Tom Coram

Coram and Jerry in the military act. From Ventriloquist Central.

Pull up a chair and look at the photograph above for a second. Two soldiers, matching uniforms, matching peaked caps, standing for the camera the way men do when they expect to be inspected. One of them is flesh and blood. The other is wood and papier mache with a hinged jaw, and his name was Jerry. That is Tom Coram's whole act in one still frame: a ventriloquist who dressed his sidekick sharp enough to pass for a real soldier at fifty feet, in front of crowds who could not always tell the difference. Here is the story behind the uniform.

A stage name bigger than the birth name

He was not born Coram. He was born Thomas Whitaker, and by the time he made his London debut in 1905, the stage name had already eaten the birth name whole.^[1][2] Ventriloquist Central's own history and a 2012 profile from the blog Travalanche give the same real name and the same debut year, from two independent write-ups decades apart.^[1][2] Forty-five years later, when the Oracle (the newsletter of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists) wrote up his son picking up the act, the paper spelled the family name Whittaker, not Coram.^[3] That is usually how you catch a stage name years after the fact: somebody's own relatives keep spelling the real one.

Jerry learns to walk

The figure's name was Jerry, sometimes billed in full as Jerry Fisher. Coram worked him, at least part of the time, through a pneumatic device rigged inside the body.^[1][2] Over the years the mechanism grew. Jerry could cry, wink, spit, smoke, blink, and eventually walk, a six-effect list two independent sources give in nearly identical terms.^[1][2] Trav S.D.'s own profile credits Coram as the first to bring electromagnetic devices into the act, driving that same list of effects.^[2] I will let that credit stand as Trav S.D.'s claim, not a settled house fact. Every figure-making shop of that era has its own candidate for "first," and this one's shop mates have their own advocates too.

The military act

Coram and Jerry became especially known for a routine built entirely around military dress: matching uniforms, matching peaked caps, turned out sharp enough that you would need a second look to find the seam between the man and the figure.^[1] Charles Hook, another working ventriloquist, wrote it up decades later for the Oracle and called it "the best act ever presented on this side by an English performer," crediting the Whitehall-style backdrop, Coram's own voice, and the uniforms themselves.^[4] Hook was not shy about a superlative that day, and he had actually seen the act. I will take his word for it before I take mine.

The men who built Jerry

Jerry did not come from nowhere. By an auction house's own account of the story, Coram issued the challenge himself: if a young craftsman named Leonard Insull could build a better dummy than the one Coram was already using, Coram would buy it.^[5] Insull could, and did, and that dare is the origin story the record gives for Insull's own career, and by extension for a whole line of English figure making that followed.^[5] Coram did not stop with one maker. He was also a client of Arthur Quisto, the Punch and Judy showman who built figures on the side for the biggest names in British music hall ventriloquism.^[1] If you have already read Quisto's own page in this archive, you have already met Coram's name there: two of the biggest acts in the business, Coram and Arthur Prince, both had figures made in Quisto's shop.

A book, and a claim from across the ocean

Sometime around 1919 or 1920, a slim instructional booklet went out under the title "How to Become a Ventriloquist," credited simply to Coram.^[6] It was not a one-listing curiosity either: a second marketplace record, found separately on the open web, lists the same title, the same rough date, and the same one-word author credit.^[7] A man selling his own instruction manual while headlining is a good sign business was good. Across the Atlantic, a New York booker named Dan Harrington told the Oracle in 1956 that Coram was the first ventriloquist in America to use an upper-lip movement in a dummy's mouth, and that Harrington ordered one built the same way the moment he saw it.^[8] Another attributed claim, another man's word on the record. I am passing it along the way Harrington told it: as a story, not a patent filing.

A television first, and the last of Jerry

By 1925, per Trav S.D.'s own account, Jerry had appeared in one of John Logie Baird's earliest experimental television broadcasts, an early date for any ventriloquist figure to show up on a screen of any kind.^[2] Three years later Coram toured the United States with a full stage set built around the gates of St. James's Palace, matching the polish of the uniformed act itself.^[2] By 1935 his sons Bill and Ralph Coram were performing too, appearing together in a British Pathe short with the plain title "Following in Father's Footsteps."^[2] Coram died in 1937.^[2]

Nine years later, in 1946, the ventriloquist W.S. Berger, whose own collection would eventually become Vent Haven Museum, bought a badly damaged Coram head from an Irish performer named Navan O'Reilley, who was acting on behalf of Coram's widow.^[1] Vent Haven Museum's own figure catalog lists a "Coram Head," credited on the museum's own placard simply as "Coram Head / Tom Coram."^[9] And the figure himself outlived the man who built the act around him. An Oracle item from 1950 reports that Jerry had been reclaimed by Coram's son, Billy Whittaker, who was putting the figure back to work in his own act.^[3] Whatever name the family used at home, the figure kept the stage name going a while longer.

The circle

No ventriloquist works entirely alone. Here is who Coram's act connects to.

A hundred and some years on, most of what survives about Tom Coram is the wooden boy who could do more tricks than the man holding him: cry, wink, spit, smoke, blink, and walk, in a uniform sharp enough to fool a crowd. That is not an insult to Coram. It is the entire point of the trade he worked, done about as well as anyone had managed by 1937.

Six effects on a pneumatic budget and Jerry still had a better resume than half the men in that music hall crowd. Cry, wink, spit, smoke, blink, walk. I'd like to see a birth certificate do that.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy