The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

Introduction:
The Contradictions of a
Collection: Dr. Lambshead’s Cabinet By the Editors

A photograph of just one shelf in Lambshead’s study displaying the “overflow” from his underground collection (1992). Some items were marked “return to sender” on the doctor’s master list.

To his dying day, Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead (1900–2003) insisted to friends that he “wasn’t much of a collector.” “Things tend to manifest around me,” he told BBC Radio once, “but it’s not by choice. I spend a large part of my life getting rid of things.”

Indeed, one of Lambshead’s biggest tasks after the holiday season each year was, as he put it, “repatriating well-intentioned gifts” with those “who might more appropriately deserve them.” Often, this meant reuniting “exotic” items with their countrymen and -women, using his wide network of colleagues, friends, and acquaintances hailing from around the world. A controversial reliquary box from a grateful survivor of ballistic organ syndrome? Off to a “friend in the Slovak Republic who knows a Russian who knows a nun.” A centuries-old “assassin’s twist” kris (see the Catalog entries) absentmindedly sent by a lord in Parliament? Off to Dr. Mawar Haqq at the National Museum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And so on and so forth.

He kept very little of this kind of material, not out of some loyalty to the Things of Britain, but more out of a sense that “the West still has a lot to answer for,” as he wrote in his journals. Perhaps this is why Lambshead spent so much time in the East. Indeed, the east wing of his ever-more-extensive home in Whimpering-on-the-Brink was his favorite place to escape the press during the more public moments of his long career.

Regardless, over time, his cabinet of curiosities grew to the point that his semipermanent loans to various universities and museums became not so much philanthropic in nature as “acts of self-defense” (LIFE Magazine, “Hoarders: Curiosity or a New Disease?,” May 19, 1975). One of the most frenzied of these “acts” occurred in “divesting myself of the most asinine acquisition I ever made, the so-called Clockroach”—documented in this very volume—“which had this ridiculous habit of starting all on its own and making a massacre of my garden and sometimes a stone fence or two. Drove my housekeeper and the groundskeeper mad.”

Breaking Ground

This question of the cabinet’s growth coincides with questions about its location. As early as the 1950s, there are rather unsubtle hints in Dr. Lambshead’s journal of “creating hidden reservoirs for this river of junk” and “darkness and subterranean calm may be best for the bulk of it,” especially since the collection “threatens to outgrow the house.”

In the spring of 1962, as is well-documented, builders converged on Lambshead’s abode and for several months were observed to leave through the back entrance carrying all manner of supplies while removing a large quantity of earth, wood, and roots.

Speculation began to develop as to Lambshead’s intentions. “If even Dr. Lambshead despairs of compromise, what should the rest of us, who do not have the same privilege, do?” asked the editor of the Socialist Union Guild Newsletter that year, assuming that Lambshead, at the time a member, was building a “personalized bomb shelter with access to amenities many of us could not dream to afford in our everyday lives, nor wish to own for fear of capitalist corruption.” In the absence of a statement from Lambshead, the Fleet Street press even started rumors that he had discovered gold beneath his property, or ancient Celtic artifacts of incredible value. Whatever Lambshead’s motivations, he must have paid the builders handsomely, since the only recorded comment from the foreman is: “Something’s wrong with the pipes. Full stop.” (Guardian, “Avowed Socialist Builds ‘Anti-Democracy’ Bunker Basement,” April 28, 1962)

Floor plan found in Lambshead’s private files, detailing, according to a scrawled note, “the full extent of a museum-quality cabinet of curiosities that will serve as a cathedral to the world, and be worthy of her.”

Throughout the year, Lambshead ignored the questions, catcalls, and bullhorn-issued directives from the press besieging his gates. He continued to entertain guests at his by-now palatial home—including such luminaries as Maurice Richardson, Francis Bacon, Molly Parkin, Jerry Cornelius, George Melly, Quentin Crisp, Nancy Cunard, Angus Wilson, Philippe Jullian, and Violet Trefusis—and, in general, acted as if nothing out of the ordinary was occurring, even as the workmen labored until long after midnight and more than one guest reported “strange metallic smells and infernal yelping burps coming up from beneath the floorboards.” Meanwhile, Lambshead’s seemingly preternatural physical fitness fueled rumors involving “life-enhancing chambers” and “ancient rites.” Despite being in his sixties, he looked not a day over forty, no doubt due to his early and groundbreaking experiments with human growth hormone.

