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1. THE BLOOD-RED MENAGERIE

1.3   The Big Top & Beast Wagon

Not surprisingly, performing animal shows thrived under such moral imperfections and the prevailing religious and scientific philosophy of reductionism. The issue of cruelty was irrelevant, the notion of animal rights, plain madness. After the fall of Rome in 476 AD, itinerant animal trainers and performers exploited the nostalgia for the ruined Roman circus, travelling from town to town with bears, monkeys, lions and other exotic animals, as well as horses and dogs. There were no organised circuses as such, though jugglers, acrobats, dancers, sword swallowers, fire-eaters, stilt walkers, fortune-tellers and animal tamers, together with pick-pockets and other tricksters, wandered individually or in small groups through Europe, Asia and Africa. Small bands of Gypsies would roam the countryside with a performing bear or two, as they still do today in Yugoslavia, Rumania and Turkey. With roads narrow, pitted and dangerous - alive with serfs, vagrants and thieves, quack medicine men, vagabond monks, and peddlers hawking their wares - most of Europe never dared to venture very far from home and thus when the travelling show people arrived in a town or village, they would be greeted with awe and wonder. Performing in exchange for food and sometimes lodging, their life was characterised - as it frequently still is today despite the romantic image - by chronic poverty and insecurity, a wretched existence which their animals could not help but share. They played wherever large groups of people gathered, on the village green, in noblemen's halls, in squares and market places. It is said that King Alfred the Great (849-899) was entertained by a wild beast show, and that William the Conqueror brought troupes of contortionists, rope-dancers and acrobats from France to England. At the same time, throughout Europe, the aristocracy, the wealthy, even bishops and popes were keeping exotic animals in private menageries, the forerunners of today's public zoos. The captive animals served much the same purpose as they did for the fallen emperors - prestige, power, the vanity of being the first to exhibit a particularly unusual exotic beast, such as Henry III in 1251 displaying a polar bear and elephant, the first of their kind to be seen in London. Many simply died in their own filth, of starvation, disease or suicide. Some of the European aristocracy even tried on occasion to revive Roman-style 'hunts', with the animals trapped in their enclosures. One of the favourite pastimes Charles IX of France, for example, was to stage combats with his menagerie animals. It is recorded that on the night that followed such a contest, October 14, 1572, he dreamt that his wild beasts had turned upon him. Evidently believing the nightmare to be prophetic, the following morning he strode purposefully to his menagerie and killed every single animal that it contained. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, mystery plays, originally devised by the Church to teach its illiterate flock the Biblical scriptures, took place in the old Roman amphitheatres, epic and grandiose performances often as spectacular as the emperors themselves had witnessed. "Christ rose through a trap door," wrote Murray. "Yawning jaws opened to spout fire and sulphurous smoke from hell. . . Saved souls ascended to heaven on a platform, while the damned fell into a pit. There were machines to make angels fly, to bring animals on stage, and to create the illusion of thunder, lightning, and wind."

But it was the fairgrounds of Europe which breathed life into the circus. Ever since the 7th century, these gatherings of merchants had enjoyed the strong backing of the Church and they rapidly began to play a fundamental role in developing international trade. The early circus folk quickly seized upon a golden opportunity to perform to what was virtually a captive audience. Just as migrant farm labourers gradually moved from the Mediterranean to the Alps following the harvest, so the show people trekked across the continent from fair to fair, thus eventually earning the circus its international character. Attesting to their popularity, when in the late medieval period merchants began to desert the fairs because more standardised means of buying and selling goods between countries had evolved, the fairgrounds did not die-out but rapidly became characterised almost exclusively by entertainment. Snake-charmers, rope dancers, animal trainers, magicians and jugglers, slowly but surely these exotic and colourful events were coming to resemble the circus as we know it today. Once again, explorers began to return from distant lands with animal curiosities which were set on display in the fairs, and reviving yet another practice of ancient Rome, almost every fair began to boast side-shows of human freaks. St. Bartholomew's in England offered a typical assortment of 'monsters' as they were known: a man with one head and two bodies, a hermaphrodite, a "child with a Bear growing on his back alive", a woman with three breasts. . . Their owners were even prepared to grant private audiences "at any gentleman's house, if desired." These freaks of nature were regarded as subhuman, on par with animals and therefore were treated and exploited as such. A handbill circulated in London in 1784 united the freak and exotic animal in a masterful display of promotion that was to become a hallmark of the modern circus. Depicted as "the Link between the rational and brute Creation," the "most astonishing creature, called the Oriental Satyr or Real Wild-Man of the Woods," was actually an orang-utan.

Travelling animal show in the Middle Ages. Bärenführer by Gottfried Mind

It was not until the 18th century that the long evolution of the circus brought about the beginnings of the familiar ring show, which, like its early Roman ancestor, was basically a display of equestrian skills. Indeed, right up to the present day, trick-riding is often staged with showmen dressed in charioteers' costume, with plumed helmet, tunic and breastplate. Furthermore, in American shows like the mammoth Barnum & Bailey Circus, the traditional grand finale was often billed as the Great Roman Hippodrome Races, which according to their own advertising blurb actually incorporated the "ancient arts of chariot racing and Roman standing riding." Similarly, the exotic and often garish circus parade, which used to be an essential feature of the American circus, held more than a passing resemblance to its ancient Roman counterpart, with a procession which featured 'Roman' charioteers driving gilt chariots presenting strange and unknown animals in barred caravans to the gawping masses.

Commonly acclaimed as being the "father of the modern circus" is the Englishman Philip Astley (1742-1814), son of a cabinetmaker from Newcastle-under-Lyme, and a former sergeant major in the 5th regiment of Dragoons with a genius for trick riding. He is credited with being the first to practice daring equestrian and acrobatic skills within an open ring enclosure, though in the beginning this served no other purpose than to advertise his newly-founded riding school in London, called the Amphitheatre Riding House. These impromptu displays proved so immensely popular that after years of nagging uncertainty Astley became convinced that he had stumbled upon his true vocation. That conviction was bourne out by the ecstatic public response to his show's premiere, and soon bareback riding and acrobatics was to become augmented by tightrope walkers, tumblers and a troupe of dancing dogs. According to most circus historians this was the time and place which saw the basic elements of the modern circus brought together for the first time. Significantly, the display of exotic wild animals was still missing. Indeed, all of these shows were confined almost exclusively to the equestrian arts and human skills in acrobatics and juggling. Exotic animals were still unheard of in the circus and it was not until 1828, fourteen years after Astley's death, that the first elephant was seen in the circus arena.

But it was one of Astley's horsemen, Charles Hughes, who in 1782 first coined the term 'circus' to describe this new and spectacular form of entertainment, borrowing the word from the Latin. Opening-up his own riding school nearby on Blackfriar's Road after witnessing Astley's astounding success, Hughes dubbed the show "The Royal Circus". Competition between the two adversaries, and among the litany of upstarts who wished to mimic their success, gave birth to another circus tradition - rivalry and feud - destined to be conducted with a vengeance in the most flamboyant period of circus history and still much in evidence today. Astley, it is said, rode around town proclaiming Hughes a fraud and impostor while Hughes retorted by posting bills which called into question his erstwhile boss' riding skills. In the same way, promotion and advertising, with all the trappings of exaggeration and hyperbole, became essential to the circus' survival, especially when it severed its roots and began roaming from town to town. Advance publicity teams, travelling to the next venue, would plaster the streets with posters, hand bills and printed heralds. Over the years, circus press officers also became adept at influencing and even manipulating the media, a phenomenon still in evidence to this very day. As the circus was growing up as an institution, it was also quite normal to produce so-called "rat sheets" which would be liberally distributed to disparage the quality of a competing circus if it should be in the vicinity. Often, fights would also break-out, sparking a ruthless vendetta between rival showmen in which animals were poisoned and circus caravans and tents burnt to the ground. Again, even this has not entirely disappeared from the contemporary circus world.

The decline of the fairs, the danger of the roads and poor modes of transport which discouraged people from travel - all of these factors combined to create a favourable climate for the evolution of the travelling circus. With the exotic, the garish, the phenomenal, the romantic, the circus brought welcome relief to the monotonous and uneventful lives of the sleepy towns and isolated communities they passed through, and perhaps simply because of this, their instant popularity was assured, even preordained. Piece by piece over the following years, separate skills and disciplines would be added to the circus concept, its future potential still restricted by equestrian acts. First of all there were the rope-dancers, acrobats and jugglers who were already searching for alternatives to the declining fortunes of the fairground and discovered that the circus, with its circular arena, was ideal for them to display their dexterity to an audience which could for the first time clearly discern that their skills were not faked. Following this, in 1815, there was the introduction of the menagerie, and in 1820, the premier "jungle act" of taming wild beasts. Shortly afterwards, Americans Aaron Turner and Seth B. Howes introduced the first "big top"; such canvas tents eventually become so large and ubiquitous that they were dubbed "canvas colosseums". The year 1859 saw the invention of the flying trapeze by the French acrobat Jules Leotard, and this major contribution to circus culture was followed by the inimitable clown, the champion of parody and mime, who provided welcome comic relief from the preceding suspense of acrobatics and lion taming. Fast on the clown's heels came the live orchestra, now as much a tradition of the circus than any other single act, and in 1871 the exotic side-show of freaks. . .

Philip Astley and a few of his contemporaries had set all this in motion. When in 1772 the English stunt-rider travelled to France to perform his "daring feats of horsemanship" before the king and the French court, he discovered a similar enthusiasm for the fledgling circus concept, particularly from disenchanted showmen who were willing to forsake the fairgrounds. Though he was to play an instrumental role in founding the French circus, with visits to Belgrade, Brussels and Vienna, he was also destined to bring the circus to the whole of Europe, and, by chain of influence, to America and the world. Indeed, during his life-time Astley was to open no less than 19 permanent circuses at home and abroad. A decade after his first visit to Paris, at the invitation of Marie Antoinette, Astley opened his own amphitheatre. When hostilities erupted between Britain and France during the French Revolution, he leased it to Antonio Franconi (1738-1836), a hot-tempered nobleman turned trick rider who claimed to be in enforced exile following a fatal duel in his native Venice. Landing up penniless in Lyon, so the story goes, he was offered a job in lion taming, but was quickly mauled. With the little money he had earned, he bought himself a cage of canaries, somehow induced them to stand on their heads, pull miniature carriages and fire toy canons and promptly went on tour with them through France and Spain. Evidently impressed by the gory spectacle of the Spanish matadors tormenting their victims in the bullring he set about promoting bull-fighting in France. Eventually Franconi was to become hailed as the father of the contemporary French circus. Astley's arch-rival Charles Hughes, on the other hand, is credited with introducing the circus to Russia, where, said unkind tongues, he not only held private circus performances for the royal court in the palace in St. Petersburg, but also enjoyed the personal favours of Catherine the Great. In any event, the Russian circus was soon destined to become one of the country's most popular forms of entertainment, apparently boasting more than a hundred itinerant and stationary shows. Even to this very day, approximately 22 million people every year watch acrobats, horse riders, animal trainers, and clowns being taught at the state circus school.

The first circus to be seen in the New World was in 1792 when John Bill Ricketts, a celebrated English equestrian who had once been a pupil of Charles Hughes, presented a show in Philadelphia and New York City. It is recorded that George Washington, an ardent horse-riding enthusiast, not only attended Ricketts' show but even rode frequently in the countryside with the father of the American circus. Notwithstanding friends in high places, Ricketts eventually fell foul of the kind of disaster which was to ruin many a circus entrepreneur. In 1799 his amphitheatre in New York burned to the ground, an accident attributed to a drunken stage-hand dropping a candle, though it has also been speculated that special effects aimed at creating "a sea of flame" in the arena went disastrously out of control. Nor was that the end of his streak of bad luck. Leaving America virtually penniless, the ship taking him back to his native England foundered, and all on board were lost.

By the turn of the century, the circus had found its way to every corner of Europe and had also become firmly established in America. Yet despite its success with the crowds, the circus was a tough and often pitiless life, with showmen constantly battling against poverty, injury and death. It was an existence governed by 'survival of the fittest', and despite its showy and sometimes genuine camaraderie, it was characterised by ruthlessness. Fire was a haunting and enduring threat which was to ruin many a circus czar and kill many a panic-stricken animal. The early buildings used to house the shows could well be described as death traps, traditionally made of wood, the arena illuminated with hundreds of candles, the show canons emitting flames and sparks and the ground littered with sawdust. Between them, Astley and Ricketts alone were to lose five of their circuses to fire, major disasters which not only killed their animals and destroyed their equipment but almost wiped them out financially. Small wonder then that they and their competitors became calculating, hard-bitten men, with little sympathy even for their fellow human beings let alone their animals. In America, home of the brave and land of the pioneering spirit, the adversity that the circus faced was perhaps even harsher. Having to combat religious prejudice, the elements, shortage of money, floods, droughts, fires, and other 'acts of God', circus life here required an even greater degree of shrewdness and fortitude, not to mention a propensity for gambling and ruthless opportunism.

It was not until the early part of the nineteenth century that the travelling circus was born, the idea of holding shows under canvas and playing to America's predominantly rural population inspired by a group of New England circus pioneers. Although crude, impoverished affairs dubbed "mud shows" because the show grounds were so often trampled into swamps during rainy weather, people flocked to them because they provided desperately needed relief from their parochial, monotonous lives. Indeed, the circus was destined to become the principal form of entertainment for most Americans for many years to come. Three of the trail-blazing New England group, Lewis B. Titus, Caleb Sutton Angevine and John J. June, were the first to import wild animals expressly for display in the travelling menageries. Prior to that, they were in the habit of buying the luckless creatures from sea captains who had picked them up on their voyages to the most exotic reaches of the globe. At first, during the slack and cold winter months, they were forced to put their animals in country barns and cellars, but this was unsatisfactory in many ways, not least of all because profits dwindled drastically. They then struck upon the idea of forming their headquarters on the Bowery, in New York where they could not only keep the animals but also exhibit them. As soon as winter loosened its grip, the animals would be leased out to other entrepreneurs - usually the highest bidder. It was thus that the idea of a touring menagerie corporation was born. By January 1835, the animal-dealing trio had persuaded more than 125 menagerie exhibitors to set their seal upon forming "one joint stock company for the purpose of exhibiting wild animals belonging to them in company or co-partnership for profit." The resulting organisation, boasting combined assets in the form of animals and equipment of over $300,000 was named, with typical grandiosity, the Zoological Institute. To avoid antagonising America's religious fundamentalists, notes Murray, "the Zoological Institute was advertised as scientific and educational, but even that did not protect its beasts, for two elephants were killed, and other animals were either shot or poisoned by fanatics." Despite such attacks, the Zoological Institute paid huge dividends and, in shades of ancient Rome, catching expeditions were dispatched across the globe in search of exotic beasts. When the fist giraffe to be seen in the USA was imported in 1835, it was billed as "The Stupendous Giraffe or Camelopard"; its life was brief, like many of the other animals imported to satisfy human curiosity and their owners' greed. Because the hunger for ever more exotic animals could never be staunched, a lively trade developed in fake animals - such as sharks and whales made of leather, as well as mermaids and sea monsters. The slick ruthlessness exhibited by such men as Titus, Angevine and June earned them and their Zoological Institute the whip hand when it came to control over the burgeoning menagerie industry. Exerting tremendous power, their reign over the animal import, lease and sale kingdom lasted for sixty years. "Sitting behind their desks hundreds of miles from actual operations," wrote Murray, "they could route shows into town ahead of their rivals, cut prices, spread slanderous tales about competitors, hire ruffians to intimidate them, cut down trees and burn bridges to delay rival companies, and otherwise exert an influence that was effective though largely covert."

The introduction of performing wild animals to the circus arena was also an American innovation, inspired by one Isaac A. Van Amburgh (1801-65) of New York who is credited with being "the first to enter a cage of jungle beasts in a public exhibition," sometime between 1820 and 1833. Legend has it that at the impressionable age of nineteen, he was reading the Scriptures and came across Daniel in the Lion's Den, and thereupon promptly decided that his one and only true vocation was lion tamer. His dream came true at the Zoological Institute's winter quarters in New York when he walked nonchalantly into a cage of snarling, ferocious beasts and began lashing them into obedience to the thunderous applause of spectators. His unique style was destined to become so appealing to the public that it would be mimicked by countless other animal tamers. Dressed in jungle fatigues, and wielding a whip and firing blanks from his pistol, he would stride into the cage, deliberately baiting and taunting the animals to bring out as much ferocity and jungle savagery as he could, whereupon he would proceed to bully them into submission. His pièce de résistance was forcing the lions to approach and lick his boots as the ultimate sign of his conquest and the animals' abject subservience. Turned into an instant hero, the young, intrepid animal tamer soon found that he could even dictate terms to the likes of Titus and Angevine. By the time he was 23, he boasted his own travelling menagerie, and in 1838 even performed six times before an enthralled Queen Victoria. Van Amburgh's publicity agent Hyatt Frost declared that, prior to one of these royal command performances, the lions had been starved for thirty-six hours, and that when Van Amburgh was putting them through their paces they were so hungry that he had to lash them furiously with his whip "into the most abject and crouching submission." Soon he was to become honoured both in Europe and America as the "greatest lion tamer in the world." With fame, came riches. By the mid-1840's he owned the largest travelling show in England and was leasing animals to many other menageries and zoos around the world. Perhaps it was these great landmarks of circus history at the Zoological Institute which later inspired the shrewdest animal tamers to claim that their routines possessed inherent educational and conservation benefits for the public. In any event, Van Amburgh is also credited with being the first man to put his head in a lion's mouth which, while not being very educational, is certainly spectacular. By this time, European animal trainers had been following the fairground circuit for centuries, but the Frenchman Henri Martin (1793-1882) has the distinction of being "the first great trainer to appear in the circus." Both he and Van Amburgh also appeared in theatrical productions, such as The Lions of Mysore, and, closer to home, The Brute Tamer of Pompeii. But while it would never fall again into such depravity and horror as its Roman namesake, tens of thousands of exotic wild animals were destined to suffer and die for human entertainment in the circus, victims of human ignorance, cruelty, supremacy.

It is generally accepted that there exists a conspicuous distinction between European and American styles of exotic animal dressage, commonly known as 'jungle acts' - though the distinction becomes blurred with time, nationality and the preferences of the individual trainer. In the archetypal American style, it is said, "the trainer, with his gun blazing and whip cracking, is pitted against roaring animals, apparently on the attack, with the final outcome seemingly in doubt. By an apparent hair's breadth margin, the disciplined routine imposed by the trainer triumphs over jungle fury." Following in the footsteps of Van Amburgh, the unchallenged maestro of this style was the American Clyde Beatty (1903-65), who is said to have "subjugated as many as 40 black-maned African lions and Royal Bengal tigers' at one time." Indeed, a 1934 poster presented Beatty as "The Jungle King In A Single-Handed Battle With 40 Of The Most Ferocious Brutes That Breathe." By comparison, the European style may seem rather sedate, if not a trifle bland, as the trainer attempts to "prove his mastery and skill by presenting his jungle charges in the role of obedient, even playful pets. The wild character of the animals, however, is revealed just often enough to remind the spectator that what he sees is indeed the result of masterful training."

The pioneer and leading exponent of the so-called "soft-dressage" technique of animal taming was Carl Hagenbeck, destined to become honoured as the "father of the modern zoo". The son of a Hamburg fishmonger, the boy acquired the first taste of his future vocation when several fishermen brought ashore six seals that had accidentally been trapped in their nets. They were put into wooden tubs and young Carl exhibited them at a penny per head. Concluding that the ubiquitous dressage techniques of the day could only inspire an animal's deep-seated hatred for its trainer, and that they were not only cruel but also uneconomic in the long run, Hagenbeck set about trying to train animals with "kindness", substituting praise and rewards for successfully accomplished tricks instead of beatings and other punishment for failures. The reality may not be quite so glowing as the legend however, since the reward - mostly food - can soon become a punishment when deliberately withheld from a misbehaving or noncompliant animal. By the time he was forty, Hagenbeck was sending tamed animals all over the world, as well as exhibiting them at home. He gained further fame, this time in the zoological world, by modifying the very physical structure of the permanent menagerie, up until then characterised by cramped, barred cages. Through the judicious use of landscaping, he established the forerunner of today's zoological park, providing animals with large open-air enclosures which went some way towards simulating each species' natural environment - at least from the point of view of the public. In 1887 Hagenbeck bought his imagination to bear on the way in which the wild animal spectacle was presented in the circus. Dissatisfied by the customary method of having the animals perform inside their beast wagons which were drawn into the ring, he invented the large 'cage-arena' that is still seen today, though often in collapsible form. This provided more space for the trainer and his animals' repertoire, and allowed the now staple equipment of the wild animal act to be utilised for the first time, such as pedestals, ladders and seesaws. But despite his reputation for innovative and humanitarian thinking, circus animals were still confined to tiny and squalid beast wagons, and thousands of creatures continued to suffer and die in the wild at the hands of those animal catchers who made a living stocking-up the "civilised" world's zoos and menageries - amongst them Carl Hagenbeck and his heirs who became Europe's foremost animal dealers. Indeed, from 1866 to 1886, at the height of his animal-catching and selling career, Carl Hagenbeck imported 1000 lions, 400 tigers, at least 700 leopards, 1000 bears, 800 hyenas, 300 elephants, 17 Indian, Javan and Sumatran rhinos, 9 African rhinos, at least 100,000 birds and tens of thousands of monkeys. It often took months of arduous travel before the captured animals arrived at their final destination. As Bill Jordan and Stefan Ormrod report, in their book The Last Great Wild Beast Show: "If you add to the fearful experience of capture, the horrific sensation of being confined to a crate or cage for months on end, bumped and jarred over rough terrain, tossed and pitched across unseen oceans, to arrive in a strange, cold and completely alien environment, only then is it possible to comprehend the suffering and anxiety caused, and the resulting mortality rate. Stress is still one of the major killers when wild animals are captured; in Hagenbeck's day its effects must have been terrible." Moreover, even the much-vaunted notion that Carl Hagenbeck instituted a revolutionary change in dressage technique from the brutal to the tender and merciful is as exaggerated and illusory as the circus show itself. Cruelties remained endemic, as they still do today, with trainers continuing to subdue their animals by means of the whip and chair, the noise of the gun, starvation, or simply violent kicks. "Even into the late nineteenth century," concedes Murray, "no matter how the training was accomplished, the exhibition of great jungle cats was still very often a matter of scaring them into a state of hysteria by firing guns, beating gongs, cracking whips, and prodding them with red-hot irons as the Romans had done. The beasts then roared and raged enough to satisfy the onlookers. Audiences were so bloodthirsty that accidents were sometimes even faked, though there were a shocking number of occasions (as there still are, and probably always will be) when the trainer actually was torn to bits."

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