Mugshots as Lydia DeVere (left) and Cassie Chadwick. Credit: Cleveland Police Museum

In the spring of 1902 a woman calling herself Cassie L. Chadwick—there was never any mention as to what the L stood for—took a train from Cleveland to New York City and a hansom cab to the Holland House, a hotel at the corner of 30th Street and Fifth Avenue internationally renowned for its gilded banquet room and $350,000 wine cellar. She waited in the lobby, tapping her high-button shoes on the Sienna marble floor, watching men glide by in their bowler hats and frock coats, searching for one man in particular. There he was—James Dillon, a lawyer and friend of her husband’s, standing alone.

She walked toward him, grazing his arm as she passed, and waited for him to pardon himself. As he said the words she spun around and exclaimed what a delightful coincidence it was to see him here, so far from home. She was in town briefly on some private business. In fact, she was on her way to her father’s house—would Mr. Dillon be so kind as to escort her there?

Dillon, happy to oblige, hailed an open carriage. Cassie gave the driver an address: 2 East 91st Street, at Fifth Avenue, and kept up a cheery patter until they arrived there—at a four-story mansion belonging to steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. She tried not to laugh at Dillon’s sudden inability to speak and told him she’d be back shortly. The butler opened the door to find a refined, well-dressed lady who politely asked to speak to the head housekeeper.

When the woman presented herself, Cassie explained that she was thinking of hiring a maid, Hilda Schmidt, who had supposedly worked for the Carnegie family. She wished to check the woman’s references. The housekeeper was puzzled, and said no one by that name had ever worked for the Carnegie family. Cassie protested: Was she absolutely certain? She gave a detailed physical description, rattled off details of the woman’s background. No, the housekeeper insisted; there must be some misunderstanding. Cassie thanked her profusely, complimented the spotlessness of the front parlor, and let herself out, slipping a large brown envelope out of her coat as she turned back to the street. She had managed to stretch the encounter into just under a half hour.

As she climbed into the carriage, Dillon apologized for what he was about to ask: Who was her father, exactly? Please, Cassie said, raising a gloved finger to her lips, he mustn’t disclose her secret to anyone: She was Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter. She handed over the envelope, which contained a pair of promissory notes, for $250,000 and $500,000, signed by Carnegie himself, and securities valued at a total of $5 million. Out of guilt and a sense of responsibility, “Daddy” gave her large sums of money, she said; she had numerous other notes stashed in a dresser drawer at home. Furthermore, she stood to inherit millions when he died. She reminded Dillon not to speak of her parentage, knowing it was a promise he wouldn’t keep; the story was too fantastic to withhold, and too brazen to be untrue. But she had never met Andrew Carnegie. Cassie Chadwick was just one of many names she went by.

“Betty” Bigley’s calling card, courtesy of the New York Daily News

Elizabeth “Betty” Bigley was born in October 1857, the fifth of eight children, and grew up on a small farm in Ontario, Canada. As a girl Betty lost her hearing in one ear and developed a speech impediment, which conditioned her to speak few words and choose them with care. Her classmates found her “peculiar” and she turned inward, sitting in silence by the hour. One sister, Alice, said Betty often seemed to be in a trance, as if she had hypnotized herself, unable to see or hear anything that existed outside of her mind. Coming out of these spells, she seemed disoriented and bewildered but refused to discuss her thoughts. Sometimes, Alice noticed her practicing family members’ signatures, scrawling the names over and over again.

At the age of 13 Betty devised her first scheme, writing a letter saying an uncle had died and left her a small sum of money. This forged notification of inheritance looked authentic enough to dupe a local bank, which issued checks allowing her to spend the money in advance. The checks were genuine, but the accounts nonexistent. After a few months she was arrested and warned to never do it again.

Instead, in 1879, at the age of 22, Betty launched what would become her trademark scam. She saved up for expensive letterhead and, using the fictitious name and address of a London, Ontario, attorney, notified herself that a philanthropist had died and left her an inheritance of $15,000. Next, she needed to announce her good fortune, presenting herself in a manner that would allow her to spend her “inheritance.” To this end, she had a printer create business cards resembling the calling cards of the social elite. Hers read: “Miss Bigley, Heiress to $15,000.”

She came up with a simple plan that capitalized on the lackadaisical business practices of the day. She would enter a shop, choose an expensive item, and then write a check for a sum that exceeded its price. Many merchants were willing to give her the cash difference between the cost of the item and the amount of the check. If anyone questioned whether she could afford her purchases, she coolly produced her calling card. It worked every time. Why would a young woman have a card announcing she was an heiress if it weren’t true?

Betty then headed to Cleveland to live with her sister Alice, who was now married. She promised Alice she didn’t want to impose on the newlyweds, and would stay only as long as it took to launch herself. While Alice thought her sister was seeking a job at a factory or shop, Betty was roaming the house, taking stock of everything from chairs to cutlery to paintings. She estimated their value and then arranged for a bank loan, using the furnishings as collateral. When Alice’s husband discovered the ruse he kicked Betty out, and she moved to another neighborhood in the city, where she met one Dr. Wallace S. Springsteen.

The doctor was immediately captivated. Although Betty was rather plain, with a tight, unsmiling mouth and a nest of dull brown hair, her eyes had a singular intensity—one newspaper would dub her “the Lady of the Hypnotic Eye”—and the gentle lisp of her voice seemed to impart a quiet truth to her every word. She and the doctor married before a justice of the peace in December 1883, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer printed a notice of their union. Within days a number of furious merchants showed up at the couple’s home demanding to be repaid. Dr. Springsteen checked their stories and begrudgingly paid off his wife’s debts, fearing that his own credit was on the line. The marriage lasted 12 days.

The time had come to reinvent herself, and Betty became Mme. Marie Rosa and lived in various boardinghouses, scamming merchants and honing her skills. Traveling through Erie, Pennsylvania, she impressed the locals by claiming to be the niece of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman and then pretended to be very ill; one witness reported that “through a trick of extracting blood from her gums she led persons to believe she was suffering from a hemorrhage.” The kind people of Erie turned out their pockets to collect enough money to send her back to Cleveland. When they wrote to her for repayment of those loans, they received letters in reply saying that poor Marie had died two weeks ago. As a finishing touch, Betty included a tender tribute to the deceased that she’d written herself.

As Mme. Rosa, Betty claimed to be a clairvoyant and married two of her clients. The first was a short-lived union with a Trumbull County farmer; the second was to businessman C.L. Hoover, with whom she had a son, Emil. (The boy was sent to be raised by her parents and siblings in Canada.) Hoover died in 1888, leaving Betty an estate worth $50,000. She moved to Toledo and assumed a new identity, living as Mme. Lydia Devere and continuing her work as a clairvoyant. A client named Joseph Lamb paid her $10,000 to serve as his financial adviser and seemed willing to do any favor she asked. He, along with numerous other victims, would later claim that she had hypnotic powers, a popular concept at the turn of the 20thcentury. Some 8 million people believed that spirits could be conjured from the dead and that hypnotism was an acceptable explanation for adultery, runaway teenagers and the increasingly common occurrence of young shopgirls fleeing with strange men they met on trains.

Lydia prepared a promissory note for several thousand dollars, forged the signature of a prominent Clevelander, and told Lamb to cash it for her at his bank in Toledo. If he refused, she explained, she would have to travel across the state to get her money. He had an excellent reputation in Toledo, cashed the check without incident, and, at Betty’s request, cashed several more totaling $40,000. When the banks caught on, both Betty and Joseph were arrested. Joseph was perceived as her victim and acquitted of all charges. Betty was convicted of forgery and sentenced to nine and a half years in the state penitentiary. Even there she posed as a clairvoyant, telling the warden that he would lose $5,000 in a business deal (which he did) and then die of cancer (which he also did). From her jail cell she began a letter-writing campaign to the parole board, proclaiming her remorse and promising to change. Three and a half years into her sentence, Governor (and future President) William McKinley signed the papers for her release.

She returned to Cleveland as Cassie L. Hoover and married another doctor, Leroy S. Chadwick, a wealthy widower and descendent of one of Cleveland’s oldest families. She sent for her son and moved with him into the doctor’s palatial residence on Euclid Avenue, the most aristocratic thoroughfare in the city. The marriage was a surprise to Chadwick’s friends; none of them had heard of Cassie until he introduced her as his wife. Her history and family were unknown. There were whispers that she had run a brothel and that the lonely doctor had been one of her clients. He divulged only that he had been suffering from rheumatism in his back, which Cassie generously relieved with an impromptu massage, and he couldn’t help but fall in love with her “compassion.”

Cassie Chadwick, 1904. Credit: Cleveland State University

The new Cassie L. Chadwick was eager to impress her prominent neighbors, among them relations of John D. Rockefeller, U.S. Senator Marcus Hanna and John Hay, who had been one of Abraham Lincoln’s private secretaries. She bought everything that struck her fancy and never asked the price. She replaced the doctor’s musty drapes and gloomy oil portraits with bright, whimsical pieces: a perpetual-motion clock encased in glass; a $9,000 pipe organ; a “musical chair” that plunked out a tune when someone sat down. She had a chest containing eight trays of diamonds and pearls, inventoried at $98,000, and a $40,000 rope of pearls. She ordered custom-made hats and clothing from New York, sculptures from the Far East, and furniture from Europe. During the Christmas season in 1903, the year after James Dillon told all of Cleveland about her shocking connection to Andrew Carnegie, she bought eight pianos at a time and presented them as gifts to friends. Even when purchasing the smallest toiletries she insisted on paying top dollar. “If a thing didn’t cost enough to suit her,” one acquaintance reported, “she would order it thrown away.” When her husband began objecting to her profligacy, she borrowed against her future inheritance. Her financial associates never believed that Mrs. Chadwick would be capable of creating an elaborate paper trail of lies.

Her scam involved large sums of money from financial institutions—Ohio Citizen’s Bank, Cleveland’s Wade Park Banking Company, New York’s Lincoln National Bank—and smaller sums, though never less than $10,000, from as many as a dozen other banks. She would take out several loans, repaying the first with money from the second, repaying the second with money from the third, and so on. She chose Wade Park Bank as her base of operations, entrusting it with her counterfeit promissory notes from Carnegie. She convinced Charles Beckwith, the president of Citizen’s National Bank, to grant her a loan of $240,000, plus an additional $100,000 from his personal account. A Pittsburgh steel mogul, likely an acquaintance of Carnegie’s, gave her $800,000. Through the prestigious Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, Cassie connected with Herbert Newton, an investment banker in Boston. He was thrilled to provide her with a loan and wrote her a check from his business for $79,000 and a personal check for $25,000—$104,000. He was even more pleased when she signed a promissory note for $190,800 without questioning the outrageous interest.

By November 1904, Newton realized that Cassie had no intention of repaying the loans, let alone any interest, and filed suit in federal court in Cleveland. In order to prevent her from moving and hiding her money, the suit requested that Ira Reynolds, secretary and treasurer of Wade Park Banking Company of Cleveland (who himself had lent most of his personal fortune to Cassie), continue to hold the promissory notes from her “father.”

Cassie denied all charges, and also the claim of any relationship with Andrew Carnegie. “It has been said repeatedly that I had asserted that Andrew Carnegie was my father,” she said. “I deny that, and I deny it absolutely.” Charles Beckwith, the bank president, visited her in jail. Although Cassie’s frauds had caused his bank to collapse and decimated his personal wealth, he studied her skeptically through the bars of her cell. “You’ve ruined me,” he said, “but I’m not so sure yet you are a fraud.” To this day the full extent of Cassie’s spoils remains unknown—some historians believe that many victims declined to come forward—but the most commonly cited sum is $633,000, about $16.5 million in today’s dollars.

In March 1905, Cassie Chadwick was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud a national bank and sentenced to 10 years in the penitentiary. Carnegie himself attended the trial, and later had the chance to examine the infamous promissory notes. “If anybody had seen this paper and then really believed that I had drawn it up and signed it, I could hardly have been flattered,” he said, pointing out errors in spelling and punctuation. “Why, I have not signed a note in the last 30 years.” The whole scandal could have been avoided, he added, if anyone had bothered to ask him.

Sources:

Books: John S. Crosbie, The Incredible Mrs. Chadwick. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. Kerry Segrave, Women Swindlers in America, 1860-1920. New York: McFarland & Company, 2007; Carlson Wade, Great Hoaxes and Famous Impostors. Middle Village, New York: Jonathan Davis Publishers, 1976; Ted Schwarz, Cleveland Curiosities. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2010.

Articles: “Mrs. Chadwick: The High Priestess of Fraudulent Finance.” Washington Post, December 25, 1904; “The Mystery of Cassie L. Chadwick.” San Francisco Chronicle, December 18, 1904; “Cassie For $800,000.” Washington Post, November 5, 1907; “Carnegie On Chadwick Case.” New York Times, December 29, 1904; “Queen of Swindlers.” Chicago Tribune, April 26, 1936; “Carnegie Sees Note.” New York Times, March 6, 1905; “Got Millions on Carnegie’s Name.” San Francisco Chronicle, December 11, 1904; “Woman Juggles With Millions.” The National Police Gazette, December 31, 1904; “The Career of Cassie.” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1904; “Carnegie Not My Father; I Never Said That He Was.” Atlanta Constitution, March 25, 1905; “The Case of Mrs. Chadwick.” Congregationalist and Christian World, December 17, 1904.

The SS General Slocum. Photo: Wikipedia

It was, by all accounts, a glorious Wednesday morning on June 15, 1904, and the men of Kleindeutschland—Little Germany, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side–were on their way to work. Just after 9 o’clock, a group from St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church on 6^th Street, mostly women and children, boarded the General Slocum for their annual end-of-school outing. Bounding aboard what was billed as the “largest and most splendid excursion steamer in New York,” the children, dressed in their Sunday school outfits, shouted and waved flags as the adults followed, carrying picnic baskets for what was to be a long day away.

A German band played on deck while the children romped and the adults sang along, waiting to depart. Just before 10 o’clock, the lines were cast off, a bell rang in the engine room, and a deck hand reported to Captain William Van Schaick that nearly a thousand tickets had been collected at the plank. That number didn’t include the 300 children under the age of 10, who didn’t require tickets. Including crew and catering staff, there were about 1,350 aboard the General Slocum as it steamed up the East River at 15 knots toward Long Island Sound, headed for Locust Grove, a picnic ground on Long Island’s North Shore, about two hours away.

Built in 1891 and owned by the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company, the General Slocum was made of white oak, locust and yellow pine and licensed to carry 2,500 passengers. The ship carried that many life preservers, and just a month before a fire inspector had deemed its fire equipment to be in “fine working order.”

As the ship reached 97^th Street, some of the crew on the lower deck saw puffs of smoke rising through the wooden floorboards and ran below to the second cabin. But the men had never conducted any fire drills, and when they turned the ship’s fire hoses onto the flames, the rotten hoses burst. Rushing back above deck, they told Van Schaick that they had encountered a “blaze that could not be conquered.” It was “like trying to put out hell itself.”

Bodies collected on the shore at North Brother Island. Photo: Wikipedia

Onlookers in Manhattan, seeing the flames, shouted for the captain to dock immediately. Instead, Van Schaick, fearing the steering gear would break down in the strong currents and leave the Slocum helpless in midriver, plowed full speed ahead. He aimed for a pier at 134^th Street, but a tugboat captain warned him off, fearing the burning ship would ignite lumber stored there. Van Shaick made a run for North Brother Island, a mile away, hoping to beach the Slocum sideways so everyone would have a chance to get off. The ship’s speed, coupled with a fresh north wind, fanned the flames. Mothers began screaming for their children as passengers panicked on deck. As fire enveloped the Slocum, hundreds of passengers hurled themselves overboard, even though many could not swim.

The crew distributed life jackets, but they too were rotten. Boats sped to the scene and pulled a few passengers to safety, but mostly they encountered children’s corpses bobbing in the currents along the tidal strait known as Hell Gate. One newspaper described it as “a spectacle of horror beyond words to express—a great vessel all in flames, sweeping forward in the sunlight, within sight of the crowded city, while her helpless, screaming hundreds were roasted alive or swallowed up in waves.”

