1873: The Wiltshire Pedestrians
September 20, 2021
By AHNZ
The Wiltshire Pedestrians were Joseph and Catherine Wiltshire, an English migrant couple who arrived in New Zealand in December 1872. Their ship was Pleiades which, by coincidence, was made into New Zealand’s 12th public holiday under the translated Maori name Matariki by the Wiltshire’s direct descendant Jacinda Ardern.
The pair were soon married became the main attraction in their own entertainment start-up business. Goes to demonstrate that show business and politics are very closely related. Joseph’s ‘act’ was endurance walking which he had done back home. New Zealand had seen it before but the Wiltshire’s were determined to milk this dying form of attraction while it lasted.
In short, Pedestrianism consisted in watching a person walk around a circle track for hours or days on end. There was music, food, drink, and the macabre spectacle of watching a sleep-deprived walker stagger on or pass out or have epileptic fits. The Wiltshire’s were also an attractive couple physically and Catherine (image left) dressed the part.
“a perfect mania for pedestrianism has affected our fellow citizens and for weeks past running matches have been of almost daily occurrence.” – Auckland Star; Quoted by Colquhoun (2013)
“Huge crowds packed indoor arenas to watch the best walkers walk. Think of it as a six-day NASCAR race … on feet…But people didn’t go just to watch the people walk. It was a real spectacle. There were brass bands playing songs; there were vendors selling pickled eggs and roasted chestnuts. It was a place to be seen.” – In The 1870s And ’80s, Being A Pedestrian Was Anything But, NPR (2014)
“She was, at that time, the greatest female pedestrian in the world,” Ardern noted in a speech marking women’s suffrage” – How the PM’s great-great grandmother proves endurance events are nothing new, Stuff (2019)
Ardern and her grandfather’s great-grandmother, Catherine, do look a bit alike too. The Wiltshires were Catholics but somewhere along the road the Ardern branch became Mormons but, still, religious is as religious does. Likewise, the family trade of stage-managing a spectacle that the ring-master is herself the main performer of remains the same. All that has happened is that the scale and spectacle and pay-offs have changed.
On 15 May, 1873, Joseph Wiltshire started his first Pedestrian exhibition in Christchurch. Wiltshire constructed an enclosure fence on a field beside the Christchurch railway station along with a covered and lit track for his long walk. He had a little room to rest in, timekeepers, and someone to sell tickets at the gate, and lots of publicity to bring people along. On this occasion Wiltshire covered 1000 miles in 1000 hours, in other words 41.5 days of going around and around with snatches of sleep. Everyone in the winter of 1873 must have known about the madman walking around in circles.
The couple claim not to have made much money but they kept up the act and toured all around New Zealand. In 1874 Catherine was performing too, shaking her “beautiful jet black curls as she advanced on her journey” wearing a costume usually worn by trapeze performers.
In 1876 the Wiltshires couldn’t pull enough people to cover their costs so tried to do a runner. The people of Waitara, Taranaki, apprehended them and made sure they paid their outstanding bills before they were allowed to leave!
The attraction of the Wiltshires was partly athletic but for the most part an expanded side-show grotesquerie. People came along to see people torturing themselves for the entertainment of others. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture. Joseph would become sick, dizzy, and go into fits then stagger on only partly conscious. Catherine lost her baby, hurt her ankles, and sometimes had to be roughly man-handled back into the walking ring like a wind-up soldier. Several of their children were epileptics too1.
At once point during the mental toll, Joseph was charged with assault with a revolver. Catherine, appearing in on her husband’s behalf, alarmed the court by waiving the revolver around in her hand so that the court reporter thought it “might go off and kill somebody!”
What the Wiltshires did, pedestrianism, might have started out as athletic and inspiring as recently as the early 1870s. It had once been part of Physical Culture, a call to the public to sharpen their bodies and minds rather than loaf about in bars and billiard halls. By the time the Wiltshires were done it was Clown World stuff. As Colquhoun wrote, when respectable middle classes began to take an interest in foot-racing they segregated themselves from “the professional taint of working-class pedestrianism, although it was many more years before their competitions had wide popular appeal.” Our 1870s Pedestrians, the Wiltshire family, were purveyor of rude, even schadenfreudian, humiliation entertainment for the proletariat in exchange for fame and attention and money.
This sort of entertainment had had its day, as had the crazy culture that supported it, and New Zealand sunk into The Long Depression exactly as the Wiltshire’s show terminated. (So too did the roller skate craze that started too late to last long.) Joseph instead turned to being a theatrical advertiser, a town crier, and hotelier in the Manawatu. When next people watched other people go around and around in circles it would be on bicycles, later motorbikes, and motorcars.
—
1 Ref. Catherine, Roe Family Tree
Ref. The Remarkable Mrs Wiltshire: ‘Greatest Female Pedestrienne in the World!’, David Colquhoun, TURNBULL LIBRARY RECORD (2013)
Image ref. Catherine sketch of a photograph of her in Auckland during the Wiltshire’s prime; State Library of Victoria; Papers Past, ibid
Like Comment Share
