Two Fat Ladies and Hercules Tom: The Story of the Australian Giant Family

By Terence Fitzsimons

Clara, Anna and Tom Snell, from Gippsland, travelled the world as the Australian Giant Family, and were acclaimed as the most famous and familiar figures in Australia during the late 1800s.

Following their ‘discovery’ in 1886 by Max Kreitmayer, proprietor of the Melbourne Waxworks, they appeared as ‘prodigies’ at various venues in America, Great Britain, South Africa, Ceylon and New Zealand.

As mature adults they had a combined body weight of over half a ton; (heavier than a Mini Minor and just a little lighter than a VW beetle.)

In their journeying they met up with other human ‘oddities’; Jo-Jo, the dog-faced boy, Abomah, the Amazon Giantess and Mrs Tom Thumb. They also mixed with celebrities such as Chief Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill.

Their father, William Snell, became the driving force behind the Giant Family, but as the giant trio grew to adulthood tensions arose between them and their father. Tom grew tired of ‘exhibiting’, and Clara concluded she and her younger sister Anna could manage to tour without their father’s help – and they did.

The Giant Family did more to advertise their country than our highly paid Commissioners today, for wherever they exhibited they received generous press notices, and were one of the wonders of the world.
The Bunyip and Garfield Express, 15th June, 1914.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mirador Publishing
• Release date: Apr 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781910530498

Book preview

Introduction

For hundreds of years large people seem to have had the capacity to generate a great deal of public curiosity and created for themselves an aura of celebrity. In England, for example, Bartholomew’s Fair had featured fat people, not just for amusement, but as a focus of wonderment. One such person was William Westhead. He first appeared at this prestigious fair in 1825 when he was fifteen years old. Weighing 308lbs he was reported as having been ‘lightly dressed in a linen garb, to show his limbs, with a bonnet of the same’. His mother and father, of normal weight and build, were present and stood beside their child to highlight the disparity in size between parents and progeny. William Westhead toured successfully for many years.

At this time having a remarkably fat person as a resident was seen by any village or town as an asset, and such people were proudly acclaimed by the local burgers. Daniel Lambert, a native of Leicester, was lauded by the citizens of that town as a ‘prodigy of nature’. When he died in 1806 at the age of thirty-nine years, his friends had a handsome stone memorial erected in witness of his personal greatness. He weighed 739lbs.

In Australia, occasional claims were made that there resided within this or that colony the heaviest British subject. Max Kreitmayer, proprietor of the Melbourne Waxworks, had already exhibited a fat girl with some success. Tasmanians proudly claimed the Hobart Publican, Thomas Jennings, as the biggest man in Australasia, though he only weighed a mere 476lbs.

And then there was the Australian Giant Family.

1

On Stage

Bourke Street was crowded and noisy. The clanking of the cable-trams and the ringing of their bells added to the general clamour. Water carts moved up and down the street in a vain endeavour to keep down the Melbourne dust. A press of people had gathered in front of the window of Kreitmayer’s Waxworks where a number of new figures were on display. The crowd parted briefly as Detective Conway of the Metropolitan Police hustled away a pickpocket who had been caught lifting a lady’s dress in an attempt to snatch her purse from her dimity pocket, hidden under her skirt.

A poster in the window of the Waxworks proudly announced that ‘The Giant Family, natives of Victoria,’ were to be seen daily on the premises. They shared the billing with a two and a half foot tall singing and dancing New Zealand midget.

The 28th of January 1886 issue of Melbourne Punch advised its readers that the three juveniles who made up the Giant Family were ‘remarkable specimens of the Australian race’. The singing of the New Zealand midget was dismissed out of hand. The Argus gave further particulars, reporting that ‘three gigantic children of one family, born in Gippsland, are being exhibited at the Waxworks. There are two sisters and a brother. The eldest, a girl, is aged 12 years and weighs 253lbs; the boy, aged eight, weighs 122lbs; and the youngest, a girl, turns the scales at 114lbs. They all look remarkably healthy and move about actively. The boy, it is stated, can cut down a tree as quickly as many expert adults. A remarkable circumstance is that their father, a selector, and the mother, are of about average height, and rather inclined to leanness than obesity’.

