by Peter Ford
Such thoughts were clearly safer left sublimated in the realms of romantic chivalry. Treves was a directly robust character among Victorian doctors, a scientific realist as well as a man of imagination. The sharp irony of the fact that Joseph’s genitalia remained perfectly normal among all his deformities cannot have been beyond him.
CHAPTER 9
‘Such a Gentle, Kindly Man, Poor Thing!’
Even during the early days following his admission to the London Hospital, the case of Joseph Merrick began to attract the attention of people who were in a position to bring social influence to bear on his behalf. Outstanding among these was the actress, Mrs Kendal, to whose actor husband, W. H. Kendal, Mr Wardell Cardew mentioned the fact of Joseph Merrick having been in Ostend. Wardell Cardew went on to suggest that Mr Kendal might care to go to the London Hospital to see the Elephant Man for himself, and so he did. In fact Kendal had studied medicine for a time before deciding to make his career in the theatre, and among his friends was John Bland-Sutton. He had made a point of keeping up his interest in medical topics.
When he returned home his wife asked him whether he had enjoyed himself amid all the medical activity. According to her memoirs, Dame Madge Kendal by Herself, he replied decisively:
‘No … I have not. I have seen the most fearful sight of my life.’
‘Don’t tell me about it,’ I replied.
‘The extraordinary thing,’ declared my husband, ‘is that out of the distorted frame came the most musical voice.’
The experience so affected him that he could hardly speak. When he recovered, he told me that Mr Cardew had said they would never allow Merrick to be in the hospital permanently, although he ought to be in there, as it was not fit that he should be seen in public.
‘Wouldn’t they let him remain in the hospital,’ I asked, ‘if the money was raised to pay for his keep?’
At this time Madge Kendal was appearing at the St James’s Theatre, Piccadilly, with her husband’s business partner in theatrical management, Mr John Hare, in The Hobby Horse, a new play by the rising young playwright Arthur Pinero. The fine cast also included Mrs Beerbohm Tree, and the drama critic of Punch said he really did not care in what Mrs Kendal and Mr Hare appeared, they excelled so in their playing. Evidently the play was not vintage Pinero, but Mrs Kendal had the rewarding and appropriate part of an irreproachable married woman whose one peculiarity was her philanthropic hobby of turning the family house into a refuge for waifs and strays, to her husband’s exasperation. It was a success with the theatre-going public, for whom Mrs Kendal was a star performer and could do no wrong.
Madge Kendal had been born into a family with strong theatrical antecedents, the Robertsons. Among her ancestors was James Robertson, an actor and playwright who was a contemporary of David Garrick and well known in the fashionable centres of Bath and York. Several generations of theatrical managers followed, and one of her elder brothers (there were twenty-two children in the family) was T. W. Robertson, the dramatist who had a decisive influence in introducing the new realism on to the Victorian stage. He saw this as a principle that would affect a production as a whole, from playscript to style of the acting and production details. He was one of the first to stipulate that when he asked for coat-pegs in the scenery they should be real coat-pegs on which real coats might be hung and not painted simulations.
When Madge Robertson married W. H. Kendal in 1869, her career as an accomplished and popular actress was already firmly launched. Her husband was similarly becoming well known as an actor manager, though in the end it was his wife’s fame that was the more durable. Nevertheless their partnership lasted throughout their lives and they became a byword for setting a respectable example in the theatrical world where a general raffishness characterized the more usual tone.
All her life Madge Kendal never flinched from performing acts of charity. Many years after the events concerning the Elephant Man she was to claim that she had been the one responsible for anonymously launching the fund that brought Merrick the financial security to maintain him in the London Hospital. Be that as it may, it needs to be emphasized that while her husband met Merrick, she herself probably never did so. The chapter on ‘The Elephant Man’ in her memoirs contains no indication of a personal encounter. The tone is detached and she even relies on Treves’s already published description to sketch in his appearance. Her incessantly crowded career could, in any case, have left her little enough time for charitable visits in the manner of ladies of greater leisure.
She nevertheless represented the starting point to a network of personages who would mobilize sympathy for Joseph Merrick’s welfare and incidentally enrich his experience of a social life in the few years remaining to him. In the meantime, he had begun to explore within the limits he could manage: a few limping steps in the darkness of late evening, a shuffling from his room, a painful toiling up the concrete steps and then the cold stillness of Bedstead Square with its shadows, the far-away glow of the high ward windows and the occasional echo of distant footsteps. Yet it prompted in him a sense of freedom to stand unmolested in the open air. With each night-time excursion, his confidence increased until at last he was able to make his way from the square, skirting beyond the patches of light thrown from windows, picking his way through the rubble of builders’ materials that littered the ground where new extensions were being built, moving in a hesitant exploration round beyond the end of the great block of the East Wing until he came to the hospital gardens and walked alone in the darkness. There he could feel the grass soft beneath his feet and savour the rediscovered scent of night flowers.
In the daytime, he spied cautiously on the comings and goings in Bedstead Square. He learnt to recognize the faces of those who passed daily above his window, and the workmen in their turn were aware of the unseen but watchful presence behind the curtains in the little basement room. Here, too, he unexpectedly found friends. Mr Taylor, the chief engineer, came one day to introduce Charles Taylor, his youngest son, a lad of about seventeen. A friendship quickly sprang up between them, and after that the youth came regularly, bringing his violin to play in private recital for Joseph’s entertainment.
Mrs Kendal sent him gifts, the first being an early gramophone of the type invented by Edison only about ten years before, the recordings for which were made on cylinders rotated by a hand-cranked handle at the side. Joseph wrote to thank Mrs Kendal for her kindness, and in fact he wrote her letters on several occasions. Alas, the letters did not survive. She presented them to the London Hospital, but they could no longer be traced when she came to write her memoirs in the early 1930s. He also sent her one of the cardboard models he had constructed with the aid of the nurses. It was a delicately detailed model of a Gothic church. This has survived, being preserved today in the museum of the London Hospital Medical College.
In one of his letters to Mrs Kendal, Joseph mentioned that he hoped one day to be able to learn basket-work. She promptly arranged for an instructor to teach him the craft. Now his room became littered with bundles of cane and small basket-work articles waiting to be given to whoever might accept them. The first basket he completed he sent to Mrs Kendal herself.
Since it was evidently not possible for her to go to see him, Joseph requested that she send him some photographs. These she forwarded, and he displayed them in his room in triumph.
It came as rather a surprise to Treves to find how Joseph was starting to develop into something of a celebrity. The letter to The Times had had the effect of arousing not only a phenomenal charitable response but also widespread curiosity. Requests to visit the Elephant Man were received by the hospital. Within a few months of the disturbing incident of his meeting with the pretty young widow, Treves came to the rueful conclusion that every lady of note in the social sphere would soon make the pilgrimage to the hospital to be escorted to the basement rooms and introduced. Each one who came was forewarned about his appearance, and each one sturdily summoned the courage to greet him with smile
and handshake, even to spend some minutes in conversation.
To begin with, Joseph was reticent towards his guests, but every introduction seemed to bring him a little more confidence, and each day his manner became more self-assured. Treves still needed to act as interpreter. Joseph’s speech was improving with practice but it remained indistinct. His visitors, though perhaps drawn mainly by curiosity or the fact that it was fast becoming the done thing to visit Joseph Merrick, were entirely benevolent. They brought him gifts so that his rooms grew bright with ornaments and pictures. Sometimes he received autographed portraits or photographs of the ladies who called, and these joined the others displayed about the room. Some of the gentlemen left money to be spent on his behalf, and in this Treves acted as steward. The gifts that always pleased Joseph most were books, for he was slowly accumulating quite a respectable library and his spare time was increasingly given to reading.
The paradox was not lost on Treves as he saw Joseph emerging into an object of patronage and interest. His protégé, once a homeless and shunned waif, was beginning to become the sought after acquaintance of duchesses and countesses. It is doubtful, however, whether the surgeon could have taken the irony the one step further, and have seen the accident of his own intervention as carrying Joseph’s career as a freak on to a new, unimaginable level of success; or himself as the alter ego to Mr Tom Norman, the showman he so consistently despised.
As Joseph lost the last of his reticence, he would speak relaxedly and strike up acquaintanceship with anyone who paused to acknowledge him. It became his habit to sit at his window to have a word with whoever happened to pass in Bedstead Square. He no longer hung back behind the curtains, and regular passers-by often stopped and called to inspect his more recent gifts or hear tales of the distinguished guests he had entertained. Such tales were told with an innocent jubilation, steeped more in wonder than in pride. On a few occasions he wandered away from his room in search of company, and once raised an alarm by appearing without warning at the entrance to one of the main wards. Only a flurry of nurses rushing to gather about him and shepherd him back to his own quarters prevented his sudden presence delivering a shock to the other patients.
Joseph’s fresh curiosity about the outside world naturally extended to Treves. He questioned the surgeon shyly about himself and the home where he and his family lived. He seemed particularly inquisitive about the house, asking wistfully about its arrangement and how it looked. At last he remarked obliquely that he should like to see the inside of a ‘real’ house. The simple artisan terrace dwellings, such as he knew in Leicester, or the lodgings of the freakshow circuit, could never have counted as such. It was the elegant town houses of the rich, as he had glimpsed them standing splendid and remote during his travels, their doors perpetually closed, which teased his imagination. With the help of his reading he had been able to people and furnish their splendid interiors, but now he wanted to measure imagined images against the facts.
Treves recognized the wish implied by Joseph’s mention of the subject. Within a few days he arranged for him to be taken to his own house at 6 Wimpole Street, safely concealed inside a hansom cab. No doubt the household was suitably prepared, and Treves’s daughters, Enid, aged eight, and Hetty, aged four, safely out of the way when Joseph was hurried across the pavements and into the seclusion of the hallway.
Solemnly Treves escorted his guest from room to room. It turned out to be a slow process, for Joseph paused to examine every object. He gazed at each piece of furniture, each curtain, each fabric with almost comically exaggerated interest. As they progressed, Treves became aware of a sense of unease within himself. The house seemed in some way to be falling short of expectations. Joseph had clearly anticipated finding a larger and grander establishment and was puzzled by the lack of liveried footmen and other servants in attendance. (Treves himself, when writing of his consulting room, once described it as the smallest in London, ‘not much more than a cupboard with a fireplace and window’.)
Anxious that Joseph should not be disappointed, while hoping to explain circumstances and perhaps retrieve a certain lost prestige, Treves explained that this was never meant to be the home of an aristocrat. It was more accurately a town house, built in the more modest style of dwellings as described in the novels of Jane Austen. Joseph, who had read Emma, accepted the comparison with polite gravity.
From the time of its foundation in the eighteenth century, the London Hospital was forced to wage a continuous battle against not only lack of funds but also a shortage of accommodation. In 1887 two sets of new buildings were nearing completion. On the south side of Bedstead Square, beyond the end of the East Wing, the new Nurses Home was being constructed. In Turner Street, at the side of the hospital, new accommodation for the Medical College was almost finished. By the spring of 1887, both buildings were completed, and on 21 May the official opening was held.
The Prince and Princess of Wales accepted the invitation to perform the ceremony, and their carriage arrived at the main gates at five in the afternoon on a day wet with a steady drizzle. They were received by a formal reception party headed by the president of the London Hospital, George William, second Duke of Cambridge, Commander in Chief of the Army and a cousin of Queen Victoria’s.
As a young man of twenty-one, George William had defied the conventions expected of a royal duke by marrying a commoner who was worse still an actress. His successful life-long marriage was quietly ignored by the monarch, the court and society at large. He had been on active service during the Crimean War, and had his horse shot from under him at the battle of Inkerman, though he then managed to rally a hundred survivors from the division to break through the encircling Russians. By the 1880s the veteran warrior was ageing and gruffly formidable. He had as good as inherited the presidency of the hospital from his father, who died in 1850, and was untiring in the support he offered and rallied. He graced official occasions, spoke at innumerable dinners, presided over charitable gatherings and maintained a determined supervision of the hospital’s variegated activities. He never hesitated to voice displeasure should someone omit to consult him over some important piece of institutional business, though his irascibility was in general recognized as concealing genuine concern and kindness. He had even continued to meet these commitments during the years of Queen Victoria’s retirement from public life after the death of the Prince Consort in 1861, when he shouldered many of the public tasks expected from the head of state.
The Prince and Princess of Wales had themselves kept up an association with the London Hospital since 1864. One of their joint duties in that year, which followed the year of their marriage, had been to lay the foundation stone for the new block known as the Alexandra Wing. For 21 May 1887, the plans were more elaborate. The royal party would first be conducted to the new Nurses Home, to be received in the dining-room by the matron, Miss Eva Lückes, heading her nursing staff. The chapel choir would then sing a hymn, the suffragan Bishop of Bedford would read a collect and the Duke of Cambridge would ask the Princess of Wales to declare the building, to be called the Alexandra Home, open. From there the party would be escorted to the new Medical College buildings, where further speeches would be delivered and a similar ceremony performed by the Prince of Wales; but on the way the royal personages would be invited to visit several wards.
The slow, dignified procession duly passed from bed to bed, and the princess was visibly moved by the spectacle of so much suffering. Then, from the wards, the party descended to the basements of the East Wing so that she might be introduced to the Elephant Man, who had by that time been almost a year in residence. She was warned that his appearance was literally shocking, and Frederick Treves accompanied the party as a matter of course.
Thus Joseph Merrick suddenly found his small room flooded with strangers, but for him the most important person among them was the Princess of Wales. She had entered the room with relaxed grace, smiled and taken the introduction with perfect serenity, shaken him by the hand
and sat beside his chair so she might talk to him. She examined his curios and gifts with an interest that left him transported with wonder. The Prince of Wales also spoke to him, being quietly amused to spot Mrs Kendal among the collection of autographed portraits. And then the royal party withdrew, leaving Joseph beside himself with excitement.
Later that night, the Duke of Cambridge confided to his diary some details of the afternoon:
1887, May 21st – Went to the London Hospital, where as President I received at 5 o’clock the Prince and Princess of Wales, who came to open the new home just finished for the Nurses of the Hospital. We passed through the wards, saw the unfortunate man called the elephant man, who is a painful sight to look at, though intelligent in himself, and then I read an address to the Prince and Princess to which the Prince replied. It was very wet, but we were able to return in open carriages. The crowds in the streets were very enthusiastic. All went off well.
It was probably on this occasion, though he did not mention it, that the Duke of Cambridge discreetly presented Joseph with a silver watch.
The following afternoon he paid a call on his mother, the aged Duchess of Cambridge. Lady Geraldine Somerset, who attended the duchess, kept a journal for her, and in this she recorded the duke’s visit:
May 22nd, 1887
… At 3 came the Duke. He gave H.R.H. an account … of the Princess of Wales … at the London Hospital, tearing up her bouquet, to give a flower of it to each sick child & each sick woman. Of their having seen the Elephant-man, poor creature – a sad spectacle! enormous, with two great bosses on the forehead really like an elephant’s head, & a protruding face like a snout, one enormous hand like the foot of an elephant, the other, the left hand, extraordinarily, exceptionally small! He can never go out, he is mobbed so, & lives therefore a prisoner; he is less disgusting to see than might be, because he is such a gentle, kindly man, poor thing! …