The Last Snake Man Read online

  But the following day he was up and about, though much less sprightly than usual, which meant he had to postpone further displays of recklessness by 24 hours. Over the next week, however, Burger claimed to have seen Wanless accept bites from a black mamba, cobras and puff adders. On one occasion, three doctors examined a mamba before it bit him and declared it to be venomous. At another display, a sceptical audience taunted Wanless into also allowing a dog to be bitten: the dog died and Wanless was fined 10 pounds.

  Always a heavy drinker, Wanless began to overindulge and was soon in constant conflict with Meekin. But there was never a physical fight, since the smaller man compensated for his size by carrying a snake in his shirt, declaring that if Meekin ever tried to hit him, he would ‘give him the snake treatment’.

  One night, while visibly affected by drink, Wanless handled a puff adder roughly and it bit into his thumbnail. The fang broke off and a doctor was called in the next day when the thumb was clearly poisoned. Once more, however, Wanless cheated death, but as with most daredevil showmen, it was only a matter of time before he received a fatal bite. Tom Wanless’s turn came on 18 July 1921 and two letters received by the Sydney Sunday Times tell the story.

  The first was signed ‘Alby Jackson, Showman, late of Glebe, Sydney’: ‘Knowing the favours the late Tom Morrissey [sic] owed to your journal and being an intimate fellow Australian Pal of his, I am penning a note Re his death, which occurred here on the 18th of July, after taking his 10th snakebite.

  ‘The last snake he chose was the deadly South African “Green Mamba,” said by experts to be even deadlier than the Indian “Krait”, that killed Professor Fox. Young Tom Morrissey, perhaps the gamest Aussie I have met, allowed himself to be bitten on the arm at 8 o’clock on Saturday night. By 4 o’clock the following morning, Tom developed bad symptoms, wreatching [sic] blood. At 10 o’clock he had a look at himself in the mirror and calmly remarked “The Green Mamba wins”. He lingered on till the next day, and died a martyr to his business, Snake Bite.

  ‘All Australians in Durban followed “Young Tom” to his last resting place, as he was a great favourite here, his gameness attracting attention.’

  The second letter was from Meekin, who alluded to the rift with Wanless and to a lack of responsible management: ‘I am sorry to say poor Tom was not showing under my Banners at the time,’ wrote Meekin, who also mentioned the previous bite to the thumb, and that Wanless’s general health was not great and he was in no condition to take a bite from such a dangerous snake as a mamba.

  ‘I…begged of him to leave it out for a while and give himself a fighting chance to recover thoroughly,’ wrote Meekin. ‘However, he would not be advised. We are to bury him tomorrow at 11.30 o’clock.’

  A fairly lurid piece from the South African press titled ‘The Man Who Shook Hands With Death’ by H. Lloyd Watkins noted Tom Wanless’s fatalism: ‘Many times I have stood and watched and listened to young Tom’s quiet and natural lectures on his “friends”, as he was always pleased to call them, when he has been surrounded by sceptics.

  ‘“If l fasten this reptile on my body,” he would say, “and you saw me go from red to black and fall foaming, to die before your eyes, you would go out and say, ‘By God! it was no fake; the snakes were poisonous, right enough. How awful.’ But just because I save myself and smile a few minutes afterwards, you all likewise smile, and mutter, ‘Fraud!’ ‘Impostor!’ Someday—who knows?—you will see Tommy Morrissey go out. Then you’ll believe; not before. I suppose I can’t blame you—it’s the way of the world!”

  ‘He would then smile and take up another hissing reptile, and make friends with it before your eyes. Well, poor Tom, he said he would find death in the tent. He little guessed how soon.’

  Rocky Vane

  The son of a bootmaker and one of seven children, Lindsay Herbert Vagne was born on 19 July 1891 at Kangaroo Valley. The family soon moved north to Lismore, where it is still represented, and young Lindsay was apprenticed to Kleins, a firm of coach builders. A knockabout young man who earned his nickname ‘Rocky’, Vagne was also a snake collector from an early age, and a chance meeting with Jim Morrissey led to him embracing showmanship as avidly as he had snakes. Soon Vagne had built a large iron shed on the outskirts of Lismore, installed a snake pit, and hung out a banner quaintly reading ‘Snaix’. Deep-voiced and prematurely grey, he cut a dash as a showman, and developed into an excellent spruiker.

  Soon Rocky had dropped the ‘g’ from his French grandfather’s name, assembled his own travelling snake show, and hit the road as Rocky Vane. In 1914 his partner Alex ‘Sandy’ Rolfe was bitten and killed by a tiger snake, but Vane was undeterred and kept his show on the move, sometimes in partnership with his early mentor, Jim Morrissey. In fact, Vane was one of the privileged few to be given the older man’s formula for his snakebite antidote.

  Vane then developed his own variant, which probably varied even more from time to time, depending on his location and the materials available. It’s most likely that the antidotes of both men were based on bracken ferns, beaten to a pulp and then boiled and strained. Salt and Condy’s crystals (potassium permanganate) would then be added, with perhaps some boot polish for colour and ‘finish’.

  Years later, in 1934, the Vane and Morrissey antidotes and two others were tested by Dr Kellaway of Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, and it was noted that ‘no protective action by any of these antidotes could be demonstrated’.

  Back in the 1920s, however, Vane’s fame was so widespread that a newspaper sent him to Bungowannah Station near Albury, to investigate the mysterious case of a worker there who had suffered an alarming number of snakebites. Vane soon got to the root of the problem when he discovered that the young jackaroo hadn’t taken to station life and had faked bites, using a pin, to secure regular breaks in hospital.

  In the early 1920s Rocky married Dorothy Whitley from Bangalow. Dot’s family had show horses, which Rocky also adopted, along with a sharpshooting act. Vane then diversified even further by painting banners for fellow showmen and, while resting from constant touring, opened tattoo parlours at different times in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne.

  Photographs of Rocky Vane at La Perouse show that he would allow himself to be bitten quite deliberately and then treat himself with his antidote. Sometimes after being bitten he would encourage the snake to bite a chicken to prove how deadly it was, though this was soon outlawed by the police.

  Pop and Rocky remained in close contact, and would often team up for a show, both then capitalising on Vane’ s basso profundo voice and great skills as a spruiker. By the time Mum and Dad settled permanently in Sydney in 1926, the Vanes were working their way to Western Australia. Dot Vane had confessed to Mum that she was terrified of snakes—but she was still handling them, and by the time she’d reached Perth she was appearing as another in the long line of showground ‘Cleopatras’. No female snake handlers had been seen in the west, and Rocky was expecting huge crowds…and got them, too, until January 1928 when he telegrammed Pop: ‘Dot died this morning.’

  At the inquest, Vane said that when a tiger snake bit his wife he had immediately applied a ligature and his antidote and sent her to hospital. The ligature was removed after three-quarters of an hour, after which Dot had discharged herself and returned to the showground. But she had a relapse and Rocky returned her to the hospital, where she died the next day. Rocky argued with the doctors that they had removed the ligature before the antidote had taken full effect, and that on his return he was not allowed to apply more antidote.

  It was also revealed at the inquest that when Dot Vane returned to hospital, a second bite was discovered on the back of her thumb. It may have been overlooked when she was first admitted, but was more likely a fresh bite.

  After Dot’s death, Rocky took on another assistant, William Harry Melrose, a former partner of Pop’s. One Sunday in February 1929, Melrose went to the Buffalo Club in Wellington Street, Perth, with a bag he told me
mbers contained performing frogs. Then, with an interested crowd around him, the trickster took out first a carpet snake and then a tiger snake, which petrified the onlookers and immediately bit Melrose. He was rushed to hospital where he died the following Wednesday.

  Snake exhibitions were banned in the state as a result, but three days after Melrose’s death, and aware that this edict was about to come into effect, Rocky allowed himself to be bitten on the thumb to demonstrate the power of his antidote. The performance was not altogether effective. Rocky collapsed and was taken to hospital, where he did recover, but not before he’d learnt the dangers of clashing with doctors. The ligature was left on for an agonisingly long time, and this resulted in loss of muscle tone so great that it took several months of exercise before Rocky regained full control of his limb.

  Eight years later, doing a show at Redhill, South Australia, Rocky was bitten by a tiger snake and collapsed soon after. He was taken to Snowtown Hospital and later flown to Adelaide Hospital, where he was admitted in a critical condition. Rocky survived but slowed down as a snake handler after that, though his involvement with the pits didn’t end completely. Pop remembered one occasion during a show when Rocky seemed to get increasingly intoxicated as the day progressed and the show boss grew equally frustrated because he couldn’t find the source of his supply. Only when the show was over and the pit and tent dismantled did he find a pile of small bottles labelled ‘Rocky Vane’s Snakebite Cure’ and smelling strongly of rum.

  Rocky remarried, and his second wife, Joyce, also a show-woman, was soon handling snakes for the first time, and so successfully she never needed to rely on either antidote or antivenom. During World War II the Vanes’ business prospered. They continued running snake shows around the Melbourne area, and Rocky’s tattoo shop did a roaring trade with Allied servicemen.

  In 1946 Rocky Vane became ill while arranging for permits to show snakes at the Hobart Regatta, and half an hour after the boat had sailed for Tasmania he suffered a stroke. He was returned to Melbourne and admitted to Latrobe Hospital, but died on 19 February, aged 55—a not inconsiderable age for a snake man.

  Joyce Vane carried on performing with snakes after Rocky died and eventually taught her new husband, Tom Kerswell, the tricks of the snakey trade, although they eventually moved into a less hazardous form of sideshow, with roundabouts and knock-’em-downs.

  Professor Victor Hullar

  Another self-styled ‘professor’, Victor Hullar was an experienced snake man who advocated using leeches to extract venom from snakebites and had survived several himself. But during a performance in May 1893 his luck ran out. He had placed the head of a metre-long tiger snake into his mouth and was gripping it with his teeth while he held a 1.5-metre tiger snake in one hand and stroked it with the other.

  Suddenly the snake being stroked darted its head out and sank its fangs into one of the professor’s fingers. He calmly returned both snakes to their box, took a nip of brandy and then rubbed some of his homemade antidote into the wound. Not long afterwards, Hullar began to tremble all over. A doctor gave him an injection of strychnine, then a controversial but popular snakebite treatment, but to no avail, and Hullar died the following day.

  Harry Deline

  Another ill-fated performer was the well-liked and highly respected Harry Deline. In December 1913 he set up at Melbourne’s Luna Park, assisted by a young woman billed as ‘Sleeping Beauty’. It was her job to lie full length on a stretcher and feign sleep while Deline placed venomous snakes all over her body.

  On the night of his last performance, Deline had about 50 snakes in his temporary pit and was playing to a crowd of about as many people, mainly women and children. As he began placing the reptiles on his partner’s inert body, a large tiger snake took offence and adopted a defence stance. Showing off, Deline picked up the snake at the middle of its body (a real error!) and held it aloft. The tiger struck at Harry’s neck, biting him firmly about 12 millimetres from the jugular.

  With blood running from the puncture marks, Deline pulled the snake away and returned it and its partners to their cage. Sleeping Beauty remained oblivious to the drama unfolding so near, and the crowd at first thought everything was part of the act. But when Deline turned deadly pale, staggered, and fell into the arms of an attendant, there was pandemonium. Thinking that the snakes would escape, women began to scream and many fainted.

  A doctor was summoned from nearby St Kilda and he ordered the showman to be driven to Alfred Hospital. As it was dark, one of the headlights was taken from the vehicle and placed on the back seat so the doctor could attend to the victim in transit. The neck was carefully scarified, a difficult and dangerous job in itself as the car jolted on its way. Owing to the speed with which Deline received attention and the fact that he’d survived many bites in the past, it was expected he would recover. But he fell into a coma and died two and a half days later.

  Sintau

  Sintau, a glamorous snake man, was working with a German American called Brooks, who claimed to be afraid of no snake’s bite. The reptiles were being freely handled by both men in front of a large crowd at Melbourne’s Brighton Beach when Sintau announced that he was going to place a large brown snake’s head in his mouth.

