The London Library Magazine Summer 2018 - Issue 40

Two Hundred and Fifty Years in the Ring In this anniversary year of the founding of the modern circus, Rick Stroud admires the courage and determination displayed by circus troupes over the centuries Circus has played an important part in my adult life. When my daughter, Nell, was growing up she insisted that she wanted to be ‘a monkey trainer’ and had a rich fantasy relationship with a group of imaginary monkeys to whom she regularly wrote long letters. Before going to Oxford she went to America and worked for a year as a labourer in Circus Flora.

Four years later she left New College, with a first-class honours degree in English Literature, and headed straight for the south-east of England to work as a skivvy for a charming but run-down operation called Circus Santus. For the next ten years Nell worked her way up the circus tree.

Starting as a muck shoveller, she graduated to the ring, riding elephants and horses, and finally became the ringmaster. Today she is the founder, owner and artistic director of Gifford’s Circus, which for the last ten years has toured the south of England playing three shows a day in an eight-hundred-seat tent. Dressed in a gorgeous costume, Nell opens each performance by cantering into the ring on a white stallion that greets the cheering audience by rearing on its hind legs.

One afternoon last winter, I was waylaid in The London Library by a shelf in Science & Miscellaneous that I had not noticed before, S. Circus, a collection of about 20 books. I could not resist spending some time browsing the titles. I took down The Greatest Shows on Earth: A History of the Circus by Linda Simon (2014), which fell open at a painting of a nearly naked female acrobat frozen in what appeared to 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE