by Peter Ford
Yet this paragraph continues with what is, from the point of view of the present account, an intriguing snippet of information: ‘The principal feature has been, of course, Wombwell’s Menagerie …’ The wild-beast show could hardly fail. Permanent collections of animals were still extremely rare, so the only opportunity most people had of seeing exotic zoological specimens was offered by the travelling menageries. There were in the country several different companies on the road each year, including Atkins’s and Sedgwick’s, but the most famous in the annals of fairground history was Wombwell’s Royal Menagerie.
It was founded in 1807 by George Wombwell, of whom William Hone spoke ill when he encountered him at Bartholomew Fair in 1825:
… he … exhibited himself, to my judgment of him, with an understanding and feelings perverted by avarice. He is undersized in mind as well as in form, ‘a weazen, sharp-faced man’, with a skin reddened by more than natural spirits, and he speaks in a voice and language that accord with his feelings and propensities.
Hone also held against Wombwell a disgraceful event of a short while before at Warwick, where the publicity-minded proprietor set up a gladiatorial combat in which his two lions, Nero and Wallace, were baited by dogs. Despite (or because of) such episodes, Wombwell’s flourished, growing ultimately into three separate touring menageries and on five occasions receiving a royal command, thrice to appear before Queen Victoria herself.
Thomas Frost, author of The Old Showmen and the Old London Fairs, has left a memory from boyhood of the magic anticipation Wombwell’s aroused for him at Croydon Fair:
I … could never sufficiently admire the gorgeously uniformed bandsmen, whose brazen instruments brayed and blared from noon till night on the exterior platform, and the immense pictures, suspended from lofty poles, of elephants and giraffes, lions and tigers, zebras, boa constrictors, and whatever else was most wonderful in the brute creation, or most susceptible of brilliant colouring. The difference in scale to which the zoological rarities within were depicted on the canvas, as compared with the figures of the men that were represented, was a very characteristic feature of these pictorial displays. The boa constrictor was given the girth of an ox, and the white bear should have been as large as an elephant, judged by the size of the sailors who were attacking him among his native ice-bergs.
Elephants had a way of figuring largely in anecdotes of Wombwell’s exploits. On one occasion the proprietor mistimed his tour and, Thomas Frost tells us, was still in Newcastle-upon-Tyne with only two weeks to go before the opening of Bartholomew Fair in London. The possibility of reaching London in time with his procession of caged beasts along the roads of those days therefore looked remote. At this point Wombwell gained wind of the fact that his arch-rival, Atkins, was promoting his menagerie at Bartholomew’s as ‘the only wild beast show in the fair’. Without hesitation Wombwell undertook a forced march to bring his caravanserai to London on the day the fair opened; but the epic effort took its toll of the elephant, the unfortunate beast dropping dead on arrival. Atkins lost not a moment in declaiming that he had ‘the only living elephant in the fair’; at which Wombwell counterattacked with his slogan: ‘The only dead elephant in the fair.’ The tactic paid off, remarks Frost, since a ‘dead elephant was a greater rarity than a live one, and his show was crowded every day of the fair, while Atkins’s was comparatively deserted’.
For the Bartholomew Fair of 1830, Wombwell’s proudest boast was the Elephant of Siam, ‘a theatrical performer’, says Henry Morley, ‘in the spectacle of the Fire-fiend, wherein it uncorked bottles and declaimed for the Rightful Prince. On each side of it he had in his show two miniature elephants, the “smallest ever seen in Europe”.’
It was a Wombwell elephant, too, that once broke out of the fairground to take a leisurely stroll down Croydon High Street in the small hours of the morning, to the alarm and bewilderment of the town constable. The animal stopped at a confectioner’s, butted in the shutters and window panes with its head and helped itself to cakes and dainties.
By 1862, when Wombwell’s was travelling to Leicester for the May fair in Humberstonegate, its founder had been dead a dozen years and the main company was under his widow’s management. The routine leading up to the menagerie’s arrival in town followed, however, a long-established pattern. First the advance agents arrived to book the site, arrange water supplies and stabling, buy in corn and forage. The printers were commissioned to run off handbills, posters went up on walls and announcements were inserted on the front pages of local newspapers whose inside columns carried news of the American Civil War.
Finally, on the first day of the fair, the city found itself aroused at seven in the morning by the rattle and shaking of a column of heavy wagons proceeding through the streets. The convoy consisted of the accommodation caravans, the provision carts and seventeen or eighteen beast wagons. These last, being cages, were eight feet high and broad and as long as eighteen feet, their occupants concealed by great shutters, their wheels iron-rimmed and noisy. Each wagon was drawn by a team of as many as four shire horses that strained before each one, their hooves slipping and sparking on the cobbles; and marching between the wagons, sometimes hitched to one or other of the larger vehicles, there walked elephants and camels.
Once in Humberstonegate, with shouting and a pushing of horses, the wagons were backed up to form a square. Three sides were formed by the wagons themselves. The fourth consisted of the high wooden façade that formed the front of the show. It was decorated with mock wooden pillars and painted panels depicting enraged beasts duelling in impossible jungles while men, magnificent in bare-chested bravery, wrestled with ferocious lions. In the centre of the façade was the pay-box, perched high on a small platform, and the square, when complete at last, was roofed over by canvas sheeting stretched from wagon to wagon. Finally, on the inside of the square, the yellow shutters of the wagons would be lowered on their hinges to mask the wheels and reveal the beasts inside.
Up the steps and past the pay-box the customer could then duck through the curtains screening the doorway to find himself at the head of the steps that led down into the covered square. Tethered here and there in small groups about the compound stood llamas and camels and other hopefully acquiescent creatures. In the cages about the square were wolves and leopards, bears, monkeys, zebras, small antelopes, parrots and pelicans. There might be a tiger, though this was a rather uncommon beast, the showmen finding tigers unpredictable and difficult to train. Two of the cages were for lions. In these a lion tamer stood face to face with two or three of the great cats, making them pose, leap through hoops, lie down and stand to command. But if the lions provided thrills, it was the elephants that imparted a feeling of solid merit to the spectacle. The local population was given to judging the status of any menagerie by the size and number of its elephants.
At midday each day it was therefore customary to open the side gates of the menagerie for the elephants to parade solemnly out and move ponderously through the streets as an impressive walking advertisement. Their procession was one of the highlights of the pleasure fair, and the reporter from the Leicester Journal was speaking for many when he cheerfully summed it up in the phrase that Wombwell’s was here ‘in all its glory’.
The reports of the local press in Leicester for May 1862 contain no mention of an unfortunate girl, crippled and pregnant, stumbling when forced by the crush of the crowd on to the roadway in front of a parading elephant, falling but scrambling clear, distressed and badly shaken. There is no reason why there should be such a record, nor any reason why anyone should have known about the incident afterwards, aside from the immediate bystanders. Yet it has become an event so inextricably intertwined in the legend of the Elephant Man, an incident so often mentioned by those acquainted with Joseph Merrick, that it would be unreasonable to suppose it never occurred.
Mary Jane Merrick gave birth to her first child three months after the Humberstonegate fair. He was christened Joseph after his father, while f
or a second name his mother chose Carey, calling him after the leading Baptist preacher and missionary, William Carey (1761–1834), who had done much to foster the Baptist ministry in Leicester. Carey not only founded the Baptist Missionary Society in London, but was also one of its two first missionaries. Three weeks after her son was born, Mary herself attended at the Register Office to record the birth.
To begin with, Mary and Joseph noticed no fault in their little boy. The anonymous but informative article that appeared in the Illustrated Leicester Chronicle in December 1930 states: ‘… the relatives declare … Merrick was born a perfect baby’. He must have seemed perfectly made, even delicately proportioned, and in spite of the hazards of his environment and an epidemic of smallpox that raged through Leicester in the following year, Mary was spared the pain of losing him. He not only survived but evidently flourished for a time.
Mary’s joy was, however, destined to be short-lived. Her infant son would soon start to grow grotesquely deformed, each year of his life bringing an increase of distortion and affliction. There is some confusion over how the onset of Joseph’s symptoms occurred; available accounts vary greatly as to when the first manifestation of his disease became unavoidably obvious. One writer, in the British Medical Journal of 19 April 1890, suggested it was almost certain that the Elephant Man was born with enlargements of the bones of the skull, right arm and feet. Yet Joseph himself wrote: ‘It was not perceived much at birth, but began to develop itself when at the age of five years.’ Again it is to the article in the Illustrated Leicester Chronicle that we owe the only detailed account.
According to this, it was when her baby was about twenty-one months that Mary first became aware of something strange happening, of a firm swelling on his lower lip. During the next few months, this increased in size, spreading up as a hard tumour into the right cheek until the little child’s upper lip was being pushed outwards by a mass of pink protruding flesh. Mary must have been tormented by the gradual realization that there was something seriously abnormal about her boy and that the trouble showed no sign of passing. As he grew, a bony lump appeared on the forehead, and this, too, increased in size. His skin became rather loose and rough in texture; even his bodily proportions were starting to be marred by peculiar enlargements of the right arm and each of his feet.
Among all the bizarre distortions afflicting the body of her child, the most terrible for Mary must surely have been the initial extraordinary mass of flesh that continued to force its way from beneath the upper lip. It was eventually to protrude several inches in a grotesque ‘snout’ weighing three or four ounces. To the most unimaginative eye, a resemblance to an elephant’s trunk must have suggested itself at once. During those early years, Mary’s mind doubtless went back ever more frequently to her mishap with the elephant in Humberstonegate as she cast helplessly around to explain the inexplicable – to herself as much as to her relations and gossiping neighbours.
In the meantime, Joseph Rockley Merrick had again moved house, taking his family from Lee Street to their new home at 119 Upper Brunswick Street. He had also again changed jobs. The history of the hosiery industry in the first half of the nineteenth century is the story of its mechanization. Steam power had altered the pattern of this former cottage industry and during the 1860s a social observer in Leicester counted more than 250 factory chimneys on the city skyline. Joseph Rockley’s new employment was as the stoker on a steam engine in one of the cotton factories.
Shortly after moving into their new home Mary became pregnant for the second time, and on 8 January 1866 she gave birth to her second son. She called him William after her own father, and added Arthur. Any fears she may have had that her second child would develop similar deformities to those crippling her firstborn proved groundless. William Arthur’s growth, it is said, remained free of abnormalities.
At about this time her elder son suffered a further misfortune. He fell heavily, damaging his left hip. After the injury the joint became diseased, and so the accident left him permanently lame. His appearance must already have been making it difficult for him to mix with other children; now it would have become impossible for him to join in their games since he could do little more than hobble. His mother no doubt did her best to ensure that his life remained as close as possible to normal, for she sent him to school each day; but she must have realized that the deformities were leaving their mark, that he was becoming a lonely introspective child, isolated from his fellows and increasingly dependent on herself for company.
On 28 September 1867 she gave birth to her third and last child. This time it was a daughter. The infant was given the Christian names of Marian Eliza, but any hopes of rejoicing at the arrival of a baby girl in the household were dashed from the start. Marian Eliza too, it seemed, carried the family curse and was born a cripple.
Joseph Rockley Merrick applied himself diligently to his work and achieved further promotion. By now he could classify himself as ‘engine driver at the cotton factory’. He also threw his energies into planning a modest but independent commercial enterprise, perhaps in a desperate attempt to make a secure future for a family that had come to include three cripples. The Leicester Trade Directory for 1870 (prepared in 1869) lists him as proprietor of a haberdashery shop at 37 Russell Square, a small square to the north end of Wharf Street. He had never had any intention of relinquishing his job at the factory. This was one among many small ‘back street’ family enterprises run by wives or relatives. As such it must have been moderately successful since it continued to gain mention in the Leicester Trade Directories through until 1880. Meanwhile he moved his family once again, not to live in the house above the shop but to another house at 161 Birstall Street, a side street close to Russell Square.
The haberdashery shop was not long in business before even more serious personal troubles began to beset the family. In the days of preparation leading up to Christmas 1870, the Merricks’ second son, little William Arthur, nearly five years old, fell dangerously ill with scarlet fever. Within twenty-four hours his condition was desperate and on 21 December he died. The following day Mary attended the Register Office to notify his death, and the death certificate bears mute witness to the devastation she felt at the loss of her one perfect child. When she came to sign the document, Mary, the Sunday school teacher who had signed her name so confidently on her own marriage certificate and each of the birth certificates of her children, could manage no more than a cross, identified by the registrar as ‘the mark of Mary Jane Merrick, present at the death’.
The only prospect she had of burying her grief lay in her time-consuming round of responsibilities: two crippled children to care for and the management of the shop in Russell Square on her husband’s behalf. It may be that her strength was at a low ebb by the spring of 1873 when she fell ill with bronchopneumonia. Her struggle with the disease did not last long. In the early hours of Thursday, 19 May, she died. The day was her thirty-sixth birthday, and her son Joseph was then just three months short of reaching the age of eleven.
When he wrote ‘The Elephant Man’, Frederick Treves, on the basis of what he knew of Joseph Merrick and his past history, reached the conclusion that Joseph’s memory of his mother as a beautiful woman who had loved him was a fantasy. He thought he needed to sustain it for psychological reasons, to counterbalance his own ugliness and the fact that ‘since the day when he could toddle no one had been kind to him’. Mary Jane Merrick was thus dismissed as ‘worthless and inhuman’, a woman who ‘basely deserted’ her small son and abandoned him to the workhouse. In the perspective of what is now known this may be seen as an unfortunate if unintended libel; and to be doubly unfortunate in that it posthumously compounds Mary Jane’s personal tragedy.
It remains a curious fact that, during his first meeting with Frederick Treves, Joseph Merrick chose not to reveal to the surgeon certain essential pieces of information concerning his family background: that his mother had been a cripple, that he had a brother who died in early childh
ood, that a sister still lived who was also crippled. He never was to do so.
CHAPTER 5
The Mercy of the Parish
To be fair to Frederick Treves, Joseph Merrick could be remarkably vague about the details of his personal life. He was even uncertain over his year of birth, recording it as 1860 in the freakshop pamphlet The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick, which is reproduced as an appendix (pages 173–5). Throughout the pamphlet the chronology is haphazard and unreliable, but we have seen that he was ten years old when his mother died from pneumonia. It was an unfortunate time of life for him to be deprived of her love and affection, though he was always to carry her in his mind as an idealized but vivid memory. The memory was of someone who had seemed the source of all the warmth and comfort he ever knew. For Joseph, the disaster marked the end of his childhood. It was, he wrote, ‘the greatest misfortune of my life … peace be to her, she was a good mother to me’.
The widower Joseph Rockley Merrick now faced several difficulties. He was left with the task of raising two crippled children while combining his duties as engine driver at the factory with running a haberdashery shop. He could not turn to his family for help. His father had died in 1856 and his mother worked in the cotton factories to make ends meet. He therefore decided to break up his home and move his family into lodgings.