The elderly British sailor with an Italian name who became suddenly famous after his death
Thomas F. Grimaldi was fairly new to town, a cobbler arriving in the very early 1870s, but in the rapidly growing railroad town he rose in prominence. He had a shop on Gay Street and became the chairman of the local shoemakers’ guild.
In late middle age, he was the head of a household that included a younger wife and three daughters.
Said to have been born in Italy, thought that’s unclear, Grimaldi the cobbler came to America during the violent uprisings in Europe of the 1840s, and first settled in Lynchburg, Va., about 300 miles to the northeast of Knoxville. He said he came for “the great facilities offered here and the general advantage of the city as a growing and prosperous place.”
There may have been another reason for the move. Although he would be known in Knoxville as “a peaceable, quiet, and industrious citizen,” he had made enemies in Lynchburg. In 1866, he had cursed at an erstwhile partner in a fish market, calling him “a damned thief and a son of a bitch,” whereupon the offended party turned and shot Grimaldi, wounding him in the side. Later, after someone tried to burn down Grimaldi’s house, he moved to Richmond, trying a new career, opening a restaurant called The Gem, “an Old English Chop House” with Scotch and English ales. Less than a year later, he was back in Lynchburg, running a “Fashionable Boot and Shoe Manufactory.” He was the subject of lawsuits when he moved here.
He seems to have been instantly popular in Knoxville, described in the Press & Herald as one of the “Men We Want…. Manufacturers and men of his class are just the kind of men Knoxville is looking after.”
T.F. Grimaldi impressed his colleagues on arrival. When local shoemakers established a union in 1871, they chose the newcomer with the exotic name to be its chair. The union met at Bismarck Hall, an impressive oyster and liquor shop established by German-speaking merchants on Cumberland Avenue, facing the side of the Lamar House. The name honored the militaristic German hero Otto von Bismarck, then working to unite the many German-speaking principalities into a Greater Germany. Bismarck soon became Imperial Chancellor of the German Empire—but not until after he had a hall named after him in Knoxville. The fact that the name was apparently dropped after 1872 may suggest local Germans were having second thoughts about the Iron Chancellor.
T.F. Grimaldi’s boot and shoe shop moved around some, on Union Avenue for a time, but seemed to settle on Gay Street, next door to the Lamar House, then a prime location for any kind of retail.
Looking north on Gay Street, 1869. Grimaldi’s boot and shoe shop was soon to open near the Lamar House, adjacent to “M. Stern’s, seen on the left of this photograph. (McClung Historical Collection.)
After a time when Mrs. Sarah V. Grimaldi ran a boarding house at Cumberland and State, the Grimaldis found a home in recently annexed East Knoxville. They originally lived on East Clinch, 80 years before that street was urban-renewalled away, but soon migrated closer to the river, to a community along the river bluff just east of First Creek, a lofty pocket neighborhood called Holston Heights. Along what’s now know as East Hill Avenue, it offered a view of the river. It apparently offered good soil for a garden; the Grimaldis were known for their abundant potatoes.
They joined St. John’s Episcopal Church, and Mrs. Grimaldi was especially active, involved in local charities, pushing for the idea of a public hospital. They seemed happy here, though after about a year here, their young daughter, Nannie, died of meningitis, and was buried at Old Gray. Their daughter, Sallie, married a Knoxville man, Samuel Mills, in 1875. In the days of gaslights, Mills was the city lamplighter. He later worked in maintenance for Southern Railway.
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The Grimaldis weren’t the only family of Italian heritage in Knoxville in the 1870s, but they were especially unusual for a couple of reasons. One was that they spoke with English accents.
Another was that although T.F. Grimaldi was well past middle age, he wasn’t the oldest one in the household. His father, Thomas Grimaldi, was a bright old man seemingly uninhibited by age, known to walk around town and relate stories of his remarkable life. He was said to be about 100, older than the United States.
He was born on Christmas Eve, 1771, in Falmouth, on the southwestern peninsula of England known as Cornwall. By some accounts, his father, who may have been known as Fidele Grimaldi, became a prosperous sugar planter in Granada, and he spent part of his long-ago childhood in the colonial Caribbean.
At a very young age, he was happy to share with Knoxvillians, he had joined the British Navy, finding work as a “warrant carpenter.” He had seen a good deal of action in naval battles, with both the Napoleonic French and in the second war with the Americans, the War of 1812. His closest call was when he was wounded in the hand during an encounter with an American privateer, the scar of which he was happy to show you.
Just as the British lost the American war, they won the French war, which had been more of an existential threat to Great Britain. Grimaldi vividly remembered rejoicing at the news of the outcome at Waterloo. His ship, under a Commodore Rogers, was returning to England from Jamaica in 1815 when they encountered another British ship. The ship that conveyed the news of British victory “halted long enough to exchange salutations with his own, and enjoy a jollification.”
So for about 40 years, some of them dramatic ones, Thomas Grimaldi had been a sailor in the greatest navy in the world. He claimed to have visited almost all the nations on the planet. He later worked for a while in a considerably less adventurous role, as a greengrocer, in a small town called Penrhyn. By the time he reached his 80s, he chose to join his son in the United States. His son was then a well-established shoe and boot maker in pre-Civil War Lynchburg.
The elder Grimaldi was a picturesque fellow. An award-winning painter from Maryville, John Colins, painted the old man’s portrait, with the intention of showing it at the Philadelphia World’s Fair of 1876.
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The lively old sailor expressed a hope to celebrate his 106th birthday on Christmas Eve, 1877, but after a brief illness, he died on Nov. 22, at his son’s home at Holston Heights. He was one of the oldest known people in the United States, and his death, first reported in the local papers, got around, gaining him more fame than he ever had in life. For several months, in several newspapers across the country, he was listed among “Centenarians,” as one of only a few known people in 1877—just 23, in one international list—who were known to have died in 1877 past the age of 100.
Knoxville Daily Tribune, November 23, 1877.
As famous as his age made him, the elder Grimaldi got an extra boost when it was revealed that he had been a heavy smoker.
To some editors, that was the most inspiring part of the story. Contrary to many modern assumptions that we didn’t know how bad cigarettes were until the surgeon general opined about it in 1964, doctors of the 19th century did blame tobacco for several serious health problems. The term “noxious weed” was generations old, some doctors were denouncing tobacco as “one of the most virulent poisons in nature,” as one 1849 Knoxville medical authority called it. Persistent reports of tobacco’s dangers caused heartburn for tobacco growers and tobacco-state politicians, who were always delighted to boost anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
The following drollery may have first appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal or the Kentucky Gazette:
“The deleterious effects of tobacco are emphasized by the death at Knoxville of the old English sailor Thomas Grimaldi who, by its constant use from his early youth, cut short his life at the premature age of 106 years.”
That sentence was reprinted, with some glee, in dozens of newspapers across the nation, from Hagerstown, Md., to Helena, Mont. Smokers thought it was hilarious. For many thousands of Americans, that was all of this obituary they heard. But there was another shoe to fall.
Certain details of the squib about Knoxville’s ancient smoking sailor caught the attention of some alert scholars in Boston and New York, giving still another life to this story of an extraordinary death.
The New York World found reason to be fascinated with the story. Not yet owned by Joseph Pulitzer, the World was nonetheless one of America’s major opinion leaders, published by Thomas A. Scott, railroad tycoon and former key member of President Lincoln’s cabinet, as assistant Secretary of War. More recently he had been boosting the campaign and program of President Hayes.
At the World were well-read editors who connected some dots in what was otherwise a bit of filler copy. On Nov. 30, the New York World ran a bold headline, “IS HE GRIMALDI’S BROTHER? Points Which May Show that He is the Long-Missing Brother of the Prince of English Clowns.”
As it turned out, a lot of people around the western world recognized the name of Grimaldi.
Portrait of Joseph Grimaldi by John Cawse, 1807. (Wikipedia.)
About 40 years earlier, the young aspiring novelist Charles Dickens had edited, and perhaps helped write, the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi. The story of talent, passion, and theatrical fame became what we might call a nonfiction bestseller. Although from an Italian family notable for several reasons—one had come to England as a dentist to Queen Charlotte—Joe Grimaldi had become Britain’s most famous harlequin, famous as the star of pantomime performances in London in the 1790s and early 1800s. Grimaldi became a popular icon, and essentially created the grease-paint persona of the Clown as we know it today. His own life had been dramatic, and tragic; due to health problems, he had outlived his stardom, and died in poverty at age 58.
But Dickens included in the narrative an unsolved mystery, that of Grimaldi’s long-lost brother. At the age of 8, the brother Dickens called “John” had fled his dysfunctional family, last seen around 1780 swimming in the direction of a British Navy sailing ship. He was assumed to have gone to sea as a cabin boy, and made a career as a sailor, perhaps lost in some faraway land. However, he appeared unexpectedly in 1803 backstage at his famous brother’s Drury Lane Theatre. The two brothers enjoyed a brief emotional reunion before the harlequin had to return to the stage. His sailor brother waited for him, with the promise that they’d go out to a tavern and swap stories. During their short visit, the performer noted that his brother was carrying 600 pounds in cash, and remarked that it was dangerous to walk around with so much. The brother responded, “Danger! We sailors know nothing of danger.”
1838 Poster advertisement for “Memoirs of Grimaldi.” “Boz” was a pseudonym for Charles Dickens. (Trustees of the British Museum/Wikipedia.)
But then, as they set out, during a brief moment when the performer dealt with a routine errand, the prodigal brother vanished. It stumped the police. It was assumed that the missing Grimaldi brother had been murdered for his cash.
The story, Dickens remarked, “possessed an awful interest to those whom it immediately concerned, and cannot fail to have some for the most indifferent reader.” The novelist had died in 1870, universally famous on both sides of the Atlantic.
Although Dickens referred to the lost brother as “John,” some sources referred to him as “Tom.” The New York World declared, “If, indeed, there has died at Knoxville ‘an old English sailor’ ‘bearing the name of ‘Tom Grimaldi,’ the probabilities are overwhelmingly strong in favor of his identity with the hero of one of the most singular cases of disappearances on record…. The name of Grimaldi is hardly likely to have been borne by two English sailors in a century, and if the person referred to in the story from Knoxville was indeed an English sailor of an age so advanced, the probabilities, we repeat, are overwhelmingly in favor ….”
That story got around, and even jumped over the pond. In England, where the Grimaldi legend was best known, it became a Christmastime mystery. The Times of London related the story in its Dec. 24 issue. “Recently, a brief paragraph in an American paper recorded the death at Knoxville, in Tennessee, of a person described as “an old English sailor,” Thomas Grimaldi. The result has led many to believe that the brother of Grimaldi, far from being murdered, shipped away to and amassed great wealth in America.”
That story appeared in what was perhaps the English-speaking world’s most-read newspaper, on Christmas Eve, Thomas Grimaldi’s birthday. Similar stories appeared throughout the holidays in newspapers in Glasgow, Liverpool, Plymouth, Birmingham, Manchester, and Newcastle. Some of them reprinted Dickens’ 40-year-old story of the brother’s disappearance at Drury Lane, under the title, “The Mysterious Disappearance.”
The Grimaldi family of Nice, France, caught wind of it and approached Knoxville sources for more information.
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However, T.F. Grimaldi, the old man’s son back on Gay Street, threw some cold water on the international fever, but affirmed some of the story. His father was indeed kin to the famous clown, but was a nephew, not a brother. How that realization had come to him and his father was in itself a dramatic story. Charles Stuart, a member of Parliament, encountered Thomas Grimaldi while campaigning along the west coast of England, and remarked on his resemblance to Joe Grimaldi, the clown, who was still alive at the time, albeit alcoholic, sometimes suicidal, and estranged from what little family he knew about. Joe Grimaldi wrote to Thomas, the future Knoxvillian, asserting that Thomas was Joe’s nephew. But that in itself meant a lot to him. “Nothing in the history of my whole life has contributed so much to my happiness as the knowledge that I have a relative on Earth.”
Grimaldi, the world’s first famous clown, died soon afterward. It sounds unlikely that he and Thomas ever met.
T.F. Grimaldi recounted that from memories of reading the letter, likely suggesting the letter itself was lost. He mentioned that his father “made a slight effort some years before his death to investigate” his relationship to Joe Grimaldi, “but advancing age rendered him indifferent.”
The New York World interviewed Knoxville’s T.F. Grimaldi, describing him as “a hale old gentleman, who though no boaster, takes commendable pride in talking of the past wealth and influence of his family.”
The World ran a correction to their first proposal: “There is no doubt that the venerable deceased is the bona fide nephew of Joseph Grimaldi, the famous clown.” It bounced across the newspapers of Britain.
But some things still don’t add up. Thomas Grimaldi of Knoxville was actually older than the long-dead legendary clown; he claimed to have been born in 1771, making him seven years older than his “uncle.” That’s not impossible, especially given that their father was known to be sexually reckless even into old age, and had children by several women, sometimes almost simultaneously.
But as some scholarly sources have implied, it’s more likely they were first cousins, both of them grandchildren of a ballet performer known as Iron Legs Grimaldi.
The story was still fresh in early 1878, but was soon forgotten.
It sounds as if the Grimaldi family has never completely left Knoxville. T.F. Grimaldi kept up his shoe business, occasionally selling potatoes on the side. He moved back to Lynchburg in April, 1880. Whether it was a temporary or permanent move, he died hardly a month later, estimated to be about 60.
His daughter Sallie Mills stayed in Knoxville. She and her husband lived mostly in the Mechanicsville area and had several children.
Sarah Grimaldi, T.F.’s widow, outlived her husband by 45 years. She moved back to Knoxville around 1911, to live with her daughter Sallie. She died in 1925.
There’s still much we don’t know for certain about him, but it would seem that Thomas Grimaldi, the old English sailor, died at an advanced age in Knoxville, and was buried near his granddaughter at Old Gray, along the steep slope near the southern edge of the cemetery, where they put the smaller and less-expensive plots. We know about where it was. If he ever had a stone with an inscription, it’s not legible today.
Shortly after of his death, a vaudeville clown who frequently performed at Staub’s Opera House in Knoxville began advertising himself as The Great Grimaldi.
By Jack Neely
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