by Peter Ford
The True History of the Elephant Man
MICHAEL HOWELL AND PETER FORD
Contents
Title Page
List of Plates
Preface and Acknowledgements
1 ‘The great Freak of nature – Half-a-Man and Half-an-Elephant’
2 On the Threshold of Eminence
3 A Living Specimen
4 A Parade of Elephants and Early Griefs
5 The Mercy of the Parish
6 The Silver King
7 A Travelling Life
8 Come Safely into Harbour
9 ‘Such a Gentle, Kindly Man, Poor Thing!’
10 What Was the Matter With Joseph Merrick?
11 The Burden Falls Away
12 The Figure in Time’s Fabric
Appendix One: The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick
Appendix Two: The Elephant Man, amplified from an account in the British Medical Journal
Appendix Three: ‘The Elephant Man’ by Sir Frederick Treves
Bibliography
Index
Plates
About the Author
Copyright
List of Plates
1. The portrait of Sir Fredrick Treves by Luke Fildes
2. Dr Reginald Tuckett
3. The Whitechapel Road outside the London Hospital
4. The birth entry for Joseph Carey Merrick in the Leicester register
5. The Leicester Union Workhouse in the 1850s
6. The record of Joseph Merrick’s discharge from Leicester Union Workhouse
7. A broadsheet advertising Wombwell’s Royal Menagerie
8. Joseph’s Uncle, Charles Barnabas Merrick, in old age
9. The barber’s shop in Leicester
10. A surgical operation in the 1880s
11. Sam Torr
12. Tom Norman, the ‘Silver King’
13. Sam Torr dressed to perform ‘On the back of Daddy-O’
14. ‘Professor’ Sam Roper
15. Bertram Dooley as one of ‘Roper’s Midgets’
16. The ‘pillar-box’ hat, devised by Sam Roper
17. Hand-bill for Sam Torr’s Gaiety palace of Varieties
18. The pamphlet containing Joseph Merrick’s autobiography
19. The SS Norwich
20. A Great Eastern Railway boat train
21. A crowded platform at Liverpool Street Station
22. The earliest known illustrations of Joseph Merrick
23–4. Engravings of Merrick’s head
25. The front of the London Hospital in 1876
26. The Princess of Wales declares the Nurses Home open
27. Merrick’s specially built armchair
28. The cardboard model of a church constructed for Mrs Kendal
29. Miss Lückes with her team of nursing sisters
30–33. A set of four photographs of Joseph Merrick in 1886
34. Madge Kendal in Pinero’s The Hobby Horse
35. The deeply recessed boxes at Drury Lane Theatre
36. Charles Lauri as Puss and Tilly Wadman as principal boy in Puss in Boots
37–8. The only known surviving example of Merrick’s correspondence
39. One of the last photographs, dating from 1888
40. Merrick’s skeleton compared with the cast of his head
41. The post-mortem cast of Merrick’s head and shoulders
42. Merrick’s skull
43. A close up showing the atrophied left hip-joint
44. Merrick’s arms compared to a normal arm
45. A cast of his right foot
46. Walter Steel and his wife
47. Joseph Merrick in his ‘Sunday Best’
48. The ‘deliberate mistake’ in Treves’ manuscript
Preface and Acknowledgements
The first edition of The True History of the Elephant Man was published in the spring of 1980. The previous autumn, while the book was in the press, Bernard Pomerance’s play, The Elephant Man (until then known mainly from ‘art theatre’ productions), was presented on Broadway. There it met with considerable popular success and in due course a Tony award, besides giving David Bowie his first serious stage role when he took over the lead. In the summer of 1980, the play began a long-running production at the National Theatre in London, and that autumn David Lynch’s film, The Elephant Man, was released. There were few evident connections in the backgrounds to these events. It seemed more to be a synchronizing of several lines of coincidence.
