by Peter Ford
CHAPTER 6
The Silver King
Of his parents’ family of eighteen sons and daughters, Tom Norman was the eldest and, as he put it himself, ‘the most roving and rackety of them’. He was born Thomas Noakes at Dallington, Sussex, where his father, also Thomas, owned the Manor House with its attached farm and grazing fields and a slaughterhouse and butchers’ shops. From early on he helped in his father’s business, spending mornings in the shop and afternoons at the local National School. At the age of twelve he left school, and by fifteen was an accomplished butcher. He was capable of going on his own to market to select and buy cattle, afterwards driving them home to slaughter them, cut them up and sell them without further supervision.
He made his meat rounds on horseback, enlivening his days by joining up with the local hunt, the East Sussex Hounds, whenever it crossed his path, and usually leaving his meat deliveries hanging in a basket from a branch of any convenient tree. At the hunt he caught the eye of the daughter of his father’s wealthiest customer and succumbed to the temptation of paying court to her. As a result his father lost trade and Tom was banned from the hunt whenever the young lady was present. In the end his father found it prudent to deny him the use of a horse whenever a hunt meeting was being held.
At seventeen Tom left home to become assistant to a butcher in London. The shop there opened at six each morning; at eight breakfast was eaten from a bench at the back; half an hour was allowed for lunch, trade permitting; and tea was a stand-up meal snatched between customers. By ten o’clock at night the working day usually drew to a close, though it might continue till midnight on Saturday. On Sunday, working hours were shorter, the shop being open only from seven In the morning till three in the afternoon. Tom Norman noted how it was the custom In town for women not to buy meat for the Sunday lunch until 1 or 2 p.m. at Sunday lunch-time. Yet, despite the long hours and hard work, he was contented, earning as much as 30s. a week with board and keep on top, and there would be a half-crown bonus in a good week.
After a year Tom temporarily abandoned the butcher’s trade, determined to make a fortune by gambling on horses. After losing all his savings in the space of two days at Ascot, he abandoned the enterprise and set out to walk back to London, pausing only to ask his way from a stout gentleman whom he encountered in Windsor Great Park. A few yards further on he was accosted by an old stonebreaker at the roadside who was anxious to know what the Prince of Wales had said to him.
Back in London he settled for working at ‘a large cutting butchers’ in Chapel Street, Islington. It was here that there occurred a random incident which unexpectedly changed the direction of his life. The shop next door to his place of work was leased to a showman who exhibited freaks and novelties to the public. The initial amused contempt with which Tom Norman observed these activities was soon transformed into a thoughtful respect as he noted the steady stream of visitors who entered the shows each day. He joined the queue and paid a penny to see ‘Mlle Electra’, ‘The Only Electric Lady – A Lady Born Full of Electricity’. He watched the sparks being drawn from various parts of her body and was startled to receive a distinct shock when he touched her hand.
It did not take much reflection to convince him that someone with his wits – ‘a man with some capital and perhaps brains’ was how he phrased it – might find a future in such a business. Within a few days he made the decision to finish with the meat trade for good and go into a business partnership with his neighbour. There was one disappointment in store: the discovery that ‘Mlle Electra’ was a fraud. She was connected to a lead from an induction coil, the other lead being attached to a metal plate that lay under a dampened carpet on which the customers stood as they viewed her.
Tom and his new-found partner set off with ‘Mlle Electra’ for Kingston Fair. According to the showman’s patter, the ‘Electric Lady’ had been deaf and dumb since birth, but Tom soon discovered she ‘had quite a lot to say, especially when it came to sharing up the takings’. She insisted on being allotted the lion’s share and also regarded it as her right to sleep in a good class of apartment. The showman and his new assistant meanwhile passed their nights either in a tent or sleeping on boards under the barrow on top of which the show was stowed away. One night, lying underneath the barrow, Tom resolved that ‘as soon as the bank was strong enough I must have a show of my own’. This he achieved with his own ‘Electric Lady’ in a shop in Hammersmith towards the end of the season. Takings were good, for he had learnt one basic lesson: more important than the exhibit were the techniques used to present it to the public.
But you could indeed exhibit anything in those days. Yes, anything from a needle to an anchor, a flea to an elephant, a bloater, you could exhibit as a whale. It was not the show, it was the tale that you told.
Panache and patter, the building up of the sense of expectation in casual listeners, drawing more of them in from among chance passers-by until you created your crowd – all of this counted for more than the material. He also made the discovery that he possessed an inherent talent for this style of showmanship and knew he had stumbled on his natural vocation.
Tom never divulged to any of his sons or daughters why he took the surname ‘Norman’, relinquishing that of Noakes along with his inheritance as the eldest son. There was a tradition among the descendants of his brother Charles that he changed his name on the insistence of the Noakeses since they found any association with ‘circus folk’ distasteful. Certainly it was nothing unusual in those days for a young man to change his name for the sake of family sensitivities when lured into abandoning a ‘respectable’ background for the vagabondage of circus or fairground life.
For a time Tom Norman’s exhibitions travelled successfully from town to town, and his memoirs convey a vivid flavour of his tours. A suitable ‘show shop’ was the first requirement, preferably in the main street of the town being visited. Such premises were honestly hired as a rule, but if times were hard the use of a shop might be obtained by guile. The way it was done ran as follows. In mid-morning on a Saturday Tom Norman would approach an appropriate estate agent, stating he was acting for a new company that intended to open a chain of fancy bazaars. He would express interest in a vacant shop already earmarked and take the key, promising to return it on Monday morning. Since most estate agents had their own houses in the comfortable quiet suburbs, they never knew that no sooner did Tom Norman see them depart safely for home at about midday than he moved into the empty premises.
In no time the ‘props’ arrived on a small cart drawn by an old black man, who happened in this instance to be the show itself. A large canvas sheet, covered by an oil painting that bore at least a remote relationship to the entertainment about to be mounted, was then hung high up on the front of the building by a system of poles and pulleys. Tom Norman usually kept several such paintings in store, ready to be adapted to practically any class of freak. Whitening or soap was then used to write notices or ‘gags’ on the shop windows, sawdust was sprinkled on the floor and a large enamel Pears Soap advertisement sign was laid on the boards so that a coke fire could be lit in a bucket to heat the red-hot iron bars the old black man would later bite and bend.
During Tom Norman’s earlier days, naphtha flares were used outside the show shops, but as these grew hot, the naphtha often began to drip on to the pavements and catch alight, becoming a hazard to passers-by. Later he adopted paraffin lamps, and when there was not enough money to buy oil for the six large lamps needed, the black man would be dispatched to the nearest stores to have ‘three quarters of paraffin’ put into each lamp. The man would tell the oilman that the lamps were now too heavy to carry all at once, so he would take three now and return for the others later. With the first three lamps the exhibition could be opened. As soon as enough money had been taken, the remaining three could be sent for and the bill settled.
When the exhibition was at last ready to take off, the black man, now clad in skins and feathers and with large curtain rings on his ha
nds and legs and a ring in his nose, danced in the shop doorway, beating a gong or tom-tom. Tom Norman further enlivened the proceedings by telling tales of how this aged native once swam across the Orange River to save a party of shipwrecked sailors who would otherwise have been lost. (It was an element in the story he hastily discarded when a knowledgeable listener – such a person being termed a ‘Noah’s Ark’ or ‘nark’ in showmen’s lingo – informed him that anyone who wished to might wade across the Orange River without getting their knees wet.)
With Tom’s ‘touting, shouting and telling of the tale’, it was seldom long before he had the thoroughfare completely blocked by people, and on occasion there could be trouble from an officious policeman. But such exhibitions were a common sight, and the police were usually readily persuaded to turn a blind eye while making a habit of looking in once during the evening, as a rule just before going off duty. Then Tom Norman, knowing what was expected, would slip the bobby sixpence for his trouble – always in coppers, since he thought it seemed a bigger sum in this form.
Throughout the Saturday afternoon and evening the show continued, often staying open till midnight. It opened for a while again on the Sunday, but by daybreak on Monday the props were safely packed on the cart and the show slipping quietly out of town. The key to the shop had been pushed through the estate agent’s letter-box with a note of regret that the premises turned out to be unsuitable for the purpose in mind.
The shows Tom Norman exhibited changed frequently and he was willing to put on almost any display. The novelties he promoted included fleas in harness, fat ladies, giant babies, tall men, short men. For a ‘Savage Zulu Show’ he recruited his savages from among the ranks of retired seamen living in the lower depths of the Ratcliffe Highway. These painted themselves for the part, conversing before the customers in a gibberish of their own invention. Such shows were, of course, common enough on the fairgrounds, and it must have been one much like Tom Norman’s that surely tested the patience of the citizens of Northampton, fed up with the frequent mounting of entertainments on their Market Square. On 4 June 1881, the Northampton Mercury recorded their complaint:
By permission of the Mayor, the proprietor of any show can pitch his tent on the Square at any time, and the latest example of the nuisance of which we are complaining occurred on Tuesday, when some Zulus were exhibited in a large booth. However estimable these gentlemen and ladies may be in other spheres, they have not proved themselves desirable neighbours in this case. During the evening they kept up a sort of exaggerated Gregorian chant, with Zulu variations, alternating with the strains of a powerful organ.
An Irish giant and an Irish dwarf, exhibited jointly as ‘The Hibernian Contrarieties’, made another striking attraction. Tom Norman also mounted the classic talking head illusion and, at a later date, even a ‘wireless’ demonstration, where the customers stood around the side of the room listening to music supposedly coming from London. In this case the moments of sharp disillusion were rather too frequent as the needle stuck on the gramophone in the back room.
One exhibition to which Tom Norman became particularly attached was his family of midgets. It consisted of two midgets, billed as man and wife and always brought into town in a specially constructed miniature coach drawn by ponies. In each town on the tour he made a point of closing the show down for a few days so as to allow the lady midget to ‘give birth to her baby’. A new-born infant would then be hired to stand in for the hypothetical offspring, and even larger queues always gathered after such a ‘happy event’ to see the new arrival. The only problem was the difficulty he had in restraining the ‘mother’ from swearing volubly, smoking a pipe and drinking gin in front of the customers. The exhibition finally came to grief when the ‘mother’ ran away one night, objecting to being displayed as a woman any longer, both midgets being men.
But Tom Norman’s ventures rarely ran utterly aground. He developed into a past master in the art of attracting the attention of a crowd with a versatility of stunts and tricks. One of his favourite gimmicks was to announce that a particular show was booked to appear at some future illustrious event – and at this point he usually invoked the name of P. T. Barnum, American proprietor of ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’. It was a trick he tried once too often. One afternoon at Arcadia, held in the Royal Agricultural Hall, Islington, he boldly stated his usual claim, only to find he had set off unrestrained merriment on the part of three gentlemen in the audience. After the show, when he was introduced to them, one of them turned out to be no less a person than the great showman himself. Barnum stretched out a hand to touch the festoons of Mexican and American silver dollars that Tom Norman habitually wore suspended from his watchchain and said to his companions with wry amusement, ‘The Silver King, eh?’ – the phrase no doubt springing spontaneously to his lips as a reference to The Silver King, Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman’s celebrated melodrama and stage hit of 1882. It was enough: from a moment of acute embarrassment Tom Norman characteristically salvaged triumph. He retained the nickname to the end of his days and claimed Barnum among his friends.
As his ventures prospered, so Tom found it possible to move into permanent premises. The first shop he took over was in the Edgware Road, but by the end of six months he was proprietor of thirteen more exhibition shops in and around London. He had a ‘money-taker’ at each and spent his time going from shop to shop to gather the takings, watch the progress of various displays, make minor adjustments to shows and move exhibits between premises.
He was now continually short of suitable novelties and freaks, and would go to immense pains to obtain new live showpieces, often making a long train journey on the strength of a friendly tip. Having come across a suitable subject for display, he would employ a skilful guile in his approach, perhaps spending several days at gaining the confidence of the person concerned before making a proposal. In speaking of the money his clients earned, he was apt to use phrases like ‘star artist amounts’ or ‘princely salaries’, and he claimed to have paid his living exhibits sums ‘that enabled them to enjoy every reasonable luxury of life’.
Should anyone level at him the charge of exploiting his freaks for personal profit, he could defend himself by pointing out that his freaks were earning more than they could hope to by any other means. Besides, so long as they remained under his care they were no longer a burden on relatives or the community. He insisted that their lives as exhibition freaks were both varied and interesting, whereas the only real alternative was for them to be shut away in the dull seclusion of their homes or a workhouse. Nothing could have shaken his conviction that, for the most part, his freaks led happy and contented lives, or that he was offering them a positive alternative. While the Poor Law remained in force he had an unanswerable point.
It was during the early period when he was building up his small empire of exhibition shops in London that Tom Norman received the proposal from ‘Little George’ that he take on the London management of the grotesquely deformed young man from Leicester known as the Elephant Man. In due course, George Hitchcock and Joseph Merrick arrived in London one Thursday afternoon in November 1884. It was a day later than planned and Tom Norman was relieved to see them, though he had a ‘second sight’ act standing by to fill the bill at his Whitechapel shop the following week in the event of a vacancy in his plans. Meanwhile, in the East India Docks Road shop, he was promoting a contortion and acrobatics team known as the Dailo Sisters. They were to be replaced after the weekend by a Professor Durland with his ‘Man Fish’ and ‘Transparent Lady’ who were the current attraction at Whitechapel.
When Tom Norman first set eyes on Joseph Merrick, he saw him wearing not the startling get-up Treves describes, but, more conventionally, a long black coat, a black felt hat and a woollen muffler concealing the greater part of his face. Mr Hitchcock introduced the Elephant Man informally as ‘Joe’, a familiarity which at once jarred on Tom Norman’s sensibilities. But his apprehensions deepened to dismay as Joseph removed his ha
t and coat and unwound his muffler. Though the showman considered himself to be accustomed to the strangest sights in nature, he had to confess that his unspoken response on first seeing Joseph was, ‘Oh God! I can’t use you.’ Yet he was already committed by contract to the Midlands showmen, and besides, he detected a palpable depth of pleading and suffering in the Elephant Man’s eyes.
‘Well, Mr Meyrick, I’ll call you Joseph if I may,’ Tom Norman said, emphasizing the dignity of ‘Joseph’ over ‘Joe’ and shaking the Elephant Man by the hand. Privately he considered that if he had seen Joseph while he was still in the Leicester workhouse, he would never have been among the parties to his release. The shrewd suspicion was forming at the back of his mind that Sam Torr’s group had all too quickly run into problems over displaying their client and were losing no time in passing him on. Nevertheless he noticed when George Hitchcock left to return to Leicester at the end of the day that the two men parted ‘in a spirit of friendship’.
Tom Norman was quite used to living rough when the occasion demanded, though he was also adept at improvising modest comforts and was a stickler for cleanliness, insisting that his assistant Jimmy should sweep the shop out every morning. In the Whitechapel premises he had set up two ‘small iron beds, one for myself and the other for any of my novelties who cared to use it’. There was also a large gas ring (the ‘Bunsen burner’ of Treves’s recollection) that he surrounded with bricks to conserve the heat. It was effective, he claimed, both for keeping the room warm and for boiling a kettle.
With Joseph’s arrival Jimmy was sent out to buy a new mattress and a couple of extra blankets for the bed. A curtain was also hung around the Elephant Man’s bed area to give him at least a little privacy. Thus they had their ‘rough and ready’ comforts and Joseph seemed quite happy with the arrangements, the anxiety having meanwhile faded from his eyes. He referred in conversation to the workhouse, commenting that, ‘I don’t ever want to go back to that place.’