The True History of the Elephant Man, Page 7

  He found accommodation at 4 Wanslip Street, Leicester: a little street only a few hundred yards away from where they lived previously. The landlady, Mrs Emma Wood Antill, was a twenty-nine-year-old widow with children of her own. It was to her that he therefore entrusted the care of his own son and daughter, and after a short interval there came about what may be seen as a predictable conclusion: on 3 December 1874, Joseph Rockley Merrick and Emma Wood Antill were married in the Archdeacon Lane Baptist Chapel. Their marriage certificate describes Emma as the daughter of a gentleman.

  For Joseph his father’s remarriage was a further calamity. Handicapped by his distressing condition and injured hip, he now found himself living in competition with stepbrothers and stepsisters who were, he said poignantly, more handsome than himself. It was a situation that condemned him to be the odd-one-out in the new family-grouping, and ultimately the family outcast. He could never succeed in gaining the affection of his stepmother, who made his life ‘a perfect misery’. Whatever emotional response his father may have managed to show him in the past, within his new marriage he became decisive in rejecting his lame, ugly and embarrassing son. Most probably his protective instincts came to be centred on his crippled daughter, though there were two occasions on which his sense of duty prompted him to go out and find Joseph and bring him home after he ran away.

  Yet another change of address brought the family to live at 37 Russell Square, a house attached to the haberdasher’s. From here Joseph attended the newly built Board School in Syston Street until he left at the end of his twelfth year, the statutory school-leaving age established in Britain by the Education Act of 1870. His education was considered to be complete and the time to have arrived when it was expected he would find work and start contributing to the family economy. It was Emma who was particularly insistent that he should look for work, and it was on the face of it a sensible enough attitude. Given Joseph’s circumstances, however, it was to become a source of bitter and insoluble family conflict.

  After a persistent search, Joseph eventually found employment at the factory of Messrs Freeman’s, cigar manufacturers, of 9 Lower Hill Street. He kept his job there for the best part of two years, but by the time he was in his fifteenth year the increasing weight and clumsiness of his deformed right arm and fingers made it impossible for him to carry out the finer movements necessary to the craft of hand-rolling cigars. He was forced to relinquish his post and to enter a long period of unemployment.

  Each day, as Joseph tramped about the town in search of a job to replace the one he had lost, his appearance and crippled state went steadily against him. He was becoming ever more keenly aware of the financial burden he represented to his family; he was, indeed, never allowed to forget the fact, facing the endless accusations of his stepmother that he had been idling on the streets instead of searching for employment. Often enough Emma would set his plate before him with the remark that it was more than he had earned, though the plate might be only half full. He found himself the target of sneers and jibes which wounded him so sharply that he began to avoid taking meals at home. For preference, he would limp about the streets, stifling his hunger rather than face the acid tongue of his stepmother, who made no secret of how offensive she found his presence in her household.

  His father must by now have been in the uneasy and unenviable position of becoming hopelessly divided between whatever sense of duty remained towards his cruelly handicapped son, his wish to shelter his daughter and the shrill, strong-willed demands of his second wife. At least it may be said in Joseph Rockley Merrick’s favour that he made one more attempt to solve the problem of employment his son faced, even if it was to be his last such effort on the teenaged boy’s behalf. He obtained for him a hawker’s licence from the Commissioners of Hackney Carriages, and thus Joseph, equipped with a tray of stockings and gloves from his father’s shop, was sent out to peddle haberdashery from door to door.

  It was by this stage too late for any such venture to succeed, if it could ever have done so. Each year that passed was seeing a steady amplification of Joseph’s deformities. The mass protruding from his mouth was making his speech virtually unintelligible to strangers, and he was now so distressing a spectacle that, as he limped slowly along the streets, people would stop to turn and gaze after him. Some of the more curious might even start to follow behind, staring at him whenever he paused. Any maid or housewife who came unsuspectingly to answer the door would invariably find the sight of Joseph standing on the threshold thoroughly unnerving. He soon came to realize that people avoided answering their doors if they knew it was he who sounded their bell or rapped their knocker.

  To support himself, meanwhile, he was expected to sell a set quota of goods each day. It became increasingly difficult. According to the anonymous article in the Illustrated Leicester Chronicle, the day inevitably came which saw his failure to sell the required quantity. Joseph, malnourished as a matter of course, spent the little money he had taken on food for himself. When he eventually returned to Russell Square he received the severest thrashing he ever was given. The blows broke more than his skin; they destroyed the last slender bonds that bound him to his father. He left the house knowing this time he would never return.

  As he dragged himself about the streets of Leicester, hawking on his own account and selling whatever goods he could, buying the small amounts of food he could afford, sleeping at night in the lowest of the town’s common lodging houses, he was on the verge of destitution and little more than a vagrant. His father sought him no more.

  Joseph Merrick’s Uncle Charles was the only member of his immediate family of whom he kept a warm recollection from this period of his life. His other uncle, Henry Merrick, had left Leicester to make a career in the army that would lead him to serve in India and elevate him to the rank of troop sergeant-major before his retirement to become a publican at Poole in Dorset in the early 1880s. Charles, by contrast, remained in the city of his birth, having taken the prudent decision to become a barber’s apprentice.

  An apprenticeship in barbering was a long and arduous commitment. There were the years as a lather boy, hands grown sore from rubbing lather on the sandpaper chins of customers who were shaved only every second or third day. The cut-throat razor was beyond the dexterity of many men to use on themselves and the services of a barber too expensive and time-consuming to be enjoyed more than two or three times a week.

  Later, as a young assistant, he no doubt practised techniques on his brothers, besides learning the arts of hairdressing, singeing and beard-trimming. (The beard had returned to favour following a fashion set by soldiers in the Crimean War, when it had, during the winter months of the campaign, been too cold to shave.) Eventually, his apprenticeship completed, he married and in 1870, at the age of twenty-four, opened his first shop as hairdresser, tobacconist and umbrella-repairer at 144 Churchgate. It was to prove a stable soundly based business that brought security to his family and continued in Leicester for four generations.

  The lives of Charles Merrick and his wife Jane had not been without their troubles. By 1877, the year in which Charles’s nephew Joseph found himself virtually destitute on the streets, they had seen three of their five children die before the age of eighteen months. As soon as Charles Merrick heard about Joseph’s plight he nevertheless responded directly and practically. He went out into the streets of the city to search till he found the boy, then persuaded him to return with him to the home in Churchgate above the hairdressing saloon. He and his wife would take his nephew into their home to be treated as one of their own.

  Joseph continued to hawk haberdashery, but now he enjoyed at least the certainty of knowing he had a place to return to where he would receive understanding and practical support. It was a period of his life that lasted for two years which must have been years of relative happiness apart from there being no remission in the merciless advance of his symptoms. His peddling expeditions grew no easier. It became usual, whenever he ventured out, for a small
crowd to collect and follow in his wake wherever he went. In the end his appearance attracted so much comment and attention that the Commissioners for Hackney Carriages, on the grounds of acting in the public good, felt obliged to take measures. When Joseph’s hawker’s licence came up for renewal it was withdrawn.

  An arbitrary fate thus once again deprived Joseph of the means to a livelihood, and he can have had few illusions about his chances of finding any other. In his uncle’s household, the extra unproductive mouth to feed that he unwittingly became placed considerable extra strains on the family finances. Besides, his Aunt Jane had in the meantime had another child who lived. Joseph could not expect to continue as such a burden in any circumstances, but this narrowed his choice of action in one direction only. He must seek the co-operation of the Poor Law authorities and apply for admission to the Leicester Union Workhouse, where his grandfather, Barnabas, had died twenty-three years before, not destitute but in one of the beds kept for terminal patients.

  He spent the days over the Christmas period of 1879 with his Uncle Charles and family in the house above the shop in Churchgate. The heartache may easily be imagined. Then, during the last few days of the Old Year, still aged no more than seventeen, he parted from the only living members of his family to have treated him with charity and decency and threw himself on the mercy of the parish.

  On the first Monday after Christmas 1879, a morning uncomfortable with showers of rain and a southerly wind, Joseph Merrick presented himself to William Cartwright, relieving officer for the No. 2 area of the city. The Board of Guardians responsible for administering the Poor Law in the parishes of the Leicester Union employed two relieving officers, and Mr Cartwright was the junior of them, but his work was nevertheless responsible and difficult. He was answerable for his actions not only to the Board of Guardians who were his paymasters, but also to the law. While expenditure on relief work was stringently supervised and regulated by the board, it was the relieving officer who remained liable to be summoned to court to face charges should he commit the misdemeanour of refusing relief in a case where legal entitlement existed. Should a destitute person be denied relief and subsequently die, the relieving officer concerned could even face an indictment of manslaughter. For carrying out his duties, William Cartwright received a salary of £45 a year.

  When Joseph presented himself, demonstrating his deformities and pleading an inability to work, Mr Cartwright can have found little difficulty in reaching a decision. The order authorizing Joseph’s admission to the workhouse was issued. On that very same morning Joseph therefore dragged his lame leg and disconcerting body up the gentle rise of Swain Street, through the grey puddles of Sparkenhoe Street to the Leicester Union Workhouse.

  The establishment stood on rising ground, on the south-eastern outskirts of the town. It consisted of a complex of large red-brick buildings, each having three or four storeys of closely spaced and small square windows. The design of the building was monotonous and nondescript in the way of the Victorian workhouse style. Only the main building, which stood immediately within the gates and was flanked by two gatehouses, possessed a touch of monolithic individuality. It presented a high façade of Victorian Gothic architecture, and its great central front door had square ornate headings. A relatively tiny, rather quaint oriel bow-window pushed itself out from the front of the building immediately above the door, while tall thin columns of brickwork, two on either side, ascended vertically to end in little mock turrets high up amid a cluster of graceful chimneys. But the overall effect remained heavy-going, and uncompromisingly authoritarian in intention.

  We can be sure the routine of Joseph’s admission was a miserable enough business. Presenting his pass at the gates, he was escorted to the admission block for the ritual of registration. He gave up his clothes after the pockets had been searched, any money found in them being confiscated as a contribution to his keep. His own clothes were put away for when, if ever, he might be discharged. The workhouse clothes issued in their place were made of heavy serge or fustian, drab in colour and undistinguished in pattern so as to make it seem that the inmate wore a kind of uniform. Before he could dress in them, however, he had to undergo the ordeal of the ‘hot’ bath. (A Leicester journalist who once disguised himself as a tramp so as to sample the amenities of the Union ferociously recorded the bitterly cold water into which he was forced at this stage of his escapade.)

  Finally an entry needed to be made in the workhouse register. This large brown book, with its list of admissions and discharges, has been preserved in the archives of the Leicester Museum, and faithfully records the admission of Joseph Merrick on Monday, 29 December 1879, giving his name and parish correctly. His year of birth is curiously given as 1861, but this, as has been seen, was a matter on which Joseph remained habitually vague throughout his life. His religion is described as ‘church’, his occupation as ‘hawker’; the reason for admission as being ‘unable to work’.

  Beyond the main admission block, pathways threaded their way between tall barrack-like buildings, passing workrooms, labour yards, kitchens, storerooms, laundries until, at the very back, they opened out into the workhouse yards. Here plain wooden benches stood in the shadows of the towering building and the high encircling wall shut out all but the grey wet sky and the wind. To step through any of the doorways was to step into a world of echoing stone corridors and draughty stairways which Joseph, with his lameness, must have found hard to negotiate. There were the communal dining halls, and there were high dormitories where the beds were lined up close together, thin cotton sheets and drab blankets covering straw-stuffed mattresses. When they brought Joseph to show him his bed space, with its small locker for personal belongings, he was looking down at the only corner in the vast complex of buildings that he might call his own.

  To comprehend anything of Joseph’s life during his few years in the workhouse we have to understand something of the principles underlying the Poor Law administration. Workhouses were never intended to be pleasant or comfortable; they were meant to solve the problem of deciding which of those among numerous applicants for aid were genuinely in need, which were not. The Poor Law Amendment Act had proposed as an alternative to ‘outdoor relief’ – given as food or money and usually a matter of only a few shillings at a time – that an applicant for assistance should be offered the shelter of a workhouse. Here all his or her needs would be met, but life would be hard, regimented and in general discouraging to anyone not in a true state of destitution. For such a policy to work, the workhouse existence needed to be made at least one degree less attractive than the living conditions of the most lowly paid labourer. In many nineteenth-century parishes, rural as well as urban, such an ideal of harsh austerity must have taken some effort and application to achieve.

  The Board of Guardians for the Leicester Union of Parishes first erected their workhouse in 1838, designing it to accommodate 400 paupers. Yet they remained reluctant to apply the so-called ‘workhouse test’ in all its severity and continued to give outdoor relief on a large scale. Unfortunately the hosiery trade on which the town depended then entered a series of depressions. Unemployment became widespread until, in one period during 1848, the board found themselves paying relief to 19,000 people out of a population of 60,000. To their horror they discovered they had disbursed over £19,000 in six months. Reluctantly the board decided to apply the ‘workhouse test’ more generally, but before this could come into force the workhouse itself needed to be enlarged. In 1851 it was rebuilt to accommodate 1,000 souls.

  On the day when Joseph Merrick was admitted, there were 928 inmates. All were classed as paupers, but the circumstances which forced each of them into the workhouse varied greatly. Some were elderly, no longer able to fend for themselves; some were widows left without means of support; some were sick and infirm. Then there were the workmen, brought to poverty by unemployment or a sudden recession in their trade; the craftsmen forced to sell their tools before becoming eligible for admission; and the wive
s and children of these destitute men. Homeless unmarried mothers would also be admitted to the workhouse for their lying-in. Orphans and abandoned children, tramps and vagrants, improvident paupers, even the mentally retarded and unsound of mind also sought refuge there.

  At the workhouse gates this unhappy tide of humanity was segregated into groups according to age and sex. Husbands were parted from wives, children from parents, boys from girls, toddlers from infants. Each group went into the separate blocks to live apart, work apart and exercise apart. Only at mealtimes or in chapel might there be the chance of a fleeting encounter or a few snatched words.

  Joseph fell within Group No. 1, of adult males between the ages of sixteen and sixty. This was the group which most concerned the workhouse authorities: adult males who had somehow failed to support themselves. Joseph’s companions were thus the broken workmen, the drunkards and dissolute, the inadequate and handicapped, the crippled and retarded. Association with the outright demented he was spared since Leicester possessed its own separate system for the insane.

  His life was controlled by bells, from the waking bell as early as five or six in the morning. All other main events of the day – meals, work and rest periods – were signalled by bells. At ten in the evening the doors of dormitories were locked and gas-lamps extinguished. Inmates were forbidden to go outside the workhouse or receive visitors unless they had first obtained a written order from one of the overseers. They were allowed neither beer nor tobacco. Their food was basically nutritional, but plain and monotonous, and suffered from the usual hazards which afflict institutional cooking. There were even dishes that seemed to be inventions unique to the workhouses, such as the oatmeal gruel referred to in some establishments as ‘hell-broth’. Only at Christmas was the boredom of meals temporarily dispelled. To mark the festive season the Board of Guardians at Leicester customarily issued an instruction ‘that the usual Christmas dinner of beef, pork, plum pudding and beer be served to the inmates of the workhouse’.