Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  ‘Of Arthur Jacob, the worst which can be said is that those objects which were nearest to his heart he loved “not wisely but too well”. [These seem to have been mainly the Royal College, and the reputation and circumstances of Irish doctors and medical services, for which he fought London rivals and governments ferociously for much of his life.] On more than one occasion the strength of his feeling and the vigour with which he went forward to his object gave him the appearance of intolerance in opinion and excessive zeal in action, and his unhesitating candour made for him antagonists whom a more cautious and disingenuous diplomatist would have conciliated.’

  It looks as if Arthur, like his long-ago mentor Dupuytren, was better at relationships with patients and students (in whom, we hear, he took a great interest) than with some of his peers. The picture is a somewhat daunting one, particularly when we are also told that he had a great wariness of appearing self-interested or of courting that ‘public and pecuniary advancement to which his labours and his talents justly entitled him’. No wonder he did not like the flamboyant Dr Wilde and his knighthood. When Arthur was seventy and some of his colleagues clubbed together to have a bronze medal struck for him, he rejected it with the remark: ‘I cannot accept this or any other testimonial, but if at my death you still think that I deserve it, you may nail it on my coffin!’

  I like to think that this was said with a wintry humour – there must have been a sense of fun in a man who chose to address his (female) housekeeper as ‘Moses’ – but it was surely rather galling for those who had planned and commissioned the medal.

  Another obituarist wrote: ‘He rarely indulged in even the mildest of festivities.’ (Knowing what ‘festivities’ in Ireland can be like, and that he and his brothers had much trouble with a drunken cousin who was also a doctor, one is not entirely surprised.) ‘He had an intense dislike to humbug of every kind.’ The worldly dinner parties of Dublin High Society, which was headed by doctors and lawyers, may also not have been to his taste. The world, in a wider sense, was where he mentally belonged: in his library, he travelled to its furthest corners.

  But what we are being shown here is a man at the end of his life, and a widower. His wife, a shadowy figure from a good Anglo-Irish family of County Sligo, who gave him five sons that grew up and a girl that did not survive infancy, had died fifteen years earlier. You do not father six children by going to sleep immediately after dinner and then staying up reading most of the night, so one may assume that in younger days Arthur had a less eccentric timetable. Witnesses from that period remembered a different man and a sociable one, forming a dining club with colleagues. And while his wife lived and the boys were growing up, there were cheerful visits between Dublin and Maryborough. Small sons in need of country air were despatched on the Maryborough coach in the charge of the coachman. Presents of plants and game went back and forth by the same means. On at least one occasion a whole family of little cousins was invited to stay in Dublin for Christmas. Arthur was evidently proud of his own family, for he had the three eldest painted while they were still very young. The future vicar of St Thomas’s, Bayswater, a doctor-surgeon and an engineer stand round with faces scrubbed, hair curling over clean collars, surrounded by some of those folio medical volumes their father used to stand on to treat his cataract patients. Later in life – possibly after their only little girl, the youngest, had died – he took his wife on one or more visits to Paris. A well-thumbed Guide to Paris among his surviving books, with advice on shopping, seems to have been mainly for her.

  When Arthur was a lecturer in the 1820s, first at the Park Street School he had helped to establish along with several colleagues, and then at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland when he was appointed Professor of Anatomy there at only thirty-seven, following on from Abraham Colles, the medical students of Dublin were an elegant lot, according to an Irish correspondent of The Lancet.1 They were given to ‘spear-pointed shirt necks’, artificially frizzed curls, and heeled boots in the manner of the Duke of Wellington. They affected umbrellas, gold rings, and ‘quizzing glasses’ hung on decorative chains round their necks – but Arthur seems to have equalled, if not excelled them, in dandified airs of his own. Slight in build, he gave the impression of disdaining elaborate dress, favouring a dark blue coat and black stock, but actually gauged his appearance nicely. His spectacles fitted his face and eyes as if they had grown there – ‘an expanse of the cornea spread out upon a delicate frame of silver wire. Over the springs of this beautiful piece of mechanism … hung two luxuriant ringlets of auburn hair, like the tendrils of a vine, and writhing into beautiful contortions.’ He came up to the lecture table ‘with a buoyant swing’ and a grin that seemed at once pleased with the effect he made and self-mocking. No medical gravitas there.

  An oil painting dating from this time shows him in just such a mode, though the curls are beginning to recede a little up his high forehead. His mouth is gentle and slightly sensuous, his expression mild. We seem far, here, from the austere old party who rarely indulged in festivities. We are near, however, to the young man walking in the Jardin des Plantes, observing animals and birds there that he could then have seen nowhere else, for it was agreed that when he lectured on anatomy he was a wonderful imitator:

  ‘With the albatross he seemed about to take wing and leave us all behind him; the penguin soon brought him down again to the very depths of the ocean; with the snail his fingers crept along the wall, and now with the parrot he worked his way, unguibus et dentibus, through the dense heart of the forest; but we confess, when he came to illustrate the fantastic tricks of the monkey tribe, he looked the character to such perfection that we could not help considering it, of all the characters he assumed, as his forte.’

  There is an edge of malice in this, but it is nothing compared with the invective that sometimes passed between doctors in those outspoken times. Arthur, and his main ally Dr Henry Maunsell, did not hesitate to use publicly terms such as ‘rabble’ and ‘scandalous’ about people of whom they disapproved, frequently the Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, and accusations of ‘plots’ pepper their letters.

  The animal theme continued throughout Arthur’s life. He collected books on zoology; he wrote a learned paper on his dissection of a whale that was washed up on the Irish coast. He also had a taste for exotic pets. In widowerhood, he used to let a parrot sit on his shoulder at dinner, for which ceremony he wore an especially shabby old coat. Parrots were not uncommon in Victorian homes, but at one time a small bear was kept in the drawing room at Ely Place, chained to the mantelpiece and released when Arthur ‘wanted to converse with him’.2 A medical student, come to collect some certificates, got bored waiting and undid the bear’s chain. The doctor was summoned from the other end of the house by screams: amused, but rather annoyed, he managed to disentangle the young man from the bear’s paws. When Archibald, Arthur’s fourth son and the one destined to follow him into the practice, got married and moved in with his bride, the bear was housed in the President’s room at the Royal College where Arthur sometimes stayed. All went well till the bear escaped one night, investigated other rooms, and tucked itself into the bed of the College Secretary, who discovered his bedfellow when getting in wearing only a nightshirt. After that the bear was given to the Dublin Zoo, but a monkey was installed at Ely Place instead.

  Archibald was twenty-three when he married: he had graduated from Trinity College but had not yet completed his MD. His bride was younger. His mother was dead by then, and Arthur, who had not married till he was thirty-four and well launched on his career, seems to have disapproved of his son’s early marriage. Possibly he disapproved of the bride too. Florence, the daughter of a fashionable Dublin dentist, was socially quite suitable, but Arthur may have thought she was silly, and such scraps of evidence about her as were passed down to future generations suggest that he may have been right. He showed a wounding lack of confidence in her by having the front windows of the house covered in whitewash. This was to
deter the young gentlemen of the Queen’s Service Academy opposite from making indelicate gestures to her or to the servants. It was a practical solution and possibly, given Arthur’s mordant sense of the ridiculous, even a jokey one, but it was one that Florence, naturally, much resented. Tears and scenes followed and the whitewash was removed, but then the monkey took against her as his master had. A crisis was reached in their relationship when poor Florence was about to go to a garden party at the Viceregal Lodge, the miniature Court of the Lord Lieutenant to which prominent residents of Dublin and their families were regularly invited. She was wearing a hat adorned with a bunch of artificial grapes. She passed too close to the monkey’s perch and he made a rapid and devastating grab. A minute later, Florence was being pelted with crushed grapes.

