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1. THE BLOOD-RED MENAGERIE

1.4   The Menagerie

Hailing from Somers, New York, one Hackaliah Bailey has the dubious distinction of founding America's first travelling menagerie. That was in around 1815, when he toured New England with his solitary elephant called "Old Bet" which he had supposedly purchased for $1000 from a sea captain who had bought her at a London auction for $20. The pair travelled by night, probably in order to guard against the prying eyes of those who would not pay to see what they could just as easily see for free. In the daytime he exhibited her in barns and tavern yards. But in 1828 Old Bet fell victim of the righteous and puritanical wrath of certain New Englanders who believed that the elephant display was as shamefully irreligious as the theatre, saloon and dance-hall. Taking the law into their own hands, just before dawn they waylaid the party that was leading Old Bet to the next town; half a dozen shots rang out and bellowing, the great beast fell to the ground, dead. Yet Bailey & Co.'s success with the crowds soon resulted in imitations, business investment and an amplifying of the concept by the likes of Titus and Angevine, and Isaac Van Amburgh. In England, there was Wombwell's Royal Menagerie founded in 1807 by Captain George Wombwell who amassed an impressive collection of animals mostly from visiting foreign ships. It is interesting to note that a contemporary of his, the bookseller William Hone, lambasted the menagerie proprietor for his avarice and cruelty, citing an incident in the city of Warwick when the publicity-hungry Wombwell had two of his lions, Nero and Wallace, baited by dogs. After encountering him at St. Bartholomew Fair in 1825, Hone wrote that Wombwell "exhibited himself, to my judgement of him, with an understanding and feelings perverted by avarice. He is undersized in mind as well as form, a weazen, sharp-faced man, with skin reddened by more than natural spirits, and he speaks in a voice and language that accord with his feelings and propensities." In brightly coloured wagons displaying jungle scenes, Wombwell's Royal Menagerie travelled throughout the British Isles with wildcats, wolves, monkeys, giraffes, elephants and camels, and eventually gained such fame that on five occasions it gave royal command performances, three times before Queen Victoria herself. For the public, the animal freaks of the menagerie were not appreciably different from the human freaks of the side-show or mental asylum. Indeed, this was an age when the insane were also on public display, with a Sunday visit to Bedlam being one of London's greatest attractions where visitors were charged a penny each at the turnstile. As authors Bob Mullan and Garry Marvin point out in their book Zoo Culture: "In the asylums the often cold and damp cage-like rooms had nothing more than straw and a pallet for the 'patients' to sleep on, and the more dangerous were often chained. Madmen were not treated as full human beings, because they were thought to be related to the animal world in all its strangeness. It is highly significant that what is normal behaviour in animals - their unrestrained wildness - is equated with human madness, that is abnormal behaviour." And just as the visitors to Bedlam goaded and provoked the inmates, so too did the visitors to the menagerie in order to incite a lion to roar, a bear to growl or a monkey to scream.

