Every Inch a Foote

Samuel Foote as Mother Cole in The Minor, engraved by W. Walker, 1777
Norma Clarke reviews Mr. Foote's Other Leg by Ian Kelly, on the C18 English comic actor Samuel Foote:

... Peter Cook['s] and Dudley Moore['s] ... Tarzan sketch “One Leg too Few”  probably originated in Foote’s story.

... Foote ran with a heavy-drinking, hard-living, insouciant elite crowd. Sexual licence was as absolute a value as the freedom their money gave them to be as obnoxious, including towards each other, as they chose. It was, after all, a cruel trick played on Foote by his friends that led to the loss of his leg. Early in 1766 he was invited to a hunting party at Methley Hall in Yorkshire, a draughty Tudor mansion that even its owners, the Earl and Countess of Mexborough, didn’t like. The Duke of York was among the guests; so too was the man Foote probably loved more than any other, Frank Delaval, handsome heir to a fortune and, in the words of Lord Chesterfield, a “consummate puppy and unprincipled jackanapes”. Delaval had been sent down from Oxford for his part in some “rough play” that ended with the death of a college porter. He boasted that he modelled himself on Hogarth’s Tom Rakewell in The Rake’s Progress. At his house at Seaton Delaval high above the sea in Northumberland he liked nothing better than to construct jests that involved clever feats of engineering: in one room an entire four-poster bed was suspended by pulleys above trapdoors so that unsuspecting guests could be suddenly let down into a bath of cold water. Naked cavortings were the least of it, though the many Delaval siblings were noted for their profligacy. Not surprisingly, Frank ran through his inheritance, upon which he decided, with his friends’ help, to persuade a short-sighted widow, Lady Isabella Pawlett, to marry him. The scheme involved Foote and James Worsdale blacking up as fortune tellers and putting on a command performance in a dimly lit room to trick the gullible Isabella. (It became a well-known story and I am convinced – on no evidence – that it gave Charlotte Brontë the idea of Rochester’s fortune-teller ruse in Jane Eyre.) The wedding went ahead and it was only afterwards that the conspirators discovered that Lady Isabella’s money was held in trust. Delaval paid Foote £12,000 for his help, expecting to get £100,000 with Lady Isabella. It didn’t work out that way and a messy divorce followed, with which Foote also helped Delaval, giving fabricated evidence against Lady Isabella.

Foote’s role at Methley Hall was to entertain the Duke of York. He was no horseman but he couldn’t resist bragging, and his friends couldn’t resist having fun at his expense. They loved to gamble so a bet was placed on Foote’s riding a horse they knew was one of the duke’s fiercest stallions. The grooms mounted the willing comedian. A touch of the spur was all it took; the stallion reared and Foote was thrown on to the granite cobbles of the yard. The fracture was so bad that bone broke through his boot leather.

He lost a leg but he gained a theatre. Six months later the Haymarket was given a royal patent for summer seasons and Foote’s financial future was secure. He maintained a fully staffed country house in Fulham and another in Suffolk Street behind the Haymarket. He went on tour to Ireland, several times, where he could play to his advantage in imitating the one-legged Dublin publisher, George Faulkner.

From a review by Matthew Sweet:

Samuel Foote … a life of bizarre complexity. Photograph: Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

There are three kinds of theatrical anecdote. There's the faintly amusing: the one about the handles coming off the French windows just before a cuckolded Martin Jarvis declares: "You're destroying my home!" There's the apocryphal: the one about the audience member who shouts "She's in the attic!" as the Nazis arrive to sniff out Pia Zadora's Anne Frank. And there's the sort from which the names must remain redacted – such as the tale of a present-day theatrical knight who, in his youth, excused his catastrophic lateness by claiming that his mother had died, obliging her to attend decades of first nights in discreet anonymity.

The life of Samuel Foote – Georgian comedian, satirist, impressionist, playwright and pamphleteer – affords a green-room incident that's rather less easy to categorise. It's the story of how Foote got his first big break. (His second came 30 years later, courtesy of a bad-tempered horse belonging to the Duke of York.) It happened backstage at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane during a 1735 performance of Robert Fabian's farce Trick for Trick. The leading man, Charles Macklin, decided to pick a fight about a peruke with his fellow actor, Thomas Hallam. "You saucy, impertinent rascal," he raged, "I wonder how such a little scoundrel dared take a wig out of my dressing room?" It seems that Macklin intended only to administer an admonitory poke in the eye with his cane. Unfortunately, he skewered Hallam's brain with it. A manslaughter conviction did not enhance Macklin's box-office appeal, so he diversified into coaching younger hopefuls – principal among whom was a spoon-faced, thick-waisted Cornishman named Samuel Foote – whose only prior claim on public attention was the pamphlet he'd written describing how his Uncle Sam had murdered his Uncle John aboard the HMS Ruby, and claimed that the victim had strangled himself.

Only those who have first ensured that their jaw is a safe distance from any hard surface should read Ian Kelly's uproarious account of Foote's career ...