Born to be a Wild Beast

To return to the Daily Mail of the 4th January, 1897, and going back to earlier days, the investigating journalist paused to note that:

George Wombwell’s uncle was the original menagerie proprietor of that name. Singularly enough, George himself was born in what at one time had done duty as an elephant house, but which had been converted by his father into a living room.

“It made a capital room”, said the old man, “and stood for years by the side of our cottage. People used to say I was born to be a wild beast then and sure enough, when I was ten years old, it was agreed that my uncle should adopt me.” 

Reading between the lines, it rather seems that George's parents, Zachariah Wombwell and Mary Webb, were not displeased to be rid of their 'problem child'. It seems also that Zachariah may well have been working for the menagerie and at one point at least, looking after Wombwell elephants before embarking on one of the more unusual home conversion projects of his or anyone else's time and transforming the elephant house into his living room.

George junior was born in Stoke Newington in around 1822. His mother was still there in 1841, and duly recorded in the census of that year, the very first national census of our times. The Wombwell home, and hence the original elephant house were almost certainly in Lordship Road, just off Church Street. 

From a website devoted to the villas that were built along Lordship Road, beginning around 1835. As a rural area just north of the city, the location would have been ideal as a transit and storage point for the Wombwell menagerie in its early days.

And on that very same census day, the recording officials also duly noted the details for the family living next door. It is just possible that they may have detected in the elderly lady they encountered there a hint or more of an Irish accent. Either way, she was giving no more away than she needed to, and the census record that survives suggests that she was originally from Middlesex. 

All this was very far from being the case however. The lady in question, also carrying the Wombwell surname, was in fact the daughter of an Irish freemason, Godfrey West and grand-daughter of a distinguished Downpatrick doctor and army lieutenant, Seneca Hadzor. Her line stretched back to Norman Irish barons, and to eminent Anglo-Irish families in County Down, from whom roughly a decade earlier she had inherited substantial holdings through her cousin, Elizabeth Carson.

In short, Maria West of Downpatrick would have been very well acquainted with that 'wild beast', who in 1897 was relaying his own memories to the Daily Mail.