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 be a backward somersault, her erotically arched body balanced on the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. The image dates from 1300 BCE to 1200 BCE and is on a fragment of pottery now in the Museo Egizio in Turin. I turned the page and read on to find that similar figures can be found in ancient civilisations from all over the Western world. In Rome, acrobats and jugglers provided light entertainment between the more serious stuff of chariot racing and gladiatorial combat.

The early Christian writer Tertullian, in his book De Spectaulis (c.197–202), claimed that the first circus was staged by the goddess Circe in honour of her father, Helios the Sun God. The word ‘circus’ appears in English in the fourteenth century and derives from the Latin circus, which is a romanisation of the Greek kirkos, meaning circle or ring. It is all too tempting then to think that the roots of the modern circus can be traced back to ancient Rome or even Greece. But Roman circuses, such as the Circus Maximus, were really the precursors of the Grand National or the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

The first modern circus was established two hundred and fifty years ago, in 1768, by Philip Astley, a largerthan-life cavalryman over six foot tall, with a strong commanding voice and a reputation as a daredevil. Astley had served with distinction in the Seven Years’ War, reaching the rank of sergeant-major. When discharged in 1766 he was presented with a strong, well-put-together grey horse with which he decided to make his living.

At the time a craze for ‘trick riding’ was sweeping England. Astley toured the country displaying his equestrian skills and swordsmanship. He could make his horse feign death, fire a pistol and appear to perform mind-reading tricks. He was not the first to realise that if he cantered his horse in a tight circle he could use the centrifugal force to stand on its back and execute seemingly impossible acrobatics. By 1768 he had made enough money to open a riding school near Westminster Bridge, close to the site that is now Waterloo Station, giving riding lessons in the morning and staging entertainments in the afternoon. At first the school was a simple open-air ring surrounded by seats. Astley went on to build covered stands so that the audience could sit in the dry, paying two pounds and sixpence for a box, or sixpence for a seat in the gallery. The ring itself was unprotected from the elements until Astley had the idea of putting on a roof so performances could go on whatever the weather or time of day. He named the school Astley’s Amphitheatre Riding House. He went on to build amphitheatres in 19 British cities as well as Dublin and Paris. The horsemen were the stars of the show but jugglers, clowns, tumblers, rope dancers, magicians and conjurors were brought on between the daring riding acts. By 1780 Astley no longer performed himself but controlled what happened in the ring, thus inventing the role of ringmaster.

Astley’s success attracted competitors, including another ex-soldier, Charles Hughes. Charles Dickens described Hughes as ‘a fine stalwart fellow, who could have carried an ox away on his shoulders and afterwards eaten him for supper’ . In 1782 Hughes built a stone amphitheatre south of the Thames at St George’s Circus, a crossroads of three main thoroughfares leading to Westminster, Blackfriars and London Bridges, calling it the Royal Circus, Equestrian and Philharmonic Academy; this was the

first time that the word ‘circus’ had been associated with performance. The building had a ring and a full-size stage, so that ‘ring and stage might be united’ . Visitors to the Royal Circus could expect to be entertained by spectacular riding, clowns, jugglers, magicians and pantomimes, while bands played music. The amphitheatre design became the standard until the second half of the nineteenth century. One still exists and thrives in Great Yarmouth, the Hippodrome Circus. Lillie Langtry, Max Miller and Harry Houdini performed there, Lloyd George gave speeches there and it has played host to the Moscow State Circus, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and BBC One’s Question Time. Acrobats and trapeze artists swing from its domed roof while far below aquatic spectacles are mounted in the flooded ring.

In 1792 one of Hughes’s performers, another ex-cavalryman, John Bill Ricketts, left to go to America, heading for Philadelphia. On 3 April 1793 he opened the first American circus in an uncovered wooden building, holding eight hundred people sitting in boxes or standing round a forty-two-foot-diameter ring. Ricketts wanted to provide entertainment which was suitable for children, an unusual ambition for the time. George Washington visited and became a fan.

When yellow fever broke out in Philadelphia, Ricketts took his circus on tour and by 1798 had performed and built circuses in New York, Boston, Montreal and Quebec. Several of his circus theatres were destroyed by fire, and he went bankrupt. Ricketts was lost at sea returning to England in 1800.

The Hippodrome in Great Yarmouth, Britain’s only surviving complete circus building, built in 1903 by the showman George Gilbert. Photograph © David Street.

In April 1871 the people of New York State and New England were inundated with leaflets advertising the P.T. Barnum Museum, Menagerie and Circus, International Zoological Garden, Polytechnic Institute and Hippodrome. Ticket-holders were led through a series of tents containing a menagerie, magicians, mechanical wonders and freaks until they

arrived in a big top where they sat and were entertained by galloping horses, clowns, jugglers, acrobats and whatever other acts Barnum and his agents could sign up.

P.T. Barnum was a 60-year-old chancer. He had made and lost fortunes as a publisher, banker, land developer and impresario. At the age of 25 he hired a blind and almost paralysed black woman and put her on show, claiming that she was 160 years old. Barnum worked her 12 hours a day and when she died he staged a public autopsy, charging spectators 50 cents to see the body cut up. In 1850, on a visit to England, he met the singer Jenny Lind and offered her one thousand dollars a night to come and sing in America. The tour netted Barnum nearly £15m dollars in today’s money.