  He took the reptile by its middle, whereupon the snake struck viciously at the bridge of his nose. The wound was bleeding freely as Brooks took the snake away and then attended to his partner’s bite with some antidote or another. A short time later, Sintau, who had presumably built up immunity, showed no ill effects. We can assume the sales of his antidote went through the roof that night—although it’s unlikely it had any effect.

  Captain Greenhalgh

  When Professor Fox was fatally bitten by a krait in India, the Sydney Mail ran an almost-full-page obituary on 14 March 1914. But down in the bottom right-hand corner of the page there is also a report on the appearance of a new snake man, one Captain Greenhalgh, who was billed to perform at White City in Rushcutters Bay.

  Later Sydney’s tennis headquarters, early last century White City was one of Australia’s show meccas, and up to 30,000 people a night would flock there to take a ride on the ‘Mammoth Carousel’ or take a gondola trip through cave scenery around an ‘underground’ river. Large bagging walls painted with white clouds gave the venue its name. And, of course, there were always snake shows.

  Snake men by the name of Pambara, Long Tim Finlay and William Keeping, as well as Morrissey, Fred Fox, my father George Cann and many others, plied their trade there and vied for customers. Captain Greenhalgh—‘handling deadly tiger snakes, just six inches in length, the first ever bred in captivity’—was a showman first and foremost, and no more than a dabbler in snakes. A year earlier he had appeared with the American Latiefa, but in 1914 he was making something of a comeback, probably cashing in on the publicity surrounding the recent deaths of better-known snake men.

  The Greenhalgh family was actually best known for its sharpshooting shows. The captain, his son Arthur and daughter Miss Eddy had a popular act in the 1920s. Arthur also took on an American partner, Abe Jackson, a motorbike stunt rider formerly of the ‘Reckless Jacksons’. The partnership prospered and diversified, taking in snake shows. Arthur was never a handler himself, but he employed many acts and in 1924 married the beautiful snake girl Navada, who, along with ‘Cleopatra’ Essie Bradley (later my mum), had worked the 1923 Sydney Royal Easter Show for him. Mrs Greenhalgh became widely known as ‘Red’, and worked the pits for several more years.

  Fred and Belle Wade

  The Greenhalghs also worked with the husband and wife team Fred and Belle Wade. Born in Victoria in 1898, Fred Wade knocked about with the snake man Marco Miller (see below) for many years and got into the snake game himself in the late 1920s.

  Belle Wade had migrated from England in 1921, and it took her many years to overcome her fear of snakes. By 1930, however, she was handling venomous reptiles and participating fully in Fred’s acts. Her show names included ‘Monica Sans’ a
nd ‘Venitia’, and when the Wades teamed up with Greenhalgh and Jackson, the banners outside her show pit proclaimed her ‘La Belle’.

  The Wades were a famous couple, enjoying popularity with the crowds and the other show people alike. Not that the opposition was strong in the 1930s; the Millers were the only performers who could readily challenge the Wades’ style and range of venomous and non-venomous snakes.

  Crowds love large pythons, and the Wades accommodated them, making numerous collecting trips to North Queensland. While on these trips they made the Millaa Millaa Hotel, west of Innisfail, their base camp, and the publican allowed Fred to store his charges loose in a spare room. They said there was nothing to beat the sight of 6-metre pythons lying on the windowsills seeking the sun while daredevil drunks gathered outside, tapping on the glass.

  A news clipping from 1928 reports that at Moira Lakes (just off the Murray River, north of Moama in New South Wales), Fred Wade was bitten by a 1.5-metre tiger snake and managed to drive only part of the way to town before becoming blind. A passing motorist found him unconscious and took him to Echuca Hospital, where he had a rough time of it but survived.

  According to Belle this was not her husband’s closest brush with death. In 1932, the Wades launched their own sideshow and were setting up at Surfers Paradise when Fred received a letter from a collector friend telling him he was forwarding him two death adders. But when the package arrived and Fred had removed two snakes from the straw lining, he was bitten by a third, collected and packed after the letter had been sent. Though antidotes were common and antivenom was just on the market, the Wades relied on ligatures and bleeding. Fred’s condition worsened and he was taken to hospital, where he lay, paralysed and blind, for five days before recovering.