IN the days before Blue Planet III beamed the wonders of the natural world onto the 60-inch plasma-screened, high definition television, with surround sound, in your living room, the only way to see exotic creatures was when a touring menagerie came to town.
In Victorian England, the lanes were full of lions, tigers, elephants and camels progressing from place to place, along with cages of monkeys, emus and eagles in search of an audience.
From stories in local newspapers about lacerated spectators and escaped animals, it seems that from the 1860s to 1890s, most towns of the size of Northallerton, Darlington and Durham were visited by a menagerie every year.
Indeed, there may well be a tiger still out there somewhere in Teesdale as it escaped into the parkland of Raby Castle when travelling from Barnard Castle to Bishop Auckland in 1891. It killed seven deer and five sheep and despite the showmen pursuing it with rifles, it was never recaptured.
“The utmost consternation has been caused amongst the inhabitants of the surrounding villages,” reported the newspapers.
The tiger belonged to George Wombwell’s menagerie, the most famous of all menageries. George was a shoemaker in the docks area of London who, around 1805, bought two boa constrictors which had stowed away on a ship from South America and began exhibiting them in pubs.
He made money, and by 1830, he had created a touring menagerie full of animals.
That year, 10-year-old Princess Victoria was being taken on her first national tour by her mother, the Duchess of Kent, so that the people could get a glimpse of the girl who might one day be queen.
Victoria was visiting Yorkshire when Wombwell’s menagerie came to Thirsk, and on May 3, she became the first royal to visit such a thing.
This gave the menagerie a royal seal of approval and in 1834, George for King William IV and Queen Adelaide in Windsor Castle and went back in 1842 to display before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Indeed, while there, Prince Albert asked George’s advice about an ailment affecting his hunting dogs where George was able to cure.
Albert told him to name his price and so George asked for some oak salvaged from the Royal George, the most famous warship of the day which had sunk off Portsmouth in 1782 while undergoing repairs, drowning about 800 people.
George turned the timber into a coffin for himself, which toured with him as part of his spectacle.
The royal patronage enabled George to call his show the “Royal Windsor Castle Menagerie”, and he soon had three shows on tour, containing giraffes, polar bears, rhinos, bears, a golden eagle and emus.
His most famous exhibit was Wallace, the lion, which became renowned for fighting dogs. It captured the public imagination and became one of the first animal celebrities, and even though it died in 1838, George always had a lion called Wallace in his menagerie.
Indeed, in November 1850, after a young lad had been terribly lacerated by a lion in Durham, Wombwell’s visited Stokesley where the “celebrated Wallace” wowed the crowds who were also touched by the sight of a lioness tenderly suckling two cubs.
George, and Wallace, then moved onto Northallerton, where George died on November 16, and finally put his coffin to good use.
After his death, various branches of his family took on his three tours, and so in 1870, it was “Wombwell’s Queen’s No 1 Royal Menagerie” that was in the district. At Durham that summer, two monkeys and a Tasmanian Devil escaped in the Market Place causing “considerable alarm”, and a couple of weeks later, a leopard jumped up and mauled the face of Mr W Watson’s young daughter in Barnard Castle, although by the time the menagerie reached Bedale, there were no incidents to report – although perhaps an elephant passed away (see below).
Mr Wombwell’s No 2 menagerie became known as Bostock & Wombwell. It was the one which, as Looking Back told a fortnight ago, was in Darlington Market Place in 1866 when Emma Bostock gave birth to Frank Charles Bostock who grew up to be the greatest animal entertainer of the era. He was known as “the animal king” in the US.
There were other menageries on the roads of the UK, principally William Manders’ Grand National Mammoth Menagerie. In 1866, it was touring through Durham northwards towards Newcastle when it became embroiled in a bitter battle with Bostock & Wombwell’s, which was heading west from Darlington to Richmond, Bedale and Leyburn. The rival shows traded insults in pamphlets, placards and newspaper adverts which helped create publicity for their visits.
The best publicity, though, was the sight of an elephant or giraffe walking through the neighbourhood. Wombwell’s had horsedrawn wagons for the dangerous animals but everything else went under its own steam.
And it went slowly – an elephant’s top speed is four miles-an-hour.
In 1913, Bostock & Wombwell’s bought the first of two steam traction engines, made by Burrells of Thetford in East Anglia. The first was named Rajah followed by Nero in 1915. Both were named after George’s earliest lions.
“They cost £800 each, so it was a major investment,” says Clive Gibbard, of Kirklington near Bedale, who owned Rajah for nearly 40 years. “They pulled two 30ft long ‘big animal’ wagons which had living accommodation on the end and a water dandy, and the elephants and camels walked alongside them.”
As zoos and circuses became more popular, the touring menageries became unviable. Bostock & Wombwell’s was the last of the three to call it a day, finishing in Newcastle in November 1931, sending most of its animals to Whipsnade Zoo and then selling off its equipment on the Old Sheep Market in Scotswood Road.
“The engines had a really good reputation and the showmen had decided before the sale who was going to buy them, but they were all outbid by John Henton & Sons from Tamworth and they steamed them up in the middle of the night and charged off before anything could happen,” says Clive.
Just as Frank Charles Bostock became known as “the animal king”, so John Henton became known as “the traction king” because he had such a large stable of engines doing haulage work.
When Clive acquired Rajah, he and his family spent seven years restoring it.
“Rajah was relatively small but still weighed 14 tons so you have a steersman who controls the direction and the driver who controls the boiler and makes it go,” he says.
When Clive moved to North Yorkshire, Rajah came too, and he kept it in a shed in Kirklington belonging to Barry and Rebecca Higginbottom – and Rebecca is the great-grand-daughter of John “the traction king” Henton.
Rajah has now moved on to another enthusiast and it lives in the West Midlands while Nero is in Cambridgeshire.
“They are the nearest that pieces of machinery come to being almost human,” says Clive. “You felt Rajah was something special, it felt like it had a presence.”
FOLLOWING the article a fortnight ago, John Walker got in touch from Exelby, a village which is two miles south of Bedale, one-and-a-half miles north of Burneston and 222½ miles north of London. We know all this because in May, we discovered a pre-1930 yellow-and-black enamel AA sign on the side of the Green Dragon pub giving us all that information from the days before local councils had to install road signs.
John points us in the direction of the British Geological Survey website where there is a map of the Bedale area prepared in 1879. It shows how Exelby sits where two large sheets of rock meet: yellow magnesian limestone to the west and keuper sandstone to the east.
More interestingly, it marks local geological features, like a gravel pit behind the Green Dragon, where a couple of new houses have recently been built.
On the map, beside the pit is a handwritten note that says: "An elephant from Wombwell's Menagerie is buried in this gravel pit."
We’ve mentioned the rumour about an elephant lying near Exelby for a couple of times recen, and now we have proof!
Menagerie elephants were usually buried where they fell, poor things, as they were too heavy to lug very far.
Sadly, we can’t find a newspaper report of when the elephant died, but it could have been in 1870 when Wombwell’s was in Bedale.
BEDALE seems to be a magnet for menageries in trouble. We told only a month or so ago how on April 12, 1824, the elephant wagon from George Morgan's travelling circus toppled over Bedale Bridge into the River Em (now known as the Bedale Beck).
The poor pachyderm had to be pacified with tots of rum until stout men with ropes could be found to winch it back up and set it on its way.
And then there’s a great story reported a century later in the Yorkshire Evening Post (YEP) concerning Patrick Collins’ menagerie from Walsall, which in June 1925 was travelling on Dere Street – the old Great North Road.
It consisted of three wagons drawn by a steam lorry.
As the road train entered Leeming, it was noticed that the first wagon, in which the monkeys were travelling, had caught fire.
Fortunately, the lions were travelling in the third wagon, and villagers were quickly able to detach it and keep it clear of the blaze. Then they urged the driver to go as fast as he could with the burning truck to Bedale Beck half-a-mile to the north.
“The monkeys were by now in a state of extreme terror, but it was found possible at the beck to get them out of danger, none of them being hurt,” said the YEP.
“The kangaroo was a tougher proposition. When the trainer entered the burning cage, it showed fight and refused to be moved.
“One of the village stalwarts went to help the trainer, but was sent to the floor with a resounding thump of the animal’s tail.
“By this time, however, the villagers had succeeded in putting the flames out, and the kangaroo was left in peace. The monkeys were soon afterwards returned to their quarters and the show was able to proceed on its way about midnight.”
AND finally to Darlington, where on June 19, 1894, the Northern Guardian newspaper reported that a 19-month-old Barbary ape, newly arrived from London, had escaped from Mr Day’s menagerie in the Market Place during 9.30pm feeding time.
It jumped on a spectator and bit his ear.
“Those in the menagerie now became very much alarmed, and the feminine portion screamed with fright, while all made a mad rush for the exit,” said the Guardian.
They exited the menagerie pursued by an ape which in turn was pursued by menagerie showmen desperate to catch it.
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“Several people whom the animal met, it attacked in a ferocious manner,” said the Guardian. “At last it dashed into the Nag’s Head Hotel, Tubwell Row, where it created a perfect panic.
“It was ultimately lassoed in a corner of the bar and dragged back to its cage.”
- Many thanks to John Walker, Barry Higginbottom and Clive Gibbard. If you have anything to add to our tales of menageries and exotic animals in strange places, please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk