by Peter Ford
I can honestly state as far as his comfort was concerned whilst with us, no parent could have studied their child more than any or all … of us studied Joseph Meyrick’s [sic] … The big majority of showmen are in the habit of treating their novelties as human beings, and in a large number of cases, as one of their own, and not like beasts.
One of Tom Norman’s boasts that he certainly made good was that the showmen acted in their exhibits’ financial interests as much as in their own. The usual deal between showman and client was for an equal share of the takings. Whereas the showman then had to carry his overheads of rental, heating, lighting and other expenses, the client’s share was clear profit. The client was moreover entitled to all the profits from the ‘sellings’, as souvenir pictures or pamphlets were termed. During the period of his exhibition, which Tom Norman stated was not above thirty months (it could, in fact, have only been twenty-two), Joseph accumulated savings of £50 from his share of the takings and the income from his pamphlet. At a time when whole families might have as little as £1 a week to subsist on, Joseph was able on the most conservative estimate to put aside between 10s. (50p) and 12s. (60p) a week. Fifty pounds was an appreciable nest-egg, sufficient to maintain him without working further and in reasonable comfort for a year at least and Tom Norman was to claim that he had considerably more than this set aside at the time when he left his care. Joseph was certainly quietly affluent, far better off than ever in his life, and better off than many who crowded the freakshows to view him.
But the difficulties were not dispersing with time. The opinion that freakshows were nothing more than exploitations of the afflicted for the entertainment of the ignorant continued to gain ground. Those with civic responsibilities saw it more and more as their duty to clamp down on all these and similar social evils wherever possible. Within the bounds of the City of London the tightening up was already achieved and the exhibition of monstrosities and freaks a feature of the past. Beyond the City’s limits, in the sprawling inner suburbs, the display shops still flourished, for here authority lay in the hands of a diversity of overlapping parish and borough councils. With such a confusion of local governing bodies, no uniform policy was possible.
The East End, with its teeming working-class population, had long held special attractions for the showmen. There had always been freakshows in the East End, and the exhibitions of monstrosities and prodigies were, as we have seen, daily events in the Whitechapel and Mile End roads. Yet even here a sense of change was in the air, and few were more shrewdly aware of it than Tom Norman. It was proposed that the various London parishes and boroughs be amalgamated into a single giant authority, the London County Council. Within three years the Local Government Act of 1888 would make this union an accomplished fact. The newly formed authority would then spring into vigorous action, bringing social reform into every corner of the lives of the people. Within a matter of months all the freakshops would be swept away, and Tom Norman, his small empire in ruins, would find himself having to adopt fresh techniques on the showgrounds.
I well remember [he wrote] an old showman telling me of the change about to take place, and, ‘Tom,’ he added, ‘when it does, your and my occupation is gone.’ As far as the show shops are concerned, he was right. Those that do not believe me, just test it in one shop alone. Why you would get closed up, before you got open.
Already, in 1885, the cold draught was being felt in the freakshow business as police and magistrates became steadily more persistent in their opposition to the exhibition shops and the obstructions on pavements they tended to create. For the showmen, any exhibition that might attract both the attention and the opposition of the police was becoming less and less a desirable property. Fate had brought Joseph Merrick into his adopted profession a little too late.
We do not know exactly when the decision was taken to dispatch Joseph on a tour of the Continent. The thinking behind it was obvious: to avoid the increasing harassment of the English police and to go on show in countries where police and authorities might be expected to be more relaxed about such matters. It was also the case that the novelty value of the Elephant Man was wearing thin on the circuits available to Sam Torr, Sam Roper and the consortium.
One source states that the manager who took over Joseph Merrick’s interests on the Continent was an Austrian. William Dooley, on the other hand, remembered his father saying that it had been an Italian ‘with a name like Ferrari’ who proposed the tour – ‘an Italian born, but he was really the same as a cockney Italian, like the ice-cream version’. There was certainly a novelty showman called Joe Ferrari who was active in showground circles at this time, and who later worked in the United States, but whether he was the figure in the Elephant Man case is not proven. In Mr Dooley’s words, ‘Sam Roper got talking to him, and “Oh”, he said, “I will put him in a show like yours, and I am going on the Continent”, and he took the Elephant Man away from us, which Uncle Sam didn’t mind really. He didn’t want to lose him, but at the same time he felt there was something there for him, you know, and Ferrari took him away with him on to Belgium …’
Unfortunately for this showman and his new property, the police forces of Europe proved as resistant to the exhibition of Joseph’s deformities as those in England. The tour was a failure from the start, leading Joseph ever closer to disaster. The police continually moved on and forbade the show, and after some months of shifting from place to place, it became clear to the manager that he had little hope of making any gain on the venture; that he had landed himself with a liability.
Some time in June 1886, the shadowy figure of Mr Ferrari finally abandoned the Elephant Man in Brussels, compounding his villainy by stealing all the money Joseph had managed to save. This was how Joseph came to awake one morning to find himself abandoned and destitute in a foreign city where he had neither friends nor hope of assistance, and where he was quite unable to communicate with those about him. For any normal person it would have been unpleasant enough, but for Joseph it was catastrophic. His predicament was extreme, and his one thought can have been to somehow get back to England. With difficulty he pawned the few possessions he was left with, raising barely enough to pay for his passage home.
Frederick Treves’s account is far too condensed to help with disentangling the course that events now followed.
The impresario, having robbed Merrick of his paltry savings, gave him a ticket to London, saw him into the train and no doubt in parting condemned him to perdition.
His destination was Liverpool Street.
The point is already made that savings of £50 were far from paltry by the standards of ordinary working people, and Joseph’s journey to his home country was nothing like the relative plain sailing that Treves implies. In 1886 the established cross-channel route from Brussels to England was by way of Ostend and Dover, the Hook of Holland terminal familiar to modern travellers not being established until 1893. There was an alternative route to Harwich, and thence to Liverpool Street, but this went round by way of Rotterdam, a long way to the north and a longer and more expensive journey. A through ticket from Brussels to Liverpool Street is therefore unlikely. It makes more sense to see Joseph making his way to Ostend in the hope of catching the regular packet service for Dover, which would in due course have delivered him into London at Victoria Station.
And it is at Ostend that we next have news of him, though the saga of his journey home was already entering its most wretched phase as he travelled on the train from Brussels. To his own consciousness inside his poor distorted skull, in an advancing state of bewilderment and panic, it must have seemed that he was on the road to his final crucifixion. The faces of strangers who spoke in languages he could not understand pressed against the carriage windows and gaped in attempts to catch a look beneath the great hat’s veilings. If he descended from the train, the crowd mercilessly followed after his bizarre shuffling figure whichever way it tried to turn. At Ostend a blow as savage as any fell when the captain of the cross-channe
l ferry, appalled by Joseph’s appearance and mindful of the feelings of his other passengers, refused to allow him aboard.
That he turned out to be not entirely friendless in Ostend even in these circumstances was a piece of fortune he certainly deserved. ‘I have had the most awful case in my care at Ostend,’ wrote Wardell Cardew to the well-known actor of the day, W. H. Kendal, referring to the Elephant Man. Mr Cardew, it seems was someone with medical connections who was able to offer Joseph the help and shelter he so desperately needed at that point. Perhaps it was on his advice that Joseph next made his way back north along the coast for sixty miles to the Belgian port of Antwerp. From Antwerp the regular packet service to Harwich was well established. It had been in operation since 1864 and worked as a branch of the Great Eastern Railway.
By 1886 the service was daily except Sundays, the run being shared by three ‘railway’ steamers. The senior ship of the team was the paddle steamer Princess of Wales, built in 1878 and joined in 1883 by a pair of ships, the S.S. Norwich and the S.S. Ipswich. These were the first Great Eastern Railway packet ships to be propelled by twin screws rather than paddles. It was, in fact, the S.S. Norwich that made the crossing on the night of 23 June and so delivered Joseph back to the shores of his homeland.
The second-class fare from Antwerp to London was 15s. (75P) at this time, and must have taken the last remnant of Joseph’s money. At least he succeeded in passing muster at the gangplank and getting himself aboard. The departure time from Antwerp was at 17.00 hours, so the long 150-mile crossing of the North Sea took place mostly during the hours of darkness. Joseph doubtless spent the night passage suffering from cold and hunger out on the decks, seeking a spot where he might merge into the shadows and be sheltered from the wind as well as the eyes of fellow passengers.
Docking time at Harwich was shortly after 4 a.m. As he shuffled wearily along the boat train in the disorientating light of early dawn, searching for a carriage where he might sit in isolation, Joseph perhaps felt a momentary sense of relief at regaining the relative sanctuary of his own country. At 5 a.m. the final stage of his journey began as the train pulled out of Harwich to carry him over the last sixty-five miles to London. Its scheduled time of arrival at Liverpool Street was ten minutes to seven.
Did Joseph sleep away the journey, or were his thoughts coherent enough for him to turn over the problems now facing him? These were surely immense, and to all appearances insoluble.
For several days he had been travelling towards a destination that did not really exist beyond the ending of the tracks at Liverpool Street Station. His resources were expended, his energy exhausted. What the next step should be was a question that found no answer. Circumstances had deprived him of the last remote hope he had of paying his way in the world; his only security, his savings, had been stolen. Liverpool Street was a metaphorical as well as a physical terminus and Joseph Merrick’s destiny was finally and utterly taken out of his own hands.
It is unlikely that Sam Torr, Tom Norman or Sam Roper could have been of much help to him by this stage. His value as a novelty had worn thin and the moral opposition was formidable. In any case, Mr Torr had his own problems. The response in Leicester to the ‘quality’ music-hall fare with which he attempted to provide the town had proved disappointing. The Gaiety at the Gladstone Vaults was closed by now, pending new management, and Mr Torr was back in London, picking up the threads of his career as a lion comique on the halls.
Strangers who were approached by Joseph recoiled in horror and revulsion and made no attempt to understand the broken speech from his lips. There was no hotel or lodging house that would receive him; no café or restaurant that would serve him; no hospital that would accept him as a patient, for he could neither share a public ward nor pay for a private one, and his condition was obviously incurable and untreatable. Only at a workhouse might he demand admission, and even there he would be eligible as a transient vagrant for no more than one night’s stay. The next morning he would be obliged to pay for his lodging by labour in the work sheds before being turned out to walk the thirty miles or so to the next workhouse or ‘spike’, for vagrants were never allowed to stay two consecutive nights in any Poor Law institution unless it was the one serving the parish in which they were accepted as resident. Only at Leicester would the Board of Guardians seriously consider letting him become a permanent charge on the rates. And Leicester lay ninety-eight miles from London, even supposing he could summon the strength to walk such a distance; and in the knowledge that once the doors of that terrible place next closed again behind him it must be for ever.
When Joseph Merrick finally arrived on the platforms of Liverpool Street Station amid the steam, smoke and bustle of a Victorian railway terminus awakening into life in the early morning of 24 June 1886, it was as it always had been for him, yet even worse. His will was gone, his demoralization complete. The attention his figure drew was instant, whether he tried to move on or stood stock-still. The crowd gathered with its murmuring comments, the fingers pointed, the eyes stared. Early travellers paused, wondering at the cause of the commotion, and the crowd grew, acting as a magnet for newcomers who pressed ever closer in their attempts to obtain a glimpse.
It was the police who stepped in and forced back the by now highly excitable crowd, guided the helpless, terrified and extraordinarily top-heavy little figure into the haven of the third-class waiting-room; then held the doors against the press of people who clamoured to be allowed a sight of the strange being that had come among them. Freed from the buffetings of the human storm outside, Joseph collapsed into the furthest and darkest corner of the room. The policemen who leaned over the evil-smelling, huddled bundle could make nothing of the high-pitched, run-together words it tried to utter. They saw only that with one evidently uncrippled hand it fumbled in an interior pocket and brought out and offered a small oblong of much-thumbed pasteboard.
The police inspected the card. It had on it the name of a gentleman apparently connected with the London Hospital. They knew the London Hospital well enough. It was a little over a mile away and the place to which every victim of an attempted suicide or murder, every unfortunate injured in a street accident or fight, would be referred on that side of London. The gentleman should be sent for to see what advice he could offer or what light he could throw on this odd, disturbing traveller.
Frederick Treves’s day’s work at the hospital can hardly have begun on that morning of 24 June 1886 when the message arrived asking him to go to assist the police at Liverpool Street Station. When he arrived the crowd about the waiting-room was still so thick that the surgeon had some trouble in pushing his way through. As at length he managed to get in at the door and to enter the waiting-room, the figure of the Elephant Man immediately rang a bell of recognition. It was huddled close against the wall as if trying to shrink away to nothing. Treves realized that the man must by now be beyond the limits of endurance and utterly broken.
After a few words with the police, the surgeon agreed to take responsibility. With their help he shepherded or half-carried the staggering Joseph out through a crowd to where a hansom cab waited. They bundled him in, and instructions were given to the driver as Treves himself clambered into the confined interior. The Elephant Man questioned nothing, but sat in a silent daze, seemingly all at once overcome with a great, trusting sense of calm. Then, as the cab turned out of the station, he sagged into a sudden and astonishingly childlike sleep.
As they clattered through the streets, Treves, sitting in the cab filled with the well-remembered stench of Joseph’s body, must have begun to consider the implications of the responsibility he had accepted. The righteous system by which society sought to control the lives of the poor and destitute could offer Joseph nothing to meet his true needs. At best they might shut him away in the anonymous harshness and squalor of an institution to await his death and so erase himself from the world’s consciousness. The rules themselves were founded on the Protestant ethic at its most perverse: that materi
al prosperity represented the natural reward of virtue. Joseph and those like him had no business to exist.
Frederick Treves’s mind was made up that the time had come for the rules to be broken, and he was prepared to use his own prestige to that end. Having descended in his hansom cab like a deus ex machina to rescue a broken life, he intended to see the role through. If his last approach to Joseph had been met by rebuff, he laid the blame for that firmly on the shoulders of the showman Tom Norman.
The hansom cab, with its incongruous pair of passengers, returned to the London Hospital, where Joseph was helped to a small, single-bedded isolation ward tucked away up in the attics. Here he was washed, given food, put to bed, and for the moment left to sleep and dream.
There was only one brief disruption to his new-found peace and quiet when a nurse bringing food, and not forewarned of what to expect, came through the doorway and saw the figure of Joseph for the first time. The tray she was carrying crashed with its contents to the floor as the woman screamed and ran off down the corridor. But Joseph, propped up exhausted against his pillows, seemed too weak to notice the commotion.
CHAPTER 8
Come Safely into Harbour
A little snort of six months after Joseph Merrick’s unorthodox not to say positively irregular admission to the London Hospital, readers of The Times opened their copies on Saturday, 4 December 1886, to find a letter that was attention-catching even within the individualist tradition of that newspaper’s correspondence column. It was written by Mr F. C. Carr Gomm, chairman of the London Hospital management committee, and in effect launched an appeal, not on behalf of any fund for medical relief or general charitable cause, but for an individual. The uniqueness of the circumstances needed to be well defined for such an appeal to be justified. It began: