As is usually the case with those who, in any sphere of life, have no fear of breaking eggs to make omelettes, Frederick Treves possessed enemies as well as friends. Those who admired him did so unstintingly, but he also had his detractors among his medical colleagues. Some considered he had built his career on a certain rather unprofessional flair for publicity. He certainly possessed a notably happy knack for being in the right place at the right time. Even one of his more ardent admirers, Dr D. G. Halsted, stated in Doctor in the Nineties that Treves first became famous because of the care he lavished on the Elephant Man. It is only one step from such a statement to the innuendo that he used his association with Merrick for self-advancement and showmanship. ‘The question is,’ Tom Norman asked bluntly, ‘who really exploited poor Joseph? I, the showman, got the abuse. Dr [sic] Treves, the eminent surgeon (who you must admit was also a showman, but on a rather higher social scale) received the publicity and praise.’
The shadow side of Treves’s benevolence undoubtedly existed but was naturally never touched on by him or any spokesman for the London Hospital. As a part of the gratitude he owed, Joseph Merrick had needed to be ever-available for inspection by medical students and emininent scientists as well as shown off to visitors and Treves’s friends and acquaintances. Tom Norman had heard a whisper that Joseph was far less happy with these circumstances and their dependence on charity than Treves ever implied or admitted. It even reached his ears that Joseph had sometimes asked, ‘Why can’t I go back to Mr Norman?’ Joseph’s omission in never divulging the fact of his mother and sister being crippled, his brother dead, may be put down to a suppression of painful memories for a complexity of reasons; but it may also in part represent a determination to preserve an area of privacy from the world, and even from Frederick Treves.
A milder accusation in circulation was that the hospital administrators had exploited Merrick as a publicity device in their fundraising campaigns. Meanwhile, in the streets outside, the people of the East End, mistrustful as always of the motives of authority, held for many years to the belief that the Elephant Man sold his body to the hospital in return for the care it offered him.
The public appeals made by the hospital on Joseph’s behalf, and Carr Gomm’s conscientious stewardship of the funds, make any business transaction involving the disposal of Joseph’s body seem unnecessary and unlikely. As for the Elephant Man’s publicity value to the hospital, it existed but was incidental. There is no evidence for any calculated or cynical exploitation in the dealings of the hospital and Frederick Treves with Joseph Merrick. To the question of whether Joseph’s unexpected return to the scene in 1886 contributed to the growth of Treves’s fame and fortune, however, the reply must be: very probably it did. Stephen Trombley, Treves’s biographer, confirms the phenomenal extent to which the case of the Elephant Man placed him in the public eye.
The line of development being taken by Treves’s career as a distinguished medical personality was well established by the time he first met the Elephant Man. The association is unlikely to have made much difference to his ultimate professional status, but in the context of Treves’s need to build up his private Wimpole Street surgeon’s practice (his surgical duties in the public wards of the London Hospital being unpaid), Joseph’s reappearance could hardly have been more timely. It is hard to believe that the flurry of public interest in December 1886 did anything other than draw his name to the attention of the rich and influential and enhance the prosperity of his practice. It may even have been an important stepping stone in bringing him to the notice of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
In other words, it must have contributed a significant momentum to Treves’s financial success, but only the most puritan moralist could blame him for unhesitatingly accepting his good fortune. The one valid question is whether his success in any way compromised his integrity as a surgeon, and that it did nothing of the kind is the decisive answer.
There is nothing to support any accusation that he deliberately set out to utilize his knowledge of Joseph Merrick’s case for financial gain. At the outset he can hardly have foreseen the course events were to follow and his preliminary investigations amounted to no more than a diagnostic foray to try to elucidate a mystery. Thereafter his only writings on or presentation of the case were exclusively to professional colleagues or in medical journals. Not until the last year of his life, long after retirement from active practice, did he publish his recollections of Merrick for a more general audience in The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences.
Even while Joseph was still alive, Treves was continuing to add corner-stones to his career in the shape of his medical writings. His third book, Intestinal Obstruction: Its Varieties, with their Pathology, Diagnosis and Treatment, based on the essay which won him the Jacksonian Prize of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1883, came from the press in 1884 and was swiftly regarded as a medical source book. The next year he produced The Anatomy of the Intestinal Canal and Peritoneum, based on his Hunterian Lectures. The book represented the high point of his achievement as a surgeon writer, becoming a classic of medical literature. In 1886, he edited a three-volume textbook of surgery with contributions from thirty-five leading surgeons of the day, A Manual of Surgery by Various Authors.
After that he seems for a time to have abandoned the pen to concentrate more on the scalpel. A young engineer was admitted to the London Hospital in December 1886, suffering from typhlitis, as appendicitis was then known. The generally prescribed treatment at the time was complete bed rest, with doses of opium to relieve the pain and enemas to relieve the bowels. The engineer recovered after six weeks, but it was known that the condition would inevitably recur and could next time be fatal. Treves was therefore consulted for suggestions of an alternative treatment, and he recommended surgery. It was a controversial and bold decision in so far as medical orthodoxy considered that acute typhlitis should simply be left to run its course.