Why the secrecy? Why the need to ignore the press? Nothing in Lambshead’s journals can explain it. Indeed, given the damage eventually suffered by this subterranean space, there’s not even enough left to map the full extent of the original excavation. We are left with two floor plans from Lambshead’s private filing cabinet, one of which shows his estate house in relation to the basement area—and thus two contradictory possibilities. One of them, oddly enough, corresponds in shape to a three-dimensional model of an experimental flying craft. This coincidence has led to one of the stranger accusations ever leveled against Lambshead (not including those attributed to contamination scholar Reza Negarestani and obliteration expert Michael Cisco). Art critic Amal El-Mohtar, who for a time attempted to research part of Lambshead’s cabinet, claimed that “It became obvious from Thackery’s notes that he was creating a kind of specialized Ark to survive the extermination of humankind, each item chosen to tell a specific story, and his particular genius was to have all of these objects—this detritus of eccentric quality—housed within a container that would eventually double as a spaceship.” However, it must be noted that this theory, leaked to various tabloids, came to El-Mohtar during a period of recovery in Cornwall from her encounter with the infamous singing fish from Lambshead’s collection. Not only had her writings become erratic, but she was, for a period of time, fond of talking to wildflowers.

Floor plan of what Amal El-Mohtar called “a nascent spaceshop nee Ark,” with a front view of Lambshead’s house beneath it.

The most popular of other apocryphal theories originated with the performance artist Sam Van Olffen, who, since 1989, has seemed fixated on Lambshead and staged several related productions. The most grandiose, the musical The Mad Cabinet of Curiosities of the Mad Dr. Lambshead, debuted in 2008 in Paris and London, well after Lambshead’s death. Perhaps the most controversial of Van Olffen’s speculations is that Lambshead’s excavations in 1962 were meant not to create a space for a cabinet of curiosities but to remodel an existing underground space that had previously served as a secret laboratory in which he was conducting illegal medical tests. A refrain of “Doctor doctor doctor doctor! / Whatcher got in there there? A lamb’s head?” is particularly grating.

Certainly, nothing about the flashback scenes to the 1930s, or the hints of Lambshead’s affiliation with underground fascist parties, did anything to endear Van Olffen’s productions to fans of the doctor, or the popular press. The Mad Cabinet of Curiosities closed on both Les Boulevards and the West End after less than a month. The combined effect of media attention for this “sustained attack on the truth,” as Lambshead’s heirs put it in a deposition for an unsuccessful lawsuit in 2009, has been to distort the true nature of the doctor’s work and career.

A Deep Emotional Attachment?

Despite irregularities and bizarre claims, one fact seems clear: Lambshead, especially in his later years, formed a deep emotional attachment to many of the objects in his collection, whether repatriated, loaned out, or retained in his house or underground cabinet.

A close friend of Lambshead, post–World War II literary icon Michael Moorcock, who first met the doctor in the mid-1950s at a party thrown by Mervyn Peake's family, remembered several such attachments to objects. “It became especially acute in the 1960s,” Moorcock recalled in an interview, “when we spent a decent amount of time together because of affairs related to New Worlds,” the seminal science fiction magazine Moorcock edited at the time. “For a man of science, who resolutely believed in fact, he could be very sentimental. I remember how distraught he became during an early visit when he couldn’t find an American Night Quilt he had promised to show both me and [J. G.] Ballard. He became so ridiculously agitated that I had to say, ‘Pard, you might want to sit down awhile.’ Then he felt compelled to tell me that he and his first—his only—wife, Helen, who had passed on two or three years before, had watched the stars from the roof one night early in their relationship, and had snuggled under that quilt. One of his fondest memories of her.” (Independent, “An Unlikely Friendship?: The Disease Doc and the Literary Lion,” September 12, 1995)

