An animal tamer act with lions and tigers in a small cage remained the major menagerie attraction in the second half of the 19th century, and it now routinely involved the handler putting his or her head in a lion’s mouth. But some spectators were not convinced that this feat, or the display of carnivores eating raw meat, should be entertainments. One of the main criticisms was that such stunts demeaned the humans involved and reduced them to the level of brute nature.1

This chapter considers animal tamer acts, fighting acts and other theatrical war scenarios with animals presented in Britain, France, the USA and British colonies from the 1870s to the 1890s. Spectacles in the colonies in Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa depicted colonial hostilities and insurrections in shows that consisted of a menagerie, a circus and a theatrical enactment of war. The tamer act might have gained social acceptance in Europe and the USA by the 1870s, but it proved controversial in the colonies during the 1890s for both the head-in-the-mouth feat and for the inclusion of female tamers. In a colonial milieu in which human fights were commonplace, menagerie human–lion acts tested the limits of social respectability.

Feeding frenzy

In England, Bostock and Wombwell’s menagerie charged extra to watch the animals being fed at set times.2 These shows involved carnivorous animals including lions, tigers, bears, wolves and hyenas being fed quantities of raw meat in front of spectators. The attendants would also become covered in animal blood during the process of delivering the meat to the cage, so it was literally a bloody spectacle.

The practice of feeding the animals was presented to the public throughout the 19th century and was compelling, even if some members of the public found it repulsive. If social abhorrence of the ‘putrid and loathsome filth accompanying animal life’ arose as much from an idea of what was disgusting and repulsive as from visible activity, the reaction at least seemed justified for carnivore feeding displays.3 Prejudices about the way in which animals lived in nature were reinforced by feeding displays in the contrived and unnatural circumstances of captivity. The spectacle of animal feeding, however, became fused with notions of human degradation because of human proximity to the animals.

Cage acts that included the feat of the tamer putting his or her head in the lion’s mouth often followed or preceded displays in which the lions were fed. The juxtaposition of a tamer act and a feeding spectacle led one to be associated with the other. There was an impression that tamers who entered cages and undertook acts with wild animals were at risk of becoming animal food. It was compounded by the inclusion of smaller feeding stunts during tamer cage acts.

The opportunity to observe menagerie animals being fed was widely publicised when Queen Victoria visited Van Amburgh’s act on 24 January 1839, and when the animals were reportedly deprived of food prior to the Queen’s observation of feeding time.4 Van Amburgh’s subsequent publicity contained a graphic account of the feeding. The practice became widespread and the delayed feeding of hungry animals maximised the effect. There was, however, some variation among the expectations of spectators in different countries. On tour in Europe, Bostock and Wombwell’s found that French spectators would not pay extra to see the animals being fed, thus reducing the menagerie’s income.5 In France horsemeat used for feeding was expensive because humans also ate it. This reflected variations in the social utility of other species.

Vivid poster images of lions eating raw meat were used to advertise feeding spectacles in the USA in the 1880s and 1890s.6 In one image, the feeding lion is in the foreground with a menagerie hunter firing a gun in the background. Such images contrasted with the posters showing images of animals standing unrealistically close together, in ordered lines, billed as ‘The Realistic Jungle Menagerie’.7

The feeding of lions and other carnivores also brought to the fore the visceral sensory dimensions of viewing menagerie animals, involving smelling and seeing the activity. Hugues Le Roux describes the experience of watching lions, tigers, wolves and bears being fed as part of a menagerie exhibition in France. The spectator enters a darkened booth that has a strong smell and, as a gas light was turned on, two keepers enter, covered in blood from the horsemeat in a barrow, which they wheel in. A third keeper calls out that the animals are about to be fed. Initially, the keepers pretend to put the meat forward to the lions while presenting an empty hook. Le Roux’s vivid account continues:

Le Roux’s description implies that the animals were kept hungry for the demonstration, and that feeding was the focus of intense interest. Some cages were even open to the public to enter. A sleeping lion was woken, pulled by the ears, and Le Roux was invited to step into the cage; he nervously moved forward and touched the lion’s leg.

In 1879 during Bostock and Wombwell’s feeding show, two lionesses leant on their cage doors, opening them. They leapt out among the spectators, who seemed to think that this was part of the show and so did not disperse.9 The lionesses were eventually enticed back into their cages without further mishap. By 1880, the feeding was followed by a pet dog being placed in the cage of a docile tiger – they had been raised together. An elephant keeper, Thomas Bridgeman, however, mistakenly let the dog into the cage of a different tiger, leaping into the cage to rescue the dog upon realising his mistake.10 The dog did not survive, but Bridgeman became known as a lion tamer, replacing a performer called Captain Cardona, but retaining the stage name.

As Le Roux explains, it took ‘nerve’ to work with lions, and it was only ‘[t]he boldest of individuals who put their heads two or three times a day into the lion’s mouth’.11 A spectator’s perception was that a lion with frightening jaws obeyed because he or she feared the sting of the tamer’s whip – but this was probably not the case. Despite the widespread use of the word ‘mouth’ in the advertising, the act involved placing the head somewhere near the upper and lower jaw of the lion.

By the 1880s, the most well-known French lion tamers were François Bidel and Nouma-Hava, as well as Jean-Baptiste Pezon, whose enterprise had 30 lions, and who employed his sons Adrian and Edmond in the family’s acts.12 Edward Bostock sold to Pezon, Bidel and others some of the lions who had been bred from Wombwell’s original lions; their lineage traced back to Wallace, the lion who toured with George Wombwell in the 1820s. One group sold to Bidel were accompanied by the keeper, Thomas Crouch, who worked with Bidel and who became known as the tamer Captain Ricardo; this group went to the USA.13 The American Colonel Bone toured France in the 1880s with a lioness, billed as being extremely ferocious, although Le Roux recounts an anecdote suggesting that such fierce lions were not as aggressive as their promotional material claimed.14 There were a number of tamers touring Europe including Miss Cora performing with a lion named Senide in Germany.15

The finale of Bidel’s act involved a lamb’s head being placed in the lion’s mouth. As testimony to the social acceptance and even admiration of tamers, a poem by French actress Roselia Rousseil, ‘The lion’s death or the tamer by love’, was dedicated to Bidel, who had become quite wealthy by then. It began by praising the beauty of a performer with Apollo’s grace and Hercules’ strength, and how his ‘soft, dark eyes, are dear to me’.16 Bidel was described as a ‘famous’ tamer working in a large cage with ‘lions, lionesses, bears, hyenas and a lamb’ and presenting ‘feats of leaping ordinarily shown in such exhibitions but the main feature was the simultaneous approach of the wild animals to the lamb, and the exchange of “the kiss of fraternity”’, which involved the animals touching noses and the lamb’s head being placed into a lion’s mouth.17 In a performance in Turin, Italy, on 23 December 1872, the lion closed his jaws around the lamb. Suddenly, ‘streams of blood were running from his mouth’ as the spectators screamed and fainted. Bidel had to strike the lion on the head to get him to release the lamb. A lioness saw this as a chance to claw and bite at Bidel, but he managed to avoid serious injury, the thick fabric of his costume protecting his skin.

Gruesome occurrences that overlapped with the feeding exhibition did give notoriety to such shows, which were, by then, relatively common. Le Roux asks whether concern about an attack prevented a spectator from attending a show.

Paul Hervieu was an eyewitness to a mishap in July 1886 in which Bidel tripped on his fork and fell during a performance at Neuilly. Sultan, a black-maned lion, took the opportunity and attacked. Bidel’s coat was completely ripped, and his torn flesh exposed; Hervieu outlined the crowd’s emotional reactions to this event. There were cries from the audience, followed by complete silence, and the hissing of the gas lighting could be heard as Sultan stopped and Bidel lay motionless. Then Sultan took two steps forward and put his paws on the tamer’s shoulders. There was uproar among the audience with shouting and screaming. Hervieu felt that the lion played with the tamer, almost accidentally causing flesh and head wounds, until two attendants pushed forward with iron bars, and the lion stopped and retreated. Hervieu was ‘distressed, horrified’ but his companion was keen to see the attack unfold, and Hervieu also quoted someone behind him saying, ‘I was for the lion.’19

The use of irons and heated irons with lion acts may have been contentious by the 1880s in Britain, even if head-in-the-mouth stunts and female tamers were permissible. A defence of menagerie practices in England implies that there was ongoing public concern about the spectacles, and about the treatment of menagerie animals. A story in an 1884 newspaper article claims: ‘Among other erroneous ideas concerning the details of lion taming is that red-hot irons are kept in readiness in case of an accident.’20 The article claims that the story arose because Manders’ menagerie had older menagerie paraffin lamps that could glow red-hot. A spectator asked if they were used for the lions, and ever the showman, Manders gave a theatrically exaggerated response that they were used to support the tamer. The article indicates an effort to redeem the reputation of menageries by rejecting practices in which irons were routinely used on the animals or kept ready for emergencies. Certainly Frank Bostock admitted that he stopped heating irons by 1890, and instead claimed that they were only used in winter to provide warmth and to heat water.21

Even in Britain, protective legislation against animal cruelty did not extend to exotic animals in menageries until 1900.22 The law stated that depriving animals of food only applied to domesticated species and there did not seem to be restrictions on the use of iron prods against lions. Edward Bostock’s rebuttal of the 19th-century claim that elephants, lions, camels and other large animals attack when they are ill treated pointed out that all male animals were liable to attack at certain times, which could be gauged by unusual feeding patterns, such as refusing food.23 Eventually it was systematic animal husbandry and knowledgeable approaches that made it possible to discard irons and older crude methods of control by force for big cats. Feeding displays were phased out with the advent of, and touring of, more complex acts with trained animals by the turn of the 20th century.

Pomp and Conklin

By the 1870s a menagerie act in a lion’s cage – sometimes wheeled into the circus ring – involved a jumping display and the animal lying down in a handling trick. The jumping trick was achieved by getting a lion accustomed to jumping over a low plank, then by raising the height of the plank, and sometimes placing a hoop on top of the plank for the lion to jump through. This could progress to the lion jumping over the bending figure of the tamer. In the handling trick, a lion could be made to lie down with the flick of a whip, and with pressure applied to his back, the tamer could stand over the lion and pull the jaws open. While this handling feat proved popular in attracting crowds, their responses were mixed and often critical. For example, one commentator stated, ‘This is a fool-hardy feat, in which risk is incurred, without exhibiting any intelligence, grace or docility on the part of the lion.’24 While simple feats could be achieved as a result of repetition, this was not yet systematic or based on a full understanding of the bodily reactions of a species to others in proximity. The menagerie cage act still deployed basic forceful handling.

George Conklin’s unusual working life spanned menagerie cage acts and circus ring performances, tamer and trained acts, and lion and elephant acts. One of Conklin’s brothers was an acrobat, and another was a singing clown, so perhaps it was inevitable that Conklin would join a circus. He was hired to put up posters in advance of the show, although his father had wanted him to join the circus band.25 Conklin became a cage boy to the lion tamer Charlie Forepaugh in the John O’Brien circus from 1867, then a night watchman, and eventually a lion tamer, performing at night in a menagerie tent that was lit by hundreds of candles in wooden racks. He moved to WW Cole’s circus in 1875 when O’Brien sold the cage of lions. Conklin’s account of how he began working with animals suggested that he was a keen observer and had taken the initiative, but he was well connected and by 1886 his brothers operated a menagerie, the Conklin Bros Great American Circus and Menagerie. They continued to do so in various partnerships in later years, but Conklin remained outside the family business, eventually becoming a leading American animal trainer. He stayed with Cole’s for a decade, during which time Cole’s undertook a tour to Australia and New Zealand, and sometime after 1886 became the head animal trainer with the Barnum and Bailey Circus The Greatest Show on Earth (BB), working with BB until 1906, including on tours to Europe.

Conklin achieved increasing complexity in his acts through close observation of the animals, and his work set precedents – although probably not as many as he claimed. His act in the late 1860s involved a lion cage that was placed on top of a wagon pushed into the circus ring by an elephant, and pistol shots indicative of a hunting act. For the anticipated and best-known feat, Conklin put his head halfway into the mouth of the lion Pomp. Conklin explains how, with one hand on Pomp’s nose and the other on his lower jaw, he would ‘open his mouth as wide as possible and put my head in it as far as it would go which was about halfway.’26 This act was intended to make ‘the crowd hold its breath’.27 While putting his head in Pomp’s mouth was a crowd-pleasing feat, Conklin explained that it was less dangerous than it looked, because his hold on the lion’s nose and the body around the jaw allowed him to detect even the smallest muscle movement. The act’s climax was a contest over a piece of meat, and although Conklin did not chase the animals around the cage in a hunting action, he exited the cage while firing two or three pistol shots.

Conklin had watched Charlie Forepaugh at work for a season, including observing the head-in-the-mouth feat. After noting the audience’s applause and the tamer’s superior earning capacity, Conklin decided to try to become a lion tamer. He began to secretly rehearse with the lions at night. Forepaugh used three cages, one with the main lions Pomp, Nellie and George plus a leopard, Belle, and two cages with another eight lions. During his clandestine night-time rehearsals, Conklin practised the same feats as Forepaugh, but with all the lions in the same cage. When Forepaugh’s contract was due to expire, Conklin approached the circus owner explaining that he could do a better act with all the lions together. Conklin perceived that the behaviour in a big group was not due to the tamer’s mastery, but instead reflected the lions’ social hierarchy. The lions followed a leader, and would even follow a lion leader who jumped over an object. Conklin also noted that a lion’s noisy roars were misleading, since they were usually not a prelude to aggression.

In 1867, Conklin’s first costume at O’Brien’s was a Roman-style shift with spangled tights and a belt of leopard skin that cost him US$100.28 The tamer act, which he had embellished based on Charlie Forepaugh’s, was of a standardised, theatrical style, though the costuming reflected the aesthetic forged by Van Amburgh’s generation. The action was also similar to Van Amburgh’s: a ringmaster began by spruiking and exaggerating the danger that sent ‘shivers down the spine of everyone’. The act involved the lions jumping over Conklin’s raised leg, over a leopard with her hind legs held up by Conklin, and then, to confirm submission, he would lie across all three lions. After the head-in-the-lion’s-mouth feat, ‘I fed them all meat with my naked hands.’29 This was followed by a type of ‘tug-of-war’ around the cage between Pomp and Conklin with a specially prepared, long thin strip of meat that Conklin and Pomp each held in their mouths. Here the feeding display was integrated into the act as a feat. The act’s ‘grand climax’ involved the lions ‘snarling and growling’ and Conklin firing a pistol – later, a revolver. After the act finished, an elephant pushed the cage out of the ring.

As Conklin explained, his cage act had novelty value c. 1870, and was a lead attraction because the lions were loose inside the cage. He was also credited with getting a lion to dance. Conklin had observed how one lion seemed to respond to the band’s music in each performance, and Conklin made waltzing gestures to frame an interaction with the lion, who did a ‘dancing’ movement on all fours. It was during an enactment of the waltz feat that one of the other lions bit into Conklin’s thigh, and he was unable to perform for several weeks. Conklin’s position as tamer seemed assured as the only replacement who came forward was, in the end, unable to enter the cage.

During the 1870s, the combined circus and menagerie shows that Conklin worked for consisted of as many as seven menagerie tents, erected along a path that led to the main circus tent.30 Audiences had to walk through the tents with as many as 50 cages to enter the tent, which hosted the circus performance in the ring.

Over the course of three decades, Conklin conditioned 25 cages of lions, which he believed was more cages than anyone else in the USA at that time. In confronting a rebellious tiger, Conklin recounted throwing a stool as a last defence, giving Conklin the few seconds he needed to extract himself from the situation. A big cat found it hard to quickly visualise the four legs of a stool or chair, so a trainer had the advantage of additional seconds, if needed. Conklin’s claim to have discovered the usefulness of holding up chair legs as a defensive strategy may or may not be accurate, as Coup also mentioned this practice, and it was widely adopted.31

In addition to big cats, Conklin worked with elephants for 40 years. For a feat in which he lay on the ground while an elephant walked over him, he kept a long nail in his hand as a defensive strategy, which could be put into an elephant’s foot (also see Chapter 6). He made competitive claims about his capacity to condition the movement of a wide range of animals, including bears, lions, tigers and elephants, and claimed that he was the first person to coach spotted hyenas to jump and run, and to teach a team of zebras to pull a cart.32

Conklin reports that for publicity in a newspaper feature, the hair was shaved off a monkey performer, who was described in before and after photographs as a missing link in evolution, reflecting ‘some of Darwin’s theories regarding animal expression’, not to mention showmen who copied each other’s ruses.33

Slightly before 1870, Conklin taught George the lion to growl and then jump at him when he blew on the lion’s nose. Conklin would fire a pistol twice before exiting the cage as George jumped towards the closing door.34 While the feat worked well for Conklin, he claimed, contradicting other reports, that it caused the death of another tamer. O’Brien managed a second cage tamer act with an ex-coachman, Joseph Whittle, and sent Conklin and Whittle’s acts on different engagements during the 1871–72 winter season; Conklin performed two shows a day at Colonel Wood’s Museum in Philadelphia. But Whittle attempted to usurp Conklin – as Conklin had Forepaugh – eventually replacing him after Conklin was refused more money for the 1872 season. Conklin claimed that he did not consider that Whittle would be given his cage of lions, and thus did not forewarn him about the routine with George. Consequently, when Whittle unwittingly gave the cue by exiting the cage, George did his usual action of jumping for the door, grazing Whittle’s leg. This minor incident was followed by a second, far more serious attack when Whittle returned to the cage to assert his authority over George. When Whittle turned to again exit the cage, George jumped a second time.

A newspaper report about this attack on 2 April 1872, however, claimed that Whittle was attacked during a rehearsal of the head-in-the-mouth feat. The paper reported that just as he put his head in the lion’s open jaw, the lion closed his jaw, ‘the teeth cutting his chin and neck’.35 It sounded more dramatic if Whittle was attacked during this feat, but it was more likely that Conklin’s account was accurate, even if there were only one attack from George. Conklin also had a vested interest in claiming that George did not attack during the practised head-in-the-mouth sequence, as he might not have wanted to divulge his knowledge of the body-handling technique used in this feat, because his techniques set him apart from competing presenters. The newspaper account reported that several attendants tried to get the lion to unlock his hold on Whittle but this was only achieved when the cage scraper was forced between the lion’s jaws. He released Whittle, but the lion sprang again at Whittle, jumping on his chest and grabbing him by the leg. The attendants forced the lion back into the partitioned cage, and eventually reached Whittle. He had his wounds sewn up by a doctor and was taken to hospital, but died two days later. Whatever caused the accident, in both accounts Whittle eventually died of blood poisoning. Conklin was asked to return to O’Brien’s and he resumed his usual act, although in his first reappearance, attendants stood ready ‘with irons to beat’ off a lion.36

The 1872 New York Clipper edition describing Whittle’s accident has an illustration with the caption, ‘The beast tamer and his beasts’, and shows the tamer dressed in tights and a body-fitting acrobat’s suit of the type worn by a 19th-century circus gymnast, holding a whip. One lion jumps through a hoop held mid-air by a tamer, watched by a lioness who seems ready to spring up through the hoop, while three others crouch nearby. There was a second front-page illustration published shortly afterwards with the caption ‘Perils of the lion tamer’, and it shows the tamer in a cage wearing a loose-fitting tunic, being attacked by two lions with their teeth sunk into his body.37 Horrified spectators watch in the background beyond the cage bars, with vivid facial expressions and open mouths as if screaming.38 The reader would have been left in no doubt as to the potential of the tamer becoming animal food.

Although there was a gradual cessation of auxiliary feeding displays, staged confrontation remained part of some big cat acts. Cage acts that fulfilled audience expectations with confronting stunts proved a durable attraction. But an act needed to be dynamic to remain competitive, and this could be achieved through noisy feats and energetic actions, although these carried more risks for presenters in small cages. Such approaches were discarded once lions, and to a lesser extent tigers, became a regular part of the circus performance during the 1890s. Trained individual animals were reliable performers of complex tricks and enriched the showmanship inside a much larger arena cage in the ring (see Chapter 6). While lions were ideal performers for these feats, since they communicate vocally in their social worlds, it was the performed reactions and gestures of a human to a rehearsed roar that highlighted ideas of danger and risk. The hunting big cat act, and its later versions, suited circus and its promotion of danger, an effect that was enhanced by the act’s props, usually a whip and a gun firing blanks.39 The theatricality confirmed a social preconception that big cats were innately aggressive.

