HAUNTING MYSTERY OF THE POLAR ICE EXPEDITION THAT DISAPPEARED
BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST STARS
HAIL THEIR ‘GRANDMA VICTORIA’
IT WAS the first time since the Declaration of Independence that a British monarch had saluted the American flag … and it happened at a private Royal Command Performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
Queen Victoria bowed her head when Buffalo Bill rode up to the Royal Box at London’s Olympia Arena as a horseman galloped around the showground waving the American flag and the ringmaster bellowed: “We are here for peace and friendship!”
It was the “most remarkable entertainment ever seen in England,” said the Illustrated London News. “Brilliant,” said The Sporting Life.
Cowboys rode bucking broncos and lassoed steers; sharpshooter Annie Oakley performed death-defying stunts, such as shooting a cigar out of a cowboy’s mouth; while Mustang Jack carried heavy dumbbell weights and jumped clean over a horse, landing standing upright on his feet.
Buffalo Bill galloped on his trusted steed Old Charlie at full speed while shooting dozens of glass balls propelled into the air and the native Americans chased buffalo across the arena, erected a tepee village and did a war dance.
Cody had arrived to play over 300 open-air shows in 130 towns and cities in the UK, playing to 2.5 million people over a seven-year period.
Reporters flocked to the Harwich dockside when the iconic buffalo hunter sailed in from America with his entourage on the SS State of Nebraska, carrying 176 horses, 16 buffalo, nine elk, the Deadwood stagecoach and a cast of 200 real-life cowboys, native Americans and Mexican vaqueros, along with sharp-shooter Annie Oakley.
A reporter from The Globe standing on the dockside, wrote: “The living freight on board the State of Nebraska is probably as curious and as mixed as was ever sent afloat. On deck Redskins stood silent and immovable. Haughty in mien, graceful in manner, picturesque in dress — the Red Indians of the Wild West and the Last of the Mohicans are one and the same.”
The inaugural show at Earls Court on May 9, 1887, was a huge hit, drawing crowds of 28,000 on its opening day. It was performed against a vast scenic backdrop depicting the prairie, with mountains, rocks and trees and produced to illustrate the life of frontiersman Bill and the North American Indian.
Two days later, Queen Victoria wrote personally inviting Cody to stage a private performance for her Golden Jubilee year. It was the first time she had attended a public performance since the death of Prince Albert 26 years earlier.
She arrived at Earls Court “in a big shiny wagon with lots of shiny horse soldiers on both sides,” one of the cast, Black Elk of the Sioux, told reporters. The arena was empty apart from the royal box in the grandstand, where the Queen and her 25-strong entourage sat.
Cody said: “We excelled ourselves for her.” Annie Oakley and fellow sharpshooter Lillian Smith, who was only 16, didn’t miss a shot, he added. The choreographed horseback charges were perfect and the bucking bronco horses “bucked like steam engines”.
Victoria had a long chat with 26-year-old Oakley after the show when she was introduced to the cast and told her how clever she was. The Deadwood star said it was the greatest compliment she could ever have. The whole cast cheered and waved, calling the Queen ‘Grandmother England’, when her entourage left for Windsor.
Black Elk said: “We stood right in front of our grandmother. She was little but fat and we liked her, because she was good to us. After we had danced, she spoke to us, saying she was 67 years old.
Victoria wrote in her diary: “All the different people — wild, painted Red Indians from America, on their wild bare-backed horses, of different tribes all came tearing round at full speed, shrieking and screaming, which had the weirdest effect.
“The cowboys are fine looking people, but the painted Indians, with their feathers and wild dress (very little of it) were rather alarming looking.”
Crowds would gather just to see the show’s arrival in towns across Britain, taking up nearly a mile of rolling stock.
FLEET STREET SNUFF KING WHO
MADE HIS FORTUNE AT A PINCH
ACROSS the road from where the Express Black Lubyanka would one day rise, in Fleet Street, a kilted Scottish Highlander would stand guard at number 106, the shop of England’s richest snuff maker.
His name was John Hardham and he made his fortune thanks to a mistake by his manager making the snuff that was to be used by the rich and famous. His shop under the sign of the Red Lion, became a honeypot for the gentry and the public in the 18th century.
They would often queue for up to an hour to purchase Hardham’s No.37 Snuff that had become famous across the country and Europe and the tobacconist hired the Highlander and his sword to keep order. It was also a nice touch of officialdom at the door.
Actor David Garrick added to the snuff’s popularity when he spoke about it in a play on stage and word soon spread.
Hardham grew up the son of a grocer in Chichester where he became a keen church bell ringer. One of his ancestors was mayor of the town in 1535. After training as a diamond cutter, he moved to Fleet Street in 1744 and started a small tobacconist business and by luck his fortune changed. He was to become a millionaire.
He dearly loved the stage and idolised Garrick, who managed the Drury Lane Theatre just up the road off The Strand. He went so often, Garrick eventually gave him a job as a numberer, the official who counted the number of people in the audience so that the ticket sellers wouldn’t cheat on seat revenue.
Hardham became so busy at the theatre that his Fleet Street business began to suffer, so he hired a manager. Months later he was surprised to discover a sudden rise in sales of one of his snuffs which the manager couldn’t explain.
In roasting the batch in question the oven had been allowed to overheat, and the finely ground tobacco leaves had started to smoulder. To disguise the burnt smell, and keep himself out of trouble, the manager added a blend of spices.
Customers loved it and came back for more hoping it would soon become an additional line. Hardham spent days with his manager finding out just how much burning had taken place, adding the spices again. When he found the right mix, it was marketed as Hardham’s No.37 Snuff”.
It took off and then Garrick began to appear before the curtains at the start of performances, to extol the virtues of his friend’s new product. He went on to use it in a script for a play. Hardham was on the road to wealth.
He was soon wining and dining with celebrities and politicians and women took notice of him. Garrick even put on a couple of plays written by his friend, but they flopped. Meanwhile rumours were rife that his shop and rooms might be more than just a tobacco outlet as ‘stage door’ women from Theatreland, many of them abandoned by fickle actors, would often be seen turning up.
The word was that the shop would always “take care of the financial considerations of the Drury Lane actors’ poor unfortunate ladies”. Truth was perhaps that Hardham was a generous man and cared about people, always helping those in need.
The caring tobacconist soon accrued a sum of over £20,000 (£5 million today) through his sales and careful investments. And on February 6, 1772, he made his will. He had never married and apart from a few small annuities bequeathed to relatives, ordered that the rest of his estate be sold and invested to help the poor of Chichester.
After he died in September that year, in his late fifties, years of litigation by his family followed. But his legacy remains to help the poor today. Why the snuff was called No.37 is still a mystery.
LOVE AND SNUFF …
A book on the history of snuff was published by Vizetelly & Co Printers and Engravers in Fleet Street in the late 1800s. Called A Pinch – Of Snuff (curious particulars and original anecdotes of snuff taking), it tells of an anonymous Irish barrister who left his snuff box to his beloved wife when he died with a touching poem.
My snuff box, that will last for ever,
The gift of my grandmother, long ago
Lift the lid, but still endeavour
To keep my dust, which lies below.
And when with cold your head is stuffed up,
Turn the screw, but cautious be,
A single pinch may then be snuffed up,
And when you sneeze — oh, think of me!
TERRY MANNERS
9 June 2025
ON THE morning of May 19, 1845, two of the British Navy’s finest vessels set out on a dangerous voyage into the uncharted and deadly waters of the Arctic.
At Greenhithe Docks, the Press reported on the crowds cheering as HMS Erebus and HMS Terror (above), in fresh coats of black paint with distinctive white bands around their hulls, weighed anchor and headed down the Thames, with their combined 134 officers and crew waving from the decks.
That was the last their loved ones and the British nation would see of them. They never came back … and what happened to them was a mystery.
They were embarking on a quest for the Northwest Passage, an unidentified sea route across the top of North America to the Pacific. At that time, it was still not known what lay in the regions around the North Pole: some believed there was a great ocean, rimmed by ice. The expedition was confident of finding it. It was to become the worst disaster in Polar exploration.
The Illustrated London News reported that the expedition led by Sir John Franklin, a proud, patriotic Navy man, had five years of food supplies, including 8,000 tins of meat, vegetables, and soup. There were also live sheep, pigs, cattle and hens. “Even 1,000 books for the crew,” it said.
“Their cabins were heated by hot water piped through the floor and the ships’ bows were reinforced with iron planks to help them break through ice. Each ship was equipped with a specially designed screw propeller driven by a wheel-less steam locomotive.” They were, better equipped than previous Polar expeditions.
Franklin’s ships were last seen by two American whaling vessels off Baffin Bay at the end of July that year waiting for ice to clear in Lancaster Sound to begin their journey to the Bering Strait, the most eastern point of the Asian continent and Alaska.
The treacherous Strait froze solid each winter and was known to be unstable. Many had tried to cross the 51 miles of it by foot and died. All contact with the ships was lost. But back home alarm bells didn’t ring for two years, even though The Times continually reported on the disappearing voyage.
Finally, Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, along with some MPs, began to pressure the Admiralty to send out search parties for the missing men.
In spring of 1848, the first overland search party was dispatched, and a £20,000 reward was offered for information on the mystery, the Morning News announced. It marked the start of what would become a 150-year effort to discover the expedition’s fate.
As the years dragged on, traces of the Franklin crew were uncovered on land. Gravesites, relics, and oral testimonies of the local Inuit population painted a bleak picture of starvation, sickness, desperation and cannibalism among them.
Inuits told of starving, exhausted men staggering through the snow not bothering to ask local people how they survived in such a wilderness.
Many historians believed this was because of Franklin’s belief that gentlemen of the British Empire never needed help. But an old Eskimo woman later told searchers how the starving men fell and died as they walked.
It wasn’t until 1990 that exhumations on Beechey Island and King William Island discovered Vitamin C deficiencies and scurvy in the bodies some of the crew, and high concentrations of lead from the cans of food.
It was believed the men split into several groups and shared out the food taking their chances to walk over the frozen sea beneath them.
The supplier came under attack in London. The Press reported: “The haste with which he had prepared thousands of cans of food led to sloppily applied beads of solder on the cans’ interior edges, allowing lead to leak into the tins.”
According to a note later found in a cairn, Franklin died on King William Island on June 11, 1847, but the exact location of his grave under the ice is unknown. He is probably well preserved.
It wasn’t until 2014 and 2016, that the wrecks of HMS Erebus and Terror were finally discovered, trapped in the ice, and battened down for winter. It was still a mystery why they were abandoned.
