ‘worn out with drink and dissipation, she had become a spectacle’.

  For someone whose career had been so inextricably linked to Dibdin’s, it was inevitable that Joe should also go into a decline. Thrust into Dibdin’s shoes in the absence of a more suitable candidate, he was confronted with all the problems of management while being far less equipped to deal with them. For a start, he had none of his predecessor’s superhuman prolificacy, and even after employing a number of London’s army of surplus dramatists, he still had difficulty furnishing all the necessary pieces, a problem perhaps best illustrated by the fact that this was the year in which he authored his first, and only, pantomime, The Fates; or, Harlequin’s Holy Day. The entire family were pressed into service – JS, Mary, Louisa and Jack Bologna all performed at the Wells, the latter for the first time in ten years – but still the responsibilities of management proved too much. Productions required his constant attention, and money became tight because he had to call off his provincial engagements. JS did not help by coming home one day and asking his father to pay off a significant debt he had accrued to a certain Mrs Price, although what for is unclear. The boy had definitely inherited his father’s poor financial sense along with his talent.

  The family moved to a smaller house nearer the theatre, at 8 Exmouth Street, just paces away from the Signor’s grave at Northampton Chapel, where Joe’s health began to deteriorate with the stress of each passing week. He endured regular bouts of breathlessness, gastric spasms and a constant low fever attended by rheumatoid aches that stiffened his joints and weakened his muscles. With his spirits desperately low, and his ‘heavy and painful infirmities’ impeding his ability to work, Joe had no choice but to resign at the end of the year.

  Change was everywhere as, within a few short weeks, the darkness wound a terminal fold around the mad King, and the Regency came to a formal close with the accession of George IV. Grimaldi, Barfoot and Dibdin all decided to put their shares up for auction. Dibdin and Barfoot, desperate to be released from debtors’ prison, sold theirs to Mr Dixon of the London Horse and Carriage Repository for a bargain price, but Joe, having either had a change of heart or, more likely, failed to receive his asking price, kept his. Without a manager to represent their interests directly, the proprietors decided to find a lessee to rent it for one or two seasons and share the risk. It was an increasingly popular expedient in these tough times, and effectively brought the age of era-defining owner-managers like Richard Brinsley Sheridan to an end.

  Sadler’s Wells’s first lessee was an American, Howard Payne, a talented actor and industrious writer who had left New York to soak himself in the atmosphere of the Anglophone world’s most important theatrical town. Arriving full of artistic intent, he began by sacking the entire company save for Grimaldi, Barnes, Bologna and one or two others, and turning one of the workshops into a green room, something the performers had never had under Dibdin and joked that they didn’t know what to do with. Payne made some interesting changes, bringing German melodrama and Astley-esque equestrianism to the Wells. But while the provisions were different, the state of the accounts was not. The Wells lost even more money and Payne, too, found his way into debtors’ prison.

  A new lessee was found in Daniel Egerton, but there were grounds of contention between him and Joe before he was even in place. Egerton wanted to retain him only on the understanding that he could loan him to other theatres as and when he wished, presumably having worked out that he stood to make more money by taking a percentage of Joe’s one-off ‘specials’ than he did by paying him a weekly salary with all his unreliability. The proposition offended Joe immensely, and he refused to sign a contract. On 5 October 1820, he took his benefit with no idea that it would be his final regular appearance at the Wells. The following week, by pure coincidence, every person in the pit was presented with a commemorative portrait of their beloved clown.

  Blissfully unaware that he’d reached the end of an era, Joe took off for an engagement in Dublin in the company of Ellar and JS, sailing on a brand-new steam-packet that cut the voyage time in half. He still had the syrup, even if it was getting harder to pour, and the trip went well. At Christmas he returned to Covent Garden to give his strongest performances for years, in Harlequin and Friar Bacon. The first gag didn’t work – an updated version of one of the Signor’s routines in which he imbibed gas instead of water from the Aldgate pump and became a human balloon – but the scene in which he invaded a lady’s boudoir dressed as a chimney sweep, leaving his sooty imprint all over her white chairs, bed and toilet, had the house in stitches, including George IV, who rocked in his box and threatened to herniate the royal corset. There was also an exploding steam coach and an exemplary piece of dumb-show in which Joe performed Macbeth’s dagger scene in full motley, mimicking Kemble’s manner and action so precisely that a dead silence descended on the audience, who ‘seemed t
o vibrate with the effect upon the imagination’. This was followed by a taste of things to come with the introduction of a new piece of machinery, a moving diorama painted with views of the Irish Channel that turned on rollers to accompany Harlequin and Columbine’s voyage across the stage from Holyhead to Dublin Bay.

  The return to form was to prove short-lived, and the months that followed were marred by ill health and further breakdowns. In May, Joe collapsed from exhaustion following a performance of Farley’s melodrama, Undine; or, the Spirit of the Waters, passing the role to JS, who was now his official understudy. In September, he, Ellar and JS returned to Dublin, but ‘an agony of mind perfectly indescribable’ forced him to cancel his shows and call one of the city’s most eminent physicians, who diagnosed him as suffering from ‘premature old age’. With his arthritic legs barely able to carry him, and his spine curled with pain, Joe went home, arriving in London weaker than at any time in his life.

  As one Grimaldi withered, another rose. At nineteen, JS had outgrown his pallid, sick-room hue to become an athletic young man with the ability to tackle a range of substantial roles, a view backed up by The Times, which believed that ‘in the language of Hector … Young Grimaldi, like young Astyanax, “– may transcend his father’s name’’ ’. Harlequin and Friar Bacon marked something of a turning point for him too, for at last he was free from the role of mini-Clown, a part that was fine for someone like Laurent’s six-year-old son Philippe, but which infantilised the dashing and ambitious JS.* Friar Bacon saw him graduate to the role of ‘Dandy Lover’, with which he would become particularly identified over the next few years as Farley used him and Clown as a double-act. The Birmingham Reporter, however, claimed to see through the arrangement, viewing JS merely as a poultice that hid the old man’s infirmities, ‘an apology for loss of agility in the parent’.

  Comparisons of this kind would be the bane of JS’s life, defining his career before it had even begun. Any compliments he received were inevitably back-handed, and he never failed to see his name in print without it being placed beside his father’s – young Grimaldi, wrote one reviewer, for example, was ‘sufficiently lively and comic to amuse, even when his father (the Prince of Clowns) is present’. Frustration, and the desire to differentiate himself, may well have been behind an early incident at Christmas in 1821, when he was censured for indulging in ‘certain gross vulgarities’ in the course of Harlequin and Mother Bunch; or, the Yellow Dwarf. ‘Indecency upon the stage is an insult to every individual in the house,’ thundered the correspondent, ‘and … if he expects to be tolerated, he must considerably restrain his propensity to be coarse and indelicate; he has not merit enough to play such tricks with impunity.’

  It was remarkably similar to an event that had taken place at Drury Lane the previous year when Robert Bradbury, the ‘Brummell of Clowns’, had caused outrage by lampooning a recent case of child abduction, compounding it by insulting a member of the audience, and then threatening to kick him in the backside when he rose to complain. Bradbury’s immediate replacement by the ever-ready Frank Hartland caused further controversy when protests were staged by some of Bradbury’s friends.* (Poor Hartland was an underdog even to the day of his death – killed by a falling beam while out strolling on the Westminster Road.)

  JS’s desire to develop a distinct identity of his own had been intensified by the constant travelling and performing in the company of his father, and if he had found Bradbury’s lewd and rebellious style appealing it was probably because it was so far removed from Joe’s. JS also emulated Bradbury’s well-documented addiction to fashion, and similarly cultivated a streetwise affect that he inflected with the louche nonchalance and studied dishevelment of the Byronic dandies. Its fullest manifestation came in his idiosyncratic speech, a blend of his father’s topsy-turvy colloquialisms, theatrical patois, and the inexhaustible slang of the late-Georgian ‘Corinthians’ or ‘swells’. ‘If he had had a companion to cope with him,’ wrote one contemporary, ‘in six weeks they would have forgotten the English language and framed an entirely new tongue. He … never used any phrase recognised by society.’ So peculiar was his argot that members of the older generation frequently failed to understand him, such as the time Thomas Dibdin enquired after Joe, and JS said, ‘The old buffer’s as stiff as pitch’:

  ‘Good God, sir,’ said Dibdin, ‘you don’t – you cannot mean to say he is no more!’ ‘No more!’ said Grimaldi, ‘he’s more than you are, he’s all drawn up of a heap.’ ‘Am I to infer that he is better?’ ‘Why, don’t I tell you so? – he’s as right as a trivet.’ ‘Shall we have the pleasure of seeing him this evening?’ ‘Course you will,’ replied Joe, ‘he’s coming at darkey just to see the beauty of things.’

  Bradbury was only a temporary role model, if he was ever one at all, as, following his ejection from Drury Lane, the eccentric Mancunian left the stage to travel the country as an itinerant Methodist preacher. But JS would not want for long because, as it would transpire, an unblushing reprobate was waiting in the wings and, like him, he hailed from theatrical royalty.

  Joe would have nothing to do with Egerton’s Wells, which was still failing to make a profit despite offering punters the sight of real Eskimos and sledge rides down an iced track that ran from the back of the stage to the back of the pit. Too unwell to travel, he found it impossible to live on the meagre ten-pound weekly salary Covent Garden had been paying him for years, so when an offer came through for six weeks’ work at Vauxhall’s Coburg Theatre ‘at a considerable sum … and a free benefit’, he rounded up his son and together they crossed the Thames.

  Named for Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, son-in-law to the Prince Regent, and later father to Leopold II, scourge of the Belgian Congo, the Coburg owed its existence to Waterloo Bridge, completed in 1817. Its opening had been heralded by a publicity stunt performed by the clown Dicky Usher, who sailed from Southwark Bridge to Cumberland Gardens in a wash-tub drawn by four geese. Landing two and a half hours later, he swapped his tub for a carriage lashed to eight tomcats, which he then intended to drive to Waterloo Road, although the size of the crowd made it impossible, and he had to be carried on the shoulders of several watermen.

  Situated in the growing but ramshackle neighbourhood of St George’s Fields, the Coburg quickly acquired a reputation as the roughest and most disorderly theatre in town. Its managers had made every effort to offset the outside squalor by fitting its interior in sumptuous style, achieving an effect that The Times snidely described as ‘rather gorgeous than elegant’, although by the time the Grimaldis arrived, they had removed their gaudiest decoration, a mirrored stage curtain that allowed the audience to gaze upon themselves through the smears and finger marks in which it was constantly covered. At forty feet high, thirty wide and weighing five tons, it had to be taken down due to the strain it put on the roof, it was later dismantled and recycled as a looking-glass ceiling.

  Joseph Glossop, the Coburg’s manager, was a wealthy chandler who had come to London after stints managing Milan’s La Scala and the San Carlo in Naples. Wily and active, he bent the rules and abjured authority, skipping off without paying his bills, punching one of the Drury Lane managers in the street and threatening to shoot the other, and being arrested for forgery after attempting to flee the country. For all his crazy bravado, Glossop was highly strung and had a nervous stomach that meant even the slightest anxiety caused him to vomit. Odd, then, that he should be at the vanguard of a growing movement among minor theatre owners who sought to challenge the terms of the theatrical monopoly and test the patent’s resolve by staging legitimate dramas in thin melodramatic disguises. The Coburg’s Richard III; or, the Battle of Bosworth Field, for instance, was essentially Shakespeare’s history staged with minor revisions and a musical accompaniment inaudible beyond the front row. Joe even gave evidence in Glossop’s defence at the subsequent prosecution, though nothing he could say could avert a hundred-pound fine, which in turn only served to make Glossop even more evangeli
cal about reform. Yet the Coburg didn’t get its nickname ‘the blood-tub’ from artistic adaptations of Shakespeare, as its stock-in-trade remained lurid, plot-free melodramas with titles like The Temple of Death and Thalaba the Destroyer, trading on a constantly regurgitated mix of murder, madness, apparitions, demagogues, prophecies, war and monsters.

  Performing at the Coburg was an experience unlike any other. The audience was rarely, if ever, quiet, barracking the actors with their ‘petulant cockneyism and vulgar slang’, producing an atmosphere so hostile that Hazlitt described it as ‘a Bridewell, or a brothel, amidst Jew-boys, pickpockets, prostitutes and mountebanks’. ‘The object was not to admire or to excel,’ he continued, ‘but to vilify and degrade everything. The audience did not hiss the actors (that would have implied a serious feeling of disapprobation, and something like a disappointed wish to be pleased), but they laughed, hooted at, nick-named, pelted them with oranges and witticisms, to show their unruly contempt for them and their art.’ Those performers included Ramoo Samee, a mystical Indian snake-charmer; ‘Jew’ Davis, turfed out of Sadler’s Wells for his brutish manners and the ‘practical and dirty jokes’ he played on the foreign rope-dancers; and T. P. Cooke, an ex-sailor who would go on to become one of the biggest stars of the era and the first actor to play Frankenstein’s monster.

  From the Grimaldis’ point of view, the most influential cast-member in residence, though neither the most talented nor the most famous, was Henry Stephen Kemble, son of Stephen George Kemble, nephew of John, Charles, and Sarah Siddons. Henry had little natural aptitude for acting, and seems to have come to it from a lack of imagination as much as anything else. At thirty-three, he was a distinctive-looking fellow, flamboyant, with a shock of snowy-white hair and a handsome face that was lined and gaunt. Said to have ‘the strongest lungs and weakest judgement’ of any performer in his station, Henry Kemble was a ranter and a ham, and thus ideally suited to the Coburg, where he was showered with walnuts and ‘peals of derision’. He was playing the young Mogul revolutionary Tippoo Sahib when the Grimaldis arrived, an exotic outsider who possessed all the qualities he wanted people to see in himself. In reality, people didn’t see much heroism in Henry Kemble, just biting wit and a reputation for raising hell.