by Peter Ford
For my beloved Sir Frederick Treves, whom we all loved so dearly and now miss so sadly, from his affectionate Alexandra, Sandringham, Norfolk.
More than thirty years had passed since Joseph Merrick himself found release from the burden of his earthly existence. It seems odd, perhaps even significant, that Frederick Treves should have turned back to the topic of the Elephant Man’s life so close to the end of his own. The first into print with a personal reminiscence of the Elephant Man was in fact Sir Wilfred Grenfell, Treves’s former house surgeon, who included one paragraph on Merrick in his autobiography, A Labrador Doctor. Since this came out in 1920 and Treves almost certainly read it, perhaps it had the effect of spurring him into thinking he should write down his own version.
After Treves’s essay ‘The Elephant Man’ was published, others who had once had a personal acquaintanceship with or knowledge of Joseph Merrick included their reminiscences in various books, among them Sir John Bland-Sutton in The Story of a Surgeon (1930) and Madge Kendal in Dame Madge Kendal by Herself (1933). All of these to some degree leaned on Treves’s essay to help with prompting their own recollections. The last to publish a firsthand memory was Dr D. G. Halsted, whose Doctor in the Nineties (1959) arrived in the bookshops when he was himself ninety-one.
In Just As It Happened, Newman Flower records an anecdote on how the surgeon author’s last work came to be written. As his publisher at Cassell, Flower had pressed Treves to set down some of his medical reminiscences, and when he was shown some of the work in progress felt excitedly that here was potentially the finest of all his author’s books. The manuscript included a magnificently written and dramatic account of the operation on Edward VII. Unfortunately, and quite by chance, Treves happened to mention the projected work to Cassell’s medical director.
‘My dear Treves,’ he said at once, ‘you can’t do this. You can’t write any reminiscences. It can’t be done …’
To Newman Flower’s frustration, he now found it impossible to shift from Treves’s mind the idea that he might be inadvertently breaking proprieties concerning well-known people. The surgeon was adamant he could not continue. Eventually he said to Flower, to ease his disappointment:
‘Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll write you another book … about the queer unknown patients I’ve had – patients from the great army of suffering men and women I’ve been mixed up with.’
As it turned out The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences was a set of twelve anecdotal pieces, but pride of place among those of the ‘great army’ thus lifted out of anonymity went to the Elephant Man. It has already been said that Treves, as writer and narrator, continues to deserve our respect, that he was capable of working up a sombre, even morbid and subjective power in his imagery. An interesting example of this type of his writing occurs in the travel book, The Other Side of the Lantern, where he includes a thoroughly unscientific description of a mangrove swamp on Singapore:
Dead creepers hang into the gloom of this forest morgue; dead boughs block every gap and path as with the debris of some grim disaster; about the ground are dead trunks, with shrunken and contorted limbs, and bare roots in worm-like bundles, that seem to be writhing out of the ooze.
In the undergrowth of this swamp of despair are horrible fungi, bloated and sodden. Some are scarlet, some are spotted like snakes, some have the pallor of a corpse. All seem swollen with venom. There are ghastly weeds, too, lank, colourless, and sapless – the seedlings of a devil’s garden …
By silent and devious passages the soiled sea creeps into the swamp. It crawls in like a thief seeking to hide. When the tide is full the floor of the outcast wood is buried in fetid water; when the tide slinks out it leaves behind a reeking and evil mud, which is smeared over every bank and root like a poisonous ointment.
To make complete the picture of this Slough of Despond one might fancy a hunted man in its most putrid hollow brushing the vermin from his wet rags and listening with terror to the tramp of eager feet about the margin of the mere.
There is a touch of melodrama in the imagery of ‘The Elephant Man’ which helps to make it so unforgettable, and it must be re-emphasized that the Elephant Man’s story would probably remain unknown outside the specialist literature had Treves failed to set it down. Yet even up to the point where he submitted the manuscript to his publisher he continued to be haunted by second thoughts over the wisdom of placing this particular story before his readership. He wrote to Newman Flower:
The story of the Elephant Man is, I suppose, unique and in the hands of a more competent writer would make very ‘hot stuff’ … I beg you to be absolutely candid about it. My books have done alright so far and I don’t want to end up with a failure. I read the MS through again before I sent it off and I am full of horrible doubts about it. If you say – and I am sure you will be Dorset straight about it – that it won’t do I shall be almost relieved. It is no use to brag that every incident in the book is true; for I am doubtful if these are the kind of truths the public want.
Of all Treves’s writings, ‘The Elephant Man’ is undoubtedly the one that will continue to be read long after the others are forgotten. If Treves owed Joseph Merrick a debt of sorts, he had gone far towards repaying it. In the air there is left hanging only one of the teasing, unanswerable questions of which history has many examples: had Frederick Treves not persisted in finding Mr Norman in the coffee-shop to get him to come and open up his freakshow on that autumn day of 1884, but had given up and returned to his duties in the hospital, would he ever have found himself standing at the bedside of Edward VII, poised to perform one of the most famous operations in the history of surgery?
Before leaving the subject of Treves’s manuscript, it is interesting to note that when it surfaced for auction in Sotheby’s London sale rooms in July 1980, it turned out to throw a small but significant ray of light on the long-standing mystery of how Treves came to deliver Joseph to posterity with the wrong Christian name. In fact, throughout ‘The Elephant Man’, Treves simply calls him ‘Merrick’, as he no doubt did when he knew him, in line with the social conventions of the day. Only once does he mention a Christian name, and this is where he states that among the sparse information he obtained from the showman was the fact that his name was ‘John Merrick’. At this point in the manuscript, hand-written in a fine calligraphy unusual if not unique in a member of the medical profession, Treves originally wrote ‘Joseph Merrick’, then firmly crossed out ‘Joseph’ and corrected it to ‘John’. The implication is unavoidable: Treves knew perfectly well that the Elephant Man’s name was Joseph and that he had misnamed him earlier. He therefore corrected it to keep the record straight and had no reason to dream anyone would consider the matter further. There has been ample demonstration that Treves could be ruthless with the facts in the cause of telling a good yarn.
The publication of Treves’s last book created wide ripples of interest. It was widely reviewed in the specialist as well as the general press, and the journal the World’s Fair, a weekly publication devoted to news of interest to travelling showmen, carried an article on the Elephant Man culled from Treves’s material. It was this that came to the attention of Tom Norman and stung him into writing a letter of injured pride in answer to the impression of him Treves had put forward. Tom Norman had been deeply wounded through his association with the Elephant Man. So far as Treves was concerned he was, he wrote, ‘really at a loss to account for that man’s antagonism towards me’. On one occasion he had tried to visit Joseph at the London Hospital, believing that the Elephant Man wished to see him, but had been turned away. He had retained a waxwork bust of the Elephant Man, commissioned from a firm called Meech in Lambeth Row, and featured it in his various waxwork exhibitions over the years. But though he might from time to time dispose of other exhibition stock, the Elephant Man bust would always be carefully returned to its crate and stored away. He never told any of his family why it was that this piece held such a special meaning for him.
In the man
uscript notes he was putting together in his closing years, the Silver King created the self-portrait of a man of chirpy courage, who knew his faults, could acknowledge failures, but continued to face the world with unconquered enthusiasm and grew to be illustrious in his profession. His triumphs included the mounting, during the First World War, of a great show in Trafalgar Square, London, in aid of war charities, and he earned his place in the fairground histories. To protect and promote the interests of his fellow showmen, he helped to found the Van Dwellers’ Association, which later became the Showmen’s Guild.
In December 1927, Tom Norman wrote a letter to the World’s Fair lamenting the passing of so many of the old showmen with each winter. His former associate George Hitchcock – the ‘Little George’ of his recollections – had died six years previously, having ‘of late years been located at the Palace Fair Ground, New Brighton, but in former years he had travelled all over the country’, reported the World’s Fair. Tom Norman’s days were also numbered and he was brought down by a throat tumour in the summer of 193O, on 24 August. He went out with a flourish, arguing good-naturedly with the surgeon over which of them was the better butcher. The ranks of the showmen, wrote the Croydon Advertiser, had lost a picturesque figure. The World’s Fair was thwarted in its hopes of recording a grand showman’s funeral. It had been, at his own wish, a quiet family occasion.
