 |
| HRH visits Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, at the Hunterian museum. The tiny skeleton standing next to Byrne belongs to Caroline Crachami the Sicilian Fairy. |
“June 1. At London, aged 22, Byrne, the famous Irish
giant. His death is said to have been precipitated by excessive drinking. His
body was carried to Margate, in order to thrown into the sea, agreeable to his
own request; he having been apprehensive that the surgeons would anatomise him.
Byrne, in August 1780, measured exactly 8 feet; in 1780 he had gained 2 inches;
and after his death he measured 8 feet 4 inches.”
The Scots
Magazine, June 1783
“The whole tribe of surgeons put in a claim for the poor
departed Irishman and surround his house just as Greenland harpooners would an
enormous whale.”
The Morning Herald, June 1783
Charles
Byrne, the Irish Giant, died of grief and gin at the age of 22 after his pocket
was picked of his £700 life savings when he was out boozing on the London
streets. £700 was a lot of money in 1783 and Byrne had amassed his small
fortune exhibiting himself in freak shows. He was born in Drummullan in
County Tyrone in 1761 the offspring of a mixed marriage between an Irish father
and a Scottish mother. At the age of 20 a local huckster, Joe Vance, convinced
his parents to let him start showing Byrne at local fairs and then travelled
with him to London via Scotland (at Edinburgh “he alarmed the watchmen at the
North Bridge one morning by lighting his pipe at one of the lamps without even
standing on tiptoe,” according to the 1922 edition of the DNB).
In
London he was a great success, exhibiting himself at Cox’s museum, living next
door in an apartment with custom built furniture, above the cane shop in Spring
Garden Gate. He was on show from 11am to 3pn and 5pm to 8pm six days a week and
became, briefly, the talk of the town, visited by everyone from the King and
Queen and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. By November 1782 London was beginning
to lose interest; Byrne moved from Cox’s in Charing Cross to the Hampshire Pig
in Piccadilly and reduced the entrance fee to 2 shillings and six for Ladies
and Gentlemen and 1 shilling for children and servants in livery. Byrne’s
allure was further reduced when a rival Irish Giant, Patrick Cotter threatened
to remove to London from his home in Bristol and then, even worse, a pair of 7
foot 2 Irish identical twins, the Knipes, also pitched up unexpectedly. The
original Irish giant took to drink and was relocated again to Cockspur Street
in Charing Cross where the price of admittance was reduced to 1 shilling for
all.
 |
| Charles Byrne in the company of the Knipe twins and various dwarfs and Lord Monboddo |
In
April 1783 disaster struck when Byre took himself on a “lunar ramble and was
tempted to visit the Black Horse, a little public house facing the Kings Mews.”
By the time he got home, and when it was too late to do anything about it,
Byrne found that he had been robbed of the £700 in banknotes that he carried
around with him under the impression that no one would dare to steal from a
giant. The loss devastated him and made him drink even more. To add to his woes
he had developed a serious cough which showed all the signs of being
consumption. He managed to stagger on through May but died at Cockspur Street
on the first of June.
 |
| Byrne's skull |
Several
noted collectors of anatomical curiosities had shown an interest in acquiring
his body but Byrne was horrified at the thought of being butchered and
displayed after his death. He left instructions that he was to be buried at sea
in a lead coffin. John Hunter bribed one of Byrnes associates £500 to get the
body for him. Byrnes friends seem to have been a mercenary lot – during the
wake they displayed his corpse in its eight foot coffin to all comers for 2 and
6 (note that in death he commanded the same fee as at the height of his fame). At
an overnight stop on the way to the Kent coast at Margate Byrne was removed
from the coffin and dispatched back to Hunter in London whilst the empty casket
was filled with rocks to imitate the weight of the dead man. Whilst the rock
filled coffin was being dropped into the sea from fishing boat Byrne was back
on his way to London where Hunter carefully sectioned his corpse before boiling
it in a large copper vat to remove the flash.
Campaigners
are currently trying to get the Royal College of Surgeons to surrender Byrne's
skeleton in order to fulfill his last wishes and bury him at sea. In December
2011 Len Doyal, emeritus professor of medical ethics at Queen Mary, University
of London, and Thomas Muinzer, a lawyer at the School of Law, Queen's
University, Belfast, wrote to the British Medical Journal calling for the
skeleton to be buried at sea "as Byrne intended for himself". Dr Sam
Alberti, director of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, rejected
the call, saying "The Royal College of Surgeons believes that the value of
Charles Byrne's remains, to living and future communities, currently outweighs
the benefits of carrying out Byrne's apparent request to dispose of his remains
at sea.”
 |
| Charles Byrne's wake from the University of Warwick website |
No comments:
Post a Comment