Local ‘crack fighting’ goes global

Human fighting acts were programmed into travelling shows with animal acts, notably within colonial regions in the competitive decades after American circuses and menageries had travelled around Australia and New Zealand (Australasia). There had been some animal exhibition in British colonies prior to the establishment of zoological gardens in the 1850s.40 But colonial concerns at that time were different from European concerns about acclimatising introduced exotic animals; for example, acclimatisation debates in the colonies centred on the introduction of domesticated species from Britain and the rest of Europe. Animal collections only began to tour within the colonies after the 1870s with the precedent of menageries arriving with travelling American circuses that followed the trade networks. By then, the menagerie functioned as a form that can be equated with David Lambert and Alan Lester’s trans-imperial forms, recognisable across the world (see Introduction).

Animal exhibition had developed in Australia and New Zealand about the same time as the circus, presenting animals from geographical regions nearer to Australasia than to Europe and North America. Mark St Leon writes: ‘The exhibition in the colonies of wild animals – animals of African or Asian origin – dates from about the same time that the circus was introduced.’41 By the late 1840s Beaumont and Walker’s menagerie was installed in the grounds of a Sydney hotel, with elephants, kangaroos and emus roaming freely. While equestrian circuses in Australia date from 1847, they did not tour with an accompanying menagerie until the mid-1870s. As entertainment forms standardised globally, it is interesting to find that human fighting in and around a circus with a menagerie was also evident across colonial domains, and seems to have been even more pronounced onstage and offstage than in the empire centres. This can be contrasted with noticeably more prudish colonial attitudes to circus tamer acts in the colonies, even during the 1890s.

From the 1870s, whole large circuses regularly travelled global trade routes, long used by performer groups and small troupes; American circuses crossed the Pacific, and European ones travelled southwards through Asia following the shipping trade routes and ports.42 There was ‘a steady stream of the largest of American circuses’ touring to Australia between 1873 and 1892.43 The Cooper and Bailey Great American Circus arrived in Australia in 1876 with a lion act in which the tamer put his head into the lion’s mouth. The accompanying menagerie animals included three elephants, one of whom, Titania, was billed as trained, and there was a giraffe that might have been stuffed, rather than alive. While most of the acts in the circus ring were still equestrian and/or acrobatic, including a solo trapeze act, the two novelty acts were those by Professor GW Johnson, presenting Titania and working in the lion’s den. His act was advertised as compelling:

This was a hunting act with a head-in-the-mouth stunt and a feeding stunt.

George Wirth saw his first elephant at Cooper and Bailey’s in 1876 – he also mentions that the first hippopotamus arrived in Australia in 1891.45 Three circuses arrived in Australia in 1876; Cooper and Bailey’s, John Wilson’s circus from San Francisco, and the Royal Tycoon Circus from Asia with Indian and Japanese acrobats. But the latter could not survive financially and was bought out by Mr Ridge and the Wirth family, and the remnants of the Royal Tycoon became part of an Australian show that toured regional Australia. John Wirth, a musician, had played with the Australian Ashton’s circus band for a short time after 1870, where his sons became circus trained. Later, the John Wirth family formed Wirth’s Circus in 1880, and it developed into one of the larger tenting circuses touring Australia and New Zealand, accompanied by a human fighting act. Wirth’s toured to South Africa in 1893 and 1894, continued on to South America and Britain, and returned to Australia via Asia in 1900.46 The Wirth’s acts with horses were highly skilled, and in the early 1900s May Wirth became a world-leading equestrian working in the USA.

Fights seemed to be an unavoidable consequence of the travelling life in Australasia, and George Wirth recounts how his father, John, broke up a three-person fight in a hotel between Ashton’s star acrobat and horse rider, the Indigenous Australian performer Combo (Combo Combo), another Indigenous Australian performer, Callaghan, and the bandmaster George Smidth. John had to bodily separate the two men, depositing Smidth outside through a window, and throwing Combo.47 The fight may or may not have involved a racial slur, since skilful Indigenous performers were respected in the circus, if not in society. Members of Wirth’s circus touring after 1880 encountered fights and comparable troubles in a range of situations, from an insulting confrontation in the street to the more generalised threat that newcomers to a town faced. The memoirs of the Wirth brothers, George and Philip, outlined staged fights, spontaneous street fights, and encounters with colonial soldiers. George also outlined the struggle of maintaining an entertainment business; Wirth’s faced intense competition from rival circuses trying to reach a town before them. In Australia it was inevitably the weather that caused the most difficulty for a tenting circus touring most of the year.

The staging of a fight within a show required an accomplished fighter. Wirth’s hired the American tumbler and horizontal bar performer Dick Mathews, who was more than six feet (1.9m) tall. Initially Mathews watched as several of Wirth’s ‘champions’ were beaten by ‘the best of the town fighting men’.48 He became Wirth’s fighter after he won a fight with a cheat at a game of cards. Mathews very effectively evaded wild swinging punches and those who rushed towards him. Philip Wirth explained that there was an expectation of a fight with the arrival of a touring show. He writes:

Mathews had to fight several men in the Monaro, including the local champion, and henceforth undertook the contest with any local fighter who came forward. A district’s recognised strongest fighter would try to outdo an opponent on behalf of the locals. But there were also separately organised travelling sideshows with boxing exhibitions that invited and thrived on the participation of the locals – possibly raising expectations that all travelling shows involved that type of fighting.50 The practice of hand-to-hand fighting became more formalised once there was a champion.

George explains that Wirth’s encountered ‘plenty of opposition in those days, and many a fight to gain supremacy.’51 It was not that fighting behaviour was simply assumed to be indicative of an innate nature. George also suggests that the fighting behaviour of young men was influenced by stories about a schoolboy character, Jack Harkaway. Clearly, influential Jack adventure stories circulated within the colonies, too.

Colonies in the Pacific region began settlement as military garrisons and transplanted fighting cultures. A Wirth’s tour to Noumea, New Caledonia, in 1888 encountered French soldiers stationed there, operating an island prison for convicts. It was here that Wirth’s slack-rope performer, Charlie Redman, was killed in a street fight.52 Back in Australia, Wirth’s circus men were attacked by a local football crowd and were only saved from serious injury by the intervention of the local police. Performers provoked fights offstage, at times through drunken behaviour.

