by Peter Ford
The Duke of Cambridge clearly put across a graphic account of Joseph to his mother. On his side Joseph treasured the memory of the meeting, recounting the events over and over, though the excitement was not yet done with. Before long he received a small package from Marlborough House. It contained a signed photograph of the Princess of Wales, sent so he might include it in his collection. For Joseph, whose emotions lay constantly just below the surface, the gift was overwhelming, and he broke down and wept over it. It was so important to him that he could scarcely bear even Treves to touch it. It was framed for him, and he hung it in his room, treating it almost as an icon.
Treves suggested he should write to the princess to thank her, and he did so, naïvely beginning his letter, ‘My dear Princess’ and signing it off, ‘Yours very sincerely’. When asked by Joseph to read the letter to see if it was all right, Treves was so touched that he let it go as it stood. The princess visited Joseph on other occasions, and when Christmas came sent him not one but three Christmas cards, each one personally inscribed with a message on the back. A further effect of her interest was to amplify the volume of other illustrious visitors. ‘It became a cult among the personal friends of the Princess,’ wrote John Bland-Sutton, ‘to visit the Elephant Man in the London Hospital.’ Neither did the Prince of Wales forget him. From time to time a bag of game would arrive for Joseph’s table following a shoot on the royal estates.
Some years later, at a charity garden fête given by Sir William Treloar in Chelsea, Mrs Kendal was selling autographed photographs of herself at one of the stalls. The former Prince of Wales, by now King Edward VII, surveyed each picture in turn before solemnly informing her, ‘I think, Mrs Kendal, you must have given your best photographs to James Merrick.’ Evidently something King Edward and Frederick Treves had in common was a difficulty with the Elephant Man’s correct Christian name.
Christmas at the London Hospital was always a well-observed festival. For weeks beforehand the nursing staff prepared decorations for the wards; for days gifts poured in at the main gates. Festivities began quietly in the early hours of Christmas morning when a choir of sisters and nurses moved from ward to ward, singing carols. Then, during the morning, Father Christmas himself arrived, helped by an assorted band of fairies to distribute a present to every patient.
At midday, as the resident doctors carved the turkeys in the lobbies to each of their wards, the patients settled down to a special dinner sanctioned by the house committee. This was finished off with a slice of plum pudding. For the sisters, nurses and probationers there were special dinners enriched with delicacies provided by the senior surgeons and physicians. In the afternoon, the consultant staff came with their children to watch the shows, for the residents, nurses, students and dentals then dressed up to tour the hospital and perform amateur entertainments for the patients. For the children there was a Punch and Judy show. In the evening, as the wards settled into darkness, a Christmas dance was given for the wardmaids, and later there was a midnight supper for the scrubbers.
The coming of Christmas for Joseph Merrick meant, in the first place, the arrival of his Christmas cards – not only the polite cards from nurses and staff but those from the various visitors who had befriended him, including the ones from Princess Alexandra. There were also many personal gifts.
One year, shortly before Christmas, Treves asked Joseph what he felt he would like, for several donations of money had been handed in for his benefit. Joseph showed no hesitation. He had seen an advertisement for a gentleman’s dressing case with silver fittings that appealed to him so much he had kept the cutting from the newspaper. The set consisted of silver-backed hairbrushes and comb, a silver shoehorn and a hat brush as well as ivory-handled razors and toothbrushes. It seemed an incongruous choice, but Treves understood the feelings behind it and purchased the set at once. He intervened only to prepare the gift by removing the mirror and carefully filling the cigarette case with cigarettes, though he knew Joseph never smoked and never could with his deformed lips; but then every item in the case was equally useless to him in any utilitarian sense.
The dressing case turned out to be the perfect prop for Joseph’s imagination. In the privacy of his small room, sitting quietly as he arranged its contents, opening and closing the cigarette case, he became an elegant, sophisticated man-about-town, preparing in his dressing-room for some formal dinner or glittering occasion.
By now Treves was beginning positively to relish introducing Joseph to new experiences. There was, he found, something about it of the pleasure to be derived from watching a child’s astonishment when surprised by a fresh and unexpected wonder. Among Joseph’s unfulfilled social aspirations was to enjoy an evening out at a West End theatre, but the difficulties here were immense. Any audience that caught a glimpse of Joseph Merrick among them was hardly to be expected to pay much further attention to anything on the stage. The matter reached the ears of Mrs Kendal, who saw at once that the answer could be for Joseph to watch the stage from a position of concealment. She moved to exploit her social contacts and went to call on the Baroness Burdett-Coutts.
The baroness, who kept a private box in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, was among the richest women in nineteenth-century England. She was a notable philanthropist, a patroness of the arts and of the theatre in particular, who had set up Henry Irving for his famous period of occupancy at the Lyceum Theatre. Now in her seventies, she still held a controlling interest in Coutts, the bankers founded by her grandfather, and so was banker to the royal family. Both the first Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were her friends, as was the second duke, the president of the London Hospital. Guests as diverse as the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, Samuel Wilberforce, W. E. Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli had dined at her table.
She was formidably well informed, cultivating, as well as politicians, scientists such as Michael Faraday and Joseph Hooker, or writers such as Charles Dickens, who gave her the dedication to Martin Chuzzlewit. She helped to finance the expeditions to Africa of David Livingstone, and later those of Henry Morton Stanley. Her vast fortune was used for prodigious acts of charity in which, while he was alive, Dickens would advise her.
The baroness had made her private box at Drury Lane available to many people in the past, including Dickens and his family, but the prospect of the Elephant Man occupying it caused her misgivings. What, she asked, would the dreadful effect be if an unfortunate woman unexpectedly caught sight of him? The consequences could be unimaginable. Mrs Kendal assured the baroness that arrangements would lie in the capable hands of Frederick Treves, that no one would see the Elephant Man arrive at or leave the theatre, and that care would be taken to ensure he was in no way visible to the audience. The baroness withdrew her objections and plans for the operation were set in motion.
It was by now the pantomime season at Drury Lane, the Christmas pantomime being a firmly established tradition in the Victorian theatre. The famous sequence of annual pantomimes at Drury Lane that Augustus Harris mounted there after he took over its management in 1880 had become bywords for rich and elaborate spectacle as well as the use of star names from the London music halls to play the leads. As The Times critic remarked in 1883:
On the stage commanded by Augustus Harris the tales of Fairyland are annually illustrated with a magnificence which sets criticism at nought. They hardly fall within the domain of drama. They are a dream, a phantasmagoria, the baseless fabric of a vision, and are best appreciated in a spirit of childlike wonderment.
Neither Treves nor Madge Kendal tell us which of those famous productions it was planned for Joseph to see, but the year Joseph Merrick was taken to Drury Lane with Madge Kendal’s help can only have been 1887. It could not have been the previous year, since the business of Joseph’s admission to the London Hospital was then only just being resolved. From the summer of 1888, the movements and preoccupations of the Kendals make it unlikely that Mrs Kendal could have been available in London to assist. On 21 July 1888, the long partnersh
ip between the Kendals and Mr John Hare at the St James’s Theatre finally broke up. With The Weaker Sex, a new play by Arthur Pinero, under their wings, the Kendals established a company of their own. There were problems to be ironed out in the play’s presentation and, to run it in, they took it on a tour of the provinces.
Their first night was at Manchester on 28 September 1888. Not till six months later did they bring the production to London, opening at the Court Theatre on 16 March 1889. They stayed at the Court Theatre throughout the summer, planning their first great tour of the United States. By the autumn they had left England, opening triumphantly at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York, in October 1889. They did not then return to England until 26 June 1890.
Had Joseph seen the show of 1888 he would have witnessed the début in pantomime of the great comedian Dan Leno in The Babes in the Wood. But the production he saw was Puss in Boots, a deduction confirmed by the fact that the pamphlet The Elephant Man was published in 1888 (see Appendix Two). It is doubtful anyway whether he would have been appreciative of Dan Leno, the element of the comedians holding little appeal for him.
The book for Puss in Boots was written by E. L. Blanchard, who scripted every pantomime at Drury Lane between 1852 and 1888 and had in his day been responsible for giving the genre a certain literary quality. Each year under Augustus Harris’s Management, however, Blanchard complained ever more bitterly at the way his scripts were ruthlessly reworked to make room for some ambitious scenic procession or the comic business of the music-hall artists. The tradition was changing and Blanchard was powerless to do anything except grouse‚ as he once did in his diary: ‘… hardly anything done as I intended it, or spoken as I had written: the music-hall element is crushing out the rest and the good old fairytales never again to be illustrated as they should be.’ In fact Harris was giving the public of the 1880s what it wanted, and his pantomimes usually justified the lavish financial investments that went into mounting them.
Such considerations would not have had even an academic interest for Joseph. The whole affair was to turn out to be for him an experience of unexampled wonder from the moment he was smuggled into Drury Lane Theatre from a carriage with drawn blinds. Permission was given to use the royal entrance with its private staircase, and, ‘All went well,’ said Treves, ‘and no one saw a figure, more monstrous than any on the stage, mount the staircase or cross the corridor.’ Once in the private box, a trio of ward sisters wearing normal evening dress who had volunteered for the job, sat to the front row to create a human screen. Treves then sat with Joseph effectively concealed in the shadows at the back.
To realize Joseph’s feelings at that moment would need a total recall of the biggest treat of childhood, before the encroachment of experience made such absorptions of innocent uncritical vision impossible. Under the direction of Mr Jimmy Glover, the resident conductor, the theatre band struck up the overture, and the curtain rose on the opening scene. Mr Blanchard kept his story line close to the fairy-tale Charles Perrault had made familiar to generations of children. It was one of those included in the collection of nursery tales he made in the seventeenth century, the Contes de ma mère l’Oye, though it had far more ancient origins in Italian folk story.
The youngest son of a miller inherits, when his father dies, nothing but the cat. In company with his feline friend, he sets out to seek his fortune in the world. One day, white he is swimming, a royal coach approaches and the quick-witted cat cries out to it to stop, for, it says, his master is drowning. Dragged from the water the bewildered youth finds himself introduced by the cat to the King, Queen and Princess as the Marquis of Carabas. Afterwards the boy and his cat travel to an ogre’s castle, where the cat tricks the monster into turning himself first into a lion, then into a mouse; whereupon he falls on him and eats him up. Having thus taken possession of the ogre’s castle, lands and treasure, the cat presents them to his master to make him a fit match for the princess of the realm. The young couple, needless to say, had already fallen in love when their eyes first engaged.
For Augustus Harris the simple scaffolding of the traditional tale provided a springboard for a variety of extravagances, not all of which had much to do with advancing the story. The list of performers was long. There were the music-hall songs, the balletic interludes, the harlequinade and the climax of the transformation scene all to be incorporated. The part of Jocelyn, the miller’s son, otherwise known as the Marquis of Carabas, was taken by Miss Tilly Wadman as principal boy, ‘handsome and plays and sings charmingly’, according to Punch, though The Times felt her singing ‘was not always very true, but she makes a capital Burlesque Prince’. Master Charles Lauri took the part of Puss, while another popular animal parody act was the tightrope-walking Blondin Donkey of the Brothers Griffiths. Letty Lind, a rising star among the dancing girls of the Gaiety Theatre who had made her début there only that year, was the Princess Sweetheart.
‘Neatly tripping, lightly dancing Letty Lind,’ enthused The Times, ‘who has already made herself a favourite with the children and their attendants.’ ‘These are leggy days,’ said Punch more cryptically.
The part of the King was taken by Herbert Campbell, a comic singer from the music halls who came to specialize in dame parts, though not on this occasion. The Queen was played by Harry Nicholls, a light comedy actor.
The one [said The Times] is a pantomime monarch worthy of Thackeray in The Rose and the Ring, and the other a depressed but loquacious Queen who manages to get in more than one word edgeways. All the matrimonial squabbles, all the domestic wrangling, all the polite sarcasms and family jars are conceived in the best spirit of humour by two actors who are singularly observant … The fun they get out of the journey in the stage coach, the incident of the pretended drowning of the Marquis of Carabas, and the struggle for supremacy with the costermonger’s donkey [the well-known ‘Blondin Donkey’ animal impersonation of the Brothers Griffiths], are all in the best and most legitimate spirit of pantomime fun.
The harlequinade towards the end was, of course, a link back to the very origins of pantomime burlesque, and by now almost anachronistic in the changing tradition. The leading part of the clown was in this case taken by Mr Harry Payne, resident clown in the Drury Lane pantomimes from 1883 until 1894, the year before his death. Prior to this he used to play Harlequin, and his father, W. H. Payne, had worked as a pantomimist with the great Grimaldi.
But, said Treves, Merrick ‘did not like the ogres and the giants, while the funny men impressed him as irreverent. Having no experience as a boy of romping and ragging, or practical jokes and “larks”, he had little sympathy with the doings of the clown …’ On the other hand he reacted with pleasure when the policeman’s dignity was decisively undermined by being smacked about the face and knocked backwards. Whatever he may have witnessed of police officiousness towards the freakshows was no doubt a factor in his response. For the rest it was the spectacle that entranced him.
His reaction was not so much that of delight as of wonder and amazement. He was awed. He was enthralled. The spectacle left him speechless, so that if he were spoken to he took no heed. He often seemed to be panting for breath … [he was] thrilled by a vision that was almost beyond his comprehension … The splendour and display impressed him, but, I think, the ladies of the ballet took a still greater hold on his fancy.
Three ‘Spectacular Scenes’ punctuated Augustus Harris’s ambitious production, two of them, according to The Times, being ‘veritable dreams of beauty’. The first showed the inner court of the King and Queen’s palace: ‘… a dazzling structure of marble, with high raised galleries, lofty columns and a grand staircase down which a dozen people can walk abreast’. And down the staircase tripped chambermaids in yellow and blue gowns, followed by a procession, heralded by trumpeters, of the entire court in costumes that exhausted ‘the whole catalogue of colours’. The Illustrated London News was carried into transports of exclaiming that bits of the production were ‘worthy of Paolo Veronese’.
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br /> The second great spectacle came after the pantomime cat had cunningly disposed of the ogre. The vast hall of the ogre’s castle was suddenly seen to be ‘filled with warriors in complete armour’, some mounted, others on foot. These forces launched themselves into an elaborate drill routine with halberds, whereupon a great expanse of tapestry at the back was drawn aside to reveal yet another staircase, down which swarmed
… some countless warriors in gold and silver armour followed by knights accompanied by their squires and standard bearers. The entire stage in its length and breadth is filled with glittering metal, nodding plumes and fluttering pennons which rival in colour the whole tribe of butterflies.
The third and last spectacle was that against which the fairy ballet took place and that became the transformation scene. In the foreground was an oak glade, the boughs of whose mighty trees overarched the stage, their trunks surrounded by a rich array of fern and foxglove. Beyond the glade stretched a lake, golden in summer light and surrounded by more trees. A line of distant hills on the backcloth closed the enchanted vista. The object of it all, said the Illustrated London News, was
… to present, by means of children and girls, a wedding bouquet. It is charmingly and fancifully carried out, and the most delightful result of white flowers and green leaves, maidenhair fern, roses, lilies, stephanotis, daisies and azalea is attained at minimum cost.
For some reason the culminating scene, meant to out-dazzle all that had gone before, was felt to fall rather flat. But it was placed at the end of an evening that had already stretched far into the night. Indeed, the fatigued critic of Punch suggested the pantomime might, next year, be drastically curtailed so the audience could rely on leaving for home by 11 p.m. Yet the opinions of critics played no part in Joseph Merrick’s responses. So far as he was concerned it could have gone on for ever. For Frederick Treves, on the other hand, it must have marked the end of a very long day indeed, since he had no doubt risen as usual at five in the morning. He still, moreover, had the responsibility of smuggling Joseph back out of the theatre and into his closed carriage before escorting him safely home to Whitechapel.