A witness reported seeing a large white yacht flying the insignia from the New York Yacht Club arrive on the scene just as the burning Slocum passed 139^th Street. He said the captain positioned his yacht nearby and then stood on the bridge with his field glasses, “seeing women and children jump overboard in swarms and making no effort to go to their assistance…he did not even lower a boat.”

Passengers trampled children in their rush to the Slocum‘s stern. One man, engulfed in flames, leaped over the port side and shrieked as the giant paddle wheel swallowed him. Others blindly followed him to a similar fate. A 12 year-old boy shimmied up the ship’s flagstaff at the bow and hung there until the heat became too great and he dropped into the flames. Hundreds massed together, only to bake to death. The middle deck soon gave way with a terrific crash, and passengers along the outside rails were jolted overboard. Women and children dropped into the choppy waters in clusters. In the mayhem, a woman gave birth—and when she hurled herself overboard, her newborn in her arms, they both perished.

At Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island, where patients with typhoid and other contagious diseases had been quarantined, staff spotted the burning vessel approaching and quickly prepared the hospital’s engines and hoses to pump water, hoping to douse the flames. The island’s fire whistle blew and dozens of rescuers moved to the shore. Captain Van Schaick, his feet blistering from the heat below, managed to ground the Slocum sideways about 25 feet from shore. Rescuers swam to the ship and pulled survivors to safety. Nurses threw debris for passengers to cling to while others tossed ropes and life preservers. Some nurses dove into the water themselves and pulled badly burned passengers to safety. Still, the heat from the flames made it impossible to get close enough as the Slocum became engulfed from stem to stem.

Rescuers at the scene of the greatest maritime disaster in American peacetime history. Photo: Wikipedia

Firefighter Edward McCarroll dove into the water from his boat, the Wade, and pulled an 11 year-old girl to safety, passing her to a man with a boat hook. He went back for another when one woman grabbed him by the throat, pulling him under water momentarily, and shouted,  “You must save my boy.” McCarroll dragged the child to the Wade, and they were both hoisted aboard. Crews from tugs following the Slocum were credited with pulling in the living and the dead “by the dozen.”

Within an hour, 150 bodies were stretched out on blankets covering the lawn and sands of North Brother Island. Most of them were women. One was still clutching her lifeless baby, who was “tenderly taken out of her arms and laid on the grass beside her.” Rescued orphans of 3, 4 and 5 years old milled about the beach, dazed. Hours would pass before they could leave the island, many taken to Bellevue Hospital to treat wounds and await the arrival of grief-stricken relatives.

Van Shaick was believed to be the last person off the Slocum when he jumped into the water and swam for shore, blinded and crippled. He would face criminal charges for his ship’s unpreparedness and be sentenced to 10 years in prison; he served four when he was pardoned by President William Howard Taft on Christmas Day, 1912.

The death toll of 1,021, most of them women and children, made the burning of the Slocum New York City’s worst disaster until the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The fire was believed to have been touched off by a carelessly tossed match or cigarette that ignited a barrel of packing hay below deck. There were also remarkable tales of survival. A 10-month-old boy floated to shore, uninjured but orphaned, and lay unclaimed at a hospital until his grandmother identified him days later. Eleven-year-old Willie Keppler had joined the excursion without his parents’ permission but made it through the flailing of non-swimmers who dragged fellow passengers down with them; he was too scared of punishment to return home until he saw his name among the dead in the next day’s newspaper. “I thought I’d come home and git the licking instead of breaking me mudder’s heart,” Keppler was quoted as saying. “So I’m home, and me mudder only kissed me and me fadder gave me half a dollar for being a good swimmer.”

The men of Little Germany were suddenly without families. Funerals were held for more than a week, and the desolate schoolyards of Kleindeutschland were painful reminders of their loss. Many widowers and broken families moved uptown to Yorkville to be closer to the scene of the disaster, establishing a new Germantown on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Some returned to Germany. Before long, Kleindeutschland disappeared under New York’s next wave of Polish and Russian immigrants.

Sources

Articles: “One Man Without a Heart,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 16, 1904.  “Recover 493 Dead,” Boston Globe, June 16, 1904.  “Captain of Boat Tells His Story,” Chicago Tribune, June 16, 1904.  “East Side’s Heart Torn By the Horror,” New York Times, June 16, 1904. “General Slocum Disaster,” http://www.maggieblanck.com/Goehle/GeneralSlocum.html. “A Brief Account of The General Slocum Disaster,” by Edward T. O’Donnell. http://www.edwardtodonnell.com/ also, http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=59062.

Books: Edward T. O’Donnell, Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum, Broadway, 2003.

Harold Holt, the Australian Prime Minister, taking a swim. Image courtesy of the National Archives of Australia

On the gusty afternoon of December 17, 1967, a group of five adults arrived at Cheviot Beach, near Portsea, Victoria, and strolled along the Bass Strait beneath the warm Australian sun. Harold Holt was eager for a swim, and after stepping behind a rock outcrop in the sand dunes, he emerged wearing a pair of blue swim trunks. Marjorie Gillespie and her daughter, Vyner, both in bikinis, turned to the water and noticed that the surf, at high tide, was higher than they’d ever seen it.

“I know this beach like the back of my hand,” Holt replied, and walked into the surf without breaking his stride.  Immediately, he began swimming away from the beach. Martin Simpson, Vyner’s boyfriend, followed but stopped when he was knee-deep in the surf. “There was a fairly strong undercurrent,” he said, “so I just splashed around without going in too far.” The third man in the group, Alan Stewart, told the others, “If Mr. Holt can take it, I had better go in too.” But he stopped quickly when he felt a tremendous undertow swirling around his legs. He watched Holt swim out into what he considered “dangerous turbulence.”

Marjorie Gillespie had kept an eye on Holt as he swam further away, drifting from them until the water seemed to boil around him and he disappeared. Holt’s four companions climbed a rocky cliff and searched the water for traces of him. Finding none, they began to panic. Stewart went for help, and within minutes, three SCUBA divers were wading into the water. But the undertow was too strong even for them, and the currents made the water turbid and difficult to see in. They retreated from the surf, climbed a rock and scanned the water with binoculars until police and search-and-rescue teams arrived.

Within an hour helicopters were hovering over the coast, and divers, tethered by safety ropes, were stepping into the churning sea. By sundown, nearly 200 personnel had arrived, including rescuers from Australia’s army, navy and coast guard, the Marine Board of Victoria and the Department of Air. The largest search-and-rescue operation in the nation’s history was all for naught. Australia was paralyzed by news of the unthinkable: Prime Minister Harold Holt was gone at the age of 59.

Two days later, Holt was officially declared dead, and Country Party leader John McEwen was sworn in as prime minister.  On December 22, a memorial service was held, attended by dignitaries including U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, Prince Charles of Wales and the presidents of South Vietnam and South Korea. But it did not take long for conspiracy theories to take hold of Australia’s collective imagination. How could the country’s leader simply disappear on the beach, in the company of just a few friends? Under the law, without a body, there could be no official inquest into Holt’s disappearance. (It wasn’t until the Coroner’s Act was signed into law in 1985 that the coroner’s office was required to investigated “suspected” deaths in the absence of a body.) Despite an extensive report made by the Commonwealth and Victoria Police, where eyewitness statements and search-and-rescue operations were recorded in detail, there were those who refused to believe that Holt, a reputed strong swimmer, had accidentally drowned. Just four years after the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, the land down under had its own sweeping intrigue.

Holt had spent more than three decades in Parliament and married to his University of Melbourne sweetheart, Zara Kate Dickens, but he had been prime minister less than two years when he disappeared. A few months after he had been sworn in, in January 1966, he had his defining moment in office: in a speech in Washington, D.C, Holt announced his support for the Vietnam War, declaring that Australia “will be all the way with LBJ.” Later that year, Holt agreed to increase Australian forces in Vietnam, and three quarters of a million people turned out to welcome President Johnson in Melbourne. There were also many war protesters who tossed paint at Johnson’s car and chanted, “LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Soon after Holt waded into the Bass Strait, speculation centered on his mental state at the time—people wondered whether, despondent over political pressures and the growing unpopularity with the Vietnam war, the prime minister committed suicide. It was also widely believed that Holt had been having an affair with Marjorie Gillespie. (That much was true; Zara Holt’s memoirs confirmed that he had had a number of extramarital affairs, and years later Gillespie acknowledged that she’d had a long relationship with him.) Rather than suicide, some suspected, Holt had merely faked his death so he could run away with his mistress.

