The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  Forced on to the back foot and naturally intimidated, Joe still managed to mount a defence, recounting in detail how Graham had gone back on a deal, and how Peake had shown him the letter containing his explicit instruction to withhold the money. Joe’s reply lit a fuse. The merest mention of salaries and managerial abuse had the company rapt, and now that Graham was required to account for himself, he exploded. ‘If Mr Peake showed you that letter,’ he shouted, ‘Mr Peake is a fool for his pains.’

  ‘Mr Peake,’ rejoined Grimaldi (who was at this point painted silver, with horns, a thick beard and a pair of furry legs for his part as Pan), ‘is a gentleman, sir, and a man of honour, and, I am quite certain, disdains being made a party towards any unworthy conduct as you have pursued towards me.’

  ‘A rather stormy scene followed,’ the Memoirs recall, during which many voices were heard, until at last ‘Grimaldi came off victorious’. Nevertheless, Joe was determined to be out by the end of the week, even when Graham threatened to sue – no empty threat, as he had coerced performers into contracts before – supported by Richard Hughes, who advised him to keep his course.

  It was an ugly conclusion to a long relationship. Joe worked unhappily through the final days of his association with the theatre he had been part of for a quarter of a century, though whatever emotions he felt were soon overshadowed by events at sea, and a battle that was both triumph and catastrophe in equal measure. Even as Joe turned on his heels and stormed out of the green room, the schooner Pickle was speeding up the Thames with news of victory at Trafalgar and the death of Admiral Nelson. It was difficult to overstate the importance of victory. With the destruction of the most dangerous fleets of Spain and France, the threat of invasion had almost certainly been lifted, although it rang hollow when weighed against the sacrifice given to achieve it.

  A new fog descended as the news spread, one of emotional blankness. Nelson’s death, wrote Robert Southey, ‘was felt in England as something more than a public calamity: men started at the intelligence, and turned pale, as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend’. Houses emptied and people came into the streets, but there was rejoicing without joy. The theatres worked up hurried panegyrics, afterpieces that did little to defray the strange pall of sadness that had fallen across public assemblies. One of these was Joe’s last night at Drury Lane, dedicated to the memory of the Admiral, his monogram mounted on an anchor and borne on palms and laurels, and saluted as the entire company came on stage to sing a specially rewritten version of ‘Rule Britannia’. Having dressed, and left the theatre for the last time, Joe walked through streets that were eerily quiet and beautifully luminous, every window lit with lamp or candle to commemorate their saviour, the ‘darling hero of England’.

  In later years, Joe would always claim that his departure from Drury Lane was due to ill-treatment, poor casting and ‘constant discomfort’, yet there was a more practical reason for leaving when he did. It appears that he had already arranged to accompany Charles Dibdin to Dublin, where he and his brother Thomas had leased a theatre for the entire winter season, beginning on 18 November. Given that they had planned their trip around their Clown, offering him twelve guineas a week, plus two more for Mary, it seems likely that he had agreed to go many weeks before his spat with Aaron Graham. Joe was committed to Covent Garden for the following year anyway, so Graham had merely provided him with a convenient excuse to leave early.

  The idea for the Dublin trip had come from Quintin Kennedy, an Irish lawyer and friend of Charles Dibdin’s father-in-law, who suggested that they take over Astley’s Equestrian Theatre Royal in Peter Street. Astley had recently sold it, and the place was lying empty. What was more, extensive renovations to Dublin’s major venue, the Crow Street Theatre, meant that it would be closed until February or March, leaving Dibdin to enjoy the city free from competition. They were sure to clean up, said Kennedy, for ‘the Public there are actually mad for Entertainment’.