Mr Kreitmayer was well pleased with the increased custom generated by his latest novelty attraction.

* * *

Max Kreitmayer was an anatomical model maker. A Bavarian, he had studied and practised his craft in Munich, Glasgow, London and Dublin. In 1856 the lure of the Australian gold diggings brought him to Melbourne. Like many before him, he failed to make his fortune and returned to model making. There were no great medical establishments or teaching hospitals in Melbourne at the time, and the call for Kreitmayer’s anatomical models was limited. By 1861 he had found himself a business partner, Philemon Sohier, a self-proclaimed professor of phrenology, and together they opened a ‘Grand Anatomical Museum’ in Bourke Street East. The brochure advertising the establishment ‘respectfully solicited the patronage of the medical profession, clergy as well as the general public, as they (the proprietors) feel convinced that their labours in the construction of this elaborate museum, will promote the best interest of Health, Morality, and Religion’.

The anatomical models exhibited ranked from the merely titivating through to the downright salacious. For example, the museum’s catalogue listed figure number 178 as depicting ‘inflammation of the testicle’, while figure 193 displayed the ‘breasts of a woman who became affected with secondary symptoms by suckling [a child] with congenital chancres of the lips’. Clearly some of the exhibits shocked the moral sensibilities of various patrons, though titillating others – as they were perhaps intended to do – and complaints were received concerning the attendance of males and females at the museum. To avoid further criticism Kreitmayer was obliged to arrange that patrons be segregated, gentlemen alone being admitted every day except Friday, this day being specially reserved for ladies only. Women would attend on a Friday between the hours of 11am and 5pm, followed by a later session from 7pm to 10pm. During these visits Mrs Kreitmayer would give lectures on the exhibits. It is not clear if figure 177, illustrating ‘paraphymosis and gangrene of the foreskin’ remained on display at these times.

The museum proved a great attraction, and over time Kreitmayer expanded the scope of the exhibition, replacing the anatomical models with life size figures of famous, and infamous, personalities. In addition, a series of ‘drawing room entertainments’ was introduced to cater for a more genteel clientele. A pipe organ was installed on the premises and novelty acts were engaged.

Very early on ‘curiosities of nature’ were invited to exhibit, probably the earliest being ‘The Fat Girl or Lachlan Prodigy’, a fourteen year old adolescent of substantial girth. A bearded lady and a bearded boy and many more lusus naturae – jokes of nature – were put on show. As business increased Kreitmayer engaged Phillip Stuart as an ‘entertainment’s manager’; his task was to seek out such human oddities, as well as variety artists and novel turns to appear at the Waxworks, as the museum had now come to be known.

Kreitmayer’s Waxworks made occasional tours to provincial centres displaying selected exhibits from the collection, and sometimes featuring a number of artists engaged by Stuart. The goldfields at Bendigo and Ballarat provided audiences who had a voracious appetite for any entertainment that served as a distraction for the hard slog of the diggings. Such visits did not always run smoothly.

In August 1861, at a time when the exhibits were still purely anatomical, Kreitmayer brought his models to Ballarat. He hired space in the Mechanics’ Institute on Sturt Street, a main thoroughfare, and put out flyers announcing that the Ballarat Hospital Trust would receive a percentage of the admission price. The Institute’s committee were happy to rent out the main lecture theatre, as they sought to encourage the ‘wider community’ to utilise the facilities, and they also needed the income. However, neither the committee nor Kreitmayer had anticipated the censorious conduct of the Institute’s secretary, William Batten, who, having seen the ‘intimate nature’ of the models on display, promptly turned off the hall’s lights. A nonplussed Kreitmayer undertook to remove some of his exhibits, but Batten had decided enough was enough and the lights remained extinguished.

Novelty and topicality became the focus of the Waxworks. In later years, after the infamous gunfight at Glenrowan, the outlaw Kelly gang were rendered in wax and displayed at Kreitmayer’s. It was rumoured that Kreitmayer himself had shaved the hanged Ned Kelly and produced his death mask. Waxen effigies of the royal family too were a perennial favourite.

* * *

The Giants that Max Kreitmayer was so enthusiastically promoting were three children of the Snell family. George and Sophia Snell were a Devonshire couple who had settled in Gippsland on the eastern coast of Victoria.

Before arriving in Australia the Snells had a fraught start to their married life. Sophia Snell, mother of these large children, came from a good, steady Crediton family. She had created something of a surprise when, at the age of twenty-two, she married her first cousin, William Snell-Pope, two years her junior. Four months later surprise turned to scandal when the couple’s first born, William George, arrived.

But William was not a flighty young man. He was, in fact, a hardened veteran of the British Army, having served from the age of fourteen as a drummer. Now in civilian life he had every intention of forwarding himself in the world. To that end he apprenticed himself to a baker.

Musically talented, William’s skill extended beyond drumming. He was a competent cornet player and adept on the clarinet. Already something of a showman, he displayed great self-confidence when it came to performing in public.

The newlyweds had settled in the city of Exeter, but within nine months tragedy struck when infant William George suddenly died. Sophia was inconsolable, though William was more stoic, his infant having been something of an embarrassment.

In time William qualified as a master baker, setting up his own shop and employing three assistants. By 1870 William and Sophia had a family of five children, the last, Katherine, being born on the 11th of May that year. It was then that William announced his intention of taking the whole family to settle in Australia. He felt he had gone as far as he could, commercially and socially, and was now being stifled in Exeter. The newspaper accounts of the gold strikes in the colony of Victoria that William read about in the newspapers at the local Mechanics’ Institute, convinced him that Melbourne was the place to be.

Melbourne at the time was a prosperous and bustling city with a population of 200,000 souls, and it had the advantage of being situated near the goldfields. While William was in no way attracted by the prospect of a hard speculative spell on the diggings, he calculated that there was bound to be a call from the locals, and the diggers, for good wholesome bread, and he would ensure that they got it. The decision being made, William arranged for the family to depart from Portsmouth during September.

Sophia was not pleased at the thought of leaving Devonshire, a place where she and her kin had lived for generations, nor was she taken by the prospect of carting four young children and a four month old infant to the other side of the world – all this on the strength of William’s cavalier promise of a better and secure future. She loved her husband dearly and was dutifully prepared, if he insisted, to do as he bid. But what if the gold gave out? What then of his hopes for a thriving business? William promised that if matters did not work out to his satisfaction they would all return to Devon. Mollified, Sophia acquiesced to his plan.

The family embarked on the Aberdeen Lines’ sailing ship Nineveh on Saturday 24th September 1870 and set sail for Australia.

2

Arrival

The Snell family landed at the port of Williamstown on the 19th of December 1870. The Argus recorded the arrival of the clipper ship Nineveh from London with 431 assisted immigrants on board, the largest number of such settlers yet to arrive in the colony. Captain Barnet was complimented on the cleanliness and good order of the ship, and Dr White was praised for the healthy condition of the passengers, only one death having occurred during the voyage.

Curiously, the family, having embarked as Snell-Pope, arrived in Australia as Snell, pure and simple. William, having listened to the comments and gossip of some of the Australian crewmen and being informed that there were many places in Victoria where Catholic Irish were not well received, imagined that the surname Pope might leave the family in the position of being mistaken as being of the Romish persuasion – maybe even taken as Teagues! He decided on the name change.

William promptly set about finding a suitable location in Melbourne for the establishment of his bakery. The family were still in the process of settling into their new surroundings when William came to hear of a new gold rush in the Gippsland area. There was also much talk of a booming local timber industry, with the prospect of the railway being taken through that part of the colony. William had not changed his attitude to mining, nor had he become enamoured of the idea of logging or working on the railway, but he knew all those miners and navigators would be in need of bread. He gave up the thought of opening a bakery in Melbourne and boarded the family on a paddle steamer taking them around Wilsons Promontory and up the east coast to the bustling customs station at Port Albert. Once there they transferred on to a small steam-powered supply ship that ferried them back across Corner Inlet and up the river to their destination, Stockyard Creek. Here a settlement, and a main thoroughfare strewn with tree stumps, had been hacked out of the bush. There were seventeen hotels in the township and many rough built stores, all catering for the crush of 2,000 diggers. The Snell family had finally arrived at their new home.

* * *

Sophia Snell had never reconciled herself to the idea that she and the children should have to make a permanent home in Australia. She was sustained by the promise her husband had made that the family would return to the Old Country if any business he undertook in the new land proved unsuccessful. The ramshackle and make-do conditions at Stockyard Creek did little to alleviate her sense of unease. By contrast, William was very pleased with the situation in which he found himself. In an attempt to placate Sophia he assured her that not only had he travelled with enough funds to set them up in their new home, but, if worst came to worst, there was sufficient cash held in reserve to pay for the family’s passage back to England.

That was all well and good; nonetheless, Sophia was not happy to find herself in a rough shack at the back of beyond, trying to bring up a family in primitive conditions. It was no consolation to be told that this was the usual lot of a settler family. She was intent, as soon as the opportunity and excuse arose, on taking the children back to the placid and settled social climate of Devonshire, far away from the dust and grime of Stockyard Creek.

However it may have been for Sophia, Stockyard Creek was proving a sound choice for William. Canny enough not to risk all his capital in a new venture, he had arranged a partnership with Edward Maginn, one of the township’s established grocers. As a condition of the partnership he undertook to keep Maginn supplied with fresh bread daily. In consequence of this arrangement, William’s bakery was doing a good trade. The nearby Victoria Gold Mine was in full operation and in addition, the drovers, who were regularly taking their cattle through from Port Albert to Westernport, provided the bakery with steady custom.

As well as the hotels and stores the township boasted a bank, post office and a mechanics’ institute. There was also the prospect of a state primary school being built. The telegraph had already been installed at Port Albert, and any important news quickly reached the township. Stockyard Creek took on a settled air. William’s bakery was needed and he enjoyed feeling important in the community.

A stipendiary magistrate, William Henry Foster, was appointed to preside in the area and in time the township came to be known as Foster. The magistrate was flattered by this name change.

William for his part, and in spite of Sophia’s complaints, was feeling very much at home in Foster. A local brass band had been formed and, having demonstrated his competence on coronet and clarinet, William was recruited as bandmaster. As always he thoroughly enjoyed being in the spotlight.

The children were intrigued by their new surroundings. Young Katherine, the infant of the family, had her two older sisters to look after her; Eliza was nine years of age and Gertrude eight. The two boys, William Gregory – dubbed Willie – aged six, and George, two years younger, enjoyed themselves playing in the local creek and investigating the workings of their father’s bakery. Sophia fretted and complained that the children were likely to run wild. There was a Sunday school the children attended, but Willie, a studious young lad, needed some serious learning, right there and then. The settlement had been promised a primary state school, but no clear indication had been given as to when the promise was likely to become fact. Time and again Sophia told William of her desire to return home to Devon and, repeatedly, William refused to abandon his thriving business.

It was then that matters took a sudden turn for the worse. The summer months of 1872 were unusually hot and dry. The conditions were a novelty to the Snell family, and the children were constantly to be found romping in the ever decreasing creek. On Friday, 20th of December, a fierce bushfire erupted at the edge of the township. A bucket ‘brigade’ was quickly set up and water drawn from the diminished creek, but all to no avail. Nothing could be done to contain the blaze and Dawson’s All Nations Hotel, Winchester’s Boarding House along with Williams’s bakery and residence, were destroyed. William had not insured either of his