From myth to misery: the tragic story of the Pig-Faced Lady
Far-fetched tales that began as entertainment ended in the exploitation of humans and animals.
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Charles H Wheatley and Henry Coe stood in the dock at Ipswich magistrate’s court on charges of child cruelty. The year was 1911 but their crimes drew on a centuries-old folkloric story of a mysterious and hideous half-human creature.
Wheatley, a fairground showman, had been paying Coe £1 a week to rent his 14-year-old daughter and exhibit her as ‘The Pig-Faced Lady’. The young woman had a facial difference described in news reports as ‘a terribly shocking one’ and ‘a horrible thing to look at altogether’.1
On Easter Monday 1911, Inspector Tydeman of the NSPCC visited a fair on Woodbridge Road, Ipswich. Outside one booth was the sign:
A Monstrosity
The Pig-Faced Lady; if proved otherwise £100 will be paid.
Inside the stuffy atmosphere of the tent, a petroleum flare lamp gave the only light. The young woman stood wearily, and when the inspector shook her hand, he found it cold and clammy. Wheatley abruptly denied her the drink of pop she asked for, telling her she had already had her tea and anything else would make her sick. Inspector Tydeman sent for the police, who arrested Wheatley and the girl’s father, Henry Coe. ‘In a crying and exhausted state,’ the girl was placed into the care of Clara Wilde, porter of the Woodbridge Road workhouse.
Part of Wheatley’s defence for exploiting her was that the girl had spent her whole life unable to set foot outside without harassment. She could not attend school and had been rejected from a London residential home on account of her appearance. At least while working at the fair she was looked after and well fed. Wheatley’s solicitor pointed out that ‘freaks were shown everywhere,’2 and the fact that some people didn’t like it did not mean a crime had been committed. Wheatley, however, was fined £5 plus £3 3s costs. Coe was bound over to be of good behaviour for 12 months.
Very little more is known about the young woman or her fate. In the 1911 census, taken just a couple of weeks before this court case, the showman’s household includes two teenagers with the names Kate Wheatley and Emma Wheatley, although they are described as boarders ‘assisting in show’, not as his daughters. Emma’s birthplace is given as Grimston, Norfolk, the home village of Henry Coe. This young woman is potentially the one rescued by the NSPCC. Intriguingly, an exhibit titled ‘Little Emma, the Pig-Faced Girl’ was advertised at Barnstaple Fair in Devon in 1921, but whether this has anything to do with the earlier case it is impossible to tell.
Wheatley had not come up with the idea of the ‘Pig-Faced Lady’ from nowhere; such a character had been a staple of fairground ‘freak shows’ for much of the 19th century, and stories of porcine aristocratic ladies in search of husbands amused Regency London.
In 1815 a rumour circulated that Miss Atkinson, a young Irish lady of good family and considerable fortune, lived in Manchester Square, but was never seen out in society. A print published by John Fairburn gave some details supposedly proffered by the lady’s former attendant, who was too frightened to continue in the role despite a salary of £1,000 a year.
Her body and limbs are of the most perfect and beautiful shape, but her head and face resembles that of a Pig. She eats her victuals out of a Silver Trough, in the same manner as Pigs do; and, when spoken to by any of her relatives or her companion, she can only answer by a Grunt.3
With varying degrees of scepticism, London society debated over the Pig-Faced Lady’s existence, and the claim that ‘on her life and issue by marriage a very large property depends’ at length brought out the fortune-hunters. In 1815, The Times received an advertisement, accompanied by a one-pound note, from a gentleman trying to contact Miss Atkinson in order to offer himself as her husband. The editor, however, brutally dismissed him:
We have put his offer in the fire, and shall send his money to some charity, thinking it a pity that such a fool should have any. Our rural friends hardly know what idiots London contains.4
No one ever managed to meet the Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square, but other manifestations of the story began to appear in travelling sideshows. In 1826, a fairground performer called Mr Lipson complained to the magistrate at Union Hall about the poor conditions in which he had to work. He was a man of short stature and was often forced to share accommodation with the show’s pig-faced lady, who was ‘neither better nor worse than a shaved bear’ and sometimes attempted to eat him.5
Bears took the role of most early 19th-century Pig-Faced Ladies, as detailed by ‘Lord’ George Sanger in his 1910 memoir, Seventy Years a Showman. He remembered seeing at The Great Hyde Park Fair in 1837 a pig-faced lady called ‘Madam Stevens’ (probably named after Irish philanthropist Griselda Stevens, whose use of a veil led to unfounded rumours that she had a snout).
…was really a fine brown bear, the paws and face of which were kept closely shaved, the white skin under the fur having a close resemblance to that of a human being. Over the paws were fitted white gloves, with well-stuffed fingers, so that the pig-faced lady seemed to have nice plump white arms above them.
The bear was strapped in a chair at the back of the caravan, clothed in female dress, shawl, cap, the poke bonnet of the time, etc.
Concealed behind the bear was a small boy, who had the job of poking the animal with a stick to make it grunt in reply to questions.
In 1829, spectators visiting the Easter Greenwich Fair were pleasantly surprised to find that the pig-faced lady on display was not the usual bear, but a sloth. The animal’s docile nature made it an easier prospect for the proprietor, Mr Maugham, to control. His exhibition made a handsome profit even though Maugham’s initial outlay for the sloth had been a bit steep.6
Eighty years later, the character of the Pig-Faced Lady was still attracting fairground audiences keen to be both entertained and repulsed - but animal exploitation had been replaced by that of a vulnerable human. I would like to imagine that the young woman rescued from Charles Wheatley in 1911 got the medical care, kindness and acceptance she so clearly needed, but perhaps this is too much to hope for.