It was an era of athletic stunts of all kinds - some of which have stuck with us to this day. In 1875 Captain Matthew Webb swam the English Channel (the first person to do so), but he would die trying to swim the Niagara Falls Rapids about ten years later. The first person to go over the falls in a barrel was a woman in 1899.
There were also plenty of sports crazes around the glove. In 1889 for example, Spaulding (the U.S. sports equipment entrepreneur) took an all star "baseball team to give demonstrations of the national pastime in England, France and other countries (including Egypt). It wasn't a real success (the game was, after all, based on the old English game of rounders) and baseball only found favor in Latin America and (of all countries) Japan - where it has remained ever since. Britain and the Empire were to show the same devotion to cricket, although lawn tennis became popular. Germany found cricket becoming popular there as well, which became something of a "nationalistic" problem in the decades leading to both World Wars. But the biggest new sports craze of the 1890s was bike riding. This was due to the invention of the safety bicycle.
Jeff
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Link to an article about Professor Robert Odlum's fatal leap from the Brooklyn Bridge in 1885. A member of Odlum's support crew, Captain Paul Boyton, was mentioned in an earlier post on this thread, "Dr. Benjamin Howard and Captain Paul Boyton."
New York Sun, May 20, 1885, Page 1, Column 1
He Met Sam Patch's Death.
Odlum Leapds from the bridge and is Picked up Dying
Smashed Against the Water, 140 Feet Below--A
Dummy Arrested by the Bridge Police
Just Before the Leap--Paul Boyton, Paddy
Ryan, Jerry Dunn, Muldoon, and Others
Waiting for him with a Tugboat on the
River--He is Brought Ashore in a Coffin--
The Coroner Orders the Arrest of All.
---end
A link to a biography of Odlum by his mother.
The Life and Adventures of Prof. Robert Emmet Odlum (Washington, D.C.: Gray & Clarkson, 1885), link
by Catherine Odlum
Steve Brodie tried to paddle down the East River in a Boyton-type inflatable suit.
New York Sun, April 25, 1887, Page 1, Column 7
Brodie Paddles Down the East River
Steve Brodie, the bridge jumpor, cllmbed into
a Paul Boyton rubber suit on one of the floats of a Harlem
boat club at the Fourth avenue railroad bridge
yesterday afternoon, and jumped into the Harlem River
with a resounding splash at 12 1/2 o'clock. His intention
was to propel himself down the river to the Battery in
four and one half hours with a canoe paddle. He had
intended to take along an umbrella that couldn't turn inside
out even if it wanted to, but he left it behind. His
brother Tom followed him in a rowboat with an American
flag stuck in the bow, and a crowd jammed Harlem
bridge to watch him paddle under it.
The tide was against him and at times twirled him
round like a chip in an eddy. Four hours after he started
he had got only as far as Grand street, and became stuck
there in an eddy near the ferry wharves. He tried for
twenty minutes to fight the eddy, and then gave the
thing up and came ashore. He was tired out, and his
face was burned as red as a lobster by the hot sun. He
wished he had taken his patent umbrella along.
---endLeave a comment:
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Actually from the description of the placement of his witnesses, none saw him jump. He went beneath the roadbed of the bridge, and my guess is he climbed down as quickly as possible. He might get wet, but it would not be like Odlum's smashing into the river's surface (which from that height would be rather pretty hard - sort of like driving into a stone wall in a car). I guess Brodie was counting on his actions before the "dive", his friends and the police noticing some of his movements, and the bridge itself blocking full view.
JeffLeave a comment:
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Two articles about Steve Brodie's alleged feat.
New York Sun, July 24, 1886, Page 1, Column 3
BRODIE JUMPS THE BRIDGE
RISKING ODLUM'S FATE AND ESCAPING ALIVE AND SOUND
His Wife Dressed Him for the Feat--Friends
were in a Boat to Pick him Up--He Goes
to Sleep in the Tombs Feeling that he is
the Biggest Man in the Fourth Ward
Steve Brodie, the newsboy pedestrian,
tired two years ago of being "King of the
Bootblacks," and resigned the leadership to
his brother Dan. Ever since then he has been
planning to jump from the Brooklyn Bridge.
He had an idea that there would be glory and
money in it. Six months ago he gave up his
place as boss bootblack at the Mills
building and came mighty near sailing
on Soto's filibustering expedition to
Honduras which wound up by leaving
a lot of Fourthwarders stranded on
Turk's Island. He came to the conclusion
that there was neither glory nor
money in Central American filibustering
and he took the money he had saved to
Brighton Beach every race day to accumulate
more by betting it on the races. He lost almost
all he had and the last two weeks he had an
especially hard time of it.
On Tuesday of last week he says he rode up
from the beach with a sporting man named
James A. Brennan. Brodie began talking on
his hobby of jumping off Brooklyn Bridge, and
said he was willing to do it any time if there
was any money in it. Brennan said he would
put up $100 that Brodie couldn't do it. Brodie
took him up and went into training for the
jump. He made another bet of $25 that he
would jump from High Bridge, and early on
Sunday morning last, he says, he went up with
a few friends and jumped off. He said at the
time that he had jumped off High Bridge once
before and didn't think anything of it. He felt
jubilant over winning the first bet and told all
his friends that in the latter part of the week
he would jump off Brooklyn Bridge and make
a name for himself.
On Thursday he went around the Fourth
ward and asked the advice of his friends about
the best time to jump. He said he thought of
jumping that afternoon, but they told him it
wouldn't be a good time, and he said he would
postpone it. Most of them thought the whole
thing was off. That evening he consulted some
more friends who are compositors in a newspaper
office, and he made arrangements with
them to witness the jump yesterday morning.
Then he went to to the back tenement at 85
Chystie street where he lives with his family
and has two rooms on the north side two flights
up and went to bed.
Yesterday morning his wife dressed him.
She was proud of his courage and wanted to
do all she could to have him succeed. He had
got a long strip of canton flannel, and this was
wound around his loins, abdomen, and chest
five plies thick. It covered him from below his
thighs up to his armpits. After it was tied in
place he put on a thick knitted red Jersey over
it, a pair of heavy striped trousers, and a pair
of old patent leather low shoes with thin soles.
His wife knotted a white silk handkerchief
around his neck over his jersey. Alter putting
on his coat and taking up his black soft felt hat
he started down town.
Near the bridge he met Dan Houston of 13
Elm street. He said to Houston: "I'm going
to jump the bridge and I want you to come
along and help me."
Houston asked him If he was n earnest.
Brodie answered that he was and promised
Houston $15 and a suit of clothes if he would
get a boat and pick him up. Houston promised
to do it. The two went on down Frankfort
street, and on the corner of Gold street they
met Paul Butler and Tim Brennan. Brodie
made the same offer to them, and told them
that he was going to make $100 from his jump
at once, and more in the future, and that he
would divide up half the $100 with his friends.
They all went along down South street to the
Battery. There Dan Houston hired a boat for
two hours from an 18-year-old boy who had
charge of it. He agreed to pay 30 cents an hour
and left his coat as security for the 60 cents.
The four men got into the boat and rowed up
to Dover street dock. There they met Jimmy
the Boatman and took him on board. They
paddled around for a while and discussed the
jump. Brodie said:
"Well, boys I've decided. I'm going to jump
the Brooklyn bridge."
The boat pulled up into Dover street dock
again. Brodie got out, shook bands with them
all, and at half-past 11 o'clock be started up
Frankfort street to the bridge. At a quarter
past 12 he came back and said that the wind
was too strong just then. The boat was tied up
at the pier until 1 3/4 o'clock, when Brodie said
that he was going to jump for certain, and
started again up Frankfort street. The boat
pulled out with Dan Houston, Tim Brennan,
Paul Butler, and Jimmy the Boatman on
board, and hovered in the river south of the
bridge. The tide was just beginning to run
out. Tugs and ferryboats were continually
passing, but none of them took any notice of
tbe boat or its occupants.
Brodie had had two drinks of whiskey during
the morning before be left his four friends
in the boat. He went up Frankfort street
alone. At Nassau street he met Jerry Kane
and said:
"Jerry, I'm going to jump the bridge. I've
got 20 cents, and I won't need only two to get
out on the drive. Come in and have a drink."
The two went into Kosmak's. Kane drank
beer and Brodie whiskey. They went out and
stood by the wagon road over the bridge. Bugs
Waterman was standing there.
"Bugs," said Brodie. "I'm going jump the
bridge. Come along and see me."
Waterman said he would. Brodle must have
found some more money about him than the
20 cents, for he took a dollar bill from his
pocket and said:
"Boys, this is my last dollar. Come and have
a drink."
He and Waterman went into Kosmak's.
When they came out Kane asked Brodie if he
was in earnest about jumping off the bridge.
Brodie said he was, and that he was going to
start at once. Kane left him and started down
Frankfort street to Dover street dock.
Waterman remained with Brodie. Brodie
stopped three or four wagons and asked them
to take him over the bridge. The drivers
refused. He stopped a coach that a boy drove,
but the boy refused. Brodie's coat was
buttoned over his red Jersey, and there was nothing
unusual in his appearance. He saw a man
driving a red wagon with one horse up Park
row. There were only a few lengths of pipe in
the wagon and the load was light. He went
down Park row, and stopping the driver, asked
him to take a drink. The driver and Brodie
went into Kosmak's. A minute later the driver,
Waterman, and Brodie climbed up into the bed of
the wagon. Brodie paid the driver two cents,
and they started over on the south roadway.
Before the wagon passed the New York tower
Brodie, who was standing up in the wagon, took
off his soft hat and waved it. It was a signal to
his friends in the boat. Besides these watchers,
Forest Rush, Charley Stevens, William Romayne,
Tim Chrystal, and Patsy Sullivan were
on the lookout on the Dover street pier.
One hundred and twenty feet beyond the New
YorK Tower Brodie took off his coat and tossed
it on the wagon bed. It was ten minutes after
2 o'clock. He dropped off the wagon and walked
along a few feet behind it. He was very nervous,
and tapped his feet on the board flooring
as if going to dance a clog. In a sing-song
voice he hummed to himself:
Lum te tum, lum te tum, God will help me, God will
save me.
He snapped his fingers over his head as if he
were trying to distract his mind by recalling some
[...] minstrel ditty. Nobody except
Waterman, the driver, and Policeman Michael
Lally was in sight on the roadway.
Brodie stopped humming, and climbed up on
the iron netting that guards the sides of the
drive and over the heavy iron railing. As he
let himself down Waterman cried:
"Look out! There's a man going to jump off
the bridge!"
Brodie was clambering down the outside of
the railing to the stringpiece below. The policeman
did not see him, and went up to the
wagon. Waterman was getting frighened and
greatly excited, and Lally, thinking he was the
man, was going to arrest him.
"I ain't the man," he shouted. "It's him.
Stop him." He pointed to Brodie, and the
policeman rushed over toward the railing. The
driver of the wagon, being a prudent citizen,
whipped up his horse, and with Waterman's
and Brodie's coats on board, drove rapidly
across. That was the last seen of him.
Brodie had let himself down over the outside
guards to the level of the floor of the bridge.
He grasped the stringpiece underneath the
flooring with both hands and hung there for
ten seconds facing up the river. The policeman
saw it was no use to attempt to stop him
and ran for the New York side of the bridge.
Brody [sic] swung to and fro twice trying to steady
himself before he let go. His legs were close
together as if tied. His face was turned up
and he took a long breath. He worked his
hands close together, and his body finally hung
still, without swinging.
He let go. With his arms outstretched
straight above his head just as they were when
he hung to the stringpiece, he started down the
124 feet to the water. His fingers had partially
closed again after letting go their hold. Two
thirds of the way his bodY flashed down rigid.
The felt hat that he had waved and dropped
just before he flung himself free fluttered in
the air following him slowly to the water. His
friends in the boat had rowed up to within a
few feet of where they expected him to fall.
His friends on the shore timed him.
Fifty feet from the water he whirled a quarter
way around to the left and his face could be
seen by the people on the pier. His lips were
clenched and his nostrils dilated. As he turned
his arms bent at the elbows and came down
bent forward so that his fists were about at the
level of his eyes, his knees bent slightly and he
put his right foot forward and lurched forward
a trifle with his body. His attitude was much
like that of a runner about to start a race.
His friend thought he was going over on his
side, and Houston shouted, "He's lost--he's
lost!"
But he came down feet foremost after all. He
neither flopped nor turned further. His elbows
bent a little more and just before hitting the
water he squatted slightly.
Time of the fall--3 seconds and perhaps a
little over. He struck squarely on his feet. He
was not inclined 15 degrees from the perpendicular.
The splash was very slight. Spray
flew up ten or twelve feet, and there was a hole
for a second where he had sunk. From the
time his head was seen over the railing to his
striking the water not over thirty seconds had
elapsed.
In seven seconds after he went under the
water he came to the surface, rolled over on
his back and blew the water out of his nose.
The rowboat was within thirty feet of him.
Houston and Butler dived in after him. Houston
got to him first, and the two swam back to
the boat. Brodie swam on his back. He needed
no assistance. He climbed in, and after a
snort that cleared his nose, he said:
"Bully boy, Steve. Thank God I've done it.
Luck is wid me. Where's me children? Boys,
didn't I do it?"
Each of his friends told him that he did.
"I said I was going to jump the bridge, and
I've done it. Haven't I? Every one of you
saw me do it. Didn't you?"
Houston tore open Brodie's shirt, produced a
bottle of brandy, and rubbed his chest with the
spirits. Brodie took no drink until he got to
land. The boat was rowed over to the pier at
the foot of the bridge tower, and Brodie and
Houston were landed on the spiles there.
Houston had lost his hat and a shoe. All this
time Butler Was struggling about in the water
where he had been left. An oar had been
thrown to him or he might have drowned. He
shouted for help, and two policemen and a
crowd came. A tug and the boat went for him
and took him ashore. Brodie didn't like his
place on the spiles, dived off, and swam across
the slip to Dover street pier. A rope was
thrown to him and he climbed up on the pier.
Bridge Policeman Lally had been on a dead
run down from the bridge entrance, and was
seen coming down the pier. Brodie got back
into the boat.
"Fetch that boat into the dock," said the
policeman. "Come in here."
"Do you want to arrest me?" said Brodie.
"No."
"Won't you touch me?"
"No."
Then Brodie and his friends came in. Brodie
and Brennan were arrested and taken to Oak
street police station. Brodie look off all his
wet clothes and capered around in the policemen's
room. There were no bruises of any account
apparent on his body. On his right
shoulder was a little red spot, and his rightside
was red as if it had been scraped when he
climbed into the boat. He said that he had
been turned on his rightside in striking, and
that his side was very sore. He howled and
talked incoherently and boastfully. Dr. White
come from Chambers Street Hospital in answer
to an ambulance call. He pulled Brodie's arms,
sounded his chest, prodded his stomach,
yanked his legs, and then said that there was
nothing the matter with him except that he
had been drinking a little too much. He had
taken a glass of whiskey in the station house,
and a reporter went out and brought him a flask
full, which he was not allowed to tOuch.
"Doctor, ain't I hurt?" he asked. The Doctor
told him he wasn't. "Why ain't I?" he asked
again.
Word had been sent up to 85 Chrystie Street,
where Mrs. Brodie was anxiously waiting. She
sent down a bundle of dry clothes and he put
them on. He and Brennan were entered on the
blotter aS
Stephen Brodie, bookmaker, 23 years of age, native of
New York, married, lives at 85 Chrystie street. Drunk
and disorderly.
Timothy Brennan, foreman at 13 Franklin Street, 24
years old, from Boston, lives at 214 East Broadway.
Same charge.
"Is there anybody that don't believe I jumped
the bridge?" Brodie continually asked. "Ain't
I got sporting blood?"
Outside the station a crowd had gathered
that blocked up Oak street, and policemen had
to clear a way before the prisoners could be
taken to the Tombs. The crowd bowed down
before Brodie.
"He's de biggest man in de Fort' ward," said
a young man.
"Yes," said Brodie, "Sam Patch or none of
dem fellers ain't anything to me."
If a vote had been taken at once who should
be the next Alderman to succeed P. Divver,
Brodie would have been next to unanimously
elected, although he lives in the Tenth ward
now. He walked proudly over to the Tombs
Court, occasionally remarking on his own
greatness.
Justice Kllbreth was holding court when
Brodie arrived. Jimmy Oliver's brother was on
hand as counsel. Both Brodie and Brennan
were arraigned. It took some time to get a
charge that would hold Brodie. He had not
collected any crowd, for the crowd had been
gathered by Butler's cries that he was drowning.
He was not drunk enough to be locked
up as drunk and disorderly. So Policeman
Lally swore that Brodie had attempted suicide,
and he was locked up in cell 23 in the lower
tier of the main prison, for examination this
morning. Brennan was held, too, but his employer
Myles Walsh, who is a bookbinder at 13
Franklin street, gave ball for him.
Brodie went to his bed in his cell at once.
When his occupation was taken at the Tombs,
he said with pride that he was a bookmaker at
the races. The charge on the slate over his
door reads "Attempted suicide."
Mrs. Brodie brought her three children,
Irene, 5 years old, Steve Jr., 3 years old, and
Nellie, three weeks old, to the Tombs to see
him as soon as he was locked up. She brought
a dozen bananas and the evening papers with
her. Brodie lay in bed and ate bananas while
he talked and read the papers. To a SUN reporter
he said:
"I've been thinking of this for two years. I
did it on a bet of $100. I can make more off it,
though, and I'm willing to jump again any
time. It's not much. I've jumped off High
Bridge twice and a big bridge out in California.
It seemed a long time coming down, but I
didn't mind it. I knew I was going down
straight, and I didn't trouble about lighting so
long as I came down on my feet. I feel all
right except on my side, which is a bit sore.
'Tain't nothin' to jump the bridge if you only
make up your mind to it and do it right.
After his wife left he fell asleep.
Brodie was born 23 years ago on Park street.
His father was an Irishman and died years ago.
His mother is still alive. There were four
brothers of them--Dan, Steve, Tom and Eddie.
Eddie was a little hunchback who used to keep
a restaurant on Nassau street near Ann. He
is dead. Steve began business as a newsboy
and bootblack. He was enterprising and got
charge of the bootblacking stand at French's
old hotel, where he had two assistants. He
lived in the Newsboys' Lodging House and began
his pedestrian record by making 90 miles
there in 24 hours. Afterward he made a tour
of the West and was in many walking contests.
That is what gave him the name of "The Newsboy
Pedestrian." His last contest was in Baltimore.
On returning he took charge of the
bootblack stand in the Mills building where
he had two helpers. Once in a while he got a
chance to make $100 in a lump by something
out of the usual run. When the last filibustering
expedition to Honduras was being got up
he acted as recruiting agent for Cherry Hill.
six months ago he gave up his place in the
Mills building and has been playing the races
since. Now there is a dime museum prospect
before him.
His wife was Bridget Breen, a small pretty
black-eyed girl, who thinks nobody is so brave
or so great as her husband.
Brodie is about 5 feet 7 1/8 inches high, lean
and hollow eyed. His hair is black and his
cheek bones are prominent. He is a typical
Fourth ward boy.
One man had jumped off the bridge before
Brodie. Prof. R. E. Odlum did it on May 19,
1885, and died of it. Several cranks and
seekers for sympathy have started to jump or
made a pretence of it, but none got any
further than the guard rail
----end
New York Sun, July 25, 1886, Page 9, Column 3
Divver Bails out Brodie
The Bridge Jumper Won't Run against Him for Alderman.
Thinks of Going Starring Instead--How he
Felt when he was falling--In Favor of
Prohibiting Other Folks From Trying It.
Alderman P. Divver showed yesterday
how a man with a pull and a great head can
make hImself solid and shine in the lustre of
a noble deed by goIng on the bail bond of Steve
Brodie, who jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge
on Friday. Steve had thought of moving into
the second district to run for Alderman, and
had consulted with his friends about it, but
after the magnificent action of P. Divver he
came up to THE SUN office and announced:
"I'm for P Divver, and it's not me to go back
on a friend and run against him for Alderman
before he's got his share."
Brodie is himself a member of the Tammany
district committee. He slept soundly in his
cell in the lower tier in the Tombs on Friday
night, ate a hearty breakfast yesterday, and
wanted more. The Tombs court room was
packed as soon as the doors opened by reformed
filibusters and other Fourth warders. A bridge
policeman brought a note to Justice Kllbreth
from the trustees asking that the hearing of
Brodie's case should be postponed until next
Wednesday, when their lawyer can be present.
The Justice told the policeman to go and fetch
a copy of the bridge ordinances, or something
that would show what offence against the bridge
Brodie had committed when he jumped off. He
was held on the charge of attempted suicide,
which is a felony, and Jimmy Oliver's brother
Frank, who looked after him could not see
what the bridge ordinances had to do with it.
In the meantime Brodie was holding a reception
to privileged friends and his family in his
cell. He made a little speech and said:
"Boys, hain't I done it? Yo's all knows that
I jumped de bridge. Didn't I? I'm de only
man that ever jumped de bridge."
In an hour and a half a squad of bridge policemen
appeared in the court carrying a pasteboard
card 10 inches by 8. It was an official
bridge ordinance poster and was reverently
laid before Justice Kilbreth. It recited that
wagons must not drive on the cartracks and that
passengers must not walk on the roadway or
smoke in the cars or whittle the iron rails or
chip pieces off the towers.
Justice Kilbreth read it over carefully and
handed it back, saying there was nothing there
to hold Brodie. Frank Oliver asked for Brodie's
release. The Justice refused, and remanded
him in $1,000 bail for a hearing next Wednesday
morning. Jim Brennan, who was arrested
at the same time, and is also out on $1,000 bail,
will appear at the same time.
Alderman P, Divver was in Brooklyn when he
heard of the trouble his promising ex-constituent
and competitor was in. He flew to the
Tombs and went Brodie's bail. Brodie was
brought up to sign the bond.
"How do yoU do, jumper?" said the Justice,
"How do you do, Judge," said Brodie.
Commissioner Porter was standing near by
and said: "It was a great thing, but don't you
do it any more."
Brode said he would consider the advice.
As soon as the bail bond was signed he was
released, and went at once to a neighboring gin
mill where he drank four sarsaparillos, one
seltzer, and an occasional hard drink, while he
told his story with the refrain, "Didn't you see
me jumping de bridge? Well, I done it, and I kin
do it again."
A lot of museum men swooped down on him
with offers to exhibit. Nathan Morris offered
to give Brodie half the receipts and take him
to Coney island to exhibit when everybody on
the Bowery had seen him. Brodie wanted a
guarantee of $150 a week for a ten weeks'
engagement. Morris would not give over a
hundred, and no bargain was made.
After he was released, Brodie said: "No
more short horses for me. I've dropped $700
on the races in the past few weeks. I had but
one dollar when I jumped off the bridge, and I
spent that on drinks. I'm going to get the $200
that was up on this and return $100 to the man
who put it up for me. The other hundred I'll
live on till I get into a museum. I'd be satisfied
if I didn't make a cent. A Bowery museum
man offered me $100 a week, and a Baltimore
man has offered me $200 a week to be exhibited,
but I think I'll go with Tom McCoy and travel
over the country for twenty weeks on shares.
"You'll see a lot of sharks jumping off and
getting killed," he went on. "There ought to
be something done to stop it. Odium would
have got along all right if the police hadn't
hurried him. That's all there is to it. Any
man who is a trained jumper can do it. It
wouldn't do for him to jump head foremost.
He could just keep his arms stiff enough to
protect his head, and if he struck square on
his head the water would smash his skull and
kill him. Why, even in my shoes hitting the
water made my feet feel as if they had got a big
shock of electricity. There's the only place
that caught me--on my feet. The bruises on
mY chest and shoulder were caused, as THE
SUN said, by my climbing into the boat and
being hauled around.
"The first time I went up in the morning I
looked down and saw the boat four piers
below. They were afraid I would fall on them.
but I knew they were too far off to get to me in
time if I should be insensible when I struck. I
Went back and stationed them off the bridge
dock, and told them to keep about forty feet
away. Then I went back and got on the wagon
to go over the bridge. I hadn't picked out any
particular place to jump from. If the policeman
was in the middle of the bridge, I was
going to try it near the tower. If he was near
the tower I was going to the middle. When I
got off the wagon I got feeling queer. That's
what made me sing that [...] minstrel song.
But I says to myself, 'Here you are and you're
in for it, and I got over that railing pretty
quick. I climbed on down as I saw the policeman
coming for me. I knew he couldn't grab
me without climbing over after me, and if he
did that he might tumble off himself. I knew
he wouldn't do that, so I wasn't afraid, and
took my time. The air was swinging me too
much when I grabbed the wire underneath. It
was hard for me to get steady, and the wire
scrapped my hand."
He held up his left hand and showed where a
piece of skin as large as a cent had been scraped
from the Inside of his third finger.
"I held on there until I was steady, then I
let go. I looked all around. I saw a tugboat
that had just passed underneath going on down
the river, and there was a little schooner up by
Catherine Ferry tacking on down toward the
bridge. It was pretty far off, but I was afraid I
would fall on it. So I hurried up to get down
before it got under me. I took a long breath
and began to drop. I kept my eyes on that
little schooner coming down from Catharine
Ferry, and kept thinking that I was really
jumping the bridge.
"About half way down my feet began to
spread and I remembered and got them
together again and put up my right hand to
balance my feet. That brought them back. They
were about a foot and a half apart. I turned
my chin to my breast and looked down and
saw that there wasn't any chance of my lighting
on the little schooner. Then I looked up and
saw the policeman leaning over and watching
me. I tried to smile at him, but it was no
use. By this time I was right by the water,
and lit. As soon as I came up I swam to the
boat.
"I didn't take any full breaths on the way
down. I just heaved twice to keep my chest
firm. Lighting didn't sicken me at all. My
stomach was all rIght, and so was I. I
expected to be unconscious when I came to the
top of the water, and had a bottle of ammonia
and a bottle of whiskey on board to be rubbed
with. When they were rubbing me it smelled
so good that I took a few tastes. That was
what troubled me in the station house."
Brodie has bad tintypes made of himself as
he looks dressed in his diving suit. He got the
clothes from the station house and put them
on yesterday morning. The jersey sags like a
ball dress. His trousers are tied at the ankles
with cords, and there is a big bulge around his
waist and chest where the canton flannel is.
In Divver's last night Brodie signed a contract
to show at Tom McCoy's for two weeks at
$100 a week, and then to travel with McCoy at
same pay and expenses, "except wine," for
thirteen weeks. P. Divver signed for him as
surety and ex-Alderman Farley signed for
McCoy.
----endLeave a comment:
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Great stuff from Mr. Brookfield, in particular that editing job from Kipling that was rejected as illegible. I almost wish Brookfield had informed him (after the publication) of whom he had slighted.Originally posted by TradeName View Post
I have not heard of Col "Troy", so I can't tell what his background is. Possibly as bad as that of Dr. Tumblety in it's way, but that's a guess.
In the last paragraph, Robert "Rob" Pinkerton took over the firm's management after the death of Allan Pinkerton (the founder of the firm) in 1876. He was, for a couple of years, friendly with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, personally showing him items of interest when the latter visited the U.S. Their friendship ended though when Doyle wrote the last Sherlock Holmes novel, "The Valley of Fear" which was based on the destruction of the "Molly Maguires" in the Pennsylvania Coal Fields in the 1870s by the Pinkerton agent, James McParland. This was changed to the destruction of the criminal gang, "the Scowlrers" in the "Vermissa Valley" by "Birdy Evans". Pinkerton felt that Conan Doyle had taken advantage of their friendship in using what was still (in 1914) classified material, and led to a break between the two men.
While in New York City on that trip (probably about 1890) Brookfield met Steve Brodie, who claimed he successfully jumped off the East River (or Brooklyn) Bridge and lived to tell about it. His feat was celebrated on stage and in song for decades before it was questioned. When the Brooklyn Bridge was opened in May 1883 it was the tallest structure in the New York City and Brooklyn area (before 1898, when the boroughs unified to create the "City of Greater New York", Brooklyn was the fourth largest independent city in the United States - and the bridge connected it with Manhattan which was the actual city of New York at the time of 1883). The Bridge itself had been built only after a fourteen year struggle by John Roebling (who died of a tetanus infection from an injury on the bridge) and his son Washington Roebling (who at one point got a case of the bends, and his wife Emily took over giving his directions to the men from her ill husband). Ill-fortune conspired against the Bridge, including a panic (ten days after it was built) where pedestrians thought it was falling, and in the rush trampled about a dozen people to death. Then in November 1883 a diving instructor named Robert E. Odlum made an illegal dive off the bridge - but died. Brodie came along about two years later, and was seen leaving the East River all wet, claiming he jumped. Problem was (later discovered) that Brodie never was seen jumping from the Bridge itself. Although accepted in his time as the man who had jumped and survived, it is more than likely he made the thing up.
JeffLast edited by Mayerling; 01-03-2016, 07:08 PM.Leave a comment:
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Thank, Jeff.
Here are some random bits from Brookfield's memoirs.
Random Reminiscences (London: Edward Arnold, 1902), link
by Charles Hallam Elton Brookfield
Page 27
It must have been in about 1875 that the committee of the Savile Club paid me the honour of election. Their house was then in Savile Row. I believe the Savile was originally a doctors' club. I know there was a superstition prevalent among the non-scientific members that the smoking-room at the back of the house, with its top light, had in its time served as a dissecting-room, and that the physiological members used to fill in their spare moments after luncheon or tea by a little desultory autoptical investigation. If the sealing-wax were missing from the writing-room, we obstinately suspected it had been used by the hall-porter to display the arterial system of some surreptitious subject that the doctors must have smuggled in at some time when they had the club to themselves.
Page 28-30
I remember one of the stories—' A Superior Animal'—which was 'syndicated ' by [walter] Besant's able friend, Mr. Watt; that is to say, it appeared in a number of local papers in different parts of the country, so that I received about four times as much for it as I should have been paid by any solitary editor. I was correcting a proof of this effort in the solitude of the card-room one afternoon, when Rudyard Kipling came in and asked to look at it. He spoke most kindly of the tale, but had many suggestions to make with regard to the telling. 'Don't you see how much stronger that would be?' he asked after suggesting an excision and a transposition. 'D'you mind if I alter it?' And, so saying, he whipped out a pencil and set to work; and having once put his hand to the plough, so to speak, he persevered, and in a few minutes the whole virgin expanse of proof was furrowed and hoed and harrowed and manured and top-dressed by the master. I packed up and despatched the corrected sheet there and then.
The result was unexpected. I received a most abusive letter from the editor, saying that if I imagined his compositors had nothing better to do than to try and decipher Chinese puzzles I was gravely mistaken; that they had been put to great inconvenience to fill in at the last moment the space my story should have occupied; that they certainly shouldn't use it now, and were extremely sorry they had paid for it; and that they were writing to Mr. Watt to complain. I had not the Christianity to write and tell the editor that what he was discarding as worthless rubble was, in reality, sparkling with Kipling nuggets.
'A Superior Animal' appeared also in the Bristol Times and Mirror. It had (originally) a most artistic, unconventional, and thrilling finish, of which I was duly proud. When I saw it in the West Country paper I found an entirely unauthorized, commonplace, and impotent conclusion, which annoyed me excessively. I wrote, accordingly, an icy letter to the office, asking how it came about that the termination of a story appearing over my name had been altered without my sanction. I received a curt note from the sub-editor, saying that he didn't know who I was; that the only individual he recognised in the transaction was Mr. Watt; and that he 'put an end to the story because it didn't appear to have one.' I wrote back and said:
'Dear Sir,
'The village editor has no more right to adulterate a story than the village grocer has to sand the sugar, though I am aware that the custom prevails in both cases.'
This closed the correspondence.
Pages 144-145
The regular 'house of call,' however, for the members of the Haymarket Theatre was the Café de l'Europe, a few doors up the street. It has frequently changed hands—-and names—-but no one has yet succeeded in making a fortune there. The miscellaneous company that used to frequent it afforded me endless entertainment. There were respectable tradespeople from the neighbourhood, 'lumberers,' confidence-men, money-lenders' touts, journalists, and actors, and occasionally a Scotland Yard detective or two. I made friends with several of 'the boys,' as the flash gentlemen who live by their wits are called. One of them showed me one day a very ingenious contrivance. This was a teetotum with a movable stem. Such of my readers as are familiar with this amusing toy will, I hope, forgive me for explaining it for the benefit of the remainder. When you spin with one end, only a i or a 2 or a 3 will turn up, but by surreptitiously pushing the stem through, and so spinning on the other end, with the top the other way up, it will expose a 4 or a 5 or a 6. 'There was an American I got acquainted with at the "Piccadilly,"' my friend told me, 'who knew—well, he seemed to know as much as what / did. Racing, cards, he wouldn't be taken on at anything. One morning I got up and I lay this 'ere teetotum in the gutter of the Haymarket just alongside of the curb. Presently I meets my Yankee friend. "'Mornin', Seth," says I. "How are you?" says he, and we start down towards the Two Chairmen for our first drink. All of a sudden I kicks up this bloomin' top. "Hullo!" says I, "'ere's some poor little kiddie been and dropped 'is top. Poor little beggar! he'll miss that, I dare say, as much as you or I'd miss a ten-pound note. I'm passionately fond of children," I says ; " I've got five of my own." And we got yarning away about kids and that. Presently we gets to the bar. "What's yours?" says I. "No, no," says my Yank, "this is my shout." "Not a bit of it," says I. "I insist," says he. At last I says, "Let's spin and see whose turn it is with this kiddie's top." And we started spinning for drinks, and we got on to shillings, and dollars, and sovereigns, and before twelve o'clock I'd lifted just on two hundred pounds off of him.' And then, after a pause, 'And all down in that little bit of bar across the way there—-the Two Chairmen they calls it.'