Over the years, the theories would only become more elaborate. Fifteen years after Holt’s death, Ronald Titcombe, a former Australian naval officer, convinced the British novelist Anthony Grey that the prime minister had been working as a spy for the Chinese government since the early 1930s. Holt, Titcombe surmised, had been convinced that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service was onto him; on the day he was last seen, Holt simply swam out to sea and was picked up by a Chinese midget submarine. This theory was greeted with plenty of scoffing, and Zara Holt dismissed it famously years later, saying, “Harry? Chinese submarine? He didn’t even like Chinese cooking.”

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was not immune from speculation. Holt might have been rethinking his commitment to the Vietnam war, which was becoming increasingly unpopular in Australia; the CIA, this line of thinking went, had gotten him before he had a chance to withdraw his support. That Holt’s death did not require a formal inquiry only added fuel to the theorizing that there had been a coverup at the highest reaches of the Australian government.

It wasn’t until 2005 that the Victorian coroner opened just such an inquiry into Holt’s disappearance. State Coroner Graeme Johnstone found that Harold Holt had drowned at Cheviot Beach and that his body had been either swept out to sea or taken by sharks. Cheviot Beach had long been perilous—countless shipwrecks had been documented in the vicinity over centuries—and the area had been cordoned off as a military zone. Holt had been given special permission to access the beach with his friends in privacy. Though he was an experienced swimmer, he had also been taking pain medications for a shoulder injury at the time, and just six months earlier he had almost drowned at the same spot while snorkeling with friends.

The coroner’s report did not halt the conspiracy theories entirely, but it did provide support for a judgment first rendered by Lawrence Newell, the police inspector who investigated the case in 1967 and concluded that the cause of Holt’s death was quite simple—overconfidence and a dangerous rip current. “I think he went for a swim under conditions where he was most unwise,” Newell said, “and that’s it.”

Sources

Books: Tom Frame, The Life and Death of Harold Holt, Allen & Unwin, 2005. Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country, Doubleday Canada, 2000.

Articles: “He Was Cast in the Mold of Harry Truman,” by Charles Bernard, Boston Globe, December 18, 1967.  ”Harold Holt Drowned, Coroner  Finds,” Sydney Morning Herald, September 2, 2005. “Case of Missing PM to be Reopened,” by Bernard O’Riordan, The Guardian, August 24, 2005. “New Inquest on Harold Holt Fires Speculation,” The Guardian, August 25, 2005. “Source Behind Holt-To-China Theory Discredited,” by Michelle Grattan, the age.com http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/source-behind-holttochina-theory-discredited/2005/08/04/1123125853880.html “On this day: Harold Holt disappears,” by Amanda James and Marina Kamenev, Australian Geographic, December 17, 2010. http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/on-this-day-harold-holt-disappears.htm “Out of His Depth: The PM Who Believed His Own Publicity,” theage.com http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/08/24/1061663679090.html

Reports: Harold Holt’s Disappearance–Fact Sheet 144 and Records Relating to the Disappearance of Harold Holt, National Archives of Australia, http://naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs144.aspx

Laborers working at the face of the Thames Tunnel were protected by Marc Brunel's newly-invented "Shield"; behind them, other gangs hurried to roof the tunnel before the river could burst in. Nineteenth century lithograph. Image: Wikicommons.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the port of London was the busiest in the world. Cargoes that had traveled thousands of miles, and survived all the hazards of the sea, piled up on the wharves of Rotherhithe—only for their owners to discover that the slowest, most frustrating portion of their journey often lay ahead of them. Consignments intended for the southern (and most heavily populated) parts of Britain had to be heaved onto creaking ox carts and hauled through the docklands and across London Bridge, which had been built in the 12th century and was as cramped and impractical as its early date implied. By 1820, it had become the center of the world’s largest traffic jam.

It was a situation intolerable to a city with London’s pride, and it was clear that if private enterprise could build another crossing closer to the docks, there would be a tidy profit to be made in tolls. Another bridge was out of the question—it would deny sailing ships access to the Pool of London—and ambitious men turned their thoughts to driving a tunnel beneath the Thames instead. This was not such an obvious idea as it might appear. Although demand for coal was growing fast as the industrial revolution hit high gear, working methods remained primitive. Tunnels were dug by men wielding picks in sputtering candlelight.

No engineers had tunneled under a major river, and the Thames was an especially tricky river. To the north, London was built on a solid bed of clay, ideal tunneling material. To the south and east, however, lay deeper strata of water-bearing sand, gravel and oozing quicksand, all broken up by layers of gravel, silt, petrified trees and the debris of ancient oyster beds. The ground was semi-liquid, and at depth it became highly pressurized, threatening to burst into any construction site.

Richard Trevithick, the Cornish engineer who made the first—disastrous—attempt at a Thames tunnel.

Today, engineers deal with treacherous ground by pressurizing their workfaces (though that solution still leaves tunnelers vulnerable to the problems that come from working in high-pressure environments, including bone-rot and even the bends). In the early 19th century, such measures were still decades away. The first men to attempt a tunnel beneath the Thames—gangs of Cornish miners brought to London in 1807 by businessmen banded together as the Thames Archway Company—had little to guide them.

The chief engineer of this first tunnel project was a muscular giant named Richard Trevithick, a self-educated man who had progressed from youthful fame as a Cornish wrestler by displaying a dazzling talent for invention. Trevithick had harnessed steam power to drive the first self-propelled engine to run on rails and designed the world’s first high-pressure steam engine. He was convinced that a tunnel could be hacked out under the Thames relatively easily. It did not take long for him to realize he was wrong.

Trevithick’s men made fine progress while tunneling through London clay, but once they got under the Thames they had constant trouble. Their pilot tunnel was just five feet high and three feet wide, and sewage-laden water seeped in from the river, thirty feet above their heads, at the rate of 20 gallons a minute. Within this narrow space three miners worked on their knees, one hewing at the face with his pick, another clearing away the sodden earth, the third shoring up the drift with timbers. Working conditions during the six-hour shifts were appalling; the men were soaked with sweat and river water, no one could stand or stretch, and the tunnel was so poorly ventilated that the fetid air sometimes extinguished the candles.

A miner inside Trevithick's cramped Thames driftway.

Nevertheless, the Cornishmen made progress, and by January 1808 Trevithick reported that his drift was within 140 feet of the north bank of the Thames and that the pilot tunnel would be completed in a fortnight. Then things began to go disastrously wrong. The miners hit quicksand, then water, this time in such quantity that nothing could stop waterlogged soil from gushing into the driftway. The men at the face fled the shaft just ahead of the flood.

Correctly guessing that his tunnel had come too close to an unexpected depression in the bed of the Thames, Trevithick arranged for the hole to be plugged with large bags of clay dumped into the river. To the astonishment of his detractors, this seemingly desperate measure worked, and the tunnel was pumped dry. Within days, however, it flooded again, and this time the Thames Archway Company had had enough. Its funds were exhausted, its chief engineer was sick from exposure to the river water, and all its efforts had proved only that a passage under the river at Rotherhithe exceeded the limits of contemporary mining technology.

At that time, the only machines used in mines were pumps. It took a man of genius to recognize that a different sort of machine was needed—a machine that could both prevent the roof and walls from collapsing and hold back any quicksand or water at the tunnel face. This man was Marc Brunel, an emigré who had fled his native France during the Revolution and quickly made a name for himself as one of the most prominent engineers in Britain.

