Good morning, Swansea!

In October 1838, thousands of people lined the streets of Swansea to cheer a man through the town like a king - and today he has a memorial beneath the archway on Patagonia Walk in the Marina.

Look closer, and you'll find quotes, images and fragments of the life of a man Swansea once treated as a celebrity — a self-styled European baron and miracle doctor.

But he wasn't a baron. He wasn't even a doctor. His real name was John Smith, and everything else about him — the title, the medical degree, the miracle cures he sold — were invented.

This week, we tell the story of Baron Spolasco: Swansea's most outrageous fraud.

In January 1838, Spolasco boarded the steamer Killarney at Cork with his young son, Robert. Sailing along the south coast of Ireland, the 264-ton vessel ran into a snowstorm and was wrecked on the Renny Rocks, near Robert's Cove, just west of Kinsale.

Around 50 passengers and crew were on board; roughly 25 died, and 13 survived long enough to be rescued. Spolasco was one of them, clinging to the rocks for two nights and nearly three days. In his own account of the wreck, he described his son clinging to his neck as the ship broke apart, crying, "papa, shall we be drowned? shall we be drowned? kiss me! kiss me!" The boy was swept from the rock during the second night and never found.

Within weeks he'd written a self-aggrandising pamphlet about the wreck, casting himself as its hero and the saviour of his fellow survivors. It set the tone for everything that followed - turning disaster into publicity, and grief into a story about himself.

Spolasco arrived in Swansea later that year in October 1838, already a minor celebrity purely for having survived the wreck - and he made sure everyone knew it. He'd papered the town with leaflets and handbills days ahead of his arrival, and Swansea turned out in force to meet him. One contemporary eyewitness described the scene:

"A large, elegant, yellow carriage with certainly four, if not six, horses, in splendid trappings, with postillions in brilliant colours and cockades, a black manservant in gorgeous livery and shoulderknot, yellow silk breeches and white stockings, sitting alone in solemn dignity immovable on the centre of the box seat, the Baron inside, bowing left and right amidst the roaring swell of cheering that beset him on all hands."

He settled into a Georgian house on Adelaide Street, on the site where the South Wales Evening Post building now stands. When the authorities objected to a rear access he'd been using for his stable, Spolasco answered by training his horse to climb the front steps and walk straight through the hallway to reach the stable at the back instead.

Anyone could call themselves a doctor in 1830s Britain. The Medical Act, which required practitioners to be registered and qualified, wasn't passed until 1858 - twenty years after Spolasco set up on Adelaide Street.

He advertised cures for leprosy, palsy, scurvy and ulcerated legs, along with his own "life-prolonging pills." One 1838 advertisement called him "the most successful practitioner of medicine and surgery in the world," and offered £20,000 to anyone who could prove otherwise. Most of what he sold was a laxative.

Local papers regularly printed testimonials from his patients, with names and addresses attached. John Clement, a Swansea ferryman, wrote that he'd spent three years dying of ulcers, given up on by doctors in Swansea and Liverpool, before Spolasco cured him within a fortnight. Mary Hendrick, of Pentregwynau, said she'd been a bedridden invalid for ten years before he restored her to health inside a month. Dina Williams, landlady of the Falcon on Golden Street, credited him with curing twelve years of ulcerated legs after "several Medical and Surgical Gentlemen in this town" had failed her.

His popularity peaked in the early 1840s and fell away steadily afterwards, taking his income down with it, and by 1845 he'd left Swansea for good, though he held onto the Adelaide Street house until 1854.

Nobody has ever fully explained why he went. Rumours later circulated of a fourth trial, one serious enough to force him out of the country, though no record of it has surfaced, and a Swansea City Council investigation into his history, decades later, ran into the same dead end: "Was there a fourth trial so serious that he had to leave the country? Did he skulk out of Swansea because of declining popularity, or was he in fact on the crest of a new wave of popularity in the Metropolis?"

What is documented is a malpractice trial in London toward the end of the 1840s, after which Spolasco crossed the Atlantic and started again in New York, where his arrival was briefly just as grand as his Welsh one had been, with an office in a fashionable part of town, a coach and horses.

A dispute with his landlord over rent pushed him into smaller and smaller lodgings, further from the fashionable end of Broadway each time, until he died of stomach cancer in 1858, leaving a will worth under $5,000 to two children who, as far as anyone could tell, didn't exist.

Spolasco's grave in New York has largely been forgotten, but Swansea kept a piece of him. The archway on Patagonia Walk, in the Marina, carries 26 stone tablets with quotes, portraits and scenes from his life, including the wreck of the Killarney - installed decades after his death, by a council that seemed unsure whether it was honouring a local celebrity or immortalising a fraud.

Next time you walk through the Marina, take a moment under the archway and read a few of the tablets - they're the closest thing Swansea has to a monument for the biggest con artist it ever fell for.

I’ll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

Thanks for reading the Swansea Scoop. If you enjoyed it, share it with a friend who would find it useful.

Catch you on Wednesday!

Andrew.

Sources: The Cambrian; The Silurian, or South Wales General Advertiser; Monmouthshire Merlin; Southern Reporter and Cork Commercial Courier; Wexford Conservative; Central Glamorgan Gazette; Herald of Wales; South Wales Daily Post/South Wales Evening Post archives; Glamorgan, Monmouth and Brecon Gazette and Merthyr Guardian; New York Daily Tribune (via the Swansea and Glamorgan Herald); Bristol Times and Mirror; Coventry Free Press; Limerick Chronicle; Swansea City Council historical research; Baron Spolasco's own published narrative of the Killarney wreck, and contemporary shipping records, via liverpool.ac.uk/~cmi/books/earlySS/killarney - all via the British Newspaper Archive.