It's monstrous! Granddaughter of showman who discovered the Elephant Man says new play traduces her grandfather's memory

It's monstrous! Granddaughter of showman who discovered the Elephant Man says new play traduces her grandfather's memory

Limping painfully with the aid of a stick, his body contorted with deformity, his face so hideous that people ran away screaming, Joseph Merrick — better known as the Elephant Man — was one of the most tragic figures in history.

Who could not pity the poor young man his horrible fate, paraded as an exhibit, ‘Half Man, Half Elephant’, by callous showmen who profited from his misery then later abandoned him?

Joseph’s tragic tale has been told in books, a film and a play that has recently been a huge hit on Broadway and has now transferred to the West End, where Hollywood actor Bradley Cooper is convincingly twisting his body and handsome features to portray the Elephant Man.

I have no doubt Cooper’s acting is superb. But I won’t be going. I couldn’t bear to. Because, like the 1980 film The Elephant Man starring John Hurt, the play is a terrible distortion of the truth, maligning the showman who brought Joseph to public notice.

In the play, the showman is called Ross (in the film he was named Bytes). His real name was Tom Norman and he was my grandfather. I never met him, as he died three years before I was born.

But from all accounts he was a good man, a devoted father of nine, who treated his performers with decency and compassion, but most of all as human beings.

Anthony Heald, the actor playing the showman in the West End play, portrays him as a seedy old drunkard and a ‘menacing exploiter’ of the vulnerable ‘Elephant Man’.

That depiction is nothing but a wicked lie, as my grandfather persuasively made clear in his own account in a series of newspaper articles.

My grandfather, Tom Norman, first met Joseph Merrick in 1884. Tom was aged 24; Joseph was 22 and his life so far had been one of relentless misery after the death of his devoted mother, whom he adored, when he was ten.

He was beaten by his father, starved by his stepmother and ended up in Leicester’s workhouse.

Joseph had appeared to be a normal baby when he was born in 1862, but soon tumours and warts started appearing on his face and body.

By the time Tom met him, almost Joseph’s whole body — barring his left arm, hand and genitals — was distorted into a monstrous shape.

He was only 5ft 2in tall but his head was vast, 36in in circumference, his forehead disfigured by bulges of bony material. 

Masses of pink flesh protruded from his mouth, making his speech difficult to understand.

Pendulous growths of skin hung down from his chest and back; his right arm was enormous and shapeless, the right hand more like a paddle. 

His skin was covered in warts that gave out a terrible stench. His right hand made manual work impossible, so he ended up in the workhouse.

Life there was so brutal — he described his four years there as the worst of his life — that Joseph determined to escape.

In August 1884, he contacted a Leicester impresario, Sam Torr, to ask if he would employ him as a ‘freak’ in his theatre, and Torr agreed.

Today it seems appalling that men and women were exhibited as ‘freaks’. But for many disabled or visibly different people, freak shows were their only means of making a living, since no one else would employ them.

 [My grandfather] paid a carpenter to make a device for him to wear at night, so that he could lie down without the weight of his head breaking his neck

My grandfather was a butcher’s son from Sussex and had at first followed his father into the trade. 

But, after visiting a freak show, he realised that a showman could earn more in an hour than he could in a week as a butcher.

He changed his name from Tom Noakes to Tom Norman and soon acquired several acts: a ‘Fat Lady’, a ‘Giantess’, an armless carpenter, a ‘Leonine woman’ with an exceptionally hirsute face, two midgets — who were supposed to be a married couple although the ‘wife’ was actually a hard-drinking man — and a Mrs Baker, who gave what Tom considered ‘the most repulsive performance that I ever had or saw’, consisting of biting the heads off live rats.

He introduced each act with an engaging patter about their life story (often somewhat embellished). 

He wore a silver watch chain hung with coins, leading his American counterpart, the showman P. T. Barnum, to nickname him the ‘Silver King’.

By 1884 my grandfather was well established in London, when his fellow showman, Sam Torr, wrote to him asking if he would take the Elephant Man act — as Torr had dubbed him — to the capital, as his novelty had worn off in the Midlands.

When my grandfather first met Joseph he reeled in shock. ‘I remember thinking, “Oh God, I can’t use you,” ’ he later recalled, so extreme were Joseph’s deformities. 

But then, looking into Joseph’s eyes, he saw ‘so much pleading and suffering that a great feeling of pity and sympathy overcame any other emotions’.

Taking Joseph’s good hand, he shook it warmly and agreed to employ him on an equal share of the takings. Soon, he began presenting Joseph to the public as ‘The Elephant Man’ in an empty shop on the Whitechapel Road opposite the London Hospital.

Ms Hawkins says her grandfather's reputation was ruined by surgeon Frederick Treves who portrayed him as a drunk brute - a narrative which feature in the new Bradley Cooper play (pictured)

The audiences, though initially shocked by Joseph’s appearance, were mostly sympathetic. The act did well, drawing large crowds.

Word of the misshapen man reached an ambitious young surgeon in the London Hospital, Frederick Treves. He approached Tom and asked to view Joseph privately. 

My grandfather and the surgeon evidently got off to a bad start, for the medic later claimed that Tom was a drunk and spoke to Joseph harshly ‘as if to a dog’. 

In fact, my grandfather was solicitous towards Joseph, who himself said that Tom had treated him with ‘kindness and consideration’.

That was not all. Tom shared a room with Joseph in the Whitechapel shop and even paid a carpenter to make a device for him to wear at night, so that he could lie down without the weight of his vast head breaking his neck. 

It didn’t work — he had to sleep sitting up — but it was well meant. And, far from being a drinker, Tom was a founder member of the Showmen’s Temperance Group.

Indeed, while my grandfather treated Joseph as an equal, Treves — at first — saw him simply as a medical specimen. He asked if he could take Joseph to the hospital so that his fellow medics could study him.

Joseph made two or three visits to the hospital where Treves stripped him naked, photographed him, took notes, then presented him at a meeting of the Pathological Society on Tuesday December 2, 1884. 

But none of the medical men could offer an explanation for his condition or any hope of a cure.

Joseph apparently objected to his treatment at their hands. He did not mind, he told my grandfather, ‘being displayed discreetly and decently when he was being paid, but over there “I was stripped naked, and felt like an animal in a cattle market.” ’

Not long afterwards, the police closed down the show and Tom and Joseph regretfully parted. 

In just a few months, Joseph had managed to save £50 — a considerable sum when many families survived on £1 a week.

 Far from being a drinker, [my grandfather] was a founder member of the Showmen’s Temperance Group

Sadly not every showman was as scrupulous as my grandfather. Joseph was taken on by an Italian impresario, Mr Ferrari, who took him to the Continent but stole all his money and abandoned him in Brussels.

Penniless and ill, he eventually ended up back in London. At Liverpool Street Station he attracted such a crowd that police were called.

Joseph, unable to speak because he was so sick and distressed, handed them the visiting card he had kept from Frederick Treves. Treves was summoned and took him back to the London Hospital.

A public appeal raised funds for Joseph to be given a permanent home there, where he spent his time reading and making exquisite cardboard models of churches with his good hand.

Treves visited him daily — and also arranged for rich and famous men and women to meet Joseph, many of whom gave donations to the hospital. 

Alexandra, Princess of Wales, was among those who visited and shook the hand of Joseph, who’d become a cause celebre among the fashionable set.

Treves later became a surgeon to the Royal Family and was knighted. Sadly, he wrote a highly inaccurate memoir, published not long before his death in 1923, in which he accused my grandfather Tom of cruelly exploiting Joseph. This travesty infuriated my grandfather.

Years later, a similar depiction in the 1980 film mortified Tom Norman’s children; and now the play — first shown in 1979 on Broadway — continues this upsetting portrayal. 

Far from being a drinker, Ms Hawkins says her grandfather was a temperance league founder - and that Treves just didn't understand the realities of living in a 'freak show' (pictured, Bradley Cooper as Merrick)

Tom’s son George — my uncle — once called the play, by American writer Bernard Pomerance, an ‘insult to the dead’.

Joseph died in 1890, aged only 27. He’d been growing steadily weaker: he suffered from bronchitis and his heart was beginning to fail. 

After he was found dead in his bed, the cause of death was given as ‘asphyxiation’, although Treves believed that he had tried to do what he had always longed to, sleep lying down like ‘normal’ people, and his neck had broken due to the weight of his head

Treves had the skeleton stripped of its flesh and exhibited in a glass case for medical students to study.

There is still no consensus on what caused Joseph’s bones and flesh to become so malformed. One theory is that it was a combination of two conditions, neurofibromatosis type 1 and Proteus syndrome. 

His bones are now locked away in the pathology department of his former home, what is now the Royal London Hospital. A replica skeleton is on display in the hospital museum.

I believe his bones should now be given a Christian burial in his home city of Leicester. But, more than anything, I wish that my grandfather’s reputation should be exonerated. 

He was not cruel, or exploitative — he was an honourable man, doing his best for Joseph, just like Treves was.

The medic, however, did not understand the way that showmen worked and that to attract the public, Joseph had to be presented in a sensational way. It was, as my grandfather said, ‘all about the tale you tell’.

In truth, the showman and the surgeon, though worlds apart, were really not so different. They both did what they could for poor Joseph Merrick.