  Dibdin was all ears. The first summer of the Royal Aquatic Theatre at Sadler’s Wells had been an unprecedented success, and the second was even better, even if The Siege of Gibraltar had not been so wildly received the second time around. In response, Dibdin added narrative tension to his aquatic pieces, and in so doing devised an entirely new form of theatre he termed ‘aquadrama’ – melodrama played on water. The format was perfected at practically his first attempt, a fantasy romance set in the Outer Hebrides called An Bratach; or, the Fairy Flag. It was also a breakout piece for the jobbing Frank Hartland, who at long last won some recognition at the Wells and had his salary doubled on account of how good he was. But there was no doubting that the scenery was the main attraction, especially the final scene set in Fingal’s Cave in which the gorgeous Madame St Louis was flung violently from a precipice by the evil tyrant who had abducted her. London audiences had never witnessed a beautiful maiden being hurled into water before, but they liked it. The Wells was packed to capacity for the remainder of its run, doubling the profits of the year before. Of course, Dibdin was far too gallant to subject a real lady to such an ordeal, especially one as rare as Madame, whose husband had been guillotined in the French Revolution. At the crucial moment, she was substituted by a ‘slim boy’, and they chucked him in instead.

  With the aquatic windfall ‘fast repaying its own purchase money’, all the proprietors had the opportunity to live a little more according to their characters. Hughes became even more parsimonious, Barfoot pursued ever more expensive women, and Dibdin threw increasingly lavish dinners, indulged his rapidly growing family (which, already large, would eventually include eleven children) and had enough left to pay off his share of the Wells.

  A trip to Dublin, especially under such favourable circumstances, could only consolidate his prosperity, and so, signing the contracts for a fourteen-week lease, he set about putting together ‘as great a combination of burletta and pantomimic talent as ever met in a minor theatre’. But plans began to unravel before the Holyhead ferry had even spread canvas. For a start, Kennedy requested £450 up front to arrange the lease, and an additional £100 as a charitable donation to the Lying-in Hospital, which, he said, was a condition of the patent. More expensive still was the cost of transporting all the things that could not be easily (or cheaply) procured in Dublin, items like velvet, lace, satin, silk, foil and spangles, ribbons, epaulettes, swords, armour, and specialist costumes like the ‘Court Dresses of the Jews’. Even more costly was the necessity of sending bulky pantomime tricks separately by coach. But the biggest problem of all, entirely contrary to Kennedy’s promise of exclusivity, was the discovery that a rival company was already plying its trade in Dublin.

  The news had arrived before they had even left, sent in a letter from Dibdin’s old employer, William Parker, whose troupe had been in Ireland for several months. Parker proposed that the two companies join forces, but Dibdin refused flat out. There was no love lost between him and the wiry old circus manager with whom he had argued furiously in the past, and as manager and impresario of the most modern and celebrated minor theatre in Britain, he saw no reason to join forces with anyone.

  The crossing itself was happily uneventful, and even though the weather was poor and the drizzle relentless, Dibdin was pleased to find that the advance party had made good progress in preparing the theatre. The manure had been cleared from the ring, and although the ripe smell of fermenting hay and horses still clung to the matting, the benches that had been fitted at least made it look like a London pit. There was even some good news – a band had been hired at five pounds a week less than he had expected to pay. He couldn’t ask for much more than that, and Dibdin spent the first night in Dublin ‘as socially as friendship, good humour, and good cheer, could make us’. The next morning, Parker arrived and, with a supercilious smile, said he was sorry his offer had been turned down, and did Dibdin know that the Crow Street Theatre was to reopen in days? This intelligence made Dibdin balk – the renovations to Crow Street were not supposed to be finished unt
il the spring. Apparently, its manager, having got wind of Dibdin’s interlopers, had tripled the number of men on the job and engaged the strongest company his theatre had seen for years in order to repel what he saw as an outrageous assault on his territory. ‘You’re sure to lose at least two thousand pounds,’ concluded Parker, tipping his hat and walking away.

  Thrown into a theatre war he hadn’t anticipated, Dibdin panicked and inexplicably bought a pair of incredibly expensive chandeliers ornamented with faux gems to hang above the wings. Next he went to work promoting his company, hand-delivering the forty or fifty letters of introduction the brothers had procured from Irish émigrés in London, although this proved a wasted effort as only one of the addressees actually showed up during the run. He also left complimentary tickets with a host of dignitaries, including the Mayor of Dublin, who then attempted to extort him for a licence he didn’t need. Dibdin drank heavily that afternoon and resorted to ‘papering’ the house, handing out free tickets to give the impression of popularity. By the time the curtain rose, he delivered a slurred and barely audible prologue of welcome to a half-empty pit. The fashionable boxes were especially deserted, an effect of the Act of Union that had come into force at the beginning of the year, dissolving the Irish parliament, transferring its MPs to Westminster and, in the process, uprooting so many aristocratic families that the city felt more like Paris during the Terror than the beamish Irish metropolis. Those who remained opted to rally around their indigenous playhouse, shunning Dibdin for his presumption in assuming that the city would rush to him merely because he came from London.

  The first acts were barely applauded. Philip Quarll, a romance about a shipwrecked hermit who lived with a monkey, came to a premature close because the ladies ‘thought the Monkey’s Tails indecorous and disgusting’, and Dibdin realised he was truly sunk when Joe Grimaldi went on to sing his best comic songs to silence. No one could fathom it, until a member of the audience told them that the songs were already well known in Dublin, pirated by Parker’s comedian, who had been singing them for weeks.

  The abysmal first night over, Dibdin turned to pantomime to save his theatre, hurriedly preparing Harlequin Aesop, a parody of female fashions, and replacing its British travelogue scenes with hastily painted Irish backgrounds of the Lover’s Leap at Dargle, the waterfall at Powerscourt and the Giant’s Causeway. The entire company worked through the night to get it ready in time, but even this novelty made only twenty-four pounds. Shaking his head, Dibdin sent back to his brother in London for money to pay the salaries and the tricks for another pantomime called The Talking Bird, while in the interim he dealt with the catalogue of assorted nuisances that attached themselves limpet-like to failure. These included Miss Helme setting fire to her Columbine dress moments before the show, and the band having a violent backstage punch-up that could be heard clearly throughout the entire auditorium.

  Even the atrocious weather refused to abate. Water had been the making of Dibdin in Islington, but here it finished him off. Like all of Astley’s jerry-built hippodromes, the theatre was essentially an enormous lean-to built against the back of a crumbling old mansion. Instead of slate or tiling, the roof was covered with large plates of sheet iron, with joints so eaten by rust that when it rained, as it did almost every night of the season, water came through in torrents that drenched the seats and refreshed the ammoniacal tang of horse piss that clung deep inside them. Rain fell directly on to the pit and dripped in the boxes, defying the bundles of rags and rigged-up tarpaulins that were supposed to keep it out. Even the minefield of tubs and saucepans laid out backstage to catch the leaks could not prevent the appearance of puddles, some of which were so large that the ladies had to be carried to the edge of the stage to avoid soaking the hems of their dresses. Most of the patrons would leave to take shelter elsewhere, though some of the more resourceful ones brought umbrellas and sat the storms out. A particularly heavy downpour in December saw the seats empty in seconds, leaving the actors performing mid-scene to a deserted house.

  Despite the continual run of disasters that befell the company, Joe and Mary had a wonderful time. Baby Joseph, known as JS, was too ill to travel. He had been sickly from birth and had been left in the care of Rebecca and the extended Bristow clan. Relieved of parental concerns, they were free to enjoy themselves. In the company of Jack Bologna and his wife Harriet, they found Dublin to be the most hospitable of cities as, armed with only a single letter of introduction to a man called Captain Trench, a relative of the Earls of Clancarty, within a week they had received more invitations than they could possibly accept; coaches were laid at their disposal and they were treated to bounteous dinners of mutton and cream. To return the favour, they threw a party to celebrate Twelfth Night, for which Joe mixed a rum punch so potent that half the guests had to be carried out.

  The contrast with Dibdin’s misfortune couldn’t have been greater, as with the generous backing of his new Irish friends, Joe even managed to do well financially. Dibdin had planned to end the season early, cancelling the benefit he was due to share with Joe. Joe, however, offered to buy out Dibdin’s half for twenty pounds if he would let it go ahead, to which the cash-strapped Dibdin readily agreed, unable to imagine for a moment that Joe would sell £197 worth of tickets, including a hundred each to his landlord and Trench. There were also some expensive gifts. Trench gave him a snuff box worth more than thirty pounds, and an ebony walking-stick with an ivory clutch handle inscribed ‘Joey Grimaldi, 1805’. Dibdin, understandably sour, was somewhat mollified when Joe gave him a much-needed loan of a hundred pounds.