Page 161
There was still a tendency, even as late as 1884, for a few malcontents to muster on a Haymarket first night and clamour for the missing pit, to the inconvenience of the rest of the audience. So on my first night I engaged a few fighting men to keep order. During the overture an individual in the front row of the gallery began to shuffle his feet, and to call out, 'Where's the pit?' He was picked up by his collar and the seat of his trousers and handed over the heads of his neighbours from one of my sturdy stewards to another, until at last he found himself at the top of the gallery staircase, where an East End light-weight, in an excess of zeal, struck him on the side of the head and knocked him downstairs. He wrote me a protest against my 'cowardly attempt to burke an expression of honest opinion.' I replied by acknowledging the receipt of his letter—' which was evidently written under some misapprehension.'
Pages 205-206
A few years ago I met at Cowes an American 'sport' called 'Colonel' Troy. I believe he has since died. He was a man of about fifty, stout, with his sandy hair en brosse and a moustache hérissée. The only feature that gave him away was his eyes, which were small and furtive. He was a genial old party, but with that strong strain of selfpity which is conspicuous in all the habitual criminals I have met. They have no sense of right and wrong (though they generally have many other excellent qualities), but, in place of it, a perpetual feeling of grievance against the existing order of things. 'Colonel' Troy waxed quite pathetic over his own plight. 'You know, Mr. Brookfield,' he said, 'I'd give anything to have a small annuity—-say about 2,000 dollars—-just enough to live on in some little quiet watering-place. I hate late hours, and I hate cards! As it is, I make the acquaintance of some bright young fellow; he invites me down to his place and gives me the best of everything; and after dinner, when I'd like to go to bed like everything, I have to say to myself, "No; you've got to sit up and rob this young man. That's the return you're goin' to make for all his hospitality." Mr. Brookfield, it's a miserable life, and I hate it.' The obvious alternative, which he could not face, however, was giving it up.
Pages 290-291
[About a trip to New York.]
But, talking of hospitality, I did on one occasion during my four nights' stay have it forced upon me in a way that some might not have relished. Amongst my letters of introduction I had one to Mr. 'Bob' Pinkerton, a partner in the famous detective agency, who was extremely polite when I called, and detailed one of his men to 'show me around' that evening. A tall, well-dressed, extremely agreeable man called for me at my hotel soon after dinner, a Mr. O'Donoghue. He took me a most entertaining round. We visited the Chinese quarter, which, though not to compare with the China Town in San Francisco, is nevertheless very interesting. Most of the little men appeared to be married to Irish wives. One of these told me she would rather have for a husband a Chinaman who would work than an Irishman who wouldn't. I did not discuss this nice point with her. We visited a joss-house and a Chinese theatre, where we saw a portion of a native melodrama played in front of the orchestra, which was on the stage. Then we went to a music-hall, where all the audience were Jews, and to another where they were all 'men of colour.' Then we called on ' Steve Brodie, B.J.,' which initials do not signify that Steve is a member of a religious community, but that he once jumped off Brooklyn Bridge and deems himself champion bridge-jumper of the world. He presides over a drinking saloon on the Bowery, and there I was introduced to sundry 'toughs' and ' Bowery boys' and 'sports' of various types. [...]Leave a comment:
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Marvelous material again. I can add some details on Brookfield, and on Alfred Austin (died 1913).Originally posted by TradeName View Post
Austin is simpler to write of and dismiss. In 1892 Lord Tennyson died and he had been poet laureate since the death of the preceeding one, Williams Wordsworth (who had succeeded Robert Southey). Wordsworth died in 1850, so Tennyson held the post almost half a century. Whild Wordsworth and Tennyson were certainly good choices, one has to recall that their best work rarely did what the Poet Laureate is supposed to do. Even a patriotic poem like Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" was not asked for by the Royal Family. The Poet Laureate is supposed to writer uplifting verse celebrating events involving the royal family (births, deaths, coronations, dedications of monuments and buildings, naming ships. It is a great honor but it rarely causes the best poetic works of the day by it's selectee.
The choice of a successor for Tennyson befuddled both the Liberal Governments of Gladstone and Lord Rosebury, and the Tory Government of Lord Salisbury. It would be four years (1892 to 1896) before Salisbury chose Austin. Of the three Premiers, Rosebury should have been the one to make the choice, but his Prime Ministership of roughly a year was a mess, and he just wanted to get through and over the entire situation. Gladstone had cared little about modern poetry (he was into the classics), and Salisbury, when he went into intellectual matters, was more into electric and chemical experiments in his home.
Also the choices were less clear. The three front runners were Wilde, William Morris, and Rudyard Kipling. Wilde was (to all the three Prime Ministers) to be avoided - even before the Queensbury debacle and trial for sodomy in 1895 his reputation was well known in London society and politics. Morris too was a problem. Although gifted as a versifier, his models (like his small fictional novels) were medieval and hardly fitted modern England. But worse, Morris was an unflinching socialist. He couldn't be chosen for political reasons.
Well that left Kipling, and he certainly the bill. Naturally patriotic, with his background of the Barrack Room Ballads like "Gunga Din" and "Soldiers and Sailors Too", he should have been chosen. But Kipling tended to celebrate the common soldier, not the national military brass, and their aristocratic friends. Also he took dim view of women in his poetry ("The Colonel's Lady and Sally O'Grady are sisters, under the skin!"; "The female of the species is more deadly than the male!"). This while there was nearly a decade more of the reign of the current monarch Queen Victoria. Finally there was the celebration of the "cockney" version of English. Most of the Barrack Room verses are in Cockney (or Kipling's version) with dropped or misplaced letters. Ironically, as George Orwell suggested in his essay on Kipling, it spoiled many of his best lines: "Follow me, follow me 'ome!" instead of "home" is Orwell's example (and a good one).
Still the post was offered to Kipling, and he turned it down. Kipling probably wanted more freedom for his uses of image, ideas, and expressions than a real Poet Laureate would get. Oddly enough, as he lived to 1936, Kipling would be offered the post twice more (in 1913 when Alfred Austin died - offered by Prime Minister Asquith, and in the 1920s offered by his cousin, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.). Again he refused - and his subsequent fame never suffered for that loss.
Aside from the big three there were a host of minor poets, most notably Sir Edward Arnold (not to be confused with the great film character actor of the same name) who had written a tedious book length "best selling" religious poem, "The Light of the World". Sir Edward apparently really campaigned for this post, and was politely ignored. A story goes he was at some event with Wilde, and complained, "There is a conspiracy of silence against me, Oscar!!...What should I do, what should I do???" Wilde didn't hesitate: JOIN IT!!!
As for Austin, while it is easy to dismiss Harris's comments as based on his admiration for the destroyed Wilde, to be fair Austin wrote some of the worst poetic drivel associated with the office of Poet Laureate in the last one hundred and sixty years. Harris was right - Austin was constantly writing garbage in support of Tory politics and politicians, some of which had traces of his attempts at poetry. When the 1895 Jameson Raid occurred he wrote lines honoring the attempt to rescue English womanhood held in durance vile by the Dutch Boers of Paul Ohm Kruegar (who was probably more concerned about protecting the self-government of the two Boer Republics from rapacious British figures like Cecil Rhodes, Leander Starr Jameson, and their hidden ally in the British cabinet, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain). He wrote the following couplet (among other, similar lines) to show the speed of the raiders (who were still captured by Boer patrols):
"They went across the veldt,
As fast as they could pelt!!"
For a selection of Austin's lines, check out the old anthology of bad English poetry, "The Stuffed Owl". To be fair Wordsworth and Tennyson and even Edgar Allen Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are included, but Austin left no living poetry as that quartet did.
Brookfield too had an interesting background. The following is from the dramatist, S.N. Behrman's book "Portrait of Max: An Intimate Memoir of Sir Max Beerbohm" (New York: Random House, 1960). Beerbohm is talking about the figures he knew in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and he naturally talks a bit about Oscar Wilde. This brings up the matter of Charles Brookfield, and fills in a bit more of the details - on page 85 Beerbohm says the following:
"But you know" --Max's eyes darkened with regret, and his brow furrowed -- "as Oscar became more and more successful he became..." Max paused, as if couldn't bear to say it, but he did say it. "He became arrogant. he felt himself omnipotent, and he became gross not in body only - he did become that -- but in his relations with people. He brushed people aside; he felt he was beyond the ordinary human courtesies that you owe people even if they are, in your opinion, beneath you. He snubbed Charles Brookfield, the actor who played the lackey in "An Ideal Husband" -- he was a wonderful, unfailing actor in small parts, and was said to be an illegitimate son of Thackeray, you know -- and Brookfield never forgave him. Brookfield was vindictive; Brookfield hated Oscar, and it was Brookfield who did him in - supplied evidence against him."
The suggestion that the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 - 1863; "Vanity Fair", "Henry Esmond", Pendennis", The Newcomes", "Barry Lyndon") was Brookfield actual father was due to Thackeray being very close to Brookfield's parents, Reverend William Brookfield and Jane Brookfield. Most of Thackeray's biographers have claimed that the relationship between Jane Brookfield and Thackeray was just platonic, but this view has been questioned in recent years - and it has come out that William Brookfield may have beaten his wife on a few occasions.
JeffLeave a comment:
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Thanks, Jeff.
Here's a quote from one of Syemour Hicks' memoirs.
Vintage Years when King Edward the Seventh was Prince of Wales (Cassell, 1943), Page 149
by Sir Seymour Hicks
[...] It was at first supposed that a homicidal maniac was at large, but ultimately detectives were hot on the trail of a certain medical student who lived at Croydon, and had they been able to arrest him it is more than probable that the the evidence against him would have put a rope round his neck. The wanted man, however, was never taken; he was found drowned in the Thames, and in his waistcoat pocket there was the return half of a third-class railway ticket to Croydon.
From the day of his death the Whitechapel Murders ceased, and this, taken in conjunction with the facts in the possession of the authorities, goes a long way to prove that the very astute members of the finest body of policemen in the world had succeeded in unravelling a very tangled skein.
----end
In an earlier memoir Hicks talks about Charles Brookfield.
Seymour Hicks: Twenty-Four Years of an Actor's Life (New York: John Lane, 1911), Pages 170-171
by Seymour Hicks
"the Other Fellow" unfortunately was not a great success; and I asked Charles Brookfield, who was a member of the Court company at the time, if he would write a musical play with me on the lines of a Paris revue, but, instead of satirising general topics of interest, make the travesty nearly wholly theatrical. This idea he fell in with, and together we wrote what was a most impertinent, and at times rather cruel, burlesque, called "Under the Clock," which was immediately accepted by Mr. Chudleigh and proved phenomenally successful.
Brookfield appeared as Sherlock Holmes, and I played his slave of the novel, Dr. Watson, and we were supposed to be showing Emile Zola, who at that time was on a visit to London, round the various theatres. Brookfield and myself gave imitations of Henry Irving, Wilson Barrett, Beerbohm Tree, Lady Bancroft, Rose Leclercq, and no end of well-known people, slashing mercilessly at them in a way I should not dream of doing to-day. For instance, Brookfield made an entrance as Beerbohm Tree in "Hamlet," saying:—
"I'm dressed in black because I did not go;
These are my trappings and my suits of woe."
And lines put into the mouth of Miss Lottie Venne in her impersonation of Miss Julia Neilson were—-
"We modern girls, who don't know how to speak,
Resort to giving imitation weak
Of Ellen, who the gift of God inherits;
Her faults become her pupils' only merits."
I blush to think now of my share of these daring things, and, though late in the day, I lay at the feet of the lessee of His Majesty's and the beautiful Miss Neilson my profound apologies.
----end
Brookfield was also acquainted with Macnaghten.
Days of My Years (New Yorl: Longman, Greens, 1914), Pages 19-20
by Sir Melville Leslie Macnaghten
I had the honour of acting with the late Charles Brookfield on the first occasion that he ever trod the boards. It was in January 1869, when he was about ten years old. The play was The Critic. Brookfield played the first Sentinel, a part which Sir George Alexander sustained at the Coronation performance in His Majesty's Theatre three years ago. Arthur Duke Coleridge played Puff in our South Kensington presentation, and, curiously enough, I noticed his death last year within a few days of that of Brookfield. Sir John Millais painted our scene of "Tilbury Fort—-very fine indeed,"—-the present vice-provost of Eton and his wife played Mr. and Mrs. Dangle, and Sir Frederick Pollock the Earl of Leicester.
Poor, dear Charles Brookfield! He often visited me at the Yard, and was very keen on all criminal matters, of which he knew more (and of the seamy side of life generally) than any layman I ever met, with the possible exception of my friends George R. Sims and Harry B. Irving; the knowledge of the latter, especially with regard to French criminals, is very remarkable. Brookfield was a good friend, and maybe not a very pleasant enemy—-brilliantly witty, but a little bitter, perhaps, in some of the best things he said. As a raconteur he was unrivalled. His health for many years was wretched, but his pluck was undefeated, and no pleasanter pal ever entered a clubhouse.
----end
Brookfield was said to have helped gather eveidence against Oscar Wilde.
Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions (New York: Frank Harris, 1918), Pages 232-233
by Frank Harris
I have spoken again and again in the course of this narrative of Oscar's enemies, asserting that the English middle-class as puritans detested his attitude and way of life, and if some fanatic or representative of the nonconformist conscience had hunted up evidence against Wilde and brought him to ruin there would have been nothing extraordinary in a vengeance which might have been regarded as a duty. Strange to say the effective hatred of Oscar Wilde was shown by a man of the upper class who was anything but a puritan. It was Mr. Charles Brookfield, I believe, who constituted himself private prosecutor in this case and raked Piccadilly to find witnesses against Oscar Wilde. Mr. Brookfield was afterwards appointed Censor of Plays on the strength apparently of having himself written one of the "riskiest" plays of the period. As I do not know Mr. Brookfield, I will not judge him. But his appointment always seemed to me, even before I knew that he had acted against Wilde, curiously characteristic of English life and of the casual, contemptuous way Englishmen of the governing class regard letters. In the same spirit Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister made a journalist Poet Laureate simply because he had puffed him for years in the columns of The Standard. Lord Salisbury probably neither knew nor cared that Alfred Austin had never written a line that could live. One thing Mr. Brookfield's witnesses established: every offence alleged against Oscar Wilde dated from 1892 or later-—after his first meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas.
----end
Montgomery Hyde attributed the following to Seymor Hicks.
The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name (Little, Brown, 1970), Page 153
by Harford Montgomery Hyde
It is said he [Charles Brookfield] was jealous of Wilde's theatrical success. At all events he was friendly with Queensbury, and probably did more than anyone else to collect evidence against Wilde which he handed over to Douglas's father. Indeed, his zeal in hunting out homosexuals did not stop with Wilde and Taylor and was continued after they went to prison. Eventually his conduct became an embarrassment to the authorities, and it is said that the London Metropolitan Police Commissioner got hold of him and advised him in the interests of his personal safety to 'lay off', pointing out that there were influential homosexuals in high places who resented Brookfield's laudable but misguided endeavours and that if Brookfield were to persist in them his dead body might be found floating in the Thames one morning. Brookfield took the hint; he was subsequently appointed to the post of censor of plays in the Lord Chamberlain's office--a singular piece of irony, since he himself had written one of the 'riskiest' plays of the period.
----end
I think I originally saw the Hyde quote here.
The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (Basic Books, 2009), Page 224
by Neil McKennaLast edited by TradeName; 12-29-2015, 08:06 PM.Leave a comment:
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I took a look at that story by William Archer. It has elements of the killing of Mr. Gold by Lefroy, and the end reference to the assassination of the Tsar has to refer to that of Tsar Alexander II in March of 1881, just three months before the murder of Mr. Gold. I also tried to read the story which seemed to cluttered with references and such to be very good. References to Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli) in it also put it in 1881, as Disraeli died that year.
That same book did have one classic short story in it: "Markheim" by Robert Louis Stevenson, which is still frequently republished.
Footnote to the play suggested by the Dreyfus Affair: "One of the Best" (which Shaw, with tongue firmly in cheek, referred to as "One of the Worst"):
This play was written in part by Seymour Hicks. Hicks, a prominent actor on his own (recently his version of "A Christmas Carol" has reappeared and is sometimes shown on television - he made it in 1935) was the son-in-law of William "Adelphi Terrace" Terris, the star of the piece, and the leading actor in popular melodramas of the 1880s to 1890s, such as "Peveril of the Peak" (based on Walter Scott's novel). He was talking to Shaw himself to appear in a play by the latter, when in 1897 he was stabbed to death outside the Adelphi Theatre in London (the spot of the attack is still shown to tourists) by Richard Prince, a jealous failed actor that was aided by Terris but resented him and suspected him of ruining Prince's self-imagined career. Prince was sentenced to life without parole to Broadmoor prison for the criminally insane (Sir Henry Irving, who was a close friend to his rival Terris, bitterly said that Prince got away with murder because he killed an actor). Shaw continued seeking another major star for the play he was working on, "The Devil's Disciple", and the role of "Dick Dudgeon" ended up being first portrayed on stage by our old friend, Richard "Jeckyll and Hyde" Mansfield.
Second footnote about the "Bordereau" forgery in the Dreyfus Case:
The forgery (and several others) was created by Major Hubert Henri, a member of the "special" (counter-intelligence) sector of the French General Staff, and a firm supporter of their view that Dreyfus was the traitor. Henri is an interesting character, and I have mixed feelings about him. No doubt he detested Dreyfus, who was a Jew (Henri was probably anti-Semitic like many of the officers of the French Army at the time - and in other armies as well in the 1890s) but he really believed Dreyfus was guilty, and not Major Marie-Joseph Estherhazy, the actual traitor. He still believed this when his neck was caught in what he did. Henri figured that for the good of France more convincing evidence of Dreyfus' guilt would silence the growing criticism of the case and the French General Staff by the French public. So he went ahead and created the Bordereau, which was seemingly convincing until studied by experts.
In 1894 when it was produced, the "expert" looking at it was a most interesting fellow. It was Alphonse Bertillon, the creator of the first successful method of criminal identification prior to the development of fingerprinting and long before our use of DNA. Although a series of cases smeared it's reputation, the Bertillon method of measurements of portions of the skull and body worked for about fifteen years, and was certainly a good idea a the time. Bertillon was soon working closely with the Surete and became a leading expert in their criminal trials (sort of like how years later Sir Bernard Spilsbury was THE PATHOLOGIST in poisoning and homicide cases). But he was asked to look at the Bordereau, and while he certainly did make a real attempt to prove it was written by Dreyfus he couldn't overcome the fact that he was not a graphologist (expert in handwriting). To this day, however, anti-Dreyfus partisans still insist Bertillon was correct.
Henri's tragedy began as the strands of the case separated, and there was a change in the government with a more critical bunch in charge of the War Ministry than the cynical and conniving General Mercier who accepted the case against Dreyfus in 1894 and kept doing so for years after. When the change came they reexamined the Bordereau and called in Henri to explain it's discovery (supposedly in a waste paper basket) and what was the reason it was supposedly written by Dreyfus. The document had by then been shown to actual graphologists who denied Dreyfus signed it. Henri was called to a special private hearing before the War Minister and two Generals who had known what Henri was up to and winked at it. Unfortunately for Henri, neither general ever committed anything to paper that showed they okayed it. Henri confessed his guilt to the Minister of War claiming (probably honestly for a change) he did it for the happiness of the French people in a) getting rid of the probable traitor (Dreyfus) and b) to stop the growing discord caused by the likes of novelist Emile Zola, Anatol France, and Colonel Piquart, that was splitting the country apart. As he finished his heart-felt confession, Henri looked at the two Generals listening, expecting they too would confess they knew of it and approved it. Both looked either with hostility at him for apparently being a self-confessed forger, or they just looked indifferently at him as though butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. He was then aware he was the scapegoat - and it knocked the props from underneath him. Taken to prison, other prisoners later reported hearing him crying piteously in his cell when he realized how he had sacrificed for what he thought was right, but was actually unappreciated in the end. Two nights into his imprisonment, Major Henri was found hanging in his cell dead. To this day it is wondered if he killed himself or was dispatched to silence him.Leave a comment:
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According to the memoirs of novelist David Christie Murray Conan Doyle once opined that Dreyfus could still be guilty even if the evidence produced at his trial didn't hold up.
Recollections (London: John Long, 1908), Pages 268-272
by David Christie Murray
One of my hobbies for the last forty years has been the study of character in handwriting. It is pretty much with the various forms of caligraphy as it is with the human face or with the human voice. The vast majority of faces that one sees are essentially commonplace, but each has somehow an individuality of its own. Handwriting has its physiognomy, and everybody who has been accustomed to a large correspondence knows how instinctively and unfailingly he recognises a caligraphy which has been presented to him only twice or thrice. It was as a result of my pursuit of this hobby that I first began to take a real interest in the Dreyfus case. When the first rough and ready facsimiles of the famous Bordereau and of the authentic letters of Captain Dreyfus were published side by side, it struck me with an immediate amazement to conceive that any person who had given even the most casual attention to this study of handwriting could possibly have supposed that the various documents had emanated from the same hand. The forgery of a signature is one of the simplest businesses in the world, but the truly deceptive forgery of a document of any length is an absolute impossibility-—an impossibility as complete as would attend the continued personification of a dual character by the most skilful mimic under the observation of one who was able to maintain a sustained and microscopic examination of the two.
It was an article in the Strand Magazine communicated by that eminent statistician, Mr Holt Schooling, which first enabled me to form a judgment in this matter, and until it and its accompanying photographs of original documents were brought to my notice, I had taken no more than an ordinary passing interest in the case. But since it had been decided, on the strength of an imagined resemblance between the handwriting of the prisoner and that of the author of the Bordereau, I had not a moment's hesitation in arriving at the conclusion that the charge against him was unfounded and absurd, and it seemed to me to be no less than a duty to bring other people to the conclusion which I so strongly held. It was not easy. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to me:—-
"My Dear Murray,—-Its being a week-end will prevent my coming up for I have always several visitors. I hope when you can come down you will let me know. Very much interested in your views upon the Dreyfus case. I fancy that the Government may know upon evidence which they dare not disclose (spy or traitor evidence) that he is guilty and have convicted him on a bogus document,—-Yours very truly,
"(Sgd.) A. Conan Doyle."
For nine long days I went over the photographs of the authentic letters and the incriminating Bordereau with a powerful magnifier, and in the end I succeeded in establishing no fewer than twenty-two distinct and characteristic differentiations between them. I had already entered upon the preparation of an alphabetical synopsis when I learned of the existence of that work of monumental patience and research which had been prepared by Monsieur Bernard Lazare of Paris, and a consultation of its pages showed me that part of the work I had undertaken had already been performed by Monsieur Gustave Bridier, an acknowledged expert in handwriting in Switzerland.