The performers were presented in onstage fights and wars that seemed to offer an implicit invitation for fighting responses from the public. In 1890 in Auckland, New Zealand, Wirth’s presented a Wild West Show – most probably riding Australian horses – reproducing a version of ‘Barnum and Bailey’s Three Ring Circus, Hippodrome and Wild West Combined Shows’.53 Harry Wirth had travelled to San Francisco and engaged Jack Sutton, an originator of Wild West performances, to hire a group of Native Americans and several cowboys from ranches to perform in the show. Native Americans might have been legendary fighters in battle, but the loss of their land and other enforced circumstances led a number to work – often unhappily – in entertainment spectacles. While New Zealand audiences were not overly impressed by the warlike fighting and horseriding, the lassoing displays provoked a craze that led authorities to ban the practice in public places. Emulating their staged battle re-enactments, the American cowboys and the Native American performers were constantly in trouble for fighting each other or the townspeople. George Wirth claimed that on one occasion, he had to have some performers knocked unconscious and carried to the train in order to get them to the next town.

In another instance, the lack of warlike fighting promised by a show sparked the fighting responses of the townspeople. The 1890s Wirth’s show usually finished with ‘“The Hunter’s Cabin” – a scene in which Indians shoot the hunter, scalp him, and burn his cabin’, but for one show in the New Zealand town of Palmerston North, the cabin did not arrive. Instead, a lassoing display finished the show, and the disappointed audience hissed and demanded their money back. The aggravation spread, and audience members began cutting ropes and destroying the tent. There was a ‘tearing down and breaking of seats’ until the cowboy and Native American performers lined up on their horses, ‘like an army of cavalry with drawn revolvers well loaded’, and fired over the heads of the crowd.54 An audience member climbed onto a pedestal and urged the crowd to attack, but George Wirth had mobilised the rest of the performers and, armed with pick handles and sticks, they marched against the mob and dispersed them.

The issue of crowd control remained a constant concern. In Australia, Wirth’s had competition from the British Harmston’s circus. It hired Wirth’s cowboys but presented fake, painted Native Americans. In Sydney, thousands of local men rushed into Wirth’s enclosure without paying for the show, which featured horsemen lassoing bulls. But the horsemen galloped through ‘the crowd of larrikins’,55 ‘and virtually mowed them down’, with several casualties.56 By 1893 Wirth’s competition came from another Australian circus – that of the Fitzgerald Brothers57 – and the circus of Frank Fillis, which included a menagerie and arrived from southern Africa via Singapore. Wirth’s went directly to southern Africa.

To further complicate matters in southern Africa, staged fighting acts began to converge with the offstage conflict. Wirth’s staged episodes of colonial conflict from the Matabele wars of 1893 and 1896 in what is now Zimbabwe, called ‘Major Wilson’s Last Stand or Fighting to Save the Queen’s Colours’.58 The performance re-enacted a battle in which a handful of soldiers from the British South Africa company were surrounded by the Impi indigenous people of Matabele.59 The latter, however, were played by 100 Zulu warriors with spears and cowhide shields, who became enthusiastically involved in the re-creation. George Wirth describes how the fight became a serious battle as the Zulu performers ‘came at me with such ferocity’ with clubs, forcing him to gallop through them. He continues: ‘They were all very much excited over their seemingly [sic] success over the whites, and for a long time that night after the performance they were still yelling and making passes at the people who attended the performance.’60

The government feared an uprising and instructed Wirth’s to stop re-enactments of the conflict. In the colonies, the requisite separation between current warfare and mock fighting in theatrical battle re-enactment was tenuous, if not non-existent, for disenfranchised indigenous peoples.

In South America, Wirth’s encountered violence that ranged from local street fights to the crowd’s indignation about war between nation-states. There were spectators who refused to pay; a spectator who fired a gun at moving acrobats mid-air; unscrupulous businessmen; and fights with locals in public.61 Philip Wirth recalls that

But in Pernambuco, Brazil, in 1895, Wirth’s circus suddenly found itself in the middle of a crowd enraged by the threat of war. During the performance, ‘[t]he news had got about that England had annexed the island of Trinidad [in the Caribbean] from Brazil’, causing Brazilians in the crowd to seek out British spectators to attack.63 Most of the British escaped from the Brazilians by leaving at interval by boat, rather than over land. Wirth’s departed quickly from South America, and became the first Australian circus to perform in England, working there for 18 months. On 18 May 1898, the company performed for the Prince of Wales at Southport. Wirth’s return trip to Australia by way of southern Africa was cut short due to the escalating Boer War, and the circus hastily departed again, travelling instead through South-East Asia to complete a world tour.

While circus productions expanded on earlier 19th-century war shows, all types of fighting and conflict seemed unavoidable for circuses and shows with animals that travelled in Australia and New Zealand and other colonial regions. Since there does not seem to be any circus depiction of the resistance of Indigenous Australians to colonial rule or the Maori wars of resistance, it is likely that war re-enactments followed the precedents set in British and American shows (see Chapter 6). Maori war arts, however, would eventually be performed in Britain.64 While shows in the colonies exposed a continuum of violence from street fights to war re-enactments, geographically specific ongoing political conflicts and wars between settlers and indigenous peoples were masked by the adoption of generic war acts in the staged performance. The battles fought by Native Americans could seem unconnected to colonial struggles in Australasia, except that the depiction of hostilities provoked violent responses from members of the audience. War re-enactment continued to be an extension of actual warfare as it ignited a sense of injustice and antagonism, the underlying emotional impetus.

Morbid bad taste?

As Wirth’s circus travelled to perform and tour in southern Africa in 1893 and 1894, a newspaper debate arose in New Zealand over the big cat act and its head-in-the-mouth stunt touring with Frank Fillis’ circus and menagerie from southern Africa, which additionally reignited controversy about female presenters. Fillis’ circus had toured through South-East Asia to Australia, and on to New Zealand, where it was on a second tour of major towns during 1894. Floris van der Merwe’s biography of Fillis remarks that he was called ‘the “Barnum” of South Africa’ because he was an extremely adventurous large-show entrepreneur.65

Fillis was born into an English circus family and became an equestrian like his father and his uncle, working at Hengler’s Circus in England before travelling to South Africa to join Bell’s circus in 1880. There, he performed the longstanding staple riding acts of the English circus, such as ‘Dick Turpin’s Ride to York’ and ‘Mazeppa’. By 1884, Fillis was running his own circus, billed as the largest in the southern African colonies, and by December 1884 it included an auxiliary zoo tent and an African elephant named Jumbo looked after by a keeper named Funny Francis. The next year Fillis bought an Indian elephant, Bob, for £580 in England. Although he admitted to resorting to what can only be considered severe force, using chains and starvation techniques, eventually the elephant would ride a bicycle, play a mouth organ, stand on his head, and walk on his hind legs. Fillis’ memoir, Life and adventures of Frank E Fillis (1901), is republished in van de Merwe’s biography of him.

Expanding on his Zulu war re-enactments, Fillis took his show ‘Savage South Africa’ to London in 1899, and in 1904 he created the Anglo-Boer War re-enactment show in the USA for the St Louis World’s Exposition (see Chapter 6).

Newspaper coverage in England during the 1870s and 1880s suggests that although there was criticism of menagerie acts, they were widely accepted. However, specific controversies arose in Australia and New Zealand between 1892 and 1894 regarding female tamers and big cat stunts in Fillis’ circus. Although Fillis conceded to the protests and removed female tamers from his acts in Australia in 1892 and in New Zealand in 1894, he continued presenting the big cat act with the controversial head-in-the-mouth feat in both Australia and New Zealand. The stunt became the topic of extended debate during the second 1894 tour of New Zealand, specifically about the handler, John Cox, putting his head in the big cat’s mouth and other handling stunts which critics believed made his act demeaning to humans. Fillis’ memoir exposed a thinly disguised opportunism in relation to publicity that corresponded with Barnum’s style of promotion, raising the possibility that Fillis might have relished publicity gained from these controversies.

The 1894 newspaper debate was precipitated by a small attack during a performance in Christchurch, New Zealand, that drew increased public attention to the presence of the lion- and tiger-handling acts in Fillis’ circus. On 10 January 1894, the big cat handler, Cox, was in the process of putting his head into the mouth of a Bengal tiger named Scindia when she closed her jaws and bit his face.

The circus program was predominantly equestrian displays, acrobatics and aerial acts, but it also included acts with elephants, lions, tigers and bears, and monkeys as jockeys. In Christchurch it was very well received, except for the head-in-the-mouth stunt, which was described as ‘needlessly repulsive’ and degrading to both, in a considerate acknowledgement of the animal.66 A review of the performance supported the appearance of the big cats, but not that particular stunt; it does seem to have been omitted in some subsequent performances.

While Cox’s wound was not serious – he performed later – ‘the incident caused considerable consternation among the audience’.67 As well, a ‘young lady was to have entered the lion’s cage, but the police prohibited her doing so’. It is unclear if this woman was another circus performer. The full routine for the cage act in Fillis’ circus must be surmised in the absence of further explanation, but it was probably performed in a confined small menagerie cage on a wagon wheeled into the circus performance space rather than in the larger arena cages that came into use during the 1890s.

Although a tamer was able to detect any muscle movement of the jaw, as Conklin explained, the feat required the trainer to exercise bodily strength and agility when handling the animal. How experienced was Cox when he undertook the feat with a tiger? Although there seemed to have been a turnover of tamers with Fillis’, Cox, who was probably initially the elephant presenter, had been billed as a big cat tamer by March 1893 – so he had at least a year’s experience before the incident in Christchurch.

The controversy in New Zealand may have surprised even Fillis, who had toured there the year before with a season in Wellington between 17 and 27 May, and in Auckland between 14 and 26 June 1893.68 But there may have been a less developed big cat act on the first tour. After the shows in Christchurch in 1894, Fillis’ very large circus was in Wellington by 13 January, with special trains organised to take people to and from where the circus tent was mounted in the city area. In a short extract quoting the theatrical newspaper Lorgnette, the Fillis show was described as being ‘decidedly the best circus’ that New Zealand had had since the 1879 Chiarini circus tour. The elephants and big cats pass unmentioned among comments that the ‘company is a very strong one’ and the acrobatic ‘Feeley [sic] family are the great draw’.69 A preference for acrobatic acts by humans may well reflect older circus tastes and their dominance of the equestrian circus before the 1890s. Alternatively, it might have indicated a wish to avoid controversy.

A writer with the nom de plume Scrutator refused to call Cox’s act a performance and demanded it be banned, claiming, ‘it is high time that such exhibitions were forcibly stopped by the authorities’, since they cause ‘the degradation of a noble animal’ with ‘the proprietor and the performer [being] equally and alone to blame, and not the lions’.70 The strongly worded statement calls a handler entering a big cat cage ‘idiotic’, and questions why Fillis would continue to allow an act in which Cox ‘mauls’ the animals. It continues that if the presenter were seriously injured, the horrified public might be spared further ‘insensate and degrading’ displays and meanwhile the putting of heads in animal mouths should be ‘forbidden forthwith’ by law. Scrutator condemned the human handler for holding the animal’s jaws open and explained that his views were confirmed by newspapers in Christchurch. A succession of big cat presenters with Fillis’ circus suggested that Scrutator was mistaken in his belief that an injury would finish the act.

Fillis wrote letters to the editors of the New Zealand Times and the New Zealand Mail in response. He writes in defence of ‘the dangerous practice of performing with wild animals’ since those in his circus were born in captivity, and no longer posed the dangers of 30 years before, when animals were taken from the wild and entry to the cage required ‘sheer pluck’ on the part of the trainer.71 He may have been mistaken about greater compliance from those born in captivity (see Chapter 6). Further, Fillis’ defence claims he provides adequate care for the animals and space to move around in. He continues that they could be let out of the cage up until two years of age, were caressed, and did not really pose a risk to handlers or to the public. Fillis’ tone is measured, but indignant, and unwittingly reveals that the wild animals in his circus were increasingly placid, and needed to be roused ‘to create the certain measure of excitement necessary to entertain the public’. Fillis compares the act to the risks of injury associated with those in sports, including horseracing, and explains that Cox’s small accident was unusual, and entirely his mistake, rather than an unprovoked attack by a vicious tiger.

While Fillis does not directly counter the 19th-century view that it was demeaning for humans to handle animal bodies, his defence suggests that he might well have been aware of the broader concerns about animal welfare and longstanding debates over menagerie exhibitions in England and the rest of Europe. The anxiety that was directly and defensively addressed by Fillis was about the dangers of attack when wild animals were close to humans, which was perceived as a display of human bravery and fearlessness.

Scrutator replies in the same edition to Fillis’ letter, and, claiming to speak on behalf of the majority who were the ‘reasonable-minded public’, he disputes Fillis’ claims about harmless docility, explaining, ‘it does not in the least shake my contention that for a performer to stick his head in a tiger’s or elephant’s mouth is a repulsive and disgusting sight’.72 He reasons that if the tigress was so placid, why had Cox not continued with his feat? Scrutator’s commentary continues, ‘[a]s to the effect upon the public I noticed that out of about fifteen ladies and children in my immediate neighbourhood, fully ten turned their chairs a little to one side . . . and on all sides I heard expressions of fear and disgust’, contending that the public does not wish to witness dangerous sports. In arguing against shows that pander to morbid public tastes, Scrutator outlines a belief that the authorities should regulate family animal entertainment.

It might be tempting to view Scrutator’s position as an indication of socially progressive values, but his criticism arises primarily from an anthropocentric position, rather than from concern about animal wellbeing. The handling of the animal was part of the reason for his rejection because it implied no separation between humanity and animality. The entertainment undermined a 19th-century vision of the advancement of human society with the spread of imperial culture that relegated close contact between humans and non-human animals to the primitivism of the past. Physical handling made humans seem animal-like, closer to nature. It was the threat to the moral standing and distinctiveness of humans within an implicit hierarchy that came to the fore in Scrutator’s comments. The debate also suggested that there were probably additional insecurities in the British settler colonies that arose from their geographical distance from the British and European centres of culture. If animal stunts were popular as entertainment, their degrading effect only reinforced the status of the colonial settlement as not yet civilised.

By the 1890s a prudish protestation about a tiger stunt may arguably have been belated and hypocritical. There had been a tiger den and performer billed in New Zealand 20 years earlier.73 In an extended review of the 1894 New Zealand tour with Cox, there was also an indication of the popularity of Cox and his act when he ‘received quite an ovation on coming forward’, although ‘the spectator breathes more freely when he is again out of the cages in safety’.74 Here was evidence of audience support for the big cat act; the head-in-the-mouth stunt may have been omitted. Any reactions of fear and disgust would have been outweighed by the applause and no doubt lucrative box-office income.

Fillis claims that his circus had been ‘well-received everywhere in Australia’ the year before, in 1893.75 He omits mention of negative publicity in Sydney about the appearance of a woman, Madame Jasia Scheherazade, in the lion act in 1892, and also in Melbourne in 1893 when the handler, Captain Russell, was attacked – Russell seemed to have replaced Captain Humphrey. Pre-show publicity in Sydney in 1892 promised Madame Jasia would ‘tackle the gory carnivora in their lair’.76 It would have been the first act with a female presenter to be seen in Australia. But only Captain Russell appeared in Sydney after a newspaper report of a scandalised protest led to the intervention of the premier of New South Wales, Sir George Dibbs, who banned the woman from appearing in the act. In Sydney, Fillis presented a water pantomime instead of a female tamer, and the show ran from 19 November 1892 until mid-January 1893. It met with a favourable reception and humorous praise for the ‘larrikin’ lion, Pasha (also spelt Pacha), who was perceived as an equal of Fillis.77

In January 1893, the ‘excellent’ show opened in Melbourne with an act in which an elephant and a pony had supper, and were served by a monkey waiter. The program included a performer named Bertie on high trapeze with a 50-foot dive to a net, a trainer putting his head into an elephant’s mouth, and the final act involved the tall Captain Russell, in a ‘red Hussar costume’ carrying a whip, in a cage with four lions, culminating in the lions jumping through blazing hoops.78 Russell was billed as a decorated soldier.

A January review in the Argus commented that at one point Russell lost his footing and had a lion standing over him until Fillis fired a rifle and the lions scattered. The next edition of the newspaper reports that ‘though the affair caused alarm, probably few people considered that Captain Russell had been in serious danger . . . [although he] had been very severely bitten by the lion Pacha’.79 Below the report was a letter to the Argus editor that contradicted the statements that spectators thought it was a minor incident. The letter describes how a lion ‘jumped’ at Russell and ‘no words can depict the groan of horror that escaped the frightened audience’. ‘It is repugnant to civilised feeling that such exhibitions should be given’, especially as the defence provided by Fillis was that ‘such feeling ceases’ after repeated viewing, which was tantamount to becoming ‘effectively brutalised’.80 The letter argued that familiarity accustomed observers to brutish behaviour and thus destroyed the morally upright human values that, the author implied, underpinned civilisation.

Clearly spectators were disturbed to witness an attack. There is a further retort of ‘unadulterated nonsense’ and memory loss to Fillis’ claim about the lack of danger, especially as the performer was hospitalised for weeks after lion Pasha attacked.81 Certainly the full houses in the 1893 Melbourne season attested that attendance was not affected by newspaper reports that a lion knocked down Russell on opening night. Even if there were some exaggeration, Russell still required recovery time from his injuries in January 1893, while Fillis’ circus played to full houses, introducing the Bengal tiger in the next week, and later presenting a re-enactment of the Zulu wars.82

Cox was named as presenter by week five; a turnover of handlers for the big cats was apparent in several years. A ‘daring young gentleman’ spectator, Mr JF McMillan, also entered the cage.83 The last 1893 Melbourne performance was a major event on the social calendar, with the acting governor and naval and military personnel in the audience, all respected members of the establishment.84 Their attendance again reinforced the convergence of an experience of military service and socio-political authority with support for animal shows and war re-enactments.

Publicity dares

The removal of Madame Jasia Scheherazade in Sydney from a cat act and of an unnamed female big cat presenter in Christchurch was a concession to colonial anxieties and raised the question as to why a female tamer was considered more unacceptable in the two colonies than the controversial head-in-the-mouth stunt. Ironically perhaps, women in New Zealand led the world in achieving suffrage at that time. Paternalistic values clearly affected social attitudes, since the female tamer was removed in 1892 in Australia due to the intervention of politicians, and in New Zealand in 1894 when expressions of public concern brought in police. The prohibition in Christchurch was not overturned until 1902, when female spectators undertook dares to appear in the big cat cage or drive a chariot pulled by trained lions.85 Yet this was not a uniform rejection of female tamers in the British colonies, as they appeared elsewhere on tour with Fillis’ circus before and after the Australasian tour.

The lions in big cat acts came from Europe, although Fillis’ circus toured southern Africa, where lions originated. Fillis presented an English style of circus there in 1885, including a staging of English hunting,86 a version of the act called ‘The Royal Stag Hunt’. He would have known it from Hengler’s circus, where it was performed from 1857 to 1888. The act involved a stag chased by riders on horses, accompanied by hounds. There were probably lions in Fillis’ menagerie accompanying the circus by 1887. These were widely seen, judging by an anecdote that quotes Cecil Rhodes; Rhodes later acquired a pet lion, Fanny, who featured in political criticism of Rhodes.87 The publicity-seeking Fillis was presenting African animals, including the so-named Jumbo, when he organised festivities in Kimberley, in southern Africa, in 1887 for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, with the continent of Africa represented by an indigenous presenter ‘with a real leopard by his side’.88 Apparently this ‘perfectly tame’ leopard was restrained only by a chain while riding aboard a wagon through a large crowd, and a 10-year-old boy who got too close was ‘scalped’. Fillis would have been aware of the huge risk with an uncaged big cat in a crowd, but could have been emulating Sanger’s tableau with a lion.

Fillis sought to attract public attention with his acts. The first imported lion act in a small cage with Fillis’ circus included cubs; it arrived in southern Africa in January 1888 with the tamer Salvator Bugeja.89 Bugeja had worked at BB, Folies-Bergères in Paris, and at London’s Alexandra Palace. The lead act in Fillis’ circus program in 1888, however, was Lazel’s human cannonball projectile stunt, imitative of Farini’s patented Zazel cannonball act.90 Eliza (Elise) Mayol was Lazel, who was shot from the cannon with a new spring mechanism, to be caught mid-air by Miss Alexandra, hanging upside down from a trapeze. Mayol became Fillis’ second wife. Despite the considerable risks of a dangerous projectile act, it may have been a more reliable top act. Just 11 months after he joined Fillis’ circus with his lions, Bugeja was attacked and badly injured. The replacement act with husband-and-wife tamers Carlo and Idola Popper had four lions acquired from Salomonsky’s circus in Russia.91 The act arrived in Africa on 21 March 1888 with Idola performing.

In 1890 Fillis claimed that the menagerie zoo travelling with the circus did not generate sufficient income to feed all the lions, cheetahs, leopards, wolves, baboons, hyenas and the elephant, and he seemed to have engineered newspaper publicity by falsely reporting that an escape had caused mayhem.92 Fillis resorted to publicity stunts on an ongoing basis, and to improve flagging box-office income in April 1890 he persuaded a boxer from southern Africa to agree to enter the lion’s cage in a convergence of fighting entertainments. As this did not improve the financial situation Fillis relinquished some animals and travelled abroad with a much smaller number. It was with this reduced menagerie that Fillis embarked on the tour of India, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand in October 1890; the circus remained on tour until November 1894. Even so, accompanying Fillis’ on the 1893 to 1894 tour of Australia and New Zealand were four lions, a black panther, a Bengal tiger, a leopard, a bear, monkeys, gorillas, zebras, 50 to 60 horses, a kangaroo and five elephants.93

After surviving a railroad accident in India in 1892, Fillis returned to Singapore to open his show on 28 May 1892. The lion act included Madame Jasia Scheherazade, probably in a partnership with a male tamer. When Madame Jasia (possibly Mrs Russell, although she is also named as Mrs Humphreys) appeared, a noticeable number of female spectators moved nearer the exit.94 This may have reflected a fear that a woman might not be able to maintain control of wild animals, but spectator unease was not the same as official intervention to remove her from the act. The tour travelled south and reached Sydney, Australia, where Madame Jasia was banned.

The issue of wild animal handling proved more contentious than even the atypical extreme athleticism displayed by muscular female acrobats in other circus acts. Philippa Levine summarises how the colonies were a pioneering masculine-dominated culture and, towards the late 19th century, ‘celebrated a very particular vision of white maleness as physical, responsible, productive, and hard-working’, qualities denied to women and indigenous peoples.95 Thus Levine suggests femininity was characterised by a ‘lack of physical prowess’, ‘delicacy’ and ‘nervousness’, and at the same time, ‘women’s place in society stood as an index of civilization’. Femininity was indicative of cultured gentility and thus emblematic of how colonial development brought civilisation. Its contravention undermined colonial rule – leaving aside women’s labour in the domestic sphere. In that framework an expectation of the social dependence of women was measured against the physical prowess of men, and in frontier colonial settlement those physical displays included the dominance of other species, and activities such as hunting. Accordingly, women needed to be protected from large animals capable of hunting humans.

Female circus performers, like theatre performers, evaded some of the restrictions on social behaviour. For example, Australia’s renowned high-wire walker, Ella Zuila, also performed in southern Africa before travelling to the USA in 1880 to become a lead act in Forepaugh’s circus.96 But a female handler of African wild animals, rather than of domesticated species like horses, directly confronted social propriety in Australia and New Zealand. She seemed to challenge more than vague sensitivities about what constituted the limits of socially respectable behaviour in public, though the norms were routinely breached in entertainment. There were no aggressive animals like lions in Australia and New Zealand, so that the human–big cat act with a female presenter directly disturbed the gendered premise within a fledgling colonial society.

It seemed, however, that a female tamer or a woman entering the cage of a big cat was more acceptable in the African homeland of the lion. Back in the southern African colonies in 1895, where Fillis’ circus promoted Herr Winschermann wrestling a tiger, it was acceptable for the newly wed Mrs Winschermann to enter the cage alone, and another unnamed woman even danced in the cage.97 In further publicity stunts, Fillis offered prize money to anyone willing to enter the lions’ cage.

By 1900 the practice of encouraging a spectator, and especially a young woman, to enter the wild-animal cage for publicity was also followed by Wirth’s in Australia. A barmaid from Ballarat, Miss Graham, who was ‘fleshy, fair and fascinating’, entered the tigers’ cage with the trainer and the tigers Pasha and Prince, and drank a glass of champagne.98 The stunt became a topic of newspaper discussion, and a humorous fake funeral business advertisement in the same newspaper edition offered to embalm Miss Graham. The advertisement explains that if she were ‘assimilated by one of the tigers, of course, it will be difficult to separate you [her], in that case we will bury the animal at reduced rates’. The presence of women in big cat acts continued to offer sensationalist value in the remote colonies long after it ceased to have novelty value in Britain, mainland Europe or the USA.

While Wirth’s circus returned to Australia and New Zealand with an expanded program, the company was also determined to make the menagerie financially viable, and it now included the elephant Ghuni Sah (or Gunnesah). Ghuni Sah was acquired from a menagerie in Surabaya, Indonesia, owned by a Dutch ‘sportsman’, Herr Von Grosser. Ghuni Sah also proved able to work, loading the circus equipment.99 The circus included elephant-riding tigers trained by Johnny Rougal, a riding bear trained by Wineherman [sic], and riding and somersaulting baboons. A feat with two or more different species became characteristic of trained acts during the 1890s and Wirth’s rival, the Fitzgerald Bros. circus, was touring an imported Hagenbeck-trained lion in an elephant-riding act by 1896.100 Eventually Wirth’s made the menagerie viable by opening the animal feeding to the public and charging patrons to hear the bear trainer Wineherman’s lectures on menagerie animals.101

The prevalence of feeding and tamer acts in menageries in Britain, mainland Europe and the USA meant that spectators could readily encounter performances by the second half of the 19th century. Such entertainments were rarer in the colonies in the 1890s, as the controversies in Australia and New Zealand reveal. Therefore Scrutator’s opposition in the 1890s to the tamer act and the head-in-the-mouth stunt might have been indicative of late 19th-century anxieties about the loss of human dignity, but it confirmed additional sensitivities in colonial settler society. The style of fighting in shows with animals and in circus war re-enactments may have expanded in circuses with menagerie entertainments that toured globally during the 1890s, but the acts still seemed to reproduce British and American precedents. Yet there were differences in responses to these shows among imperial countries and their colonies. Re-enactments of local wars were only acceptable away from the colony that experienced the war.

The tamer act controversies cannot be attributed to concern about the treatment of animals and their rights. The loss of animal dignity did become a preoccupation in England as the century progressed, but the head-in-the-mouth stunt in the colonies was troubling because it undermined human identity in new settler societies that sought to uphold a hierarchy of culture over the natural world and indigenous cultures. The removal of women from tamer acts emphasised lasting concerns, derived from beliefs about innate divisions in nature pertaining to gender and ideas of a human–animal species hierarchy (see Chapter 7). Domesticated, but not large, exotic, or wild animals were acceptable in acts with women. Regardless, the 1890s was a decade of transition in big cat stunts throughout the colonies, and in Britain, Europe and the USA, menagerie feeding displays and head-in-the-mouth stunts were largely relegated to the 19th century as they were superseded by trained acts with complex feats.