  After that the monkey followed the bear to the Zoo. Archibald and Florence moved, for the time being, into a place of their own, a house in the long, light Georgian vista of Harcourt Street, on the other side of St Stephen’s Green. There, they took in medical students as lodgers, till their rapidly growing family made this unfeasible. It was said that, in any case, Florence sometimes found the students ‘difficult to keep in order’, as she later did her children. They did not take over Ely Place as living quarters till Arthur retired, when, to the surprise of his colleagues, he removed himself entirely from Dublin and from Ireland. His last years were spent in the home of another son, who was Chief Engineer to the booming industrial municipality of Barrow-in-Furness, across the Irish Sea. The three other sons were in London, India and Australia. Already the mould of Anglo-Irish life was beginning to break up.

  Many years before this, John Jacob, Arthur’s younger brother who had taken on the Infirmary and the practice in Maryborough, had written to Arthur apropos of some now-impenetrable row with a local dignitary: ‘I suppose one of the marked features of the Jacob character is and has been a disregard and non-practice of the usual civilities of life.’

  This trait, along with a basic decency and honesty to a fault, did indeed seem to run through that generation and was handed down. Archibald, too, had little concern for niceties of dress or behaviour, though he is said to have been much more charming and conventionally fun-loving than his father. His career, though respectable, was less distinguished. He and Florence had twelve children, of whom ten survived. They lived comfortably and hospitably, but never had quite enough money or much idea where it went. One of Florence’s daughters always remembered her mother in tears over the simple lack of cash to buy groceries. ‘You see this house and everyone in it?’ Archibald is said to have told the tax inspector when pressed to state his income. ‘Well, there’s my wife, ten children, four servants and a governess and I keep the lot of them. Now go home, my dear Sir, and you calculate how much I earn.’

  As for the Jacob clan in and around Maryborough, the small amount of Arthur’s personal correspondence that has, by some quirk, survived, contains letters to and from the brothers, all dating from a brief period at the beginning of the 1840s. At one point both John and another brother, Thomas (a country solicitor), were writing passionate letters to Arthur to get him to intervene in the case of ‘an unfortunate wretch’ who had, in their view, been unfairly condemned to death for the murder of his mother. They wanted Arthur to raise influential Dublin medical feeling against a Queen’s County doctor who, they thought, was the person really responsible for the old woman’s death. Her son was said to have caused her to break her arm while he was drunk:

  ‘Dr Edge was examined … He found the deceased, a woman between sixty and seventy, lying on wet straw, that the rain ran down thru the roof of the Cabbin [sic] upon her …’ (Thomas).

  ‘This is a bad case and the convict must not be permitted to be executed … Edge visited, ordered a warm plaster, castor oil and “the usual remedies” – did not set her arm. She lived in that state two months and half – in all probability would have recovered if sent to the Infirmary’ (John).

  ‘… Edge has a dispensary in the Colliery and spends more time hunting hares than seeing patients and gets his grant in consequence of his family being useful in election offers to the party in the County who have the management of the Public money’ (Thomas).

  ‘… The prisoner was inefficiently defended by a lawyer as provided by the Crown … Bushe [Chief Justice] has arrived at the lachrymose period of second childhood the wreck of a whole fabric not wishing to join issue with the profession and the Press of which I believe the judiciary here has become somewhat fearful – charged strongly against the prisoner descanted on the atrocity of the parricide –’ (John).

  Neither brother seems to have had much regard for the ‘usual civilities’ of punctuation.

  John wanted Arthur, as well as marshalling the doctors, to call on Bushe when he returned from the Quarter Sessions circuit to Dublin and ‘talk it over with him privately’. Arthur agreed to respond to the various appeals, and evidently did so effectively: a few days before the due date for hanging, the sentence was set aside. There is no further written information on the young man’s fate. He may have been transported to Australia, he may simply have gone free. He may have taken himself off to America, like so many of his fellow Irish, and prospered there, or not – but at least he was not laid in a felon’s grave within the precincts of Maryborough Gaol.