Yet only gradually did the menagerie and the modern circus form its so-called "traditional alliance". Indeed, it was not until 1851 that the two elements appeared together for the first time, when George F. Bailey, a nephew of Hachaliah's, bought six cages of animals from the conglomerate Zoological Institute, and added them, together with several elephants, to his ring show. From then on, the menagerie was destined to become a major feature of the American circus, usually exhibited in a separate tent through which the public passed on their way to the big top. The collections were often extensive, and included wildcats, giraffes, elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas, rhinos, and polar bears. But what is especially ironic is that the founding of the circus menagerie - which contemporary circus entrepreneurs so resolutely insist is an innate and inviolable part of their golden tradition and heritage - was little more than an inflated circus illusion, perhaps the greatest conjuring trick to beguile the public ever seen under the big top. Indeed, that "golden tradition" actually came into being entirely artificially, through the same deliberate falsehood that we hear today, namely the circus' spurious claim that the menagerie and the performing animal plays a vital educational role. As we have already seen, by this time, the circus, as well as some of the small travelling menageries, were experiencing strong opposition from religious fundamentalists who viewed the conjuring tricks and illusions of the circus as works of the Devil. Declared an editorial in the Weekly Recorder of Chillicothe, Ohio on August 2, 1815: "The principal object pursued by the conductors of the circus is to enrich themselves at the expense of others. . . Believing that these men are prosecuting an unlawful calling - one that cannot be defended on Scriptural grounds, or on principles of sound reason and good policy, we presume the good sense of the citizens in general would lead them to treat their exhibitions with that unqualified neglect and contempt which they so justly deserve." The citizens of Sunbury, Pennsylvania, even went so far as to charge six members of a circus company with witchcraft, following a performance on April 19, 1829. The charge sheet accusing them declared that they possessed the "power of witchcraft, conjuration, enchantment and sorcery and being moreover persons of evil and depraved dispositions, and as magical characters having private conferences with the spirit of darkness, did. . . expose to the view of diverse and many people of this Commonwealth various feats, acts, deeds, exhibitions, and performances of magic and witchcraft." Although the case was dismissed and those arrested freed, the incident brought home to the circus proprietors of the time just how formidable the opposition had become. It was thus that they ingeniously contrived to bring the menagerie into the circus - after all, the reasoning went, although the magical quality of the circus unavoidably seemed to suggest witchcraft and devilry, animals had been collected by pious humans since the time of Noah. Indeed, although the churches had declared circuses "immoral", ambitious entrepreneurs like Titus and Angevine at the Zoological Institute were convinced that by introducing exotic animals, the whole caboodle could be passed off as 'educational'. To sweeten the pill, great spectacles were held which depicted some historical or biblical scene, such as Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. With typical ingenuity, another way to overcome puritanical resistance was to give attractions Biblical names. P.T. Barnum, tongue in cheek, dubbed his hippopotamus, "The Behemoth of Holy Writ Spoken Of by the Book of Job." The zebu was converted into a "holy cow", and the vile animal cages referred to as "dens" to evoke Daniel and the den of lions. Robinson and Lake's circus in 1883 even went so far as to dub their big top the "Superb Firmament Pavilion," while another travelling menagerie went by the name of "Animals of the Scriptures". Like the murals which adorn the menagerie today showing animals roaming free and wild in an untouched environment, the sides of the gilded animal cages depicted colourful biblical scenes, such as Noah's Ark, Jonah and the Whale, and the lion and the lamb lying down together. As they intended, these new features gradually overcame public hostility and the menagerie thus became a permanent if artificial fixture of the modern circus. There can be little doubt that the relentless competitiveness between circus rivals led to great resourcefulness and ingenuity, but apart from being put through ever more bizarre, perverse and cruel routines, the concept of the performing circus animal has never been able to keep pace with the genuine imagination and innovative ideas that other circus performers brought to their respective arts and disciplines.

A slight variation on the circus theme in the USA was the Wild West Show, the first of which was founded by William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody in 1883. They featured reconstructions of historical events such as Custer's Last Stand, the Indian attack on the stage-coach and the inevitable last minute rescue by the US Cavalry, as well as sharpshooting - starring the legendary Annie Oakley - bronco busting, roping and other ranch-hand skills. So fallen had the Indian nation become by this time, that even Indian ceremonials were held to entertain the public, the crowds lured by the imposing presence of Sitting Bull. Although not kept in quite such deprivation as the circus' exotic animals or P. T. Barnum's freaks of nature, the Indians were nevertheless displayed as curiosities. For the proud Indian, like the proud tiger, it had now come to this, paraded from town to town, no longer a threat, but a "quaint heritage" of the white man. And indeed, this kind of exploitation glaringly revealed the white psychology and the faith of its bible-toting priests: to civilise the red Indian according to God's wishes. The savage, the wild animal; the two were virtually indistinguishable, even to the Christian religion which had concluded that both were soulless - perhaps because both were close to Mother Earth.

Back in Britain, one 'Lord' George Sanger was becoming the country's pre-eminent circus chieftain. In the rags-to-riches tradition that proves so endearing to circus culture, from a poverty-stricken boyhood Sanger emerged to became a multi-millionaire. One of ten brothers and sisters, he was born in 1827 to a peep-show impresario. As a child he worked at the pitiful little circus as a barker but when his father died in a cholera epidemic, George Sanger went to work at a freak show at Richardson's Theatre, where, beside the usual fat men, two-headed woman and living skeleton there was also 'Madame Stevens, the Pig-Faced Lady'. This was actually a brown bear whose face had been shaved and the rest of its body hidden in a dress, shawl, bonnet and gloves. The wretched animal was strapped into a chair and seated close to a table from under which it would receive prods to make it produce the supposedly life-like grunts of a pig-faced lady. After experiencing many years of hardship and poverty, Sanger started his own circus and then hit 'lady luck'. During its heydays in the 1850's - with amphitheatres in Plymouth, Exeter, Bristol, Bath, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen - his company was to consist of 1,100 persons, 180 horses, 18 lions and countless other animals, making it the biggest collection of menagerie animals in the UK. By 1930, it was the respected Bertram Mills circus which led the field in Britain, followed by John Sanger and Sons. Four other large companies were to join the fray by the 1950's: Chipperfield's, Billy Smart's, Sir Robert Fossett's and Robert Brothers', all sporting such huge menageries that wild animal acts were also dispatched to perform on the Continent.

The German circus world during the 19th century was characterised by the extravaganzas of the Busch and Krone dynasties. Busch's "Siberia" show featured 120 polar bears, all sliding down a specially constructed metal slope into an arena filled with water; in "Sevilla", the circus baron even presented bull fighting in the circus ring. The Krone dynasty was born in the 1870's when Fritz Krone founded a small impoverished menagerie which roamed from fair to fair. By the 1930's, thanks largely to the shrewdness and imagination of Fritz's son Carl, Krone had become a flourishing circus with an unrivalled collection of exotic animals. Some twenty years later it was known as the greatest travelling circus in Europe, with a menagerie containing 70 elephants.

Elephants, it has been said, are the very hallmark of the circus, the awesome size of the animal making its submission to homo sapiens a curious and compelling paradox. The first recorded presentation of elephants performing together in one ring occurred in 1874 in Howes' Great London Circus and Sanger's Royal British Menagerie. In the USA, the largest herd ever employed by a single circus was the 50 elephants of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1955. Though countless other species have performed in the circus ring, few are more associated with circus "tradition" than the elephant. In America, explains Murray, the elephant was "a stupefying novelty" the appearance of which eventually became woven into the very fabric of the circus tradition, so much so that "no American feels he has seen a real circus unless he has found in it at least a couple of elephants."

Elephants walking on enormous glittering balls, elephants dressed up as Charlie Chaplin, playing musical instruments or sitting neatly at the dinner table, elephants standing on one leg, forming pyramids, carrying tigers on their backs. Perhaps the fascination in all of this is the paradox of a great, and at first sight clumsy beast, performing with such delicate balance and control. Yet almost without exception the stunts that the animals are induced to perform in the circus arena turn them into grotesque caricatures of their true selves. Even to this very day, elephants are still trained to walk the tightrope - a trick first seen at Rome's Circus Maximus. "To walk a rope is no harder for an elephant than for a man," asserted Marian Murray. "The difficulty lies in making the elephant get up onto the rope in the first place." As we shall see in the following chapter, one method, employed by the Swiss National Circus, Knie, was to beat the young elephant's legs repeatedly until they bled.

But elephants, especially the great tuskers, are unpredictable and notoriously difficult to control; many a trainer has been trampled, crushed to death, or impaled on tusks, either by accident as an animal panics, or deliberately as the creature exacts revenge for some earlier abuse or mistreatment. Van Amburgh's great tusker, Hannibal, brought to USA in 1824, killed at least seven persons, and according to the animal tamer's publicity man, Hyatt Frost, the elephant possessed "an almost unparalleled reputation for viciousness." On one occasion, says Frost, men had to stab the elephant repeatedly with pitchforks in order to subdue it during one of its frequent rampages. On another occasion, it took several men three days to subdue the tusker Romeo when the elephant flew into a rage after they had tried to chain it. "When an elephant grew too dangerous," writes Murray, "or had killed too many persons even for a sensation-avid public, the owner had several choices. He could shoot the offender; he could give him to a zoo; or he could sell him to another circus where he would appear under another name. The last was one of the commonest procedures - and of course the most dangerous."

Impresarios soon learned that elephant babies were the paramount attractions with which to draw the crowds. In 1955, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey imported 27 elephant calfs of varying sizes to take their place alongside 27 adult "aunties". As usual, it was brilliant publicity, and few of the public can have questioned the origin of those babies and what had happened to their mothers. According to a 1952 census, all except 6 of the 264 elephants in the USA were female, making sheer nonsense out of circus claims that the animals would be bred in captivity.

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