“PIG-FACED LADIES”

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 3394, 9 July 1926, Page 13

“PIG-FACED LADIES”

A STRANGE BELIEF. Tho historian who wanders off Into the enchanted forest of peasant beliefs in old-time Europe ever and anon finds himself mocked by the elusive wriath of the Pig-Faced Lady (writes Basset Digby, F.R.G.S., in “T.P’s Weekly”). Hero and there at a dozen points in Wcsltern Europe site makes her "appearance,” gradually acquires a reputation, gets herself talked, about, written about, drawn and painted—and fades away, only to reappear in a subsequent generation of the morbid. It is no exaggeration to say that hundreds of millions of people in Western Europe have firmly believed in tho existence of a rich, well-born lady, with a good figure and shapely arms and legs, who had a pig’s head and manners, and confined her conversation, perforce to grunting and squealing. So late as February, ISIS needy gentlemen and ladies were advertising in tho London Press their readiness to be nurse-companion to the Pig-Faced lady, about wnom Fairburn, the publisher, had recently brought out a booh, which described her as 20 years of age, of aristocratic parentage, born in Ireland, unmarried, and occupying a high-class sty in a house in Manchester Square. Site fed out of a silver trough placed on the table. "This prodigy of Nature,” declared the author, "is the general topic of conversation in the metropolis. Her person is most delicately formed, and of the greatest symmetry; her hands and arms are delicately moulded in the happiest mould of Nature; and the carriage of nor body indicative of superior birth. Her manners are, in general, simple and unoffending; but when she is in want of food she articulates certainly something like the sound of pigs when eating. Nurse’s Thousand a Year. Her nurse found the lady so disagreeable that she threw up her not ill-requited £IOOO That thousand a yar, however, looked attractive to a good many not oversqueamish Londoners, so in “Tho Times” of Thursday, February S, 1815, you may sec the following offer:—• For the Attention of Gentlemen and Ladies. A Young Gentlewoman having heard ’of an Advertisement for a Person to undertake the care of a Lady, who is heavily afflicted in the Face, whose Friends have offered a handsome Income yearly, and a premium for residing with her seven years, 'would do all in her power to render her Life most comfortable; an undeniable Character can be obtained from a respectable Circle of Friends. An Answer to this Advertisement is requested, as the Advertiser will keep herself disengaged. Address, post paid, to X.Y., at Mr. Ford’s, Bauer, 12 Judd Street, Brunswick Square. A few months before a fashion-ably-gowned lady, topped with a pig’s head, was certainly teen on several evenings, driving around the West End streets to gaze at the illuminations celebrating the victory at Waterloo. Whether this was a purely disinterested practical joker, or the author of one 'of tho Pig-Faced Lady books taking steps to establish his heroine in thhe minds of eyewitnesses, I can’t say. But lot us put the clock back a couple of centuries and glance at Tanakin Skinker, born at Wirkhcim, on the Rhine, in 1018. Tanakin’s British biographer was too gentlemanly to call her a Pig-Faced Lady. Grunt that Banished Suitors. Tanakin embarrased her conventional parents. They offered forty thousand pounds to any man who would wed her. Suitors came from far and wide—but their resolutions broke down when, as shown in a wood-cut on the title-page, their courteous address and sweeping bow, hat in hand, were received with a double-barrelled grunt. Now for "Grisly,” a bit of a comedown in nomenclature for a Pig-) Faced Lady after the Stuart HogFaced Gentlewoman. You’ll find plenty of old Irish people who firmly believe in her. Early in the seventeen hundreds a certain Dr. Stecvcns died in Dublin, leaving £6OO a year to his sister Griselda for life, tho legacy then to be applied to the establishment of a hospital called after him. Griselda, however, at once set aside £450 a year for the hospital, and, by energetic canvassing, managed to get it going in a few years. Grisly Stecvens. Gossiping tongues got busy, and hardly had the worthy woman died than the legend was generally accepted in Dublin that Dr. Stecvcns, burdened with a Pig-Faccd daughter, and anxious about her future, had endowed a hospital .the trustees of which had to take Grisly, as she had affectionately been called in the family circle, with tho rest of tho legacy. As lato as a hundred years ago tho matron of the Stecvens Hospital, in Dublin, was often being called on by groups of visitors who wanted to see the silver trough from which Grisly fed. The servants at a country house in Iho north of Ireland, years later spread tho report that their master’s

battered silver punch-bowl, embossed | with a boar’s head, was none other | than Grisley’s trough. I A noble bride, importuned by a ! beggar woman and her unpleasant impm’tunai' child, exclaimed; “Take ! away tho little swine—l won’t give }you a penny!” “Ho!" retorted the outraged mother. "Ho!” Little swine is she? May your own baby, when you boar it, bo more like a pig than mine!” The curse worked. I have a soft place in my heart for the Plymouth Pig-Faced lady. There was a row at a fair held there, early last century, and the crowd, investigated her on (heir own account. She proved to be a live bear, strapped to a heavy armchair, in a sitting posture. Her face and neck were shaven, she wore a wig, a granny cap, with a gown adorned with artificial flowers.