Brunel was a tiny, eccentric man, impractical in his private life but an intensely able innovator. His inventions, which had brought him to the attention of men as illustrious as Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, included machines for mass-producing cannon balls, embroidering fabric, sawing wood and making ships’ tackle. This last had cut the cost of producing rigging pulleys by 85 percent. After he secured a number of contracts to supply pulleys to the Royal Navy, the Frenchman found himself relatively wealthy despite his lack of business acumen.

Marc Brunel, father of the celebrated shipbuilder and railway engineer Isambard, was a notable engineer in his own right. Image: Wikicommons.

Not long after the failure of the Thames Archway Company, Brunel happened to be wandering through the Royal Dockyard at Chatham when he noticed a rotten piece of ship’s timber lying on the quay. Examining the wood through a magnifying glass, he observed that it had been infested with the dreaded teredo, or shipworm, whose rasping jaws can riddle a wooden ship with holes. As it burrows, this ‘worm’ (it is actually a mollusk) shoves pulped wood into its mouth and digests it, excreting a hard, brittle residue that lines the tunnel it has excavated and renders it safe from predators.

Though he had no prior knowledge of or interest in the subject, Brunel realized that the shipworm’s burrowing technique could be adapted to produce an entirely new way of tunneling. His insight led him to invent a device that has been used in one form or another in almost every major tunnel built during the last 180 years: the tunneling shield. It consisted of a grid of iron frames that could be pressed against the tunnel face and supported on a set of horizontal wooden planks, called poling boards, that would prevent the face from collapsing. The frames were divided into 36 cells, each three feet wide and almost seven feet tall, and arranged one atop another on three levels. The whole machine was 21 feet tall, and the working surface was 850 square feet—68 times bigger than Trevithick’s.

The shield was topped by sturdy iron plates that formed a temporary roof and protected the miners as they worked. Instead of hewing away at a large and exposed surface, they would remove one poling board at a time and hack out a mailbox-shaped hole to a predetermined depth—say nine inches. Then the board would be pushed into the hole and screwed back into place before the next one was removed and the whole process begun again. When the miners in a cell had excavated the earth behind all of their boards, their frames could be laboriously jacked forward those nine inches. In this way, the whole 90-ton tunneling machine could move inexorably and safely on while masons trailed behind, shoring up the newly exposed tunnel with bricks.

A model of Marc Brunel's tunneling shield on display at the Brunel Museum at Rotherhithe, London. Photo: Wikicommons.

The prospect of tunneling beneath the Thames promised a lucrative test of Brunel’s new invention, and he raised funds for the project through a public subscription. Soil samples were taken beneath the riverbed, and Brunel was advised to stick close to the muddy river bottom, where he could expect clay, rather than risk striking quicksand by going deeper. When he began work on his tunnel in 1825, the shaft that was sunk in dingy Rotherhithe was only 42 feet deep, and it was planned to pass within seven feet of the river bed in places.

The hazards of such an operation soon became apparent. Although the shield worked well and the miners dug, at first, through the predicted clay, water began to drip into the tunnel before the shaft had even begun to pass under the Thames. This influx was more of a nuisance than a real danger while the pump was working, but in the summer of 1826 it failed, and the whole shaft was soon flooded to a depth of 12 feet.

From then on the project proved ever more difficult. Brunel’s machine could cope with the sodden mud and dry gravel that his miners encountered nearly as well as clay, but he ran short of funds. The economies that followed left the shaft was poorly drained and ventilated, and miners were poisoned by the polluted river water or afflicted by illnesses ranging from diarrhea and constant headaches to temporary blindness. Most of Brunel’s workers complained of feeling suffocated and tormented by temperatures that could plunge or rise by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit within an hour. One miner died of disease.

In May 1827, with the tunnel now well out into the river, the ground behind the poling boards became so liquid that it forced its way through the gaps between the boards; a gusher in one of the cells bowled the miner working in it head over heels. The rest of the 120 men working in the shield could not force their way into his frame in time to staunch the flow. Bitter-tasting, gurgling water rose rapidly and flooded the tunnel, sending all the miners scurrying for their ladders and the surface.

The diving bell used by Brunel to plug a hole in the bottom of the Thames.

Brunel, like Trevithick, recognized that his tunnel had passed beneath a cavity in the riverbed, and he too solved his problem with bags of clay. Thousands, containing a total of 20,000 cubic feet of earth, were dumped into the river over the shield’s position, and two weeks after the flood his men began to pump the tunnel dry. It took four months, and when work was restarted in November, a highly publicized banquet for 50 guests was held in the tunnel. Thousands of visitors were permitted to enter the shaft and gaze at the wonderful tunneling machine on payment of a penny a head. The tunnel’s construction became news worldwide; Edward Lear, traveling through the mountains of Calabria, stopped for the night in a lonely monastery run by an abbot who informed his monks: “England is a very small place, altogether about the third the size of the city of Rome…. The whole place is divided into two equal parts by an arm of the sea, under which is a great tunnel so that it is all like one piece of dry land.”

Work at the face began again late in 1827, but within months the shield was advancing through treacherous ground once more. Early in the morning of January 12, 1828, the miners in one of the top cells were hacking away when another unstoppable torrent of water flooded into the tunnel. Once again the men in the shield had to run for safety, but this time they had left it too late; six miners were drowned. Just as seriously for Brunel, the cost of tipping a further 4,500 bags of clay into the Thames to plug this latest hole in the river bed exhausted his company’s funds. With no new financing in the offing, the tunnel was pumped dry, the shield was bricked up and the tunnel was abandoned.

The interior of the tunnel was later occupied by vagrants and known grimly as "Hades Hotel".

It took Brunel and his supporters seven years to cajole the government into advancing a loan of £246,000 to allow work on this “project of national importance” to be completed. And despite the replacement of the old tunneling shield with a new model better able to resist the pressure of the Thames as it swelled with each high tide, it took six more years of round-the-clock labor before the tunnel finally emerged at Wapping on August 12, 1841. Work on the 1,200-foot tunnel thus occupied 16 years and two months, an average rate of progress (allowing for the seven-year layoff) of only 4 inches a day—a good measure of how sorely the project tested the technology of the day.

Brunel’s triumph was only partial. Once again his company’s funds were at a low ebb, and the tens of thousands of penny-a-head visitors hardly paid the interest on the government loan There was never enough to complete the approaches to the tunnel and make it accessible to horse-drawn vehicles, as intended. Instead, the passageways were filled with souvenir-sellers by day and by the city’s homeless at night. For a penny toll, vagrants could bed down under Brunel’s arches in what became known as the Hades Hotel.

It was only when the underground railway came to London in the 1860s that the Thames Tunnel achieved a measure of real usefulness. Purchased by the East London Railway in 1869, it was found to be in such excellent condition that it was immediately be pressed into service carrying steam-driven trains—at first along the Brighton line and later from Wapping to New Cross. The tunnel became, and remains, part of the London Underground network. It is a tribute to Trevithick and Brunel—and mute testimony to the difficulties of tunneling in London—that it remained the only subway line so far to the east until the opening of the Jubilee Line Extension in 1999.

Sources

Anon. The Thames Tunnel. London: Henry Teape, 1825; Richard Beamish. Memoir of the Life of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel. London: Longman, Green, 1852; H.W. Dickinson and Arthur Titley. Richard Trevithick: The Engineer and the Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011;  James Hodge. Richard Trevithick: An Illustrated Life. Princes Risborough: Shire Publication, 2003; Charles Knight. Pictorial Half-Hours of London Topography. London: The Author, 1851; David Lampe. The Tunnel: the Story of the World’s First Tunnel Under a Navigable River. London: Harrap, 1963; Gosta Sandstrom. The History of Tunnelling: Underground Workings Through the Ages. London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1963;  Barbara Stack. Handbook of Tunnelling and Mining Machinery. New York: Wiley, 1982.

Upon his arrest for murder, Roscoe Arbuckle was booked into custody and denied bail.

In the summer of 1921, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was on top of the world. Paramount Pictures had paid him an unprecedented $3 million over three years to star in 18 silent films, and he’d just signed another million-dollar contract with the studio. The portly comedian’s latest film, Crazy to Marry, was playing in theaters across the country. So his friend Fred Fischbach planned a big party to celebrate, a three-day Labor Day bash at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.