The extraordinary concentration of interest in the life of Joseph Carey Merrick that was caused by these treatments, imaginative and documentary, had two main effects. First, it established the story itself as an invariably moving myth in popular consciousness. Secondly, it led, directly and indirectly, to further details of Merrick’s life emerging from obscurity, sometimes from unexpected sources.
So far as the facts in the case are concerned, Dr Howell and I had called our book a ‘true’ history. Even if that, too, carried a mythic resonance in the style, say, of the balladeers of earlier times, it was disconcerting to find how many of our assumptions and inferences came to need reappraisal and adjustment. We had striven to include in our account no statements beyond those that could be justified from documentary record. Yet interpretation may only proceed in line with the facts as known. A shifting pattern of facts, in any context, becomes a part of the process of understanding events.
As for the mythic dimension – and here it is essential not to fall into the common error of calling myth per se ‘untrue’ – it has resulted in the story of the Elephant Man acquiring a whole cultural history in its own right. It was a process that may be said to have begun in 1923 when Sir Frederick Treves’s The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences was published, and to have received a boost along the way in 1971 with the publication of Ashley Montagu’s The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity. Its manifestations have been remarkably varied.*
John Hinkley, for instance, the schizophrenic young man who in 1981 made an attempt with a firearm on the life of President Reagan, was found to have written poems that contained the cryptic thought: ‘Perhaps the Elephant Man would understand my dilemma … it’s all a matter of face to face communication.’ A cycle of poems, Words for Elephant Man, was published in 1983 by the American poet, Kenneth Sherman. In 1988, Michael Cavalli, an amateur composer, spent his life savings on hiring an orchestra and the Central Hall, Westminster, to hear a performance of his Symphonic Poem, also based on the Elephant Man’s life. The previous year the singer and performer, Michael Jackson, had been reported to have made the London Hospital an offer of $500,000, later expanded to $1,000,000, if they would sell him Merrick’s skeleton.
This episode in particular provoked a good deal of ill-informed speculation in the British press for a day or two. It has subsequently been claimed that Jackson’s bids were no more than a publicity stunt. Nevertheless his visits to view the skeleton, and his obsession, seem to have been real enough. Yet if the episode was nothing more than a prank to do with image making, then clearly it misfired. The impression created was of a bizarre spectacle, as if a demonic emissary were attempting, almost a century on, to reclaim Merrick’s bones for show business.
The untimely death of Michael Howell in 1986 deprived me of a friend and colleague, and of many continuing opportunities for entertaining and wondering discussion. We did, of course, work together on the revised text for the 1983 edition, but its print numbers were relatively restricted and it was the original 1980 trade edition that continued to be most widely available during the rest of the decade. In preparing what is therefore the third edition for publication, I have been conscious of the absence of Mic
hael’s shrewd asides and wise counsel, though I hope he would have approved of the result. It chronicles and attempts to balance all the facts in Merrick’s life as they are presently known. Since it was Michael Howell who, some time in the late 1960s, set out on the trail of the Elephant Man during his precious afternoons off from a demanding Black Country practice, I feel it appropriate that it should be dedicated both to his widow and his own memory.
Considering the wealth of fresh information that came to the surface during the 1980s, it would perhaps be rash to speculate that we now know most of what we are ever likely to know of Joseph Merrick in a documentary sense. On the other hand, it is clear that the history of his story is far from over and may, indeed, remain open-ended indefinitely. In certain of its aspects, it seems firmly set in the Victorian matrix of its origins, for even the elements of fairy tale and melodrama are naturally there in the known details and have no need of embroidering. In other aspects, its time-transcending qualities possess an influence to teach, to change attitudes towards the disabled and malformed, perhaps even to help to heal the psychic traumas that must always be a hidden component in physical disability. During fifteen years of living with Joseph Merrick’s story, and never ceasing to be moved by it, I have inevitably had my fanciful moments of feeling that is what he would wish.
