The Longest Nose

Thomas Wedders, some authorities believe his surname to have been Wadhouse, holds a curious record that has stood the test of time for some two and a half centuries. He holds the record for having the longest nose, which measured an astonishing 19 centimetres, the equivalent of the length of a standard pencil. The average European male’s nose is approximately 5.8 cm long and sticks out 2.6 cm.

Little is known of Thomas’s origins save that he was born in Yorkshire around 1730, some researchers believing that his parents were siblings, and that his enormous nose was a symptom of an unknown disease that caused his intellect to stop developing when he was five. Intellectually challenged and with a pronounced and visibly obvious physical deformity, a combination that was considered amusing by the cruel standards of the time, Thomas was an obvious candidate to be exhibited in the sideshows that were so popular during that period.

Thomas seemed to have scratched a living by touring his home county of Yorkshire, amazing audiences with the size of his nose. Little is known of his life, save that he died in the early 1780s in his fifties, but his memory lived on, earning him a mention in Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, a book about rare medical conditions by George Gould and Walter Pyle.

As well as mentioning Thomas’s nose size, the authors alluded to him being intellectually disabled, declaring that he “expired as he had lived, in a condition of mind best described as the most abject idiocy.”

The Strand Magazine, also in 1896, picked up the reference and gave it some additional and far from sympathetic colour. “If noses were ever uniformly exact in representing the importance of the individual”, they wrote, “this worthy ought to have amassed all the money in Threadneedle Street and conquered all Europe, for this prodigious nose of his was a compound of the acquisitive with the martial. But either his chin was too weak or his brow too low, or Nature had so exhausted herself in the task of giving this prodigy a nose as to altogether forget to endow him with brains; or perhaps, the nose crowded out this latter commodity. At all events, we are told this Yorkshireman expired, nose and all, as he had lived, in a condition of mind best described as the most abject idiocy”.

Whether Thomas’ nose was actually as long as it was claimed to be, circuses and sideshows tended to exaggerate the degree of the physical deformity their star performer was blessed or cursed with, it has continued to fascinate. Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Even went to the lengths of making a fanciful reproduction of his head and enormous nose which still attracts crowds to this day.