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.