I caused all the documents at my disposal to be photographed on glass, and thus prepared I betook myself from my home in North Wales to London, where I found an immediate and enthusiastic helper in the person of Mr J. N. Maskelyne of the Egyptian Hall. He lent me the use of the most powerful oxyhydrogen magnifying lantern in London and prepared for me a great screen on to which the photographs could be most delicately and accurately thrown in an enormously magnified form. Until the fact of my intended demonstration was announced by the Press, I had not the remotest idea as to the intense interest with which the case was regarded by the British public. I had caused it to be announced that anybody desiring to be present might secure a ticket of admission by forwarding to me a stamped directed envelope. The Egyptian Hall seated about 360 people, and I received applications which would certainly have enabled me to fill the vast auditorium of the Albert Hall twice over. The result was that I was enabled to make a choice, and when the night arrived the little hall was packed with the pick of the brains of London, drawn from both Houses of Parliament, from the Bench, the Bar, the diplomatic services of Europe, the Royal Academy, the learned professions generally and the Press of London. When a page of the Bordereau was first thrown upon the screen side by side with the authentic handwriting of the prisoner at Devil's Island, I knew that I had my work cut out for me, for there were murmurs everywhere of "Identical!" "Damnatory!" "That settles the whole question," and so on. The mood of the audience was not to be doubted for an instant, but I knew my case and I was confident. Little by little, as demonstration succeeded demonstration, the temper changed, and at the conclusion I achieved a triumph such as I have never before or since enjoyed. I hope sincerely that I do not take more credit to myself for that night's work than I deserve, but so far as I could judge there was not one of my hearers who went away unconvinced. The Metropolitan Press woke up and in its turn awakened the yet more influential journals of the provinces, who exert an intenser as well as a narrower influence, and in a very little time there came a reverberating boom in answer from the other side of the Atlantic. Before the lecture was delivered I received many threatening letters from truculent Frenchmen, who regarded any foreign criticism of the evidence on which Dreyfus had been found guilty as an insolent assault upon the honour of the French army. Two of my correspondents threatened me with assassination if I should dare to carry out my project, and scores of them expressed themselves in terms of indignation and contempt. The most popular idea appeared to be that I was a hireling in the employ of the Jews, and that I was being very handsomely subsidized to take up the cudgels in a base and disgraceful cause. I confess that I rather wished that this idea of a subsidy were true, for in time and money I had spent considerably more than I could legitimately afford, but the truth remains that Mr Maskelyne and I stood the whole racket and that, so far as we were concerned, there might as well have been no Israel in Great Britain or outside it.
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Link to the article mentioned by Murray.
The Strand, Volume 14, December, 1897, Pages 784-788
The Dreyfus Case
A Puzzle in Handwriting
by J. Holt Schooling
Two reviews (one by a Shaw) of a British play inspired by the Dreyfus case, with William Terriss in the lead.
The Saturday Review, December 28, 1895, Pages 867-869
One of the Worst
"One of the Best" A drama in four acts. By Seymour Hicks and George Edwardes. Adelphi Theatre, 21 December, 1895.
by G.B.S.
The new entertainment at the Adelphi has for its object the reproduction on the stage of the dramatic effect of the military ceremony of degradation undergone not long ago in France by Captain Dreyfus. The idea is not a bad one from the Adelphi point of view; but the work of setting it into a dramatic frame has fallen into the wrong hands, the two authors' familiarity with the stage and its requirements only giving an absurdly cheerful and confident air to their feeble and slippery grip of a subject much too big for them.
The Dreyfus affair was interesting in many ways. It was French—-French in the most unEnglish way, because it was not only theatrical, but theatrical at the expense of common sense and public policy. At the Adelphi Mr. Terriss is able to exclaim at the end of the piece that no English officer has ever betrayed his country; and this, understanding, the value of which we are all sensible enough to appreciate, we keep up by breaking and getting rid of our Dreyfuses in the quietest possible manner, instead of advertising them by regimental coups de theatre which, in addition to being as demoralizing as public executions, would shatter that national confidence in the absolute integrity of our public services and institutions which we all keep up with such, admirable esprit de corps, not that any of us believes in it, but because each of us thinks that it is good for all the rest to believe in it. Our plan is to govern by humbug, and to let everybody into the secret. The French govern by melodrama, and give everybody a part in the piece. The superiority of our system lies in the fact that nobody dislikes his share in it, whereas the French are badly hampered because you cannot have broadly popular melodrama without a villain, and nobody wants to be cast for the villain's part. Consequently a delinquent like Dreyfus is a perfect godsend to the French authorities, and instantly has all the national limelights flashed on him, whereas here he would be quietly extinguished in support of the theory that such conduct as his could not possibly occur in the British army.
There is another weakness in the French method. Even when you have got your villain, how are you going to make him do his best for the effect of the sensation scene? At the Adelphi it is easy enough, since the villain, though he might often make a whole play ridiculous by a single disloyal intonation, can be depended on to omit no stroke of art that will intensify the loathing or louden the execrations of the gallery. It is his point of honour as an artist to blacken himself: he is paid to do it, proud to do it, and depends on doing it for his livelihood. But Dreyfus was not in this position. He had every possible motive to "queer the pitch" of the military melodrama of which he was the villain and victim; and he did it most effectually. He declined to be impressed by the ceremony or to pretend that the parade of degradation was worse than death to him as a French soldier. He displayed a sardonic consciousness of the infinite tomfoolery of the whole proceeding, and succeeded in leaving all Europe able to think of nothing in connection with it except the ludicrous fact that the uniform which had been stripped and defaced had been carefully prepared for that stage trick the night before by having its facings and buttons ripped off in private and basted on again with light cotton. When the farce was over, he took the stage, shouted "Vive la Republique," and marched off, having made the hit of the piece, and leaving the Republic and its army looking like the merest crowd of "extras." This was perhaps a mistake; for the shout of "Vive la Republique " was, at least to English ways of thinking, out of the wronged and innocent character which Dreyfus was assuming: at least, it is certain that an English officer, if innocent, would under such circumstances either keep his feelings to himself, or else, if unable to contain them, roundly and heartily damn his country, his colonel, the court-martial, the army, the sergeant, and everybody else on whom he could with any sort of relevance bring his tongue and temper to bear.
A Dreyfus case is the less likely to arise here because we are not only free from the fear of invasion from armed neighbours which makes Continental nations so sensitive on the subject of spies, but also less childishly addicted to keeping secrets that are no secrets. Campaigns depend on strategy, fighting, and money, not on patents; and a nation which had no better idea of preparation for war than hiding a secret explosive or a new weapon or an undisclosed plan of fortification up its sleeve—-an idea which appears particularly plausible to the civilian imagination-—would richly deserve what it would probably get in the field. We have many ways of making idiots of ourselves; but the Continental way of arresting artists on sketching tours, and confiscating drawings which give no information that cannot be obtained at any stationer's shop where they sell maps, photographs, and railway timetables, is one which we have so far spared ourselves.
These observations are not very recondite; but they appear to have completely escaped the perspicacity of the authors of "One of the Best." In the second act an impossible K.C.B., A.D.C., declaims against the folly of England in allowing strangers to roam the land with kodaks, photographing her forts and worming out the secrets of the Tower of London, Woolwich Arsenal, Dover Castle, and other strongholds of our national independence, instead of imitating the heroic example of the foreigner by turning out the garrison and searching the pretended tourist, artist, and holiday-maker for concealed copies of the Monroe Doctrine. A gratuitously asinine opinion, I thought, which was received by the gallery with obediently asinine applause. The degradation scene showed an equal want of grasp of military life and English character. The one sentence that was taken from life as exemplified by Dreyfus was just the one sentence that stamped that gentleman as probably guilty. Lieutenant Dudley Keppel is made to finish his ordeal by shouting "God save the Queen" (the equivalent of "Vive la Republique"), which at such a time can only mean either that the creature is tamed by discipline to the point of being an absolute spaniel, or else that he is a genuine criminal, asserting his highmindedness in a fine stock phrase, as all rascals do whenever they get a chance. On the points of Dreyfus's bearing which seem worthy of imitation by officers in trouble, Dudley Keppel was resolutely original. He did his utmost to make the barbarous and silly spectacle a success by displaying frightful emotion. Before parting with his claymore he kissed it and then broke it across his knee, a proceeding which even the greenest country cousin in the pit must have known to be quite acutely the reverse of anything that a British officer could be conceived as doing upon any provocation or in any extremity. And yet the scene, properly re-written, could be made highly entertaining with Mr. Fred Kerr instead of Mr. Terriss in the principal part.
It is interesting to observe that Messrs. Hicks and Edwardes seem as incapable of realizing the reality and humanity of a woman as of a soldier. I am not now alluding to the maiden of Keppel's heart. Like most such maidens she is a nonentity; and the unlucky lieutenant is driven to the most abject expedients to work up the sentiment in his love scene with her, shaking blossoms from a tree over her, and helplessly repeating a catalogue of the most affecting objects and circumstances of the scene (provided on purpose), as, for instance, "The old Abbey, the organ, the setting sun," and so on. But there is another young and beauteous female in the piece, a Miss Esther Coventry, who in the most pathetically sentimental way commits a series of crimes which Jonathan Wild himself would hardly have gone through without moments of compunction. Political treachery, theft, burglary, perjury, all involving the most cruel consequences to her father and his amiable young lieutenant, are perpetrated by her without hesitation or apology to get money for a man with whom she is carrying on an intrigue out of pure love of deceit, there being no mortal reason why he should not woo her in honourable form. Throughout all her nefarious proceedings I failed to detect any sign of its having occurred to the authors that any moral responsibility attached to this young woman. In fulfilment of their design she went about with an interesting air of having sinned and suffered, cheating, lying, stealing, burgling, and bearing false witness exactly as if she were the heroine of the play, until, in the last scene in the barrack square, the rehabilitated Keppel suddenly said, "Allow me," and gallantly ordered his general to take that wounded dove to his manly bosom and be more a father to her than ever. As in real life the young lady could not, even by the most violent stretch of judicial leniency, have got off with less than ten years penal servitude, it was difficult, in spite of the magnificent air with which Mr. Terriss proclaimed the amnesty, to quite believe that the civil authorities would submit to be set aside in this manner; but apparently they did: at all events she was still in the peace of complete absolution when the curtain descended.
On the whole, the play, even judged by melodramatic standards, is a bad one. The degradation scene is effective in a way; but what that way is may best be shown by pointing out that if a military flogging had been substituted, the effect would have been still greater, though the tax on Mr. Terriss's fortitude would no doubt have been unreasonable. The court-martial is also effective, but not more so than any trial scene must necessarily be. A trial is the last resource of a barren melodramatist: it is so safe an expedient that improvised amateur attempts at it amused even the doomed aristocrats in the Paris prisons during the Terror. The scene of the attempt to rob the safe produces a certain curiosity as to how the authors will bring about the foregone conclusion of fixing the guilt on the innocent Keppel; but the clumsiness of the solution soon melts this curiosity into a sensation like that of watching a bad chess-player. Then there is the scene in which the villain is thrown like a welsher on a racecourse to a savage crowd, who delight the audience by making as plausible a pretence of tearing him to pieces as is consistent with the integrity of Mr. Abingdon's person. The comic scenes may be divided into three parts: first, puerile jokes about the deficiencies in a Highlander's uniform and the situation of the "pistol pocket" in the bicycling suit worn by Miss Vane Featherstone; second, speeches not in the least funny which are nevertheless funnily delivered by Mr. Harry Nicholls; and third, a certain quantity of tolerable fun mixed with a few puns and personalities, evidently the invention of that gifted comedian. The rest hardly rises sufficiently above nothingness to be as much as dull; and I see no reason to anticipate an exceptionally prosperous career for the play. Mr. George Edwardes was immensely congratulated on his appearance as an author, the audience seeming to regard it as an irresistible joke; and I am rather inclined to take that lenient view myself. If I am to take it seriously I can only say that however successful Mr. Edwardes may be as a manager, he must work a good deal harder if he wishes to succeed in a really difficult profession like that of dramatic authorship.
