COWERING and afraid, a disfigured form faces the jeers of the freak show audience. Like a circus animal, The Elephant Man is kept in a cage and is regularly beaten by his “owners”.
That’s how most of us think of Joseph Merrick — wrongly called John in the 1980 David Lynch film — but nothing could be further from the truth.
Despite his lumpy and malformed features, the real Merrick escaped a life of poverty to make his own money before enchanting the wealthy upper classes, even making friends with the Queen’s great-grandmother.
But in his home town, Leicester, there is nothing to celebrate the life of this trailblazer for people with disabilities. That’s why I have been campaigning for a statue to be erected in his honour.
But shockingly, I’ve faced strong opposition to a Merrick memorial. I’ve had abuse over social media, with cruel protesters mocking his disability by saying: “Leicester’s ugly enough.”
I’ve even been called a “vampire showman” — a reference to freak show bosses who people mistakenly believe made his life a misery.
Behind this stereotype, the true story of the Elephant Man is a tale of empowerment and inspiration. He was nothing like the film suggests, but rather an independent disabled man who was ahead of his time.
In 1879, aged 17 and impoverished, he checked himself into the Leicester workhouse, a dire institution where the destitute were given food, shelter and work.
Despite his disability, for four years Merrick would have probably been put to work grinding stone or crushing bones.
He was faced with a decision — whether to stay there and die or go out and live his life. He decided he would try to make his name and fortune by appearing in a novelty show.
Victorians loved the weird and different and would pay to see a bearded lady or a tattooed man at one of these shows. But importantly, it was a way for people who were different to earn good money and avoid the workhouse.
NOVELTY SHOW
So Merrick wrote to music hall manager Sam Torr, asking him to be his agent, just like in the 2017 film The Greatest Showman.
Torr then arranged Merrick’s release from the workhouse and he was soon touring around clubs in the East Midlands.
Then when he ran out of local audiences he moved to London, where he met his next agent, Tom Norman — a distant cousin of mine.
They set up the Elephant Man show on Whitechapel Road, and for the two weeks they worked together and were more like business partners than owner and slave.
In the 1980 film, Tom Norman is portrayed as Mr Bytes, an old drunk who beats Merrick. Norman was actually young, and a member of the Temperance movement, which campaigned against drunkenness, so certainly not a boozy old man.
For a fee, Norman would tell crowds a myth of how, at his birth, Merrick’s mother was stamped on by an elephant, resulting in a half-man, half- elephant creature.
He would pull back a curtain to reveal Merrick, leaving audiences gawping in amazement. Enterprising Merrick wrote a short pamplet of his life story, which was sold at the show, and he would keep these earnings for himself.
In the film we see Merrick’s mother Mary Jane screaming in terror while being trampled by elephants. But according to Merrick himself, his disability did not begin to show until he was five.
He lived a normal childhood, going to school and learning to read and write. Mary Jane, a Sunday school teacher, died from unknown causes when he was just 11, and his father — also Joseph — soon remarried.
By then young Joseph was keen to go out and start earning a living. He initially worked in a cigar factory before getting a peddler’s licence to hawk bobbins and gloves around Leicester.
He later said if he didn’t make enough money, his father and stepmother would not feed him. While this sounds like child abuse to us, the Victorians firmly believed in “spare the rod and spoil the child” so this would have been seen as normal.
The cause of Merrick’s disability is still open to debate but the most popular diagnosis is proteus syndrome, a rare condition characterised by overgrowth of the bones and skin.
A doctor has even suggested that his condition is unique — and should be named Merrick’s syndrome after its lone sufferer.
It is impossible to test Merrick’s DNA to identify the illness, as when he died, his flesh was stripped from his bones, which were bleached twice, while hairs taken from his clothes have failed to produce any DNA results.
In his day he was a medical curiosity and doctors did try to study him. A surgeon, Frederick Treves, sought out Merrick and asked him to come to the London Hospital to be studied by doctors.
At first Merrick agreed, yet after three or four visits he refused to go back, saying he felt like he was in a cattle market.
Treves was furious and a week later police shut down Merrick and Norman’s show as a public nuisance. Whether Treves had a hand in it is impossible to say.
Undeterred and wealthy from his show with Norman, Merrick then spent three months with a travelling circus in Northamptonshire.
DISLOCATED NECK
While travelling, he began to wear a hood and cape so he could walk the streets without getting jeered or followed. His real ambition was to entertain audiences in Europe, so he advertised in the papers for a new manager who could take him to the Continent.
Details of what happened abroad are vague but Merrick seems to have been robbed and abandoned by his new management, leaving him in Brussels without a penny to his name.
He somehow travelled back to London, where he found Dr Treves, who agreed to let him stay at the London Hospital.
His care would be funded by wealthy benefactors — but there would have been an expectation that Merrick would let doctors examine him.
One, Dr Wilfred Granville, wrote in his memoirs that Merrick would look at specimens in the hospital and ponder what his body parts would look like in a bottle. It was clear he knew his fate.
But there is no reason to believe Merrick was unhappy in the hospital, in fact he seems to have enjoyed himself.
While the Queen’s great-grandmother Princess Alexandra was opening a nurses’ wing in the hospital, she visited Merrick and shook his hand.
They became firm friends and she would often visit and write him letters. In turn, Merrick made her a cardboard model of a German cathedral. Her husband Prince Edward, the future King, even sent food and drink packages to Merrick.
As a result of this friendship it became fashionable for the upper classes to visit Merrick and give him signed pictures and trinkets.
Aristocrat Lady Louisa Knightley invited him to holiday at the grand Fawsley Hall in Northamptonshire, where he stayed three times, enjoying walking freely in the estate’s grounds without fear of being ridiculed.
But he never forgot Tom Norman. A porter once overheard Merrick asking when he could visit his old friend. But when Tom visited the hospital he was refused entry and the pair never saw each other again.
Many people believe Merrick died by taking his own life. He was unable to sleep on his back as the sheer weight of his head could dislocate his neck, so instead he was forced to sleep with his head against his knees.
In the film a desperate Merrick — played by Oscar-nominated John Hurt — is shown removing the cushions which helped him to sit up straight while sleeping, insinuating that he killed himself.
But while he did die tragically young at 27, the evidence points to his death being accidental. He was found in the afternoon — not at night — lying across his bed as if he had slipped and was trying to get up.
His inquest found he had died from a dislocated neck but we can’t trust the science of the time. Merrick’s death could have been caused by a stroke or seizure, but it is a mystery we will never solve.
While his skeleton is kept at the Royal London Hospital, last May I found the unmarked grave of some of his flesh in the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium in Ilford.
It made worldwide news and I was astounded by the reaction to my discovery. So many people were interested in his story.
This is what led me to my quest to get Merrick recognised for the great man he was, with a statue in Leicester city centre.
I want people to take off their blinkers, see what he really did with his life and realise he was not just the freak show casualty who was portrayed in the Elephant Man film.
And to those who complain his statue would be “ugly” — take a lesson from Merrick’s life to see what’s on the inside, not just the outside.
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