In 1871 Barnum had the idea to move his circus on specially built railroad cars travelling from city to city by night. The trains carried everything the show would need, including tents, machinery and accommodation for the artists, animals and stage crew. After the last performance of the day, his huge tents were torn down and the mile-long train loaded up and sent steaming into the night. The next day the stage crew got to work rebuilding the whole thing while the acts paraded through the town, drumming up business for the evening performance. Barnum’s engineers evolved ingenious methods for loading circus wagons on to flat-bed railroad cars.

The same techniques were still in use over a hundred years later. At the end of the first season Barnum’s train, which was 65 cars long, had played 3 performances a day in 145 cities. The enterprise was a huge success and Barnum bought hundreds more horses, hired more acts and bought his own trains. He added another ring to sell more tickets and renamed the show P.T. Barnum’s Great Travelling Exposition and World’s Fair, Menagerie, Caravan, Hippodrome, Polytechnic Institute, National Portrait Gallery, Hall of Classic Statuary, Mechanics and Fine Arts, Garden of Zoology and Ornithology. He later shortened this to the Greatest Show on Earth.

By now circuses in America and Europe were getting bigger and bigger. Two-, three- and even seven-ring shows appeared. Wild animals were introduced, with spangled performers risking their lives in cages filled with lions, tigers and bears, while elephants were trained to perform comedy routines. The shows themselves got more ambitious. Huge historical pageants, shipwrecks, battles, the life of Alexander the Great or the destruction of Rome were all on offer. For the circus impresario, bigger was better.

In 1859 the New York Times reported that a new acrobatic act had appeared at the Cirque Napoléon in Paris, where a young man called Jules Léotard could be seen performing dangerously high in the air. Léotard came from Toulouse where his father had a gymnasium and pool. One day Léotard noticed that there were two ropes hanging from a roof ventilator. He tied them to a wooden bar and invented the trapeze. By the time he got to Paris he had devised an act in which he somersaulted between three trapezes, flying through the air high above the crowd. He had no safety net, although the management had insisted that he place mattresses on the ground to cushion him should he fall. Léotard wore a tight sleeveless costume which took his name and has been the outfit for acrobats ever since. Thanks to Léotard, acrobats, not horses, became the stars of the show. One legendary acrobat was the German, Lillian Leitzel, whose mother, grandmother and aunts were all aerialists. Born in 1892, she spoke several languages and had trained as a concert pianist before joining her mother’s act, the Leamy Ladies. Leitzel had an ideal physique for an acrobat: she was strong, light and tiny. Leitzel dressed herself in silk tights and a diaphanous short skirt, her midriff bare, her long hair tied up and golden shoes on her feet.

She was carried into the ring by a powerful man, her diminutive size making him look like a giant. She was followed by a woman acting as her French maid. When the strong man put her down Leitzel staggered and appeared to swoon, putting her hand on her heart as if summoning up courage for the ordeal ahead. Then, with the spotlight on her, she climbed ‘the web’ , the ropes hanging from the roof of the tent. At the climax she was hauled to the roof, where she stood on a small platform lit by a single, dazzling spotlight. Drums rolled as the petite figure slipped her hand into a padded loop attached by a swivel to a hanging rope which she slowly swung round and round. As the rope gained momentum the audience chanted, while more dramatic drumrolls increased the tension. Finally Leitzel hurled herself into the abyss, a part of the act known as the ‘full-arm plange’ or ‘dislocate’ as it caused the bones in her right shoulder to dislocate, with only the strength of her muscles snapping them back into place. High above the crowd she spun, her long hair flaming behind her like a golden comet tail. One spectator said she looked like a ‘pastel doll spinning in a halo of flame’ .

Leitzel admitted that, like many aerialists, she had a desire to let go: ‘I had to fight it … you’re spinning around way up there, holding by one hand, and all of a sudden you hear a little nagging voice – Why not let go? I’ve never managed to get over it. ’ On 13 February 1931 one of the swivels holding her rope broke, and she fell 40 feet to the floor of the ring. Apparently uninjured, she was taken to hospital where she died. She was 39 years old. One obituary described her as the queen of the circus and said that she would be welcomed into heaven by a celestial drumroll.

Outside the Library, night had fallen and it had begun to snow. A collection of less than two dozen books had lured me into a dream-world of bright lights, noise and glamour, of bravery and daring, of clowns and laughter, bands, parades, pretty girls and fortunes won and lost. My mind reeled with small facts: that ‘clown’ may derive from a word meaning clumsy peasant, and that the harlequin character once carried a wand called a slapstick that he used to magically make acts start and stop; that David Garrick despised circus performances, finding them an ‘abomination in the house of Shakespeare’; and that in 1840 the English showman Thomas Cooke brought the idea of a travelling tented circus from America to England. I had to stop. The Library was closing and my desk needed clearing.

I left the stacks and returned to the silence of the Reading Room, feeling the gulf that separates the writer from the circus performer. The essayist E.B. White, who was fixated by circus, wrote that ‘out of its wild disorder comes order; from its rank smell rises the good aroma of courage and daring; out of its preliminary shabbiness comes the final splendour’ . He felt that he had failed in his attempts to describe it, but added: ‘a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is just too much for him. ’ I realised that my afternoon with Science & Misc., Circus had taught me a lesson: tomorrow I must try harder and dare more. .