The Wolf at the Door

The Eagle Pub on the City Road. George Wombwell junior spent his last years playing his cornet outside such pubs for whatever pennies he could. The sign above the name of the pub, quotes the lines from the nursery rhyme for which it is famous, rather ominously under the circumstances:

Up and down the City Road
In and Out the Eagle
That's the way the money goes
Pop! goes the weasel.

Photo from: By User: Justinc - Photographer: User: Justinc, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=338765

The first part of the Daily Mail article of January 4th 1897, introduces a George Wombwell junior, who has pretty much reached the end of his tether, living in a basement room somewhere near the City Road, and relying on his old and battered cornet to bring him in some petty cash to help him survive. The Mail headline summarises his predicament succinctly enough. It is, the paper concludes, 'A Pathetic Story'.

After facing lions in their dens for many years, poor old George Wombwell, the famous showman, now finds the wolf at his door; and the man who has risked his life by daily contact with wild beasts is by way of dying through the ravages of the worst beast of them all – starvation.

George Wombwell’s name as a menagerie proprietor has, in his day, been known from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Now he is nearing four score years in age and the showman who in his time has given pleasure to thousands in all parts of the country, who has gained admiration and applause for his deeds of daring with lions and tigers, and who still bears the marks of desperate encounters, now finds it difficult to scrape together a few shillings to obtain the barest necessities of life.

It was in a little underground room in a street leading off the City-road that the showman of a bygone age told the story of his chequered life to a representative of the “Daily Mail” on Saturday. The surroundings were dismal enough, in all conscience. The old man was alone; his wife, he said, was in the infirmary. The rent of the room is paid out of pence collected at public-houses, outside of which the old fellow stands and plays his worn-out and leaky cornet. What is left goes for food and, if possible, a bit of firing.

It was in the afternoon that the representative saw him. The “guv’nor,” as he was once familiarly called, had just finished tidying up and an hour or so later would have seen him wending his way through the dense fog with his instrument in an old black bag tucked carefully under his arm to the spots where, perchance, a few coppers would reward his efforts.

“But I have no teeth,” was the old man’s lament, “and my instrument is patched up with cobbler’s wax, or I could play much better than I do.”

How the 'guvnor' had been reduced to such an impecunious state, was the next question that the Daily Mail journalist proposed to answer.