by Peter Ford
Petty breaches of discipline were punished by restriction of diet or loss of privilege. The refractory offender, defined as one who transgressed twice within a week, might find himself confined alone for one day or two. Such serious offences as refusal to work or striking an officer of the institution could lead to an appearance before the magistrates’ court and a subsequent prison term. The workhouse, indeed, lived up to its name. None was allowed to remain idle. About its grounds stood the labour yards, sheds whose interiors were divided into stalls so a man might work undisturbed by his fellows. One of the most common among a range of thankless tasks was that of oakum-picking, the beating and unravelling of pieces of old rope and rag into a loose hemp to be reused. It was awkward tiring work, made more clumsy by the fact that many of the mallets provided at Leicester had lost their handles. At the end of each work period the beaten hemp would be carefully gathered and weighed, for there was always a work quota to be accomplished. Other inmates would have to meet a quota for wood-chopping, corn-grinding or the breaking of granite into chips for use on the roads. There was also digging to be done on the workhouse allotments.
For women there was perpetual washing and cleaning, and the hours of drudgery were long. Six and a half hours of washing was considered the equivalent of picking three and a half pounds of oakum. There was also the mending and making of workhouse linen and clothing, as well as work in the kitchens and dining-rooms. For the elderly there were the duties of supervising the infants or the boys and girls, acting as helpers in the lying-in rooms or as nurses for the sick, even taking charge of the mentally retarded. For the younger children there was the workhouse school, where epidemics of minor eye infection caused the Leicester authorities recurrent concern.
Only for the infants was nothing arranged, but then, as late as 1905, a Royal Commission inspecting workhouses was distressed by the provisions it found for the care of infants in many institutions. It spoke with concern of young babies lying unchanged in cold wet cots; of babies who had no hope of getting outside into the sunlight and fresh air, the only attendant present having no means of carrying them all down several flights of stairs from the nursery to the ground floor; of the helplessness of a single attendant faced with the task of feeding a roomful of toddlers from a bowl of rice pudding while armed with only one spoon.
Yet, hard as conditions were, they provided basic standards of shelter and as often as not were comparable with the conditions of home life many inmates had known. There were even families, ‘the ins and outs’, who caused consternation to the administrators by seeming to flout and even exploit the whole ‘workhouse test’ system and to thrive on the existence. These would sign themselves in during times of need, and out again whenever there was a race meeting, fair or market in the vicinity.
At the outset Joseph Merrick endured the workhouse routine for twelve weeks. Then, on Monday, 22 March 1880, he signed himself out, putting on his own clothes again and leaving shortly after breakfast. For two days he sought work, but discovered only that his circumstances remained unchanged. On the evening of the second day he was forced to turn again to the relieving officer for help. On this occasion it was the senior relieving officer, Mr George Weston, who interviewed him and heard his case sympathetically. He was granted a further order for admission, but it was too late to return to the workhouse that night. Only on the following morning did he present himself at the gates. The same ordeal of admission and registration awaited him, though now he managed to give the year of his birth correctly, and his religion as that of his mother, ‘Baptist’. The reason for admission was recorded as ‘No Work’.
It had been a last hopeless protest against the inevitability of his pauperism. Now he must resign himself to this existence, to a life he would later speak of with loathing and horror. On this occasion his workhouse term was to last unremittingly a full four years. There is no knowing what humiliations he suffered, what petty tauntings his condition attracted from both staff and fellow inmates in an institution never meant to be anything but heartless.
About half-way through his workhouse years, probably in 1882, though the precise date is uncertain, an episode did occur to disrupt the institutional monotony into which his life had fallen. His deformities were still advancing and were causing him increasing distress. By the standards even of the workhouse he must have presented a remarkable sight. The mass of flesh that grew from his upper jaw, and which so resembled the trunk of an elephant, was still literally growing. It was now eight to nine inches long and forcing back his lips so that he found it difficult to eat without losing the food from his mouth. His speech was almost incomprehensible, and of all his deformities it was the mass from the upper jaw which caused him most distress. In due course he was referred to the surgeons of the Leicester Infirmary.
