The champion malingerer
The champion malingerer
A young man in late Victorian England used his ingenuity to be allowed to stay in bed.
Although The Quack Doctor likes to focus on dodgy doctors and dubious advertisers, sometimes it’s the patient who is taking everyone for a ride.
This week I have been researching the life of Abraham Henry Carter (alias Herbert Ellis Carter, alias Lennox Alphonsi, alias Lennox de Voy etc.), whose feigned illnesses and months of hospital care at parish expense led to the newspapers dubbing him ‘The Champion Malingerer’. Not only did he get free bed and board by convincing doctors that he was unwell, but his charming personality, conversational skill and artistic talent also endeared him to those responsible for his care.
‘He is one of the most fascinating men that ever enlivened a sick room,’ reported the Manchester Evening News in 1899. ‘His capacity for making friends is endless.’
Carter was born in Keadby, Lincolnshire, in 1872. After his father deserted the family, he lived with his grandfather John Ellis, who had a much younger wife and a daughter Abraham’s age. He attended the local grammar school and, on finishing there, went to nearby Doncaster to train as a joiner.
Things began to go wrong for him when he was about 20 years old. He was convicted of stealing a lady’s silver hunting watch and a cheque book, and (under the name Herbert Ellis Carter) sentenced to three weeks’ hard labour at Hull Prison. Just a couple of months later, he was back inside – this time at Wakefield – for stealing some dead rabbits and various sundries including a button hook.
The prison sentences appear to have shown him that he was not cut out for hard labour – or indeed, any labour. After his release he joined the Army, but didn’t like it and feigned lunacy to get discharged (it is not recorded whether this involved putting underpants on his head and saying ‘wibble’). The army surgeons referred him to the workhouse in his home parish union of Thorne but the staff there knew him and did not believe in his insanity, so they discharged him as ‘cured’ a couple of days later.
He then frequented the racetracks for a while, trying to win his fortune, but when this did not work out he entered the Army Service Corps. Once again, he got himself discharged for lunacy.
From that point, the workhouses became his target. Traditionally the last resort for those facing destitution or infirmity, they were to Carter a source of free accommodation and food. He just had to find a way to avoid doing any of the work that was required of physically capable inmates.
While the workhouse was not renowned as a desirable holiday destination, it had come on a bit since the dark days of Oliver Twist. The infirmary wards were clean and orderly, with trained nurses and plain but nourishing food. At Halifax Union Workhouse in 1895, Carter spent more time in the infirmary than anywhere else, but the staff got wise to him and sent him back to Thorne.
Carter next tackled Chorlton Union Workhouse at Withington near Manchester. He sought admission with the story that he was an acrobat called Lennox de Voy and had injured his back falling from a trapeze at the Royal Albert Hall. Once admitted to the workhouse infirmary, he ‘conveniently lost the power of motion’ and remained in bed there for several months, delighting the nurses with tales of his life as an acrobat and his extraordinary talent for drawing sketches. He convinced the doctors that his legs were completely paralysed.
All the while, he maintained correspondence with a nurse at the Halifax hospital, having been ‘successful in securing her photograph’ while there. These letters aroused the suspicion of the Chorlton officials, who investigated and found him to be the responsibility of the Thorne parish union. Against the protestations of his fans among the staff, they arranged to send him back there.
Transporting an apparently paralysed patient, however, proved tricky. The doctors insisted that he remain in a lying down position on the journey, and this proceded with some difficulty via ambulance, train and a spring lurry (a flat-bed style of cart). The relieving officer who accompanied him provided some port, brandy and fresh eggs to sustain him along the way.
His homecoming to Thorne, however, was underwhelming. The jaded workhouse master met him with the words ‘Oh, it’s you, is it? Get up!’ and he sheepishly walked into the building unaided.
After another spell in prison for stealing a suit of clothes, Carter popped up at the Brownlow Hill infirmary in Liverpool as injured Parisian acrobat Lennox Alphonsi. In 1899, a Chorlton workhouse official happened to be talking to one of the nurses from Brownlow Hill, and heard all about this popular patient who was ‘a most interesting conversationalist and drew the loveliest sketches.’ Sure enough it was Carter, and back to Thorne he had to go.
The details of his career after this are hazier. In November 1900, a pedlar named Charles Blair Carter got into trouble at Bedford for having allegedly faked being ‘deaf and dumb’ for a year and living at the parish expense, before making a sudden recovery. He was widely believed to be the ‘champion malingerer’ who had done the rounds of the northern workhouses. An official from Chorlton identified him from a photograph, and another testified in court that he was ‘quite certain’ this was the man he had known as Herbert Ellis Carter/Lennox de Voy.
There does, however, appear to have been a real Charles Blair Carter, a licensed pedlar who suffered intermittent loss of speech and hearing associated with epilepsy. He was known to the workhouses of South Wales and Gloucestershire and seems to have been active in that area while our Carter was charming the nurses of the north. Could Abraham Henry/Herbert Ellis Carter have got hold of this person’s documentation and performed identity theft at Bedford? Or was the Bedford defendant telling the truth when he insisted he really was Charles Blair Carter, and the Chorlton officials were mistaken?
What I did find out was that Abraham Henry Carter’s career of fraudulent idleness was cut short by genuine illness. He died in the workhouse at Ecclesall Bierlow, Sheffield, in 1903 at the age of just 31 – an early end to an unusual life, in which his obvious intelligence and talent could perhaps have been used more constructively.
From The Quack Doctor Archives
The alleged Dr Barber: a case of identity theft in 1912
A horse, tacked up but riderless, grazed peacefully on the north bank of Oregon’s Siuslaw River one December morning in 1904. When the search party saw it, they shouted out in hope, but no human response broke the after-storm silence of the damp air. Dr Richard Henry Barber of Gardiner hadn’t been seen since he set off on a gruelling twenty-mile journey to an emergency in the town of Florence the day before. His body was found under a jetty.
Two years later, Britain’s General Medical Council received a letter from Dr Richard Barber stating that he had returned from Oregon and now resided at 52 Tunnel Road, Liverpool …