One of Sam Van Olffen’s stage sets for the supposed laboratory of Dr. Lambshead, taken from the Parisian production of the musical The Mad Cabinet of Curiosities of the Mad Dr. Lambshead and supposedly inspired by Van Olffen’s own encounter with the cabinet several years before. (Le Monde, March 2, 2008)

The “secret medical laboratory” stage set for The Mad Cabinet of Curiosities of the Mad Dr. Lambshead. A much less grandiose version of the musical was eventually turned into a SyFy channel film titled Mansquito 5: Revenge of Dr. Lambshead, but never aired. (Le Monde, March 2, 2008)

One of Lambshead’s few attempts at art, admittedly created “under the influence of several psychotropic drugs I was testing at the time.” Lambshead claims he was “just trying to reproduce the visions in my head.” S. B. Potter (see: “1972” in Visits and Departures) claimed the painting provided “early evidence of brain colonization.”

A fair number of the artifacts in the cabinet dating from before 1961 would have reminded Lambshead of Helen Aquilus, a brilliant neurosurgeon whom he appears to have first met in 1939, courted until 1945, and finally married in 1950 (despite rumors of a chance encounter in 1919). She had accompanied him on several expeditions and emergency trips, as a colleague and fellow scientist. She had been present when Lambshead acquired many of his most famous artifacts, such as “The Thing in the Jar,” a puzzler that haunted Lambshead until his death (see: Further Oddities). She also helped him acquire a number of books, including a rare printing of Gascoyne’s Man’s Life Is This Meat. Some have, in fact, suggested that Lambshead turned toward the preservation of his collection and building of a space for it as a distraction from his grief following Helen’s death in an auto accident on a lonely country road in 1960.

Other items had significance to Lambshead because he had had a hand in their discovery, like St. Brendan’s Shank, or in their creation, like the mask for Sir Ranulph Wykeham-Rackham, a.k.a. Roboticus. Perhaps most famous among these is the original of his psychedelic painting The Family from 1965, which for a time hung in the Tate Modern’s exhibit “Doctors as Painters, Blood in Paint.” In the painting, Death stares off into the distance while, behind it, a man who looks like Lambshead in his twenties stands next to a phantasmagorical rendering of Helen and her cousins.

In many cases, too, these objects, as he said, “remind me of lost friends”—for example, St. Brendan’s Shank, which he came to possess during World War II, and which, as he wrote in his journal, “I spent many delightful days researching along with my comrades-in-arms, most of them, unfortunately, now lost to us from war, time, disease, accident, and heartbreak.”

One of the few museum exhibit loans ever to have been photographed (Zurich, 1970s)—presented as evidence to support Caitlin R. Kiernan’s accusations of Lambshead using artifacts to convey secret messages. She claims that Russian artist Vladimir Gvozdev, the creator of the mecha-rhino above, does not exist, and is a front for the “Sino-Siberian cells of a secret society.”

Dr. Lambshead’s Personal Life

In searching for a theme or approach to the cabinet, it may be relevant to return to the subject of Lambshead’s wife. Throughout his life, and even after her death, Lambshead kept his attachment to Helen almost as secret as his cabinet, and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases never mentioned her, or referenced the marriage. Aquilus, a Cypriote Greek, came from a long line of dissenters and activists, and had originally left Athens to go to school at Oxford. She was and, at first, often seen as a beard for the doctor, since he was known to be bisexual and somewhat hedonistic in his appetites.

Aquilus, though, was a force and a character in her own right: a groundbreaking neuroscientist and surgeon in an era when females in those fields were unheard of; a researcher who worked for the British government during World War II to perfect triage for traumatic head wounds on the battlefield; and a champion at dressage who combined such a knack for negotiation with forcefulness of will that for a time she entered the political sphere as a spokesperson for the Socialist Party. Possessed of prodigious strength, she could also “shoot like a sniper” and “pilot or commandeer any damn boat, frigate, sampan, freighter, destroyer, or aircraft carrier you care to name,” Lambshead wrote admiringly in a late 1950s letter to Moorcock.

All that ended in the one-car accident that left Lambshead in shock and Aquilus dead, her remains cremated and buried in a small, private ceremony almost immediately thereafter. Lambshead would never remarry, and often spoke of Helen as if she were still alive, a tendency that friends at first found understandable, then obsessional, and, finally, just “a quirk of Thackery’s syntax,” as Moorcock put it.

From 1963 on, however, despite his journals containing any number of elaborate descriptions of medical exploration and of artifacts acquired or sent off, there is only one mention of Helen. “Helen chose a different life,” he writes in 1965, on the anniversary of her accident. The words are crossed out, then reinstated and emphasized overtop of the cross-out, with a violence that has torn the page, and several pages after, so that many entries thereafter are marked by and linked to that one sentence.

What to make of the statement “Helen has chosen another life”? Since 2005, when the journals first became available to the public through the British Library, many a researcher has attempted to make their reputation on an interpretation—everything from psychological profiling to outright conspiracy theories. Riffing off of the ideas, if not the political inclination, of the second endnote in Reza Negarestani’s “The Gallows-horse” (see: The Miéville Anomalies), unexplained-phenomena enthusiast and self-described “heretic Lambsheadean” Caitlín R. Kiernan has speculated that “Helen Aquilus did not die in a car crash in 1960. She staged her own death to join a secret society devoted to radical progressive change in the world, and spent the next half-century of her life in that struggle until a car bomb in Athens took her life in 2005, the body unclaimed for forty-eight hours and then mysteriously disappearing.”

Evidence for this claim is flimsy at best, although Kiernan cites the speedy cremation of the body, the lack of any follow-up report, “due to the actions of a sleeper cell” within the police department, and “a damning history of collusion between the timing of Lambshead’s museum loans/artifact purchases and the movements of known spies and double agents in the area. It must be assumed that encoded into such transactions were secret messages, some of them from Helen and some of them from Lambshead to Helen.” Kiernan also notes the rapid reversal of some museum loans; in one case, involving “The Armor of Saint Locust,” Lambshead rescinded his approval for the loan five days after the exhibit had opened to the public. She also references “the timing of Lambshead’s visits to the Pulvadmonitor” (see: “Pulvadmonitor: The Dust’s Warning,” The Mignola Exhibits).

Kiernan saves her most pointed commentary for specific evidence: the rolled-up piece of parchment found inside a mechanical rhino in Zurich in 1976. “The text and image on this paper is ostensibly a maskh spell for constructing a pod for a journey toward the afterlife of the Elysian Fields. The spell is comprised of four main elements: a body wrapped in a shroud, one square and one rectangular chart, and lastly a scorpion, which in Middle Eastern folklore and talismans plays the role of a delivery system or a catalyst (here the scorpion is the engine for the pod to the afterlife). The dimensions of the pod (the shrouded body) have been given in the spell. The word ‘scorpion’ in Farsi has been hidden in this spell in the form of a cipher that looks like an abstract scorpion (the mark just above the word ‘Elysian’ at the bottom of the drawing). But what’s also been hidden here, encrypted, is a series of messages from a husband to his wife that, if ever properly deciphered, would no doubt prove to be a hybrid of a love letter and a complex series of orders or recognition of receipt of commands that might have agency over several years, if not decades. That is the true scorpion in this image.”

All of this “information” has been gleaned from what Kiernan calls “further encrypted evidence in Lambshead’s journals from 1965 on—the year he learned that Helen wasn’t dead—and supported by such circumstantial evidence as their heated public argument in 1959,” also documented in the journals, in which Lambshead confesses, with no small amount of anguish, that “Helen is much more radical than I could ever be. How am I supposed to follow her in that?” Kiernan points to Lambshead’s writings on “the second life of artifacts” in his “The Violent Philosophy of the Archive,” which she claims “isn’t about the objects at all, but about their repurposing by him.”

Spell or secret communication? The page found inside of the mecha-rhino, as photographed by Zurich investigator Kristen Alvanson.

Kiernan further claims that Helen attended Lambshead’s funeral, “the mysterious woman in white standing at the back, next to Keith Richards and Deepak Chopra.” However, photographs from the funeral clearly show many older women “standing at the back,” several of them mysterious in the sense that they cannot be identified and are not on the guest list.

A theory put forward by Alan Moore, who knew Lambshead late in life better than anyone, is more reasonable and doesn’t presume conspiracy and collusion. Moore suggests merely that the hectic pace Lambshead set from 1963 until his death in 2003 came from a sudden resolve: “It was merely one of the oldest stories, you see. A man attempting to outrun the knowledge of the continuing absence of the love of his life.” (In the subtext of his pornographic masterpiece The Lost Girls, Moore would reference both Lambshead and Helen, through the device of a mirror separating them forever.)

Loans with Strings Attached: The Museum Exhibits

Of all of Kiernan’s “evidence,” the most fact-based concerned Lambshead’s eccentric attitude toward the visual documentation of the contents of his cabinet, whether parts of it were at home or roaming abroad. Although it’s hardly evidence of secret messages being included with his loans, Lambshead usually forbid even the usual photographs a museum will commission for catalogs or postcards. His sole recorded explanation? “It creates greater anticipation if the public has no preconceived idea of what they may be about to encounter. A photograph is a sad and lonely idea of an echo of something real.” (Guardian, “Sir Ranulph Wykeham-Rackham. a.k.a. Robotikus, Still on Loan to Imperial War Museum, But Nowhere to Be Seen,” June 4, 1998)

However, as even the barely suppressed emotion evidenced by the quote may suggest, it seems more likely that Lambshead’s intense personal commitment to the core collection made the loaning of items, while necessary and part of what the doctor considered his “civic duty,” also painful, and that forbidding photographs gave him a measure of control, a way he could allow the public to experience his cabinet and yet keep it from the Public Eye. As might be expected, the compilation of a book chronicling highlights from Lambshead’s cabinet has been made much more difficult due to this eccentricity.

The Doctor Versus the Collector

For the majority of his career, due to his insistence on remaining true to his main passions, Lambshead existed on the fringes of medical science. He was wellrespected by some of the world’s best doctors, but it was only by becoming a kind of cult figure in the 1960s and 1970s, when he forged friendships with many of pop culture’s elite, along with “sheer bloody persistence and endurance,” that his medical exploits began to receive the media attention he believed they deserved. Later on, there would even be factions of Lambsheadologists who clashed in their interpretations of the doctor’s theories, with Lambshead rarely if ever willing to put an end to such conflict with a definitive conclusion. “Definitive conclusions are for politicians, proctologists, and those who wear mascot costumes,” he liked to say.

Despite the time spent on his cabinet, Lambshead’s interests always manifested most concretely in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. First published in 1921, the Guide gave agency and credence to real but obscure and often only anecdotally documented instances of diseases, parasites, and tumors. Not only did many young doctors from all over the world, who would later publish influential findings, receive a sympathetic welcome from the doctor, but marginalized peoples often found the Guide took up their cause, sometimes creating publicity for situations that local governments and foreign-relief agencies wished would just go away.

Published almost continuously until the doctor’s death, the Guide received a controversial send-off with Bantam Books’ commemorative eighty-third edition in 2003. That reviewers and readers were often confused as to whether the book constituted fact or fiction was the result of a colossal blunder by Bantam’s marketing and PR departments, which were, as would be well documented later, largely dominated by pot-smokers. However, the doctor’s legacy was vindicated by the fact that a large number of medical libraries now carry that edition in their medical-guides section.

Legendary Czech artist and animator Jan Svankmajer's tongue-in-cheek tribute to Dr. Lambshead’s so-called “Skull Cucumber” hoax, perpetrated on London’s Museum of Natural History in 1992, during as Lambshead put it, “a period of extreme boredom.”

However, as should be clear, the doctor’s career was only half the story. Just as his exploration of eccentric diseases forms a secret history of the twentieth century, so, too, his cabinet of curiosities, in all of its contradictions, provides an eclectic record of a century—through folly and triumph, organized, if you will, by the imaginations of the eccentric and the visionary.