There were at that time three surgeons associated with the infirmary (known today as the Royal Infirmary, Leicester), the eldest of whom was Thomas Warburton Benfield, who had come to Leicester as a young man after qualifying in London in 1843. He then held various appointments and won several distinctions, working mainly for the poor in voluntary Poor Law establishments. By the early 1880s he was in semi-retirement, his successor as senior surgeon at the infirmary being Charles Marriott, whose younger colleague was Julian St Thomas Clarke. All three had distinguished themselves during their training and subsequent careers, and they were beyond question highly qualified and capable in their field.
The Leicester Infirmary was itself a good provincial hospital; its results compared respectably enough with those of other hospitals about the country, though they were still depressing enough. As the hospital records for 1882 show, for the 587 operations performed there was a loss of only twenty-three lives – but the operations listed include many such minor procedures as avulsions of toenails, incisions of abscesses, circumcisions, and amputations of fingers. By contrast, of eighteen hernias treated surgically, three died. Two years later, in 1884, there were nine cases that required the abdomen to be opened, and only five of these survived. Mr Benfield, in an address to the Midlands Branch of the British Medical Association, of which he was president, could speak proudly of a mortality rate as low as one in fourteen for operations to remove stones from the bladder, but the most routine operation still tended to be a perilous venture once the risks of haemorrhage, shock or hospital sepsis were taken into account.
It is possible that Joseph was seen by all three surgeons at the Leicester Infirmary, but no records survive to tell us which of them undertook responsibility for treating him. It was most probably Mr Marriott, since Mr Benfield was by now associated only as a consultant. At all events, Joseph was advised that something might be done to help the swelling from his mouth, provided he was willing to risk an operation. It cannot have been an easy choice given the existing hazards. At the best of times, the average expectation of life in the 1880s was still only forty-one years. Yet Joseph placed himself in the hands of the surgeons, ready to take the risks for any relief their knives might bring him. Arrangements were made for his admission.
By that time the long dark wards of the Leicester Infirmary had witnessed a century of suffering. With its 189 beds it differed little from other voluntary hospitals of the day. For support it depended on the contributions of a host of benefactors, whose names and subscriptions were carefully recorded each year in the annual hospital report. It was administered by a Board of Governors selected from among the more generous of the benefactors. Apart from accident or emergency cases, or private patients, admission could only be obtained by a letter of recommendation from a benefactor. The number of cases a benefactor might nominate in any one year was in proportion to the scale of his subscription.
The hospital wards were noisome places, with lines of low beds, each with its neat cotton counterpane. Pictures hung on the walls and the serpentine pipes feeding overhead gas-lamps ran across the ceilings. There were open fireplaces in each ward, involving the inevitable accumulations of coal dust in the hospital co
rridors. The centre of each ward was dominated by the ward table with bulbous brown legs and, on its surface, large Winchester jars of medicine. There was the ever-present unresolved problem of fleas and bugs in the wards and cockroaches in the kitchens.
The nurses, in long dresses and starchy white aprons, stiff collars and white caps, worked long hours: as many as fourteen hours on day duty or twelve hours on nights; though two hours were free once a week, and they enjoyed one half-day and one Sunday off a month. In their first year of employment, they were paid £1 a month. Some received training, but most, particularly those of the older generation who occupied the more senior posts, had learnt their professions in a hard experience that seemed to scar their personalities with characteristic emotional toughness and cynicism.
From what is known of the hospital routine, we may reconstruct the course of events from the moment Joseph entered the operating theatre. This was a large room where everything seemed centred on the wooden table in the middle, its hinged flaps capable of being folded away from beneath any limb to be amputated. Underneath the table rested a convenient box of sawdust. There was also a black metal box in which the surgeons’ instruments were stored, white china jugs to hold hot water, and the pervasive, irritating smell of carbolic spray. While the nurses continued to wear their everyday uniforms, the surgeons stood waiting in waistcoats, sleeves rolled up as they prepared to scrub hands with soap and lysol before soaking them in, first, carbolic lotion, and secondly a solution of bioiodide of mercury. It was their practice to work bare-handed.