  The Wells company in Dublin stumbled on until shortly after Christmas, when Dibdin was approached by Jones, the Crow Street manager, whose season was also suffering from rain and polite society’s exodus for London. Jones invited the Sadler’s Wells company to merge with his, an offer Dibdin gratefully accepted, playing out the dregs of a miserable January before moving in with Jones to perform afterpieces to thin houses until late March. The end couldn’t come soon enough, and when they finally came to count their losses Parker’s prediction proved to be perfectly correct – the Dibdins were in for more than two thousand pounds.

  Dublin was an unprecedented disaster for the brothers, effectively destroying any chance of financial security for either man for the rest of their lives. This, however, may have been exactly the point. Unknown to Charles, Quintin Kennedy, the man who had put him on to the Peter Street venture, also served as Philip Astley’s agent. Relations between Astley and Dibdin had been strained for a while, and had only recently survived a fracas after Dibdin had hired an impressionist whose routine included an impression of the Lambeth manager. It seems remarkable that Dibdin hadn’t anticipated that the hot-tempered military man wouldn’t take such mockery in good sport and, sure enough, his son turned up at the Wells ready to defend the family honour. As a youth, John Astley had been an elegant and graceful dancer, who had once performed at Versailles and been honoured with a diamond-set medal and the title of ‘English Rose’ by Marie Antoinette. In his prime, he had been proud and quick to aggression, ‘not a man to be intimidated’, said Dibdin.

  Astley junior took a box and waited until the impressionist had taken the stage before standing up to brandish a horsewhip and announce to the audience that if the act was allowed to continue he would beat the man in full view of the public. Dibdin dropped the curtain immediately, which disappointed the audience so much that the uproar took a full half-hour to die down. Astley senior thanked him for his actions in an open letter to The Times, while the impressionist, fearing for his safety, had his son bound over to keep the peace.

  But this was nothing compared to the bigger problems that faced the Astley empire. Just a year before the Dublin débâcle, his Lambeth Amphitheatre had been consumed by flames, destroying forty houses and claiming the life of John Astley’s mother-in-law. Old Astley had been in France where, during the short-lived Peace of Amiens, he had successfully petitioned Napoleon for ten thousand pound
s’ worth of property and fourteen years of back rent he had lost on his Parisian theatre during the Revolution. When war resumed he was interned, yet managed to break free by feigning illness and being granted leave to visit the spa at Piedmont, whence he fled down the Maine, hijacked a postilion at the German border, drove to the banks of the Rhine and escaped via the coast of Schleswig-Holstein. On arrival in London, he learnt that his wife had died the week before, his double loss compounded by chronic under-insurance that forced him into a number of expediencies, of which selling his Dublin theatre was one.*

  Even in adversity, Astley remained a dogged and fierce competitor, outlasting almost every other manager in London over a career that spanned thirty years, including Charles and Thomas Dibdin’s father, whose Royal Circus he had especially despised. Jealously noting the success of Sadler’s Wells’s aquatic enterprise as he embarked upon the long process of rebuilding his flagship theatre in Lambeth, and fully cognizant of their chances of failure, Astley may well have contrived to send the young Dibdins on a wild-goose chase. It is an intri-guing possibility as, after all, what better way to teach an up-and-coming manager about the risks inherent in management?

  * Astley might well have accomplished his escape by swimming much of the way: despite being enormously fat, he was an expert swimmer, who once floated on his back all the way from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars holding a flag erect in each hand for a bet. He also owned a very large bathing-machine for the use of the general public, which he stationed on the Vauxhall side of Westminster Bridge. After his death, the Sadler’s Wells treasurer, Polly de Cleve, as executor of his will, claimed to have taken possession of all the verse Astley had written on the subject of his wife and son, both of whom, it revealed, he hated prodigiously.