Resurrecting the Cabinet

Not until well after Lambshead’s death of banal pulmonary failure did anyone except for his housekeeper seem to have had even an inkling of the full extent of the underground collection. This situation had been exacerbated by the old man’s knowledge of his impending extinction. He had, for three years, been issuing a “recall” of sorts on many of his permanent loans. (This fact did not go unnoticed by Kiernan, who claimed these particular exhibits “had expired in their usefulness for communication with Helen.”)

A long process of discovery awaited those assigned by the estate to take care of the house, which still begs the question: Why did it take so long to unearth the collection? Estate representatives have been vague on this point, perhaps hinting at some private foreknowledge and personal plundering prior to the British government, in 2008, declaring the property a national treasure—nothing was to be touched, except with extreme care, and certainly nothing removed.

But it is also true that Lambshead had left enough aboveground to keep archaeologists and appraisers busy for several lifetimes. In later years, Lambshead’s housekeeper had gotten lackadaisical, and Lambshead made eccentric purchases of furniture—which, the week before his death, he’d hired movers to stack against the front door, as if to barricade the house against what he must have known by then was coming.

An invention commissioned from Jake von Slatt demonstrating the doctor’s commitment to the future as well as the past. Some have speculated this device supports Amal El-Mohtar’s “space Ark” theory. As described by Annalee Newitz, this image “illustrates an ideal system, where the knobs on the lower right demodulate cultural transmissions, and the amplifier beneath the bell transmits a psionic signal that can reach any analog neurological entity within 7,000 kilometers.” (See Newitz’s extended description in the Catalog section.)

More evidence of the disarray of the cabinet space, in a photograph taken during a 2009 appraisal. (Found in the display case at the back, a half-finished letter penned by Lambshead: “As Lichtenberg said of angels, so I say of dust. If they, or it, ever could speak to us, why in God’s name should we understand? And even if so, how then should we reply?”)

Therefore, the man’s house was in a catastrophic state of disarray, with letters from heads of state mixed in with grocery lists, major medical awards propping up tables or sticking enigmatically out of the many cat litter boxes, and several hundred volumes of his personal journals shoved into random spaces in a library as shambolic as it was complete. The only clean, uncluttered space was Helen’s study, which remained as it had been upon her death.

No doubt because of this disarray, and the introduction of an administrative red herring—Moorcock has suggested that Lambshead left instructions for someone to “plant the herring, no matter how badly it might begin to smell”—indicating that the collection had long ago been sent into storage in Berlin, it took caretakers until last year to unearth perhaps “the most stirring find,” as Le Monde put it. In the basement space, lost under a collapsed floor, were found the remains of a “remarkable and extensive cabinet of curiosities” that “appeared to have been damaged by a fire that occurred sometime during the past decade.” (Le Monde, “Une merveille médicale: Le curieux cabinet d’un médecin renommé enflamme l’imagination,” April 14, 2010) Strangely, there is no report of any fire from the many years Lambshead owned the house, and we have only a brief anecdotal (and probably false) statement from the doctor’s estranged housekeeper to guide us to any sort of conclusion.

The cabinet of curiosities took more than eighteen months to unearth, reconstruct, document, and catalog. Many of the pieces related to anecdotes and stories in the doctor’s personal diaries. Others, when shown to his friends, elicited further stories. In many cases, we had only descriptions of the items. Still, we were determined to build a book that would honor at least the spirit and lingering ghost of Lambshead’s collection. Thus, in keeping with the bold spirit exemplified by Lambshead and his accomplishments, we are now proud to present highlights from the doctor’s cabinet. These have been reconstructed not just through visual representations but also through text associated with their history and (sometimes) their acquisition by Lambshead. (As with any cabinet, real or housed within pages, it is, as Oscar Wilde once said about an exhaustive collection of poetry, a “browsing experience, to dip into and to savor, rather than take a wild carriage ride through.”)

We also have Lambshead’s own wistful words from his diary, written on a long-ago day in 1964: “It is never possible to completely reconstruct a person’s life from what they leave behind—the absurdity of it all, the pain, the triumphs. What’s lost is lost forever, and the silences are telling. But why mourn what we’ll lose anyway? Laughter truly is the best medicine, and I find whisky tends to numb and burn what’s left behind.”