Also awaiting Joseph was an enveloping mask of cotton gauze to cover his mouth and nose, a towel to be laid over his eyes, and then the sweet enveloping smell of chloroform and a continuing but distant sense of pain and panic.
The operation seems to have been a success, for the larger proportion of the ‘trunk’ on Joseph’s face was removed. It can only have been a terrifying and dangerous experience, but remembering it afterwards he was able to dismiss it with the words: ‘I then went into the Infirmary at Leicester when I had to undergo an operation on my face, having three or four ounces of flesh cut away …’
On the corner of Wharf Street and Gladstone Street, close to the Lee Street house in which Joseph was born, there stood a hotel known as the Gladstone Vaults. Its proprietor was Mr Sam Torr, whose official business was listed in the Leicester Directory as ‘Wines and Spirits Merchant and Manufacturer of Aerated Water’. In fact he was already far better known as a star of some magnitude in the British music hall, being a figure of great popularity on the London halls, including Wilton’s, where he presented his song material in the style of the lion comique – the song defining the character role, whether comic or sentimental, and interspersed with patter. After he had made his first fortune working the London music halls, he went to Leicester, not far from his home town of Nottingham, where his father had been a tailor, and at first became licensee of the Green Man in Wharf Street.
When he took over the Gladstone Vaults, Sam Torr certainly had his eye on its possibilities for conversion into a premises with music hall attached. His ambitions were fulfilled with the grand opening there, on 3 September 1883, of the Gaiety Palace of Varieties. Top of the bill for the opening night was Vesta Tilley, ‘The Masher King … The London Idol’, and among supporting acts were Mrs John Wood, ‘Nightingale of the Midlands’, Mr Wilfred Roxby, ‘Legitimate Character Comedian’, and Messrs Young & Sandy, ‘Negro Comedians’.
The hall, reported the Nottingham Journal on the day of the opening,
has been converted into a spacious and excellently appointed saloon for the purpose of furnishing amusement to its frequenters. A select area near the orchestra and the chairman’s seat is reserved for about fifty persons. There are seats for about 200 in the body of the hall, while a promenade gallery will accommodate a similar number. The stage is admirably arranged, and in point of tasteful decoration is scarcely surpassed by the other places of amusement in the town … evidently no expense has been spared to render the hall as attractive as possible.
It was Sam Torr’s declared intention to run his establishment along ‘high class lines’, seeking to cater for the ‘better class society of the hosiery metropolis’. Prices for admission ranged between 6d. and one guinea. The Gaiety had as chairman Mr Will Till, himself a baritone soloist, who introduced the turns and generally presided. It also had a resident orchestra coerced into performing by a lady conductor, Mademoiselle Banvard, who rejoiced in the title of ‘Leader of the Band’. Its proprietor would also not infrequently appear on his own stage to sing an item from his repertoire of comic ditties, the greatest success and constantly demanded favourite being ‘On the Back of Daddy-O’. This he would perform dressed in an ingeniously devised life-size dummy with a wickerwork frame, on whose back he appeared to be sitting while it cavorted to the music. It was a droll effect that never failed.
There were six verses to the song, the first of which ran:
Here I am, friends, how do you do,
They call me Sam the silly-o.
This is my old Dad you see,
Happy, good old Billy-o.
Each verse was followed by the chorus, sung ‘in quick time whilst galloping around stage’:
Gee up, gee whoa, and away we go,
Mind yourself old laddie-o,
Gee up, gee whoa, and away we go,
On the back of Daddy-o.
