by Peter Ford
The Leicester consortium had sent down a set of ‘rather crude posters depicting some monster half-man and half-elephant rampaging through the jungle’. Tom Norman saw these as more of a liability than a help, for Joseph was incapable of anything beyond a ‘somewhat erratic walk’. But the posters were all they had to hang outside the shop and attract interest. There were also around one thousand copies of a freakshow pamphlet, to be sold at a halfpenny each, the proceeds constituting a contribution to Joseph’s income.
By the time the show opened at midday on the Monday, Tom Norman had his walk-up patter worked out to explain the posters away as nothing more than attention-catching devices. ‘The Elephant Man is not here to frighten you but to enlighten you,’ he informed the lunchtime crowd, prudently adding that no lady in a ‘delicate state of health’ should enter the shop. As soon as he had gathered his audience and ushered them inside, he offered his introduction, shaped to a formula which could be adapted to every occasion and would hopefully forestall the comments of any smart alec or ‘nark’ who might be present:
Ladies and gentlemen, in the absence of the lecturer, with your indulgence, I would like to introduce Mr Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. Before doing so I ask you please to prepare yourselves – Brace yourselves up to witness one who is probably the most remarkable human being ever to draw the breath of life.
As he next drew back the curtains to reveal Joseph on a low platform stage, he noted the gasp of horror that ran through the group of onlookers. Thus it was on each occasion. Neither was it unusual for one or more of the audience to depart hastily at this point in the proceedings as Tom Norman continued:
Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you please not to despise or condemn this man on account of his unusual appearance. Remember we do not make ourselves, and were you to prick or cut Joseph he would bleed, and that bleed or blood would be red, the same as yours or mine.
The account of Joseph’s mother being frightened by an elephant when she was in a ‘delicate state of health’ then followed in its place, with an explanation of how he had come to be in the Leicester workhouse until the chance of joining the showmen made his release possible, so enabling him to pay his way in the world, ‘independent of charity’.
Tom Norman was adamant that at no time did he treat Joseph like a ‘wild animal’, as Treves implied. He pointed out that it would have been in neither his nature nor his interests to do so. It was his experience that a majority of the show’s patrons responded with a degree of pity and sympathy after their initial shock. ‘Had I attempted to be harsh with him … I would very soon have had the show wrecked, and me with it.’
One morning, a week or so after the Elephant Man’s arrival in London, Tom Norman awoke in the early hours and was startled to catch sight of Joseph through a gap in the curtains and to realize he was sitting up, his chin on his knees. When he asked if he was ill, Joseph replied that this was how he always slept. To lie down to sleep, he explained with a dark humour, would be to risk waking with a broken neck. Tom Norman wondered whether it might be possible to devise a form of support something like a milkmaid’s yoke to ease Joseph’s nights. He set his mind to work on the problem and called in Joe Wintle, a carpenter who often helped him out with odd jobs. Mr Wintle and his wife contrived a basketwork frame, padded with lambswool, that could be strapped to Joseph’s shoulders and allow him to lie down. It was an ingenious attempt, but they were never able to make the contraption comfortable enough for it to function.
Business was satisfactory if not especially brisk. The pamphlet in particular was selling well. It would not be long before they needed to think about ordering fresh supplies. The steady stream of medical students and staff who had started to come across from the London Hospital to satisfy their curiosity was meanwhile turning into a mixed blessing. These visitors tended to stand about afterwards, asking questions, talking among themselves and holding up the next viewing. Tom Norman decided he must draw a firm line and insist that they clear the shop promptly. Shortly before the start of business one day, however, a young doctor approached and introduced himself as Dr Tuckett. His pleasant manner favourably impressed the showman, who agreed to the doctor’s request to be allowed to meet the Elephant Man before the show opened. These three young men, each of them still aged less than twenty-five, then held a brief conversation that closed with Dr Tuckett asking if one of his colleagues, a Mr Treves, might be accorded the same privilege. Tom Norman unhesitatingly said yes.
His assistant Jimmy was a sharp twelve-year-old who would dress in a cast-off, brass-buttoned red waistcoat of his chief’s to perform the most important of his duties: that of doorman. Jimmy had the responsibility of holding the door curtains closed and not letting anyone further in once a show was in progress. It had been impressed on him by his employer that his answer to any question about show, client or showman – whoever was doing the asking – must always be, ‘I don’t know.’ There was also a coded whistle, something like a donkey’s ‘hee-haw’ reversed, that he was trained to use to signal trouble.
A morning or two after Dr Tuckett’s overture Tom Norman was in Jack Winder’s, a nearby coffee-shop, ordering breakfast for himself, Joseph and Jimmy. Their breakfasts consisted as a rule of a pair of kippers or bloaters, a jug of coffee, tea or cocoa, and a plate of ‘doorsteps’ of bread. While he waited he heard Jimmy’s whistle and turned to see the boy pointing him out to a tall important-looking gentleman before doubling back to guard the shop. As Jimmy told the story later, Mr Treves ‘didn’t half want to know a lot, Guv’nor’, but he had kept to his instructions and replied, ‘I don’t know,’ to every question. In the end the exasperated Treves commented, ‘You don’t know much, do you?’ To which Jimmy responded that he did know where Mr Norman could be found, but wouldn’t tell for less than sixpence. Treves paid up and at last the showman and the eminent surgeon stood eye to eye.
It was a moment of mutual antipathy. Treves, thoroughly put out by the bother he had been through and awkward in the dingy surroundings, asked brusquely, ‘Are you Norman, the showman?’ ‘That is my name, sir, unfortunately,’ Tom Norman replied, the ‘unfortunately’ being a disarming little linguistic trick he used to break the ice with any new contact or acquaintance. It cut no ice with Mr Treves, and since it was obvious that he had no wish to tarry in Winder’s coffee shop, Tom Norman suggested he wait outside till his order was completed. Once back at the show shop, Tom Norman treated Mr Treves to a quick run-through of the routine and patter, deciding he would allow him no more than a quarter of an hour. As soon as it was over he insisted that they must now get on with their breakfast.
Treves probably acted wisely when, later in the day, he sent the more tactful Reginald Tuckett back over the road to negotiate to bring the Elephant Man across to the hospital. Joseph himself raised no objection, while Tom Norman saw in the proposal both the advantage of publicity and the chance that Joseph might come by some medical advice. So far as he could remember in later years, there were in all two or three such visits to the London Hospital, but after the last of them Joseph dug in his heels and said he had no wish to go again. He did not mind, he said, being displayed discreetly and decently when he was being paid, but over there ‘I was stripped naked, and felt like an animal in a cattle market’.
A further week passed before the next request was received, and this time Tom Norman turned it down. Frederick Treves arrived forthwith in some agitation, explaining how there were several distinguished visitors whom he had invited to meet Merrick. Tom Norman, perceiving that the surgeon was anxious over ‘losing face among his colleagues’, went in to Joseph to try to persuade him that he should perhaps go just one more time. But by now Joseph’s obstinate streak was in the ascendant. He forthrightly refused. ‘Treves could hardly control his rage,’ wrote Tom Norman, ‘at being told of Joseph’s refusal, especially when I said that in future he and his colleagues could only see Joseph as paying customers.’ Treves may have needed to hand the boy Jimmy sixpence for his troubl
e, but it seems there were none of the other financial arrangements he implied. For his part, to the end of his life, Tom Norman felt it was significant that, only a few days after this incident, the police moved to close the show.
The worst anyone could find to say about Tom Norman was that he had been a bit of a rascal in his youth – he admitted it himself. He could be disarming, even charming, in self-criticism, as when he remembered as an old man the ‘very flash appearance’ he once cultivated with his curly-brimmed bowler hat, his waistcoat jingling with watchchains and silver coins and his white gloves with ostentatious rings worn on the outside: ‘always appearing to be up to the thousand pounds a year mark, and perhaps, if the truth were known, I did not possess a thousand pence … I often think that my flashness proved to be a big asset.’
The contrast of the man as he showed himself to be with the surly, harsh image briefly conveyed by Frederick Treves in the opening passages of ‘The Elephant Man’ is striking. Treves claimed to have extracted Norman from a pub, but Norman describes a coffee-shop as their meeting ground and states he was a convinced teetotaller at that stage of his life. He was no fly-by-night nonentity, but a man who learned his trade inside out, lived intensely by his wits and founded a dynasty that continued to be active in fairground and circus circles for many years. He was known as one of the most enterprising of the English showmen, having been the second in the country, it was said, to introduce a steam generator to provide electric light on a fairground. In 1890 he also set up as a showman’s auctioneer. In time he would act for such famous personalities as Lord George Sanger and the Bostock family, who had, of course, at an earlier stage, taken over the running of Wombwell’s Menagerie.
Tom Norman felt he came to know Joseph Merrick well during the few weeks they were together. Of the reactions of the freakshop audiences he commented that, while ‘they could not have admired his appearance, none could doubt his spirit’. Shortly before their paths divided he gained a further insight into Joseph’s proud independence. With all the pamphlets sold and the new printing awaited, Joseph was temporarily deprived of this source of his income. A fellow showman suggested that they ‘work the nobbings’, which in showground slang meant passing round the hat for the performer’s benefit. Yet Joseph would hear none of it. He turned at once to Tom Norman with the words, ‘We are not beggars are we, Thomas?’
He also confided in the showman his dream of eventually having enough capital set aside to buy himself a small house where he might live quietly. The showman himself claimed that, if only Joseph had remained under his management, the dream could have been fulfilled. While this may be seen as wishful thinking after the event, the Silver King was also a man who might well have brought it off.
CHAPTER 7
A Travelling Life
When the police closed down the show shop in the Whitechapel Road, it could not be argued that they were acting in Joseph Merrick’s best interests, but that was not what they had in mind. Whether or not it was Frederick Treves who laid a complaint against the exhibition, they were responding to a shift in public opinion that demanded a tightening up of the standards of what was considered fit for public viewing. The forces of respectability were making a determined onslaught. Reading between the lines of Tom Norman’s account, it seems that the police action prompted the Leicester consortium to panic and withdraw the Elephant Man from his management.
Joseph, back on the road in the depths of winter, had gained little enough from his encounters with Frederick Treves and the Pathological Society of London. There had been no explanation offered for his illness, no hint of a possible treatment. The only souvenirs he evidently carried away were Treves’s visiting card and a set of the photographs Treves had taken. One of the photographs was used as the basis for an illustration on the front of the new printing of the freakshop pamphlet, The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick, that Tom Norman had been awaiting.
There is room for debate as to whether Joseph himself wrote the pamphlet or whether it was written for him. Those who read it must make their own judgement, but, on balance, the tone and content, the words and phrases, have a feeling of authenticity. Joseph was most likely its author, even if he did write it under the tutelage of Mr Torr or a resident copywriter. The fact that the birth date given is wrong may itself be seen as a confirmation of his authorship. As we know, he rarely got it right. In the illustration on the cover there is also a striking detail of artistic licence: the engraver has worked in the proto-‘trunk’, the extension of flesh that once protruded from the upper jaw but which the surgeons at the Leicester Infirmary had already removed.
Apart from the indignity of being a public exhibit, there is no reason to think that Joseph’s life on the road was unremittingly harsh. Neither, despite Frederick Treves’s views on the subject, was it lacking in friendship. The available evidence is quite to the contrary. Tom Norman’s account amply demonstrates the protective instinct Joseph inspired among the showmen who handled his interests, and the principle seems to have held good for the next phase of his progress. Tom Norman stated that, to his certain knowledge, Joseph never saw the inside of a caravan up to the time he knew him, though he could not answer for what may have happened afterwards. It must therefore have been with the season of 1885 that Joseph’s travels with Sam Roper’s Fair began. According to a verbal tradition he was, during his time with the fair, allotted his own small caravan to journey in and so enjoyed a degree of privacy.
Two young men who worked in the boxing booth, billed as ‘Roper’s Midgets’, befriended him at this time. These were Bertram Dooley and Harry Bramley, Bertram being a nephew of Sam Roper’s by marriage and Harry his cousin. The present book is indebted to Bertram’s son, Mr William Dooley, who was himself a professional illusionist on the variety stage under the stage name of Benson Dulay, for retelling his father’s stories about the Elephant Man.
Bertram and Harry were in the habit of standing by to ward off any unwelcome attentions Joseph might attract. Bertram himself would make a point of visiting Joseph in his caravan to make sure all was well with him, and would sit and talk to him. He was, said Mr Dooley, impressed by Joseph’s standard of conversation: ‘A most interesting man – he would talk on subjects that you would never really think a man in that condition would talk about. Very upstage subjects, you know, and he was a bit on the religious side, too …’ As for the outdoor garb and the theatrical cloak described by Frederick Treves: ‘Uncle Sam thought of that, because the kids used to wait for him outside the fairground and follow him to the place where he slept.’ Seemingly Tom Norman was therefore correct in his description of Joseph’s mode of dress when he first arrived in London, and Frederick Treves, in another stroke of poetic licence, transposed the more dramatic get-up from a later occasion.
On one occasion with the fair set up on Market Square, Northampton, Joseph found himself being harassed by a group of town hooligans. Their ringleader took hold of the cloak to try to pull it away, but Harry came at once to the rescue, ‘and laid the boy out, completely out. He must have hit him hard, but he was a good boxer, was Harry. He was a pretty broad, well-built chap, and he could use them …’
But the turn taken by events in Whitechapel Road, with the show closed down and moved on, had been a portent for the future. Sam Roper began to grow nervous about the way the Elephant Man drew the attention of local officialdom. The show was being kept under close scrutiny and Sam feared some sort of court case might be pending. The shocked reactions of the viewing public remained consistent. Possibly the idea was spreading that Joseph could represent a health hazard; that children especially ought not to be exposed to a risk of contact.
The main problem was that, as a freak, Joseph was almost too great a success. The showman’s patter was designed to excite the imagination and anticipation of the crowd. Like the comedian’s joke, it was the way it was told that counted. And the way it was told created a shared illusion with the audience that was all a part of acknowledged technique in t
he show business, as the old-timers referred to their profession. The trouble began when the audience actually set eyes on Joseph and the horror of his situation became all too immediate; and doubly disturbing for those sensitive enough to catch a glimpse of a living, suffering being inside the dreadful shell.
At the end of the freakshop pamphlet Joseph had quoted, or to be more exact misquoted, a verse from a poem by Isaac Watts (1674–1748), the English Nonconformist clergyman and poet who wrote some of the finest hymns in the Protestant heritage, two of the best-known being ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ and ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’. In its original form, in Watts’s Horae Lyricae, Book Two, where it is part of a poem entitled ‘False Greatness’, the verse Joseph quoted runs as follows:
Were I so tall to reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul,
The mind’s the standard of the man.
The variations that Joseph introduces (see Appendix One; and also Appendix Two) do nothing to alter the sentiment, and it may be that he was quoting from memory a verse that had stuck in his mind since childhood. Perhaps the words once appeared in his mother’s Baptist hymnal. In the strange and pitiful case of the Elephant Man, Isaac Watts’s words made their point well, though the old hymnographer could never have imagined the circumstances in which they now became so appropriate an assertion of human dignity. Nevertheless, those who felt affronted by the sight of Joseph made their complaints known.
The surgeon John Bland-Sutton had stated that: ‘None would give him lodging except in an outhouse, or a stable, as if he were a wild animal.’ It must have been true that his difficulty in keeping clean and the continual characteristic stench of his condition made him hardly an ideal touring companion. Yet, so far as the attitude of his managers went, Tom Norman was forthright in his protestations: