The man who befriended a circus freak

It's late September, and I'm in Wirksworth, a Derbyshire town south of Matlock, and I'm walking about with LXV, my Leica camera, shooting anything that catches my attention. 

This is typically what I do on holiday. I look for interesting things: often topical, often historical, sometimes quirky. I look for striking scenes, unusual light effects, and shoot both beauty and ugliness so long as it makes a good picture. Although it's a boast, I think I definitely have an eye for a shot. I don't try to be clever or arty; the aim is to capture aspects of a particular place or occasion. Later on I'll create a file in my archive for Wirksworth, and the day's photos, fully captioned, will go into it. And if I ever return, more photos will go in that file. In this way I gradually I build up an ongoing record of places, people and other subjects, spanning many years, so that I can (say) compare the pictures I took in 1990 with what I took in 2000, 2010 and 2020. It's fascinating to see the gradual changes. Including how advances in my equipment make for a better, more informative record. 

Right now I think the results from LXV, my Leica X Vario, are the best I've ever achieved, rivalled only by the Nikon D700 that I was using in 2008 (and the extraordinarily good f/2.8 24-70mm zoom lens I bought for it). But I can carry LXV all day long; the big full-frame Nikon was always too heavy for comfort, and impractical for social occasions. Weight and bulk do matter. Not that LXV is itself a featherweight - its fixed zoom lens contains a lot of fancy glass - but it's unobtrusive, unthreatening, quick to turn on and off, and very fast to use.  

So there I was, walking about Wirksworth. And a large old town house with big windows caught my eye. Then I saw a blue plaque. I had to look more closely.

Sir Frederick Treves. Aha! This was the man whose innovative surgical skill saved the life of King Edward VII, who developed appendicitis in 1902. But also, as the plaque says, he looked after Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. He was in practice here for a while when younger.

Poor Joseph Merrick. He died aged 27 of a broken neck, having attempted to sleep normally, lying down. He was grossly deformed. A chromosomal abnormality - which one is still debated - led to excessive and horrific bone growth, plus pendulous warty skin, all from an early age, so that by his teens he was dreadful to see. He had a lopsided appearance, with a huge misshapen head, a massive right arm and hand, and bent leg bones. The rest of him was normal. He was highly conscious of how ghastly he looked. In the 1880s it meant social revulsion and rejection, and invited the taunts of the brutal and the ignorant. 

The only opening for him, if he were to make his way in the world, was to put himself on exhibition under a manager for the paying public to gawp at, at first in a circus, then in a London shop, where Treves first saw him. Treves' first reaction was disgust. But nevertheless he asked Merrick to come to hospital, and for a while he became a clinical curiosity for the medical students to study. Objecting to this role, Merrick left, but ultimately returned to live at the hospital until his death. In that latter part of his life, with his deformities getting ever worse, a kind of friendship grew between he and Treves. 

Merrick had to sleep propped up, his oversized and very heavy head resting on his knee. Lying down (as ordinary people did) risked dislocating his neck, probably with lethal consequences. And so it was. I think he knowingly committed suicide that way, and who can blame him.

He first came to my attention when the 1980 film The Elephant Man was released. I was 28, but still as fearfully imaginative and impressionable as I had been at 8 or 18, and the image of Merrick in the film poster - a figure hidden beneath a black cloak and black hat, with a face mask - troubled me greatly. I was living in London at the time, and those posters were everywhere on the Underground. You couldn't get away from them. I had nightmares, imagining that I would actually encounter that cloaked figure. I shuddered at the thought that this ghoulish being would approach me, touch me, and the mask would be lifted to reveal the horror beneath. Or worse, a sudden full-on confrontation with no possible escape.

Since my early teens I'd known about the terrible things done to prisoners and internees in wartime concentration camps, but this was something else. It was highly disturbing. I felt threatened by it. I found it hard to sleep, thinking about it. I was trying to pass some important Inland Revenue exams at the time: the thought of the Elephant Man waiting for me around the next dark corner couldn't have helped. 

Writing this hasn't reawakened anything. So, forty-four years on, I must have put away a lot of fears. I suppose the shock-horrors of the cinema - grisly aliens, frightening robots, horrible infections - have inured me somewhat. But I still avoid horror films and anything that might prey on my mind like this had. 

I am still amazed at Treves' spectacular rise to eminence. He was born in ordinary circumstances in Dorset. He was working as a GP in Wirksworth, a Derbyshire practice far from London, in the 1870s. Ten years later he was established as a specialist abdominal surgeon in London. Perhaps it was a case of talent, famous patients, and (I doubt it not) good connections supercharging a career in nineteenth-century circumstances. 

Well, despite his fame, he kicked the bucket at 70. I've outlived him. Ha!

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