It has been suggested that the figure of ‘Daddy-o’ was an early version of the ventriloquist’s dummy of the later variety stage tradition, but while Sam Torr addressed remarks to it, he never made it speak in its own right. ‘Daddy-o!’, however, became a well-known catch-phrase of the day, and is said to have been as popular as ‘By Jingo!’ for a time in Victorian London.
In the meantime, the idea was taking root in Joseph Merrick’s mind that the one escape route out of the workhouse open to him – the one hope he could ever have of paying his way in the world – could be to place himself on exhibition as a freak. He had heard that Sam Torr was interested in exhibiting specialities and novelties that might make a turn or display for the Gaiety. It was therefore Mr Torr to whom he wrote. The comedian responded by paying Joseph a visit in the workhouse and summing up his possibilities.
The prospect of taking on Joseph as a property certainly caught his attention, but he was too good a showman to under-estimate the complications. No exhibition featuring Joseph could hope to remain for more than a week or so in any one place before its novelty began to fade. For such a plan to succeed it was essential that arrangements be made to travel to a succession of towns. It all needed a degree of thought and organization.
Sam Torr’s solution was to set about bringing together a group of businessmen with interests and establishments similar to his own. Within a short while he was able to tell Joseph that he had managed to persuade three fellow managers to come in with him to form a syndicate to organize Joseph’s exhibition. As a result, on Sunday, 3 August 1884, Joseph was able to eat his last institutional breakfast, reclaim his clothes, go through the formality of obtaining a release form and turn his back on the Leicester Union and all Poor Law institutions for ever.
It was an interesting group that Sam Torr brought together to manage the promotion of Joseph’s new career. Besides himself there was one other music hall proprietor: Mr J. Ellis, who styled himself ‘the Caterer of Public Novelties’ and owned The Living, a Palace of Varieties at the Bee-Hive Vaults, Beck Street, St Anne’s Well Road, Nottingham. Another member of the group was a travelling showman who specialized in the exhibition of novelties (this rather more delicate term being preferred to ‘freaks’). He was Mr George Hitchcock, known familiarly in the circles in which he moved as ‘Little George’. And last though not least there was ‘Professor’ Sam Roper, a licensed victualler of Belgrave Gate, Leicester, who was also founder of Sam Roper’s Fair, which toured regularly out of Nottingham, across into Lincolnshire and eventually to north Norfolk and King’s Lynn.
; Immediately after his release from the workhouse Joseph came under the care of Mr Torr and Mr Ellis. They prepared him for his first exhibition, suggesting he be presented as ‘The Elephant Man, Half-a-Man and Half-an-Elephant’. So far as is known, Joseph’s début before the public was at Nottingham in The Living, Mr Ellis’s music hall. He was also shown in at least two other towns, including his home town of Leicester, according to one account. The time came, however, for the partnership to cast its eyes on the possibilities of London, the great metropolis, especially with the winter season approaching.
By now they were into the autumn, and George Hitchcock undertook to write to his acquaintance Tom Norman, a quick-witted young showman who was just at that time making a name for himself in the novelty display trade. Mr Norman was currently operating two show shops in the East End of London: one in Whitechapel and the other in the East India Docks Road. He replied promptly and agreed to take over the management of Mr Merrick (though in the workhouse release form he was shown he read the name as ‘Meyrick’). It became Mr Hitchcock’s responsibility to escort their client up to London from Leicester.
It is all too easy to see nothing but degradation in Joseph being obliged to uncover his bizarre body to public gaze and ill-informed wondering. Yet, short of a miracle, there had been no other conceivable line of escape from the grinding limbo of workhouse life in which he could only have spiralled ever downwards to an end in the unmarked shadow of a pauper’s grave. Whatever humiliations fate still had in store for him, it must have been for Joseph a time of hope such as he cannot have known for many years as he took the road south to join Tom Norman in Whitechapel. It boded well to hold the key to his financial independence, the one condition that could be in harmony with his natural interior dignity. For the moment Tom Norman looked like the closest Joseph Merrick came to having a fairy godfather.