Of the other leading protagonists in the Elephant Man’s story, Bishop Walsham How had died at the age of seventy-three during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee year of 1897. As Bishop of Wakefield he had performed one last task of importance. A crisis was precipitated when Sir Arthur Sullivan declined to set the words the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, wrote specially for the Jubilee service of thanksgiving in St Paul’s Cathedral, saying they were unworthy of his music. Bishop How was asked to step into the breach, and this he did, producing some alternative acceptable verses. The bishop who had confirmed Joseph Merrick at the London Hospital therefore also came to write Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee hymn:
Thou has been mindful of Thine Own,
And lo! we come confessing –
’Tis Thou has dowered our queenly throne
With sixty years of blessing.
Seven weeks after the celebrations he died on holiday in western Ireland. His body was brought home to the Shropshire village of Whittington where he had once officiated as parish priest, and there, respected for his integrity and obstinacy of purpose, the great churchman was buried, his grave marked by a simple stone slab.
At the beginning of that same Jubilee year of 1897, at 28 Justice Street, Leicester, on 30 January, Joseph Merrick’s father, Joseph Rockley Merrick, died at fifty-eight of chronic bronchitis. His death was registered, not by any member of his family, but by his next-door neighbour, Mr George Preston, who had been present at his passing. The address was the same as that where his twenty-four-year-old daughter Marian Eliza had died within a year of her elder brother on 19 March 1891, her death certificate stating the cause to have been ‘myelitis convulsions’, adding that she had no occupation, having been a cripple since birth. Joseph’s uncle, Charles Barnabas Merrick, lived on in Leicester to achieve the ripe age of seventy-nine, dying there in 1925. His eldest son, Charles Henry, and his youngest surviving son, John Ernest, carried on with the family trade of hairdressing.
Sam Torr’s daughter, Clara, who herself went on the halls, kept a diary in which she remembered how it had been at the Gaiety Palace of Varieties, Leicester, under her father’s management.
Everything was going lovely as we thought.
We had a manager. He looked like a parson and knew about as much as one concerning the profession. We had several barmaids sometimes taking farthings for half-sovereigns.
We had several waiters always missing when they were wanted. One would be on the top flat roof waiting for the pill man to set his stall out. Then he would throw a bag of flour down and upset all the pills. Another waiter would be fastening the ends of the coat sleeves of the other waiters so that they couldn’t get their arms through. We also had a chairman which they played all kinds of jokes on …
But the crash came, all too soon. One morning my dear Mother came to me in terrible distress saying, ‘Clara, everything will be sold in a few days and we shall be homeless. Whatever will become of us?’
‘Don’t grieve so, mother dear. Something will turn up!’
And something usually did turn up for Sam Torr, who was another true professional and who, it is said, made and lost three fortunes during the course of his life, through a cheerful mixture of generosity and profligacy. His London career was, however, finished by 1899, his style of presentation being by then more or less out of fashion. He returned to Leicester, but injured himself falling from the stage in 1904 while attempting to perform ‘On the Back of Daddy-O’ in a state of intoxication. Briefly he became a publican, but sadly spent most of his declining years earning his bread and butter with a rather dubious turn performed in the back rooms of local hostelries. According to family recollection, he died quite gently in his own bed at the age of seventy-four, surrounded by those he loved. His end had come in 1923, the same year as Treves’s death and the publication of ‘The Elephant Man’.
Madge Kendal retired from the stage in 1908, but lived on triumphantly as ‘the matron of the British drama’ until 1935, loaded down with honours and accolades, having received her DBE in 1926. She was, said Seymour Hicks, ‘the very greatest of actresses’. ‘No other English actress has such extraordinary skill,’ wrote Ellen Terry, with whom Mrs Kendal was supposed to have enjoyed a life-long jealous rivalry, though like most such legends it was largely an invention of the press. On the other hand, Sir Cedric Hardwicke in A Victorian in Orbit had an altogether more waspish recollection of her. ‘She was one of a raft of sturdy, stage widows,’ he wrote, ‘whose sheer, awesome vitality had enabled them to outdistance their husbands in billings and longevity.’ Summoned to an audience with her after she had admired his creation of the role of King Magnus in Shaw’s The Apple Cart, he found the encounter something of a trial, she making it clear ‘that, in her view, the world had been running downhill since the death of dear Queen Victoria, accelerating with each year that passed’.