  Everything about this case – the drunken and penitent son, convicted on the evidence of a child; the victim saying he was ‘a good and kind son to her unless when he was drunk’; the rain-sodden cabin, the family’s poverty, the sister’s children ‘all but begging’ and ‘eating heartily of a meal of dry potatoes which were given by a neighbour’ – all is redolent of the stereotype of the wretched Irish peasantry, who would die in their thousands in the potato famine three or four years later. But the other part of that stereotype is an image of the Anglo-Irish ruling class, which is now popularly held to have been responsible for that misery. It is cheering, therefore, to record the Jacob brothers banding together to remedy an injustice (‘This will be judicial murder’) and bringing their combined power to help what must have counted as one of the less deserving poor of Queen’s County. However abrasive their manners, their hearts were evidently in the right place.3 The next letter preserved from that summer finds John approving of a paper Arthur had written on the need to make smallpox vaccination free for all, and urging him to pursue the matter in the next edition of The Medical Press, since ‘I find I cannot explain these matters without making enemies.’

  * * *

  When John Jacob could not get his way in the Infirmary, he formed the habit of co-opting his near relatives as life governors and extracting a ‘subscription’ from each. After he died, reputedly from overwork and not yet sixty, a question was asked in the House of Commons as to whether it was proper that one family should effectively own the Queen’s County Infirmary. The Jacob clan were also, needless to say, Justices of the Peace, Poor Law Guardians and local Councillors. However, no one was able to point to any particular evil resulting from this hegemony, and the matter was dropped.

  John was succeeded as County Surgeon by his son David, and he in turn by his son William, who was finally edged from power in the Infirmary in 1900, but continued in practice and was surgeon to the local regiment. William died while returning from visiting a sick patient in December 1914, and thus the one hundred and fifty years’ medical link between Queen’s County and the Jacob family ended. But a great many more things were going to end then, in the hurricane blown up by the Great War. In 1916 came the Easter Rising, followed by the Troubles and Irish Independence in 1922. By then, the greater part of the extensive Jacob family were no longer in Ireland. Arthur’s grandsons and most of their cousins were scattered to ‘the dominions’; his granddaughters had married Scots or Englishmen, or were eking out lives of genteel penury in west London. The world of Anglo-Ireland was now vanishing as fast as that of Anglo-India was going to a generation later.

  The Jacob Diaries, the record of the health and sicknes
s of every local family from top to bottom of the social scale since the late eighteenth century, were bequeathed by William to the Infirmary. They were kept in a bookcase in the Surgeons’ Dining Room, where they could be consulted. In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, the hospital was being cleared for Army occupation. Though Ireland was to remain neutral, it was foreseen that, as in previous English wars, Irishmen would enlist and so might come home wounded, though it was no longer absolutely clear on whose side they would be. The Diaries were thrown out, and burnt. Apparently this was on the orders of the Fianna Fáil-appointed Manager of the County that was now called Laois, who said that they were ‘useless old rubbish’.4 In this way, a precious social record of the lives of countless ordinary Irish families was destroyed for ever.

  Part II

  FROM ARTHUR TO BERTIE: 1815–1895

  Chapter IX

  LES COMPTES FANTASTIQUES DE HAUSSMANN

  Between the departure of Arthur Jacob from the Latin Quarter in 1815, and the arrival there of his grandson-in-law eighty years later, the Quarter was to experience greater change than it had in more than five centuries.

  Here and there, of course, and most specifically in the creation of the new medical schools, change had already come before the nineteenth century had even begun. There had been plans, and dreams, and Napoleon himself had envisaged far grander schemes for the whole of Paris than, in the event, he had time to build. After he had been consigned to his final exile on the South Atlantic remoteness of St Helena, he wrote: ‘If only Heaven had allowed me a twenty-year reign and some time to spare, then Old Paris would have been nowhere to be found; no vestige of it would have remained.’

  For this reason, among others, one may feel thankful for the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo. But Napoleon was not, of course, alone in his conviction that old Paris, medieval within-the-walls Paris, would not do for a modern capital. Time tends to telescope change in the collective memory, simplifying events, creating spurious Befores and Afters. The popular myth now is that old Paris remained intact in all its gabled, unhygienic picturesqueness till Baron Haussmann burst on the scene in 1853 like a satanic jack-in-the-box and, in his capacity as Préfet of Police under the Second Empire, imposed a new order. It is only partially true. The Restoration of 1814 may have cut short Napoleon’s grand plans, but the task of modernisation did continue piecemeal, and was possibly all the better for being conducted with more pragmatism.