Was George Grossmith a drug addict?

In the Mike Leigh film Topsy Turvy 'GG' is shown in a scene injecting himself in his dressing-room at the Savoy theatre just before his first performance as Ko-Ko in The Mikado on 14 March 1885. There is no doubt that 'GG' did suffer badly from nerves, even after he had given hundreds, or even thousands, of stage appearances: he feared he would forget his lines and wreck his career. He also suffered badly from insomnia, as he explained in an interview. It is not unlikely that he took an opiate like morphine, or perhaps cocaine, to calm himself or to boost his self-confidence.

But the question is not whether 'GG' could have taken drugs but whether he did. The written evidence is gossip reported decades later in Hesketh Pearson's Gilbert and Sullivan: A Biography (1935). Pearson is describing the rehearsals for The Mikado, where the company was being driven ruthlessly by W.S. Gilbert:

The effect on Grossmith, a highly sensitive man, was disastrous. He was reduced to a pitiable state of nervous trepidation and almost wrecked the piece on the first night. Though Gilbert can hardly be held responsible for Grossmith's nerves, it was partly due to the extreme methods of the producer that the actor took to drugs in order to keep himself going; and at the end of his long engagement at the Savoy Theatre a member of the company was horrified by the sight of Grossmith's punctured arms (158).

The identity and reliability of Pearson's informant, who in 1935 must have been recalling events more than forty years earlier, is unknown. However, according to Leon Berger, the authority on Grossmith's music, gossip about it has been handed down in theatrical circles for many years. Berger first heard it when he was working at the Players' Theatre, a venue that specialized in replicating Victorian Music Hall.

Furthermore, it is said that when 'GG' died in 1912 the coroner at the inquest mentioned that the arm was bruised from needle punctures, and that he had been an addict when he died. However, no report of the inquest has been located.

Many dangerous drugs were, of course, readily available in late nineteenth-century and Edwardian England, and were sold without legal controls. However, drug-taking was regarded as a vice (see Dr Watson's reaction, at about the same time, to Sherlock Holmes' 'seven-per-cent solution'). No one in Grossmith's position, with a public image to maintain, would want to admit to it, and would take care to indulge the habit in private.

SHERLOCK HOLMES took his bottle from the corner of the mantlepiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject; but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.

Yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune which I had taken with my lunch or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.

“Which is it to-day,” I asked, “morphine or cocaine?”

He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened.

“It is cocaine,” he said, “a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?”

“No, indeed,” I answered brusquely. “My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it.”

He smiled at my vehemence. “Perhaps you are right, Watson,” he said. “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”

“But consider!” I said earnestly. “Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process which involves increased tissue-change and may at least leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.”

The Sign of Four (Feb 1890)