But by the end of the week, Fatty Arbuckle was sitting in Cell No. 12 on “felony row” at the San Francisco Hall of Justice, held without bail in the slaying of a 25-year-old actress named Virginia Rappe. Crazy to Marry was quickly pulled from theaters, and a nation was outraged to discover a sordid side to the off-screen lives of Hollywood stars. Behind Arbuckle’s troubles was a mysterious woman named Maude Delmont, a witness for the prosecution who would never be called to testify because police and prosecutors knew her story would not hold up on the stand. Yet what she had to say would be more than enough to ruin Arbuckle’s career.

The days leading up to the party did not put Arbuckle in the best of moods. He was in Los Angeles having his Pierce-Arrow automobile serviced when he sat down on an acid-soaked rag at the garage. The acid burned through his pants to his buttocks, causing second-degree burns. He was tempted to cancel the trip to San Francisco, but Fischbach would have none of it. He secured a rubber-padded ring for Arbuckle to sit on, and they made the drive up the coast to the St. Francis, where Fischbach had reserved adjoining rooms and a suite.

According to Arbuckle, Fischbach arranged everything from the rooms to the guests to the liquor (despite Prohibition), and on Labor Day, September 5, 1921, Arbuckle awoke to find that he had many uninvited guests. He was still walking around in his pajamas, bathrobe and slippers when he saw Delmont and Rappe and expressed concern that their reputations might alert police to the “gin party.” In Los Angeles, Delmont was known as a madam and blackmailer; Rappe had made a something of a name for herself as a model, clothing designer, aspiring actress and party girl. But the food and booze were flowing by then, the music was playing, and Arbuckle was soon no longer focused on his exhausting work schedule, the burns on his backside or just who all those guests were. What happened in the ensuing hours would play out on the front pages of William Randolph Hearst’s national chain of newspapers, in lurid headlines, before Arbuckle had a chance to tell his side of the story.

Virginia Rappe was 25 years old when she arrived at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco for a Labor Day Weekend party.

Maude Delmont soon painted a sinister portrait of the happy-go-lucky portly prince of silent film. This is what she told the police: After Arbuckle and Rappe had had a few drinks together, he pulled her actress into an adjoining room, saying, “I’ve waited for you five years, and now I’ve got you.” After a half-hour or so, Delmont heard Rappe screaming, so she knocked on and then kicked at the locked door. After a delay, Arbuckle came to the door in his pajamas, wearing Rappe’s hat “cocked at an angle” and smiling his “foolish ‘screen smile.” Behind him, Rappe was sprawled on the bed, moaning.

“Arbuckle did it,” the actress said, according to Delmont.

Rappe was taken to another room. A doctor was summoned, and he attended to her. She stayed at the hotel for a few days before she was taken to a hospital—where she died, on September 9, of a ruptured bladder.

The Hearst papers had a field day with the story—the publisher would later say the Fatty Arbuckle scandal sold more papers than the sinking of the Lusitania. While sexually assaulting Virginia Rappe, the papers surmised, the 266-pound star had ruptured her bladder; the San Francisco Examiner ran an editorial cartoon titled “They Walked Into His Parlor,” featuring Arbuckle in the middle of a giant spider web with two liquor bottles at hand and seven women caught in the web. Rumors that he had committed sexual depravities began to swirl.

Arbuckle turned himself in and was held for three weeks in jail. Police released a mug shot of the dejected actor, photographed in a suit and bow tie, his round face showing nothing of the joy everyone saw on celluloid. He remained silent as the innuendo swelled. Arbuckle’s lawyers insisted he was innocent and requested that the public make no judgment until all the facts were established. But they quickly realized Arbuckle would have to make a statement, and the comedian told a very different story from Maude Delmont’s.

After having a few drinks with Virginia Rappe, the actress became “hysterical,” Arbuckle said. She “complained she could not breathe and then started to tear off her clothes.” At no time, Arbuckle insisted, was he alone with her, and he said he had witnesses to corroborate the point. He found Rappe in his bathroom, vomiting, and he and several other guests tried to revive her from what they believed was intoxication. Eventually, they got her a room of her own where she could recover.

Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter and scheduled for trial that November. San Francisco District Attorney Matthew Brady saw the case as the perfect opportunity to jump-start his career in politics, but he was beginning to have trouble with his star witness, Delmont. Sometimes she claimed to be a lifelong friend of Rappe’s; other times, she insisted they’d met just days before the party. She also had a criminal history of fraud and extortion, Brady discovered. Also known as “Madame Black,” Delmont procured young women for parties where wealthy male guests soon found themselves accused of rape and blackmailed into paying Delmont. Then there was the matter of the telegrams that she sent to attorneys in both San Diego and Los Angeles: “WE HAVE ROSCOE ARBUCKLE IN A HOLE HERE CHANCE TO MAKE SOME MONEY OUT OF HIM.”

Still, Brady proceeded to trial. The newspapers never questioned Delmont’s version of events, and they kept flogging Arbuckle. His reputation was in a shambles, even after his friends Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin vouched for his character.

But Arbuckle’s lawyers introduced medical evidence showing that Rappe had had a chronic bladder condition, and her autopsy concluded that there “were no marks of violence on the body, no signs that the girl had been attacked in any way.” (The defense also had witnesses with damaging information about Rappe’s past, but Arbuckle wouldn’t let them testify, he said, out of respect for the dead.) The doctor who treated Rappe at the hotel testified that she had told him Arbuckle did not try to sexually assault her, but the prosecutor got the point dismissed as hearsay.

Fatty Arbuckle was making $1 million per year in 1921 with Paramount Pictures. Photo: Wikipedia

Arbuckle took the stand in his own defense, and the jurors voted 10-2 for acquittal. When the prosecution tried him a second time, the jury deadlocked again. It wasn’t until the third trial, in March of 1922, that Arbuckle allowed his attorneys to call the witnesses who had known Rappe to the stand. He had little choice; his funds were depleted—he would spend more than $700,000 on his defense—and his career was presumed to be dead. They testified that Rappe had suffered previous abdominal attacks; drank heavily and often disrobed at parties after doing so; was promiscuous, and had an illegitimate daughter. One of them also attacked Maude Delmont as “the complaining witness that never witnessed.”

On April 12, 1922, the jury acquitted Arbuckle of manslaughter after deliberating for just five minutes—four of which were used to prepare a statement:

Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done to him … there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime. He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story which we all believe. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and women that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.

One week later, Will Hays, whom the motion picture industry hired as a censor to restore its image, banned Fatty Arbuckle from appearing on screen. Hays would change his mind eight months later, but the damage was done. Arbuckle changed his name to William B. Goodrich (Will B. Good) and worked behind the scenes, directing films for friends who remained loyal to him and barely earning a living in the only business he knew.  A little more than ten years later, on June 29, 1933, he had a heart attack and died in his hotel room. He was 46.

Sources

Books: Robert Grant, Joseph Katz, The Great Trials of the Twenties: The Watershed decade in America’s Courtrooms, Sarpedon, 1998.  Scott Patrick Johnson, Trials of the Century: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture and the Law, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2011.  Charles F. Adams, Murder by the Bay: Historic Homicide In and About the City of San Francisco, Quill Driver Books, 2005.  Stuart Oderman, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle: A Biography of the Silent Film Comedian, 1887-1933, McFalrald, 1994.

Articles: “Quiz Arbuckle Over Death of Film Actress” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep. 11, 1921.  “Arbuckle Held Without Bail As Murderer” Chicago Daily Tribune, Sep. 12, 1921. “Mrs. Delmont Tells of Arbucle Party” Boston Daily Globe, Sep. 13, 1921.  “Many Theathers Ban Arbuckle Pictures” New York Times, Sep. 13, 1921.   “Fatty Arbuckle and the Death of Virginia Rappe” by Denise Noe,  TruTV Crime Library, www.trutv.com.  “The Case Against Arbuckle,” “Arbuckle Answers to Girl’s Murder Charge” www.callmefatty.com.

Pablo Fanque: expert equestrian, tightrope walker, acrobat, showman–and Britain's first black circus owner.

Anyone who has ever listened to The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band–and that’s a few hundred million people at the last estimate–will know the swirling melody and appealingly nonsensical lyrics of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” one of the most unusual tracks on that most eclectic of albums.

For the benefit of Mr. Kite
There will be a show tonight on trampoline
The Hendersons will all be there
Late of Pablo Fanque’s Fair—what a scene
Over men and horses, hoops and garters
Lastly through a hogshead of real fire!
In this way Mr. K. will challenge the world!

But who are these people, these horsemen and acrobats and “somerset turners” of a bygone age? Those who know a bit about the history of the circus in its mid-Victorian heyday–before the coming of the music halls and the cinema stole its audience, at a time when a traveling show could set up in a mid-size town and play for two or three months without exhausting demand–will recognize that John Lennon got his vocabulary right when he wrote those lyrics. “Garters” are banners stretched between poles aloft held by two men; the “trampoline,” in those days, was simply a springboard, and the “somersets” Mr. Henderson undertakes to “throw on solid ground” were somersaults.

While true Beatlemaniacs will know that Mr. Kite and his companions were real performers in a real troupe, however, few will realize that they were associates of what was probably the most successful, and almost certainly the most beloved, “fair” to tour Britain in the mid-Victorian period. And almost none will know that Pablo Fanque–the man who owned the circus—was more than simply an exceptional showman and perhaps the finest horsemen of his day. He was also a black man making his way in an almost uniformly white society, and doing it so successfully that he played to mostly capacity houses for the best part of 30 years.

The 1843 benefit poster advertising a performance in Rochdale by Pablo Fanque's circus. It was this bill that John Lennon discovered in a Kent antique shop and used as inspiration for his song "Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite."

The song that lent Fanque his posthumous fame had its origins in a promotional film shot for “Strawberry Fields Forever”—another Lennon track—at Sevenoaks in Kent in January 1967. During a break in the filming, the Beatle wandered into a nearby antique shop, where his attention was caught by a gaudy Victorian playbill advertising a performance of Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal in the northern factory town of Rochdale in February 1843. One by one, in the gorgeously prolix style of the time, the poster ran through the wonders that would be on display, among them “Mr. Henderson, the celebrated somerset thrower, wire dancer, vaulter, rider &c.” and Zanthus, “well known to be one of the best Broke Horses in the world!!!”—not to mention Mr. Kite himself, pictured balancing on his head atop a pole while playing the trumpet.

Something about the poster caught Lennon’s fancy; knowing his dry sense of humor, it was probably the bill’s breathless assertion that this show of shows would be “positively the last night but three!” of the circus’s engagement in the town. Anyway, he bought it, took it home and (the musicologist Ian MacDonald notes) hung it in his music room, where “playing his piano, [he] sang phrases from it until he had a song.” The upshot was a track unlike any other in the Beatles’ canon—though it’s fair to say that the finished article owes just as much to the group’s producer, George Martin, who responded heroically to Lennon’s demand for “a ‘fairground’ production wherein one could smell the sawdust.” (Adds MacDonald, wryly: “While not in the narrowest sense a musical specification, [this] was, by Lennon’s standards, a clear and reasonable request. He once asked Martin to make one of his songs sound like an orange.”) The Abbey Road production team used a harmonium and wobbly tapes of vintage Victorian calliopes to create the song’s famously kaleidoscopic wash of sound.

What the millions who listened to the track never knew was that Lennon’s poster caught Pablo Fanque almost exactly midway through a 50-year career that brought with it some remarkable highs and astonishing lows, all of them made a little more exceptional by the unpromising circumstances of his birth. Parish records show that Fanque was born William Darby in 1796, and grew up in the English east coast port of Norwich, the son of a black father and a white mother. Nothing certain is known about Darby senior; it has been suggested he was born in Africa and came to Norwich as a household servant, even that he may have been a freed slave, but that is merely speculation. And while most sources suggest that he and his wife died not long after their son’s birth, at least one newspaper account has the father appearing in London with the son as late as the mid-1830s. Nor do we know exactly how “Young Darby” (as he was known for the first 15 or 20 years of his circus career) came to be apprenticed to William Batty, the proprietor of a small traveling circus, around 1810, or why he chose “Pablo Fanque” as his stage name.

Andrew Ducrow rides five-in-hand during a performance of "Mazeppa", an elaborately staged spectacle, loosely based on the life of the Cossack chief, that helped make his name.

What we can say is that Fanque proved to be a prodigy. He picked up numerous acrobatic skills (he was billed at various stages of his career as an acrobat and tightrope walker) and became renowned as the best horse trainer of his day. The latter talent was most likely developed during a spell with Andrew Ducrow, one of the most prestigious names in the history of the circus and a man sometimes considered the “greatest equestrian performer who has ever appeared before the public.” By the mid-1830s, Fanque was noted not only as a daringly acrobatic master of the corde volante, but also as a superb horseman, billed in the press as “the loftiest jumper in England.”

His most remarkable feat, according to the circus historian George Speight, was leaping on horseback over a coach “placed lengthways with a pair of horses in the shafts, and through a military drum at the same time,” and during the 1840s, the Illustrated London News reported, “by his own industry and talent, he got together as fine a stud of horses and ponies as any in England,” at least one of which was purchased from Queen Victoria’s stables. Fanque was capable of turning out horses that “danced” along to well-known tunes, and it was said that “the band has not to accommodate itself to the action of the horse, as in previous performances of this kind.”

John Turner, who has researched Fanque’s life more thoroughly than any other writer, says that he found little or no evidence that Fanque suffered racial discrimination during his long career. Contemporary newspapers mention his color infrequently, and incidentally, and many paid warm tribute to his charity work; the Blackburn Standard wrote that, in a world not often noted for plain dealing, “such is Mr. Pablo Fanque’s character for probity and respectability, that wherever he has been once he can go again; aye, and receive the countenance and support of  the wise and virtuous of all classes of society.” After Fanque’s death, the chaplain of the Showman’s Guild remarked: “In the great brotherhood of the equestrian world there is no colour line, for, although Pablo was of African extraction, he speedily made his way to the top of his profession. The camaraderie of the Ring has but one test, ability.”

Yet while all this may be true—there’s plenty of evidence, in late Victorian show-business memoirs, that Fanque was a well-respected member of an often disrespected profession—racism was pervasive in the nineteenth century. William Wallett, one of the great clowns of the mid-Victorian age, a friend of Fanque’s who worked with him on several occasions, recalls in his memoirs that on one visit to Oxford, “Pablo, a very expert angler, would usually catch as many fish as five or six of us within sight of him put together”—and this, Wallett adds, “suggested a curious device” to one irked Oxford student:

One of the Oxonians, with more love for angling than skill, thought there must be something captivating in the complexion of Pablo. He resolved to try. One morning, going down to the river an hour or two earlier than usual, we were astonished to find the experimental philosophical angler with his face blacked after the most approved style of the Christy Minstrels.

The acrobat and equestrian John Henderson as owner of his own circus in the 1860s, from a contemporary circus poster.

Although Wallett does not say so, the gesture was a calculated insult, and it may also be significant that it took Fanque years to gather up the wherewithal to go into business for himself. He did not own his circus until 1841, three decades into his career, and when he did finally leave Batty it was with just two horses and a motley assortment of acts, all of them provided by a single family: a clown, “Mr. R. Hemmings and his dog, Hector,” together with “Master H. Hemmings on the tightrope and Mr. E. Hemmings’ feats of balancing.’ ”

Still, Fanque’s showmanship, and a reputation for treating his acts well, helped him to expand his troupe. We have already seen that he was joined by William Kite, the acrobat, and John Henderson, well-known as a rider, wire-walker and tumbler, in Rochdale in 1843. By the middle of the century, historian Brian Lewis notes, Fanque’s circus had become a fixture in the north of England, so it seemed entirely natural for the schoolchildren of one mill town to celebrate a  holiday with “a tour of a bazaar … refreshments and a visit to Pablo Fanque’s circus.” The troupe grew to include a stable of 30 horses; clowns; a ring master, Mr. Hulse; a band, and even its own “architect”–a Mr. Arnold, who was charged with erecting the wooden “amphitheatres” in which they generally performed. When the circus rolled into the Lancashire town of Bolton in March 1846, Fanque himself announced its coming by driving through the main streets twelve-in-hand, a spectacular feat of horsemanship that brought considerable publicity. There were many extended seasons in locations throughout England, Scotland and Ireland. At one point, the circus was based in its own purpose-built auditorium in Manchester, capable of holding an audience of 3,000.

One reason for Fanque’s success that goes unremarked in the circus histories is his keen appreciation of the importance of advertising. Among the advantages that his circus enjoyed over its numerous rivals was that it enjoyed the services of Edward Sheldon, a pioneer in the art of billposting whose family would go on to build the biggest advertising business in Britain by 1900. Fanque seems to have been among the first to recognize Sheldon’s genius, hiring him when he was just 17. Sheldon spent the next three years as Pablo’s advance man, advertising the imminent arrival of the circus as it moved from town to town. Several other mentions of Fanque also testify to his talent for self-promotion. In Dublin in 1851 (and perhaps not entirely inadvertently), another of his stunts prompted a virtual riot. The Musical World reported:

The Dublin playgoers … have nearly torn down a theatre, because of a shockingly bad riddle. “Pablo Fanque, the acrobat,” advertised the gift of a pony and car to the propounder of the best riddle. There were 1,056 competitors, and the prize was awarded to Miss Emma Stanley, for a conundrum so mediocre, that we will not attempt to transcribe it; it is neither good enough nor bad enough for notice. The audience, touched with a sense of national degradation, that out of more than a thousand Irish, not one could make a better piece of wit, broke into such excesses, that a body of police had to be marched into the building, to preserve it from wreck.

Emily Jane Wells, the teenage equestrienne, performed alongside Fanque's circus c.1860 in a benefit for her father, John. She was "regarded as the most finished and graceful" of British circus horsewomen.

The lineup of performers in Fanque’s circus varied endlessly. At one point, Pablo traveled with Jem Mace, the celebrated bare-knuckle boxing champion, who put on exhibitions of fisticuffs, while toward the end of his career he employed a “Master General Tom Thumb”—a play on Barnum’s famous midget—and Elizabeth Sylvester, Britain’s first female clown. He also exploited the provocative allure of “Miss Emily Jane Wells,” whose “pleasing Act of Horsemanship” was daringly performed in “Full Bloomer Costume!!” Late in life, Fanque switched to an entirely family-oriented show, recognizing that it would appeal to a broader range of customers. Bringing in a more middle-class audience allowed Fanque to charge the then-high price of a shilling for a box seat and sixpence for the pit.

For most of these years, Fanque remained respected and esteemed, a fixture on the northern touring circuit, while attaining national prominence just once, when, in Bolton in May 1869, his decision to hire another female performer, “Madame Caroline,” (billed as “the Female Blondin” in imitation of the world-famous tightrope walker and conqueror of the Niagara Falls), almost resulted in tragedy. As the “wire dancer” set off on a rope strung between two buildings in one of the town’s busiest streets, the Penny Illustrated Paper reported, she

stumbled, threw away the balance pole, but by a desperate effort grabbed the rope. She made strenuous efforts to regain her position, but although a strong muscular woman, she was unable to do so and remained suspended in mid-air. Loud cries then arose from the crowd… Attempts were made to lower the rope, which was at a height of about 30 feet, but these were unsuccessful. Just as the poor woman was becoming exhausted, men’s jackets were piled below her and she was persuaded to drop into the arms of those beneath … sustaining no injury beyond the fright and a shake.

Madame Caroline, the Female Blondin, cheats death in Bolton.

Yet Pablo’s life was not without its tragedies. The circus was a harsh mistress. Wallett’s memoirs are filled with gleeful accounts of “triumphs” interspersed with almost equally numerous descriptions of the “chequered fortunes” that saw the circus play to tiny crowds, in bitter weather, or lose out to the more compelling spectacles offered by competing shows. Members of the profession lived on the cusp of financial disaster; the Law Times of December 1859 contains the record of a successful action that Fanque brought against a bankrupt performer to whom he had lent “a number of horses and theatrical accessories,” while he was forced on at least one occasion to close down his circus and sell most of his horses, retaining just enough “to preserve the nucleus.” (On this occasion, Turner notes, “short of resources, Pablo is reported to have appeared at William Cooke’s circus, on the tight-rope.”) On another occasion, Fanque found his troupe sold from under him when a creditor transferred Fanque’s debts to his old master, William Batty, who—Wallett recorded–”came down, holding a bill of sale, and in a most wanton and unfeeling manner sold up the whole concern.”

The lowest point of Fanque’s career, however, came on March 18, 1848, when his circus was playing in Leeds. The troupe took over a wooden amphitheatre that had been erected for his rival Charles Hengler, and used it to put on a benefit performance for Wallett. Partway through the show, when the pit was packed with an audience estimated at well over 600, some supports gave way and the floor collapsed, pitching the spectators down into the lower gallery used for selling tickets. Fanque’s wife, Susannah—the daughter of a Birmingham button-maker and mother to several children who also performed with the circus—was in the ticket booth, and happened to be leaning forward when the structure, according to the Annals and History of Leeds:

fell with a tremendous crash, precipitating a great number of people into the gallery… Mrs Darby and Mrs Wallett were… were both knocked down by the falling timber; two heavy planks fell upon the back part of the head and neck of Mrs Darby, and killed her on the spot. Mrs Wallett, besides a many others, received bruises and contusions, but the above was the only fatal accident.

Fanque rushed to the scene, helped to move the heavy timbers, and carried his wife in his arms to a nearby tavern; a surgeon was called for, but there was nothing to be done. A few days later Susannah “was interred at the Woodhouse cemetery, where a monument records the melancholy event.” At the inquest into her death, it emerged that the builder’s men had partially dismantled the amphitheatre before Fanque arrived, removing a number of the supporting beams, and the structure had been sold to him “as it stood,” with the new owner undertaking “to make any alterations as he liked at his own expense.” Although Pablo still employed Arnold, the architect, nothing was apparently done to strengthen to flooring, but no charges were ever brought against either man for negligence. To make matters worse, it was discovered that as Mrs. Darby lay dead amid the pandemonium, the box containing the evening’s takings, amounting to more than £50, had been stolen.

After his wife’s death, Fanque married Elizabeth Corker of Sheffield, who was 20 years younger than he. They had several children, all of whom joined their circus, and one of whom, known professionally as Ted Pablo, once performed before Queen Victoria and lived into the 1930s.

As for Fanque himself, he survived just long enough to witness the beginnings of the circus’s terminal decline. He died, aged 76 and “in great poverty” (so the equestrian manager Charles Montague recalled in 1881), in a rented room in a Stockport inn.

He was remembered fondly, though. A vast crowd lined the route of his funeral procession in Leeds in May 1871. He was buried alongside his first wife.

Sources

Anon. “Irish war.” The Musical World, 19 April 1851; Anon. “Hope and another v Batty,” The Law Times, November 19, 1859; Brenda Assael. The Circus and Victorian Society. Charlottesville [VA]: University of Virginia Press, 2005; Thomas Frost. Circus Life and Circus Celebrities. London: Chatto and Windus, 1881; Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (ed). Black Victorians/Black Victoriana. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003; Brian Lewis. The Middlemost and the Milltowns: Bourgeois Culture and Politics in Early Industrial England. Stanford [CA]: Standford University Press, 2001; Ian MacDonald. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. London: Pimlico, 1994; John Mayhall. Annals and History of Leeds and Other Places in the County of York. Leeds: Joseph Johnson, 1860; Henry Downes Miles. Pugilistica: the history of British boxing containing lives of the most celebrated pugilists… London: J. Grant 1902; Cyril Sheldon. A History of Poster Advertising. London: Chapman and Hall, 1937;  John Turner. ‘Pablo Fanque’. In King Pole, December 1990 & March 1991; John Turner. The Victorian Arena: The Performers; A Dictionary of British Circus Biography. Formby, Lancashire: Lingdales Press, 1995; W.F. Wallett. The Public Life of W.F. Wallett, the Queen’s Jester. London: Bemrose & Sons, 1870.