From the number of pressing invitations to return to her house, which followed the first encounter, I could appreciate that she was in dire need of company – and I could understand why. She reminded me forcibly of Boadicea, that Amazonian English queen who mowed down Romans with her chariot wheels. Mrs Kendal was so terrifying that most contemporary members of our profession stayed clear in droves. Generally speaking, she regarded herself and her late husband as the last flowering of the dramatic arts.
Dr Reginald Tuckett, who first pressed Treves to go and view the Elephant Man, in 1893 went into a rural practice at Woodhouse Eaves, not far from the city of Leicester. He remained there as a general practitioner more than fifty years, well known for his strength of personality and independent viewpoint. He refused to co-operate with Lloyd George’s and Winston Churchill’s National Insurance Act of 1911 when it was introduced, and the advent of Britain’s National Health Service after the Second World War seemed to him the last straw. He finally retired in protest in 1948 at eighty-nine, dying two years later, one of the last of the impressive breed of physicians who were the products of the great teaching hospitals of Victorian London.
*
In the quiet hall of the Medical College of the London Hospital, in a glass case tucked away among other anatomical specimens in their glass cases, the skeleton of the Elephant Man stands, apparently ready to face up to any casual scrutiny. His surviving memorabilia are about him: the huge ‘pillar-box’ hat Sam Roper had made for him and, at his feet, the cardboard model of the church he put together and presented to Mrs Kendal. The plaster casts of his head and limbs that were made post mortem are also there, and perhaps invoke something of the instinctive sense of shock and revulsion felt by so many when they first saw him. The skeleto
n itself, however, remains oddly touching, even moving, in its slightness of stature. The delicacy of the bones of the left arm still contrast strikingly with the random distortions of the bones on the opposite side of the body. The consequences of the old hip injury may still be detected, the severe atrophying of the hip joint being, in the view of Professor Seward, the probable result of tuberculosis setting in within the femoral head after trauma. The curvature of the spine that accompanied the advance of the disease is also evident. On the skull the effects are dramatic: the bone down the right side of the head looks as though it has in some way melted to a point where it ran like a flow of lava.
Bedstead Square has been swept away by successive improvement and modernization schemes at the London Hospital, but the room Joseph occupied in the basement still exists. Even this is not exactly as he knew it. There has been some reorganization of the internal walls and it is now used as a storeroom. Large asbestos-clad pipes from the hospital’s central-heating system run around the walls, and it is impossible to conjure up any remaining shred of his presence. Perhaps it is only in the imagination that he retains an undoubted power to haunt us, though there has been a tradition among student nurses at the London Hospital that his ghost still walks the upper corridors where he was lodged after his admission.
Many of those who met and came to know Joseph Merrick were struck by his sensitive intelligence, by the sweetness of personality beneath the horrifying outer shell. If there were elements of naïvety, this was inevitable in someone forced by circumstance to live so much of the ‘normal’ side of life inside his head and to take his experience of sophisticated living from books and romantic novels. Yet the lack of embitterment in his character had seemed a great puzzle, contrasting with the fierce cruelty of the attack fate launched on his physical body and the abrasive cruelties he experienced at the hands of men.
In his earlier book on Merrick, The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity, Ashley Montagu included an important chapter that explored this apparent contradiction in terms of Professor John Bowlby’s seminal work on the effects on personality of maternal deprivation and, conversely, the importance of maternal love to a child if it is to develop into a socially healthy human being. Unfortunately Professor Montagu had no choice except to draw his conclusions according to the face value of the information on Joseph’s personal background that Frederick Treves happened to include in his essay. As the present book has shown, Treves succeeded in uncovering only the most fragmentary information about his patient’s early life. The information on the period that he did include is also, for the most part, inaccurate or positively misleading.