When he opened up his patient Treves found the trouble lay in a kinking of the appendix trapping mucus and leading to inflammation. As Treves prepared to remove the appendix and freed the peritoneal folds (the layers of membrane that line the abdominal cavity), the appendix sprang back into its normal position. Treves therefore simply sewed his patient up again and the man duly recovered, though he was kept under anxious observation for nearly two months. There was no recurrence of typhlitis in the engineer, and, so far as is known, this was the first operation undertaken in Britain to treat chronic, relapsing appendicitis. It made Treves a leading authority in this particular branch of surgery.
Meanwhile Treves’s reputation as a surgeon spread far and wide in fashionable circles. Sir Henry Irving consulted him when he inhaled the nozzle of a throat spray into his lung. He performed a desperate tracheotomy by the light of an oil lamp on the Victorian painter and president of the Royal Academy, Sir John Millais, who was a victim of throat cancer. Another rich patient, a Mr Fielden, donated £22,000 to the London Hospital in gratitude for what Treves had been able to do for him and the hospital built a complete isolation block on the strength of it. Mr Fielden then made further donations of £62,000 and left the hospital £100,000 in his will.
In the 1890s, Treves resumed his medical authorship, producing in 1891 a large two-volume textbook, A Manual of Operative Surgery, concerned solely with the practical aspects of treatment by operation. An abridged version followed a year later, and in 1895 his last full-length medical textbook, A System of Surgery, also in two volumes, was published. He was writing these during an intensely busy period as he continued to fulfil his duties as consulting surgeon to the London Hospital. He did not resign from his post there until 1898, the year after Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations.
A sequence of personal honours was now the inevitable corollary to the advances in his career. Following the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, he saw service in South Africa as a surgeon to one of the field hospitals. He witnessed the relief of Ladysmith before a severe bout of dysentery laid him low. While he was still recovering, the Court Circular announced that Queen Victoria had been pleased to appoint Mr Treves as one of her surgeons-in-ordinary. Within a year the queen was dead and the Prince of Wales had succeeded to the throne as Edward VII. On 4 May 1901 the following announcement appeared in the Court Circular:
Mr Frederick Treves was introduced to the King’s presence when His Majesty conferred upon him the honour of Knighthood and invested him with the insignia of a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. Sir Frederick Treves who was Surgeon in Ordinary to her late Majesty Queen Victoria and is Surgeon in Ordinary to the Duke of Cornwall and York was recently appointed one of the honorary Sergeant Surgeons to the King.
Since the Royal Victorian Order is awarded personally by the monarch, and for services only to the sovereign and his or her family, it might have seemed that Treves was at the zenith of his ambitions. Yet only a year earlier a personal and ironic tragedy had struck at the family of this surgeon who was probably his country’s leading expert in acute appendicitis. His younger daughter, Hetty, was struck down by the condition at the age of eighteen, and became mortally ill. He called in two eminent colleagues, but they could only gently tell him that if he could do nothing for her then no one in the country could do better. Her death cast a shadow over all the years that followed, though his most dramatic encounter with appendicitis was yet to follow. When Edward VII became ill almost on the eve of his coronation in June 1902, appendicitis was diagnosed. It was decided that an operation on the king’s appendix was imperative if his life was to be saved and that the coronation must be postponed; it was Treves who stood by to make the historic cut and who drained the offending abscess, deciding it was not essential to remove the appendix itself. Twenty-one years later, in its obituary notice of the surgeon, The Times wrote:
Though Treves had eminent colleagues who supported him, he was in principal charge and the real responsibility for the operation and postponing the Coronation rested wholly on his shoulders. Only a man of inflexible resolution, perfectly convinced of the correctness of his diagnosis and proposed treatment, could have carried it through.
In Edward VII’s Coronation Honours List, Treves was one of those who received a baronetcy.
It surprised many that this was the point when, apparently at the height of his powers, Treves chose virtually to bring his medical career to a close. But, he had once said, no surgeon should operate after the age of fifty. His was to be no idle retirement: he retained his royal appointments and became involved, among other things, as a founder member of the British Red Cross Society and in setting up the Radium Institute in London to pioneer the uses of radium in British medicine. The wealth he had accumulated, however, meant he had no further need to work for a living, while King Edward had granted him the use of Thatched House Lodge in Richmond Park as a home. There had always been about him something of a writer manqué, but it is hardly possible to build up a literary reputation by composing medical textbooks, however elegant their phrasing.
A book for the general market, The Tale of a Field Hospital, had in fact come out of a series of field dispatches he sent home to the British Medical Journal from the war in South Africa, and it had met an encouraging reception. Others were to follow. In 1905 he published The Other Side of the Lantern, an often vivid collection of travel impressions accumulated from a round-the-world trip. It was reprinted five times in the year of publication. The next year he brought out his volume on Dorset for the Highways and Byways counties series. For over seventy years, it has remained a classic of regional topography. To write it he visited every town, village, hamlet and manor house in the county by bicycle, pedalling a total distance of 2,200 miles.
The bonds Treves felt for his native Dorset remained strong throughout his life. He had continued to visit the county at every opportunity, and it reciprocated his interest by electing him first president of the Dorset Society. In 1905 he took a house in Dorchester, close to Max Gate, the home of Thomas Hardy, and while there he developed a former acquaintanceship with the poet and novelist into a close friendship. The desk Hardy used for his writing throughout his life was originally bought from Treves’s father’s shop in the county town.
Other travel books came from Treves’s pen. A trip to the Caribbean produced The Cradle of the Deep (1908), and one to Africa resulted in Uganda for a Holiday (1909). A visit to the Holy Land produced The Land That is Desolate (1911), and then he undertook a close study of Robert Browning’s long narrative poem in an Italian setting, ‘The Ring and the Book’. This he described as: ‘One of the finest, most imaginative and most human poems of the nineteenth century … Some of the passages … are amongst the most beautiful to be found in any country or any age.’ He made an expedition to Italy to work out the topography of the poem, accumulating a profusion of maps, plans and photographs. The photographs he took himself (as he did for several of his other books), and was careful to take them not only in the places described by Browning, but at the right time of day and in the right season of the year. The result was eventually published as The Country of ‘The Ring and the Book’ (1913).
The outbreak of the First World War called a temporary halt to Sir Frederick’s literary efforts and he returned to official duties. Only after the war was he able to move his household to Switzerland, to live on the shores of Lake Geneva and once again to take up his pen. Two more books were produced, The Riviera on the Corniche Road (1921) and The Lake of Geneva (1922). But his health was showing signs of giving way, and only one more book was to come. This was the title by which he was to be longest remembered: The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923). He was suffering by now from a weakened heart, but had recovered remarkably from a bout of severe pneumonia in 1922. In early December 1923, however, a sudden chill developed into peritonitis, and by the seventh of the month he was dead. His body was cremated at Lausanne.
The Society of Dorset Men arranged for Treves’s ashes to be interred with appropriate ceremony in Dorchester cemetery, though a brief farce intervened when the customs refused to let the small container through unless they were shown the death certificate. Treves’s publisher, Newman Flower, recorded in his book of memoirs, Just As It Happened, how he invoked the name of the king and obtained a special order from the Home Office to get the ashes past this bureaucratic obstacle.
The ceremony was in due course held with a most distinguished gathering, on a day of foul weather amid sheets of driving rain. After moving off from the house in which Treves was born, 8 Cornhill, the funeral procession moved on to St Peter’s Church for a service, then arrived at Dorchester cemetery with its host of mourners. Lord Dawson of Penn represented the royal family; Newman Flower came for Lady Treves. Thomas Hardy himself had chosen the hymns for the funeral service, and determinedly went on to stand in the exposed cemetery, shaking with cold. As the rain poured down his face, the old man brushed aside the pleas of those who feared it would be his death. ‘I have known Treves since he was young,’ he told Newman Flower, ‘and I am going through with it.’
Once he was alone in his study later that night, the great writer who had transformed his native Wessex into an immortal and peopled literary landscape by his novels and poems, confided to his journal the sparest of impressions:
January 2. Attended Frederick Treves’ funeral at St Peter’s. Very wet day. Sad procession to the cemetery. Casket in a little white grave.
The experience of having known Treves, however, coalesced into ‘In the Evening’, a poem published in The Times two days later. Eventually, in its revised and polished version, it was included in Human Shows, Far Phantasies (1925), the penultimate volume of Hardy’s verse and the last to be published during his lifetime.
In the Evening
IN MEMORIAM FREDERICI TREVES, 1853–1923
(Dorchester Cemetery, Jan. 2, 1924)
In the morning, when the world knew he was dead,
He lay amid the dust and hoar
Of ages; and to a spirit attending said:
‘This chalky bed? –
I surely seem to have been here before?’
‘O yes. You have been here. You knew the place,
Substanced as you, long ere your call;
And if you cared to do so, you might trace
In this grey space
Your being, and the being of men all.’
Thereto said he: ‘Then why was I called away?
I knew no trouble or discontent:
Why did I not prolong my ancient stay
Herein for aye?’
The spirit shook its head, ‘None knows: you went.
‘And though, perhaps, Time did not sign to you
The need to go, dream-vision sees
How Aesculapius’ phantom hither flew,
With Galen’s, too,
And his of Cos – plague-proof Hippocrates,
‘And beckoned you forth, whose skill had read as theirs,
Maybe, had Science changed to spell
In their day, modern modes to stem despairs
That mankind bears! …
Enough. You have returned. And all is well.’
The warmest tribute of all came from Queen Alexandra, the Queen Mother. She sent a cross composed of flowers gathered in her own garden at Sandringham, and with it a card bearing the inscription:
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 manuscript 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 skeleton 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.
Nevertheless Professor Montagu’s final insights into the case match the facts as they emerge. He makes the point that if Merrick had really suffered the life of total deprivation Treves assumes, then the nature of his character would remain wholly inexplicable. From the descriptions of Joseph’s character he deduces that he must have received a mother’s loving care at least during the first few years of life, and that he must from time to time have later been shown a degree of supportive kindness by others. His mother’s love, it so happens, was only withdrawn from him by her death when he was almost eleven, and after his father rejected him, his uncle, Charles Merrick, offered him the support it was in his power to give, while the showmen who managed his exhibition in England, despite Treves’s description of them as vampires, showed a characteristic protective concern.
Certain so-called freaks have, in any case, demonstrated patience and good nature as integral parts of their characters. Perhaps there are at times other compensatory processes at work. Tom Norman certainly claimed that all the freaks with whom he had dealings were ‘with but very few exceptions, as happy as the days are long, and were very contented with their lot in life’. At one time he included among his client showpieces the Scottish giantess, Mary Campbell,
… who used to sing ‘Annie Laurie’, and drank Scotch whisky and keep time with the next. But she was a dear old soul, good as gold. She lent me all her savings once, about £80, without asking, or a murmur. She was with me five years.
When William Hone interviewed M. Seurat, ‘The Living Skeleton’, in 1825 at the Chinese Saloon in Pall Mall, he found him neither unhappy nor miserable, despite the extreme emaciation of his frame. Seurat, in fact, had gone so far as to write a letter to the press to answer an expression of moral indignation about his being put on show at all. His present situation was, he said, ‘more happy than I ever yet enjoyed during my whole life, and is entirely conformable to my desires’. He had hopes that the proceeds of his exhibition would shortly allow him to return to France to live out his life at ease. It turned out that poor Seurat was to die soon and leave his bones in London, where they went to join those of the Irish giant, Charles Byrne (also called O’Brien), and the Sicilian dwarf, Caroline Crachami, in the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons. With Seurat, however, it was the unembittered quality of his patience and gentleness that caught Hone’s attention. These clearly have parallels in the later example of Joseph Merrick.
The story of the Elephant Man and the Victorian surgeon, Frederick Treves, who took over the management of his destiny when every other path was closed, never ceases to act as a sounding board for many resonances. So long as it continues to catch the imagination, then each generation will read into it its own mixtures of insight and prejudice. As with the relationship between Prospero and Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the emphases may seem to shift subtly in time as new social parables are read in or drawn out. The monstrous whelp Caliban begins to shade into the figure of the Noble Savage, an ambiguous representation of man in a state of sexual innocence. The omnipotent magician Prospero, who can control the elements and hence the lives of men, is revealed to have feet of clay and to carry responsibility for the things that go wrong as well as those that may be put right. Interestingly enough, the fact that Treves tended to see Merrick, if only subconsciously, as a late manifestation of the Noble Savage is given away here and there by a piece of phrasing, as when he describes Joseph as ‘an elemental being, so primitive’ or ‘this primitive creature’. Is it possible that Treves was himself driven by that underlying sense of guilt the doctor so often feels when he becomes aware he must inevitably fail a certain patient over providing a cure?
It is perhaps one interpretation of the story to see Treves as a fundamentally exploiting figure sheltering behind an attitude of moral righteousness, while Merrick becomes the tame freak on whom society can safely lavish attention and so assuage its guilt at the vast inequalities of wealth created by the Industrial Revolution. This was a basis of interpretation Bernard Pomerance used for his distinctive play The Elephant Man that enjoyed much success in its productions on the Broadway and London stages. But interpretation implies a partial view of the facts, however valid or illuminating that view may be. The actual story of the Elephant Man remains constantly rich beyond the devices of fiction in its startling contrasts and turns of fate. The greatest presumption of all would be to think it possible to know or guess what it was truly like to have lived the life of Joseph Carey Merrick.
The closing and most valid image of Joseph to summon up is that of a squat figure, extraordinary in outline, limping without hurry in the starlight across Bedstead Square and into the gardens of the London Hospital. The freedom to walk there unobserved and take into his lungs the cool night air together with the scent of the spring flowers, became one with the hard-won freedom and dignity of his spirit under the stars: and so the limits to the span of his existence, the various griefs and injuries his life sustained, even the hideousness of his flesh, were transformed eventually into matters of small importance.