The acting is, of course, consistently outrageous, though by no means unskilfully so. Mr. Terriss contrives to retain his fascination even in tartan trousers; and he rises fully to such heights as there are in the trial scene and the degradation scene. It is always a pleasure to hear his voice now that we have on the stage so many made-up voices which ring with monotonous sonority in the speakers' noses. With the single exception of Mr. Bernard Gould, Mr. Terriss appears to be the only serious actor in his line from whom we hear a cultivated natural voice instead of an acquired artificial one. Of Miss Millward's capacity I have no idea beyond the fact that she has clearly more than sufficient for such parts as are to be had at the Adelphi. Mr. Nicholls is an excellent actor: it is a thousand pities that his talent is only employed to put us into good humour with bad plays.
I observe that Mr. Dana, at the Duke of York's Theatre, has also fallen back on military melodrama. But the enterprise, not having expressly courted my notice, escaped it until too late; and I can only admire Mr. Dana's daring in making yet another effort to convert the west end to melodrama after the extremely poor luck which has attended that aspiration so far.
G. B. S.
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The Theatrical 'world' of 1895 (London: Walter Scott, 1896), Pages 378-382
by William Archer
One of the Best
25th December.
When it has been stated that One of the Best at the Adelphi is a good and effective play of its kind—-certainly one of the best of recent years—-there remains very little to be said of it. The ability displayed by Messrs. Seymour Hicks and George Edwardes is of the purely spectacular and stage-managerial kind, not in the least dramatic. There is little or no invention in the play. The skill of the authors lies in seizing upon a picturesque and impressive incident—-the degradation of Captain Dreyfus—-and forcing it, not without violence, into an English setting. In doing so they shrink from no extreme of physical or moral improbability. The English Dreyfus must, of course, be innocent of the treachery attributed to him, so he has to be provided with a double, and we are asked to assume a strong personal resemblance between Mr. Terriss (the hero) and Mr. Abingdon (the villain). This is a pretty steep assumption to begin with. Then, that the villain may gain access to the safe in which the War Office plans are deposited, the daughter of the officer entrusted with their charge has to be represented as a most abandoned and repulsive criminal. Poor Miss Millward! never was a more hateful part assigned to an Adelphi heroine. The authors' efforts to keep Esther Coventry within the pale of sympathy only made her more intolerable. We should have liked her better as an out-and-out villainess. She cannot possibly be deceived by her villain-lover's representation that his object in stealing the plans is only (!) to swindle the Government out of £5000. Unless she is a mere idiot, she must know that she is betraying not only her father, but her country. Then in order to screen her lover, she perjures herself through thick and thin, and suffers an innocent man who has done her no harm to be subjected to an infamous punishment and condemned to penal servitude for life. And finally, there being no one else left to betray, she turns round and betrays her lover, not out of remorse or any sort of compunction, but simply because he declines to marry her. I must say the hero's magnanimity in imploring her father (and the audience) to pardon her seems to me misplaced. She ought to be handed over to Professor Lombroso to adorn his gallery of female delinquents. A character of more unredeemed turpitude has never been presented to the execrations of a British gallery. Yet such is Miss Millward's empire over the affections of the Adelphi gods that they positively applaud her! This Esther Coventry is the pivot of the whole action, and in designing her the authors have simplified their task with a happy audacity, on which I beg to congratulate them. The scene of the robbery is a stirring piece of melodrama, and the court-martial is fairly effective, though it would be much more so if Lieutenant Keppel made some slight attempt to defend himself, instead of indulging in mere futile protestation and declamation. But the great attractions of the play are of course the scenes representing the hero's degradation and reinstatement, the bestregulated pieces of military spectacle I remember to have seen on the stage. The degradation was really moving after its fashion, and it seemed to me that Mr. Terriss here attained a genuine dignity and sincerity of emotional expression, not always to be found in his acting.
Mr. Abingdon, as the villain, had a more than usually ungrateful part, and I must protest against the cowardly brutality with which the mob of soldiers and rustics is suffered to treat him at the close. Such outbreaks of bestial ferocity do, indeed, occur, but that is no reason why they should be presented with approbation on the stage. When the benevolent clergyman appeared on the scene, I did not doubt that he was going to rescue the defenceless and cowering wretch of a villain, and put to shame the dastardly crew who were torturing him. But not a bit of it! After a feeble protest, he left them to their savage sport; and no doubt the gods went away full of admiration for this mob of sturdy Britons, and prepared to imitate them on the first opportunity. Mr. L. Delorme and Mr. Athol Forde played two minor characters very cleverly, the one a French spy, the other an octogenarian rustic. Mr. Harry Nicholls was exceedingly droll as a Highlander from Hampstead (he said Hampshire, but that must have been a slip of the tongue), and Miss Vane Featherston, as the comic maidservant, played up to him very brightly. By the way, Mr. Nicholls's allusion to some supposed jealousy between the Commander-in-Chief and another distinguished General (both mentioned by name) struck me as being in execrable taste; but since the sagacious Mr. Redford sanctions it, I suppose it is little short of high treason to say so. It seems to me that the one conceivable utility of a censorship would be to check silly and offensive personalities of this sort. The speech may very probably be a "gag"; but whether Mr. Redford did, or did not, pass it, the fact remains that our beneficent censorship failed to prevent its being spoken on the stage. Were it not that Mr. Redford is supposed to relieve us of all responsibility in these matters, the slight hiss which greeted it would doubtless have been much more emphatic. Hence the popularity of the censorship with low-comedians, on whom it places no check, while it protects them against the censorship of the decent-minded public.
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A story by the above drama critic which may owe a bit to the Lefroy case.
The Broken Shaft: Tales in Mid-ocean (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1886), Pages 132-155
by Francis Marion Crawford, Robert Louis Stevenson, F. Anstey, Walter Herries Pollock, William Archer, Tighe Hopkins
My Fascinating Friend by William ArcherLeave a comment:
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Sir Michael Redgrave was married to the actress Rachel Kempson. His father, Roy Redgrave was a rather colourful actor who's second wife, Michael's mother, was Margaret (Daisy) Scudamore, the daughter of a Plymouth man who had nothing to do with showbusiness.
At 18 and alone in London, a theatrical agent, thinking she was a Scudamore relative, had sent her to the playwright Frank Scudamore's house. She wanted to be an actress and he and his wife (he was a very jovial, kindly man) took her into their home. She lived with the family for a while. Frank Scudamore's name was really Davis. He had just adopted the name Scudamore.Leave a comment:
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Thanks, Jeff.
This is a piece by Forbes Winslow on the Lefroy case, from a journal edited by Winslow.
The Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, 1883, Pages 122-127
Art VII. The Plea of Insanity in the Lefroy case
signed Ed. {L.S. Forbes Winslow]
Having expressed an opinion a few days after Lefroy was condemned to death that there were sufficient grounds to justify the Home Secretary in granting a medical inquiry, and no response having been made to an appeal so numerously signed, we have thought it desirable to discuss "The Plea of Insanity" in this unfortunate case. Having been concerned in the matter we feel it an imperative duty we owe to ourselves, the public, and to the friends of the young man now gone over to join the great majority, to give the following particulars.
Within a few days of the termination of the trial we were consulted by some relatives of Lefroy with reference to our forming a conclusion on his state of mind. Certain documentary evidence was placed in our hands, and family histories were disclosed, all bearing directly on the case. Having carefully perused these we expressed an opinion that there were sufficient grounds for petitioning the Home Secretary to grant a medical examination of the condemned man. A few days subsequently we had occasion to go into the country, and on our way down in the train we read in the morning's paper that we had been appointed to visit Lefroy at Lewes Gaol. Upon arrival at our destination we immediately telegraphed to the Home Secretary, expressing our desire that if such were the case we would rather make the examination in conjunction with a medical Government official appointed by himself. This wish was also subsequently expressed by us at the Home Office. We felt that public opinion was so great against the condemned man that we did not care to take upon ourselves the responsibility of acting as mental adjudicator in a case of so much public importance and interest. We only saw the friends on one occasion. We have never seen or had any communication with Mr. Dutton, the solicitor for the defence, beyond telegraphing to him on the day before the execution, and also signing the petition presented to us by his clerk, not asking for a reprieve, but simply praying that the Home authorities would sanction an inquiry into Lefroy's mental state. This petition was subsequently signed by upwards of one hundred medical men.
Three years ago a young man presented himself at the house of a consulting physician in Brook Street, giving the name of Percy Lefroy Mapleton. This circumstance had escaped the memory of the medical man whom Lefroy then saw, until hearing of the murder, when, upon reference to his note book, the following entry was seen attached to the name, "This person is evidently insane." Lefroy, inheriting insanity on the side of both father and mother, commenced his career with anything but a hopeful future. His mother dies before he reaches the age of five; his father suffers from softening of the brain for some years previous to his death, which only occurred recently. His natural disposition is described as being gentle in the extreme, and he is reported as abhorring all crime and vice. Of the early life of Lefroy we know but little. He was sent to Australia, and returned a short time back, but whilst on his passage home he conducted himself in such a strange manner as to necessitate being placed under absolute restraint—-the captain and officers of the ship can testify to this. If, therefore, his real state of mind had been properly recognised by his family at this period of his history, a terrible calamity would have been averted. We hear of his going into theatrical speculations with an imaginary opera bouffe, supposed to have been written by Offenbach, which he called "Lucette," but which had no reality beyond his own morbid imagination. The extraordinary statements, founded on fabrication, which from time to time have been called "lies," were, in our opinion, delusions, existing only in his diseased mind. We have had in our possession, and we deposited at the Home Office, a letter written to a friend of his, in which he stated that he had come into a property of £10,000 per annum for life, and that he was going in for "parliamentary honours." Does this look like the saying of a man in his right mind? The letter to which we refer is dated May of last year. Within a few weeks of his penning this epistle he commits the murder for which he has met the death of a wilful criminal. Cunning is conspicuous in lunatics, and this quality had been shown throughout the whole of the transaction. Commencing the crime with Hanoverian medals in his possession; the endeavour to conceal the watch in his hoots; sending one of these counterfeit pieces to the post office, and expecting to receive a sovereign in exchange for it. His conduct was very peculiar after the murder. It may be alleged on the other hand that there was distinct premeditation, but this is no argument against his insanity. Surely, many of the murders committed by lunatics are premeditated, and suicidal insanity is nearly always so. His method was not that of a sane man. With regard to his confessions, they appear to be nothing but a tissue of crazy incoherencies. He admits one crime after another. It is said that he did this to obtain a reprieve, so as to give time to investigate the truth of his statement. This opinion was eagerly grasped by those desirous of hurrying the victim into eternity. What possible evidence have we that these statements were not positive delusions, emanating from one, who at the time he is reported to have uttered this, was described as "raving like a lunatic and foaming at the mouth?" We could adduce from the other documents we have had in our possession in further proof of what we urged to the Home Secretary, that there were sufficient data for an inquiry to be held. It would be as absurd to consult a medical man upon some knotty legal question as it would be to ask a lawyer to solve some psychological problem. Why then, in the name of justice and common sense, were not those experienced in insanity called in to report on his mental state? The only official opinion as yet published was Marwood's, who considered him sane, and the press grasped this opinion as carrying weight, and sent it forth to the world. In our opinion Lefroy was subject to paroxysms of homicidal impulse, in addition to other marked symptoms of insanity.
In homicidal insanity it requires one especially conversant with the subject to detect mental aberration. A visit to Broadmoor will convince anyone of this fact. Here we see persons convicted of murder, but subsequently acquitted on the ground of insanity, who since their confinement have been of sound mind; but they are, and rightly so, detained during Her Majesty's pleasure. "Homicidal impulse" is often recurrent, and it is never known when a fresh paroxysm may occur, and what the result of such outbreak may involve. It is not connected with any special type of mental aberration, and is generally associated with monomania. The insanity here is often of so superficial a kind that it is most difficult of detection, the intellectual powers remaining seemingly intact throughout the disease. Persons so afflicted are liable to sudden paroxysms of mental excitement and murderous desire. No reason can, as a rule, be detected for the perpetration of the deed, and the crime is apparently quite motiveless. Many homicidal lunatics destroy the lives of those they love most dear. Some victims to this homicidal tendency are quiet, morose, and gloomy in their nature; they are naturally a most dangerous class of humanity, and too often it happens that their real condition is not detected until some crime has been committed which brings their actions under the immediate attention of the authorities. Unnatural cruelties, impulsive desires are also present; the reasoning power, judgment, and ordinary mental symptoms remain intact, the chief characteristic being a morbid and irresistible wish to commit extravagant and murderous acts, no positive delusion being present. It belongs to a class of insanity called "moral insanity," and one under which Lefroy laboured, the symptoms we have just enumerated being all present. His love affair, which was so conspicuously, we regret to say, brought prominently forward, had not the slightest foundation, but was purely an hallucination of his disordered fancy. According to the law of England, if it can be conclusively established that a prisoner knows the difference between right and wrong, he is therefore held legally responsible. This is a monstrous doctrine. If we examine one hundred ordinary lunatics in any asylum, not, of course, including the demented and absolutely idiotic inmates, we find that quite ninety of this number are able to discriminate between right and wrong; and yet, according to the rule of law now laid down, these persons must be regarded as responsible beings, who, if they aggress, must pay the penalty for so doing. The opinion we originally entertained that a medical examination should have been granted by the Home Secretary is universally held by all those medical men with whom we have discussed the case. As far as the unhappy man himself is concerned, it may perhaps be a mercy that he is spared incarceration as a criminal lunatic for life; but in discussing a case of this nature we should not heed the popular cry for vengeance towards a condemned man. It is to the immediate relatives and those with whom he has been all through life associated that we must extend our pity, and by whom sympathy was doubtless deeply felt for the family of Mr. Gold. It is the opinion of many individuals that insanity, if clearly established, should not exempt a criminal from the extreme penalty of the law. We do not, however, for one moment, endorse this, or credit that such a monstrous and unchristian doctrine should be tolerated by the more enlightened members of our community. There are undoubtedly some individuals among both the legal and scientific sections of society who entertain extreme views respecting crime and punishment—-men not deficient in natural sagacity, and not uninfluenced by feelings of humanity, who, being educated in the spirit and prejudices of the old school, consider the throne, the seat of justice, and the State in danger if any undue mercy is extended towards those who violate the sacred majesty of the law.
"Not hang a lunatic!" they exclaim, "who has committed the crime of murder! Not hand over to the tender mercies of Marwood an insane person who has imbrued his hands in the blood of a fellow creature? If doctrines like these are promulgated, if such principles are allowed to interfere with the legitimate administration of justice, who will answer for the safety of society, or the security of the State?" We have the happiness, however, of living in an age when such obsolete doctrines can exercise no influence upon the understanding, the humanity, character, and conduct of those placed in positions of great legal trust and responsibility. It may be asked, Why was the plea of insanity not raised at the trial of Lefroy? But with this we have nothing to do. It was our opinion from the first that it ought to have been. Again, Why were the officials, on pain of dismissal, not allowed to divulge anything that occurred within the precincts of the gaol for twenty-four hours previous to the execution, in reference either to the prisoner's conversation or demeanour? The case, from first to last, was a sensational one; and under no pretence whatever could the public executioner be deprived of his victim. Reviewing the case calmly and deliberately, and taking into consideration all the concomitant facts, it would have furthered the interests of intelligence, humanity, science, civilisation, Christianity, and justice if a deaf ear had not been turned to the prayer of these petitioners, simply begging that the Home Secretary would grant a medical inquiry into the mental state of the youth then standing on the precipice of his fate.-—Ed.Leave a comment:
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The ascerbic comment linking Lefroy's claims he wrote several plays in America, and that "American" plays are plagiarized from France and Germany is just this side of unfair. In 1881 there was no real universal copywrite protection for writers around the globe, so that a writer like Charles Dickens (while protected in Britain and the Empire from unscrupulous publishers "pirating" his writings without paying him royalties) had no real recourse to Americans doing the same (or French or German or Italian or Russian). The same was true for Americans like Mark Twain, Frenchmen like Emile Zola, Germans like Theodore Fontane, Italians like Verga, and Russians like Leo Tolstoi in Britain or in each other's country. The same for the existing drama, although not as relevant to us today because in the 19th Century drama was so moribund. Gilbert and Sullivan were in the vanguard among dramatists (and musical composers) who worked to improve the situation. After seeing many pirated versions of "H.M.S. Pinafore", especially in America, they hit back by having two opening nights, one in London and one in New York, for "The Pirates of Penzance". Thus they had an American copywrite as well. This practice continued for the rest of their careers.
However, what "Truth" lied about was that it was only an American habit. The British practiced it too, changing names and play locations to new ones in works that were by the French dramatists Eugen Scribe and Victorien Sardou when they were introduced as "new and original" (!!!) British plays. Even Gilbert was guilty of this, but at the start of his career. Naturally, given his own spotty reputation for probity, Labouchere overlooked this in his editorial diatribe.
As for the claims of theatrical swindles perpetrated by Lefroy, there is some evidence that he was involved in them - but possibly it should be said that he did try to put on productions when he really did not have the resources, and frequently authorized dramatists to write plays without being prepared to pay for their work. I have come across such a claim by Frank Scudamore, a dramatist of the 1880s who made it in a newspaper at the time of the trial of Lefroy. I am not really certain of this, but Scudamore may be the father-in-law or grandfather-in-law of Sir Michael Redgrave, as Redgrave's wife was Mary Scudamore.Leave a comment:
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Thanks, Jeff. Here are links to the Montagu Williams memoir you mentioned, and some Lefroy items from Truth, including a mention of our ould friend Forbes Winslow.
Leaves of a Life: Being the Reminiscences of Montagu Williams (London: Macmillan, 1891), Pages 277-294, Pages 335-348
by Montagu Stephen Williams
Truth, Volume 10, July 28, 1881, Pages 112-113
According to a letter published in the Era, it would appear that Lefroy, alias Percy Mapleton, alias John Howson, advertised largely for actors and actresses in 1878, and that above sixty were duped, swindled, or hoaxed by him. The writer of the letter says that Lefroy gave as his address a large building in Chancery-lane, consisting of chambers and offices. Upon going there, the writer was referred by the hall porter to a clerk in a solicitor's office, who was in the habit of receiving the letters addressed to Lefroy-Mapleton-Howson. This person, he adds, figures as an important witness in the recent investigation. A warrant was obtained against Lefroy, and a summons against the solicitor's clerk, but as funds were not forthcoming to go on with the case, it collapsed.
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An American theatrical critic thus comments upon the Brighton Railway murder:—-“Lefroy, who is suspected of the murder, claims to have written several American plays, and was a regular attendant on first nights at the London theatres. These evidences of guilt are, at first sight, not very obvious, but upon reflection, they should go to the jury as part of the very strong case against the accused. We know that a man who claims to have written an American play will stop at nothing; he will translate a piece from French or German, and claim that it is his own work. He will put his name to another man's play and declare that he wrote every word of it. He will steal another person's drama and take the money for it unblushingly. He will dramatise a book, and claim all the credit for the production. He will write three or four words in a foreign play, and assert himself as the joint author, entitled to half the profits, although his interpolations have been cut out during the rehearsals. When the author is called for, he will bow before the curtain just as if he had written the piece. From these crimes to murder the descent is easy. As for the regular first-nighters, there is cruelty in their composition which may naturally lead to the shedding of blood. They attend, not to enjoy good plays or good acting, but in the hope of witnessing disastrous failures, and to gloat over the agonies of managers, authors, actors, and actresses. Give them a fiasco, and they are as happy as Spaniards at a bull-fight. The English idea that when a crime occurs, suspicion should be directed against a first-nighter, is judicious. Let him prove his innocence, if he can. The probabilities are that he is quite capable of the deed, if he did not actually commit it, and, according to the laws of eternal justice, he ought to be punished, anyhow."
December 1, 1881, Page 707
I heartily congratulate the Home Secretary for not having paid the slightest attention to the plea of insanity, urged by Dr. Forbes Winslow and the friends of Lefroy, in mitigation of the punishment of that murderer. Neither the friends nor their solicitor do I blame--they were bound to do all that they could for the man; but it really is high time that Dr. Winslow should realise the fact, that his amiable theory that the world is peopled by irresponsible lunatics, and that he is the only sane person in it, is an illusion of the brain under which he himself is suffering. He should seek rest and quiet, otherwise he will find himself one of these days lodged in a lunatic asylum, on a certificate signed by himself. Lefroy was a weak, vain, and vicious young man. When he wanted money, he stole it. Having one morning obtained a supply by passing counterfeit coin, in the afternoon he obtained a further supply by murder. There was nothing of insanity in this. Had he been allowed to escape punishment, none of our lives would have been safe. Everyone able to show either that some relative had been eccentric, or that his mother had been ill at the time of his birth, would have cut a throat whenever he wanted half-a-crown, with a well-founded conviction, that the worst that could occur to him would be to be well taken care of in a lunatic asylum.
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All persons who commit a murder in cold blood may be said to have a homicidal mania, which simply means that their impulse to kill is stronger than their respect for human life. What deters many from yielding to this impulse is the fear of the consequences to themselves; and if once this fear were to disappear, murders would be far more frequent than they are. As a rule, the respect for human life is, however, a sufficient deterrent; but it is a curious fact that, when once a person has killed another, he, if left alone, follows this up by other murders. This is especially the case in poisoning. In these matters, it would appear, Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte.
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As for Lefroy's confessions, all that one can say is, that they may be true, but more probably they are untrue. This unhappy youth was so eaten up with a morbid desire for notoriety, that it is difficult to say how far this passion may have led him. To have let a man off who had been convicted of one murder, because it pleased him to assert that he had committed others, would indeed have been a strange proceeding.
It is rather hard that Lefroy should have tried to couple the name of that pretty actress, Miss Violet Cameron, with his, considering that he never spoke to her in his life. As a matter of fact, shortly before his trip to Brighton with Mr. Gold, he did call upon several of the leading London actresses, who, knowing nothing about him, declined to see him.
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Apropos of Lefroy, a few years ago he was staying at a country house for Christmas. It wan suggested that some charades should be arranged, each person naming a subject. Lefroy chose as his the murder of a man in a railway carriage.
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We are likely to have a convict literature from the pens of those who have paid the penalty of inconsiderate homicide. The publication of the nauseating confessions of such wretches, edited by sentimental gaol chaplains, is a matter of taste, but it seems to me that any publisher who would answer the following advertisement would be something more than "enterprising " :—
LITERARY.—-Offers wanted for the M.S. of a short
Christmas story, never yet published, by Lefroy.Leave a comment:
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