This book has evolved into its present state through three editions; its list of acknowledgements is therefore long. The quotation from the journal kept by Lady Geraldine Somerset for the Duchess of Cambridge is reproduced by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen. It was Georgina Battiscombe, the biographer of Queen Alexandra, who drew attention to this in the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle Library, and Sir Robin Mackworth-Young, the then librarian, supplied a copy of the text.
The London Hospital kindly gave permission to quote from the Minutes of the London Hospital House Committee. Professor Gordon Seward, CBE, of the London Hospital Medical College, has continued to be unstinting in the way he has given encouragement and time in checking and offering criticisms of the text, both of the original draft and of the rewriting made necessary by developments in the hypothetical medical picture during the 1980s. J. P. Entract, former librarian of the London Hospital Medical College, was patient and more than helpful over a long period, as was Percy Nunn, the former assistant curator of the college museum. The latter’s son, David Nunn, has, as his successor as assistant curator, happily continued this tradition and maintained contact in mutual exchanges of fresh information. Margaret Robertson took photographs in the London Hospital Medical College Museum, and Julia Short searched the hospital’s photographic archives for items of possible relevance.
There are many others to whom a special debt is owed, for kindness in general and for guidance in the direction of much particular information. These include: W. J. Barlow; Mrs Nellie Batchelor, who was kind enough to recount all she could remember of her uncle Walter Steel’s recollections of meeting Merrick; David Braithwaite; Dr K. T. Brown; Colonel Rixon Bucknell, who helped to clarify the likely train ferry routes from the Continent to Harwich in 1886; Richard Carr-Gomm; G. W. Essex; William Dooley (Benson Dulay), who passed on information about his uncle Sam Roper’s fair as well as family anecdotes originally told by his father Bertram Dooley of the time when he travelled with Merrick on the fairground circuits, and who made family photographs available; Mrs Marion Duck, who corresponded about her and Tom Norman’s Noakes forebears and origins; Colin Eaton, who generously shared his researches in the Northamptonshire Records Office, drawing attention to the existence there of Lady Louisa Knightley’s diaries and acting as an initial contact with the families of Bertram Dooley and Walter Steel; Dr Ron Finch, who, by his painstaking photographic skills, made some excellent prints out of apparently unpromising archive material, work later supplemented by Denis Clark and by Les Curtis of Chilton Colour Laboratories, Sudbury; Desmond Flower; E. R. Frizelle; John Garratt; Robert Geary; the Great Eastern Railway Society, for help with amplifying earlier research, and whose members, L. D. Brooks and J. Sweszkowski, located some rare picture material; Peter Honri; Mrs Leila Hoskins, who provided information about her aunt, Mrs Leila Maturin (née Leila Scot Skirving), and a copy of the pamphlet reproduced here as Appendix Two, and who presented the authors with the only known surviving example of Merrick’s correspondence; Winston F. Hughes, who offered an eyewitness description of Merrick’s specially built bed; Mrs Margaret Hunter, who sent details of the book inscribed by Merrick for his cousin; Pat Kingston, who, with the help of Janice Tipping, typed the successive drafts of the first edition and handled much of the correspondence in the early stages; Mrs Kenneth Lindy, daughter of Dr Tuckett, who spoke of her father (and of his disappointment at Treves’s failure to record his role in his version of the story) provided prints of the Elephant Man that had been among his papers; the staff and facilities of the London Library; Michelle Merrick, whose interest in and diligent researches into the Merrick family history have uncovered further details of value; the descendants of Tom Norman, among whom Tom Norman Jnr originally made his father’s unpublished memoirs available, while Arthur Van Norman helped to round out details of the later days of the Silver King’s career and George Barnum Norman kindly presented a copy of the published edition of the memoirs, including his additions, which also threw some new light on the story (and additionally made it at last possible to reconstruct the most probable sequence of events in Merrick’s travels with the showmen); Michael Pointon; Nicholas Reed, who kindly allowed access to Treves’s autographed manuscript of ‘The Elephant Man’, which was then in his possession, and to a collection of Treves’s correspondence; W. H. Steel; Dr C. E. Taylor, possessor of the chair that his grandfather, William Taylor, adapted for Merrick’s use; Dr Kate Thompson, former archivist of the Leicester Museum, and the staff of the Leicester Museum and Library; the descendants of Sam Torr, and especially Mrs Harry Heatherley (Patricia Torr), Mrs Hilda Metcalfe and Roy Torr, who made their collections of cuttings and family memorabilia fully available; and Frederick Treves, great-nephew of Sir Frederick Treves, who gave help and showed interest from a very early stage of the search for the Elephant Man.
Finally‚ I would like to record my gratitude to the island of South Walls off Hoy in the Orkneys for providing the peace and seclusion in which to work on much of the revision for this edition.
P.F.
Suffolk and Orkney
1989–92
* Those who may wish to read more deeply into the mythologizing elements (both purposeful and involuntary) involved in versions of and responses to Merrick’s story, will find a wealth of material usefully summarized and analysed in Peter W. Graham’s and Fritz H. Oehlschlaeger’s recent study, Articulating the Elephant Man. Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters.
CHAPTER I
‘The Great Freak of Nature – Half-a-Man and Half-an-Elephant’
When the Elephant Man appeared as if from nowhere in a shop premises in the Whitechapel Road in London towards the end of November 1884, he was still in the early days of his career as a professional freak. His real name, as his birth certificate bears witness, was Joseph Carey Merrick, and his manager at that time was Mr Tom Norman, a showman who specialized in the display of freaks and novelties. The shop hired for his exhibition was then numbered 123 Whitechapel Road. The building survives today as one in a terraced row of early nineteenth-century shops, though it has since been renumbered as 259. The adjoining premises to its east side carried until recently the pawnbroker’s emblem of three iron balls high up on the wall. To the west side lay the shop of Mr Michael Geary, fruiterer and greengrocer.
Directly across the road from the row of shops, on the other side of the wide thoroughfare, stands the imposing entrance to the London Hospital. The present front in fact dates from improvements made in 1891. In the 1880s the hospital displayed a long and imposing classical façade, set well back behind railings and with porters’ lodges at the main gates. The whole effect was designed to inspire confidence in t
he capabilities of medical science as well as a measure of appropriate awe among the inhabitants of the district. It was the outward and visible sign of authoritarian benevolence and charity in an area that had for many decades experienced an intimate connection with deprivation and poverty: one in which successive waves of penniless immigrants settled alongside the original communities of London’s poor; those who, in the definition of the great Victorian pioneer in social investigation, Henry Mayhew, ‘Will work, cannot work and will not work.’
In such a district therefore Joseph Merrick arrived to fall under Tom Norman’s care, it being hoped that the Elephant Man’s impact on London would be profitable for them both. Outside the premises, across the shop front, leaving only the doorway clear, the showman hung a large canvas sheet painted with the startling image of a man half-way through the process of turning into an elephant and announcing that the same was to be seen within for the entrance price of twopence. If the artistry was rough, and the colours garish to sophisticated taste, the poster evidently had the sensational effect intended. A young surgeon from the London Hospital, Mr Frederick Treves, who visited the freakshow, could recall the poster in every vivid detail when he came to write about it some forty years later:
This very crude production depicted a frightful creature that could only have been possible in a nightmare. It was the figure of a man with the characteristics of an elephant. The transfiguration was not far advanced. There was still more of the man than of the beast. This fact – that it was still human – was the most repellent attribute of the creature. There was nothing about it of the pitiableness of the misshapened or the deformed, nothing of the grotesqueness of the freak, but merely the loathing insinuation of a man being changed into an animal. Some palm trees in the background of the picture suggested a jungle and might have led the imaginative to assume that it was in this wild that the perverted object had roamed.