Menagerie spectators took liberties. The inclination to touch or even taunt meant that menagerie staff had to remain vigilant to forestall harm arising from contact between animals and curious spectators. Yet many menagerie visitors developed and expressed strong allegiances with exhibited animals and, when Barnum was planning to transfer the elephant Jumbo from London to the USA, he encountered considerable public resistance.

Audiences could be fickle. This chapter is about the extreme responses of 19th-century audiences to menagerie animals – placid or otherwise – and to workers. It outlines instances of spectator misbehaviour and fighting that occurred in menageries and in towns visited by a menagerie. The travelling menagerie could become a catalyst for individual hooliganism, but it sometimes brought with it law-breaking activity, not to mention questionable dealing, scams and hoaxes. A menagerie’s capacity to attract large crowds proved an incentive for crooks and criminals.

Unruly spectators

The behaviour – and misbehaviour – of the public seemed unpredictable to workers in menageries.1 Instances of hostile behaviour that had been evident in the smaller-scale 18th-century animal show continued in 19th-century animal exhibitions. William Cameron Coup outlines how care had to be taken by workers to avoid being caught up in situations of threat towards animals, and he describes fights among workers and with members of the public. Admittedly some of the antagonism from locals may have been due to the deceptive show practices and unpaid bills widely associated with touring shows, but this did not explain spectator misbehaviour towards the animals. Whether it was a spur-of-the-moment response or a calculated one, some spectators could be dangerous.

Coup’s account of touring with a mid-19th-century American menagerie depicts conflicts between individuals and groups in and around the exhibition tents. In 1852 the 16-year-old Coup joined PT Barnum’s touring caravan, which included a menagerie and a so-named ‘freak museum’; Coup remained associated with menagerie businesses until he died in 1895.2 Coup was inspired by the show created after Barnum and Seth Howes brought 10 elephants from Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to the USA in 1850 to add to the 11 camels that had arrived the year before.3 The menagerie also included 100 horses and an elaborately carved, painted wagon.

In one small town on tour in the 1850s, the elephant, Old Romeo, was tormented by a group of locals led by a young woman. Old Romeo ignored her annoying provocation for some time. Coup explains what happened:

Apparently, an elephant keeper rushed forward and rescued the female spectator before the situation escalated further. Despite Old Romeo’s reputation, Coup defends Old Romeo as placid in his own early experiences with him. Once Coup had been sleeping on hay and Old Romeo used his trunk to gently lift Coup off the hay that he wanted to eat. Coup’s explanation for Old Romeo’s encounter with the female spectator is that the girl was showing off to her friends and was angered and/or embarrassed by the animal’s resistance. Regardless, Coup claims that this type of tormenting behaviour was typical. Menagerie animals were victimised by unruly spectators.

There were spectators who inadvertently provoked responses from animals because they did not perceive a risk from venturing too close. For example, some would hold children up to a cage with a chimpanzee or baboon or orangutang in order to shake hands.5 George Conklin, who started out as a lion tamer and later became an animal trainer, confirms that the menagerie workers had to ensure the animals were not poked with umbrellas or fed the wrong food or patted to see how they would react. He explains: ‘The more you warned people about an animal and said it was dangerous, the more most of them seemed to want to get up to it and pet it.’6 In another example given by Conklin, someone who fed peanuts to an elephant, after being told not to, let the elephant take them from his pocket, and complained vehemently when his coat was badly ripped.

While contributing to an ideal of rational recreation for the populace, a visit to the zoo (or  travelling menagerie) was enjoyed in part because opportunities for leisure excursions were limited, especially for children.7 There was a positive benefit to a two-way interaction, and potentially even feeding animals, albeit with careful management. Arthur Munby visited London’s Zoological Gardens in 1864 and describes how:

A perception of similarity through what Munby deemed human-like qualities and behaviour had the potential to change social attitudes towards other species and towards processes of captivity. At the same time perceptions of either difference or sameness may explain misbehaviour.

Spectators were not necessarily well behaved, thoughtful onlookers like Munby – that is, looking passively; protected by the anonymity of the crowd, a number indulged in the freedom to ignore instructions and menagerie protocol. Some even became belligerent. The comments of showmen revealed that caged and restrained animals were targets of human hostility. Anecdotes of spectator misbehaviour confirmed that the animal keeper’s job was to prevent direct contact by which a member of the public could abuse an animal, and maintain order among the crowd. In hindsight, descriptions may actually have been circumspect about the extent of the problem in order not to detract from a show’s reputation. While explaining that misbehaviour is atypical of most visitors to zoos today, Gareth Davey writes:

Davey continues that recent research reveals how the position of spectators and crowd size can physiologically stress animals.

Some misbehaviour may have been due to the dynamic in spectator groups, including showing off or starting fights, and some of this activity was clearly preceded by alcohol consumption. The public had to be constantly watched for everyone’s protection. Major disruptive behaviour ranged from ignoring the warning not to pat the animals to poking them and abusive provocation, as the prodding of Old Romeo illustrated.

Some of the behaviour around menagerie entertainment seemed at odds with what JM Golby and AW Purdue outline as a progressive ‘civilization of the crowd’ during the 19th century when working-class entertainments converged with those of the middle class and bourgeois respectability, and they argue that the crowd became less unruly and less violent.10 The pursuits nominated as tending to lead to riotous responses – such as cock fighting and dog fighting – involved animals, which Golby and Purdue admit had gone underground, and various sports games had become more rule bound. The menagerie crowd may have resisted civilising restraint evident elsewhere. While there probably were a large number of working-class spectators in the crowd, violence surrounded the animals on display and this tacitly encouraged fighting behaviour in an atmosphere with comparatively few familiar social restraints.

The travelling menagerie was a place of organised leisure, but its transient character may have made it appear less regulated than comparable entertainments. It was a popular, seemingly classless entertainment and menagerie audiences in the mid-19th century wandered through in groups at their own pace. There were few inbuilt restrictions imposed, such as the organised seating in a circus show, which additionally had a small barrier around the ring. In the USA, the seating in the largest circuses from the 1870s reflected social hierarchies of race and class, but even the circus was viewed as having some potential for violence because of the diversity of spectators.11 In the absence of formal viewing arrangements that positioned spectators at a distance, the menagerie became a space in which protocol could be more easily ignored.

Taunting actions played out in the menagerie reflected the values of the wider social sphere. Anecdotes about individual spectator provocation and bullying provide a glimpse of how humans who might have had limited social power – such as the woman tormenting Old Romeo – potentially took out personal and/or social frustrations on animals. A captive animal might have been viewed as passive – an objectified Other – and comparatively powerless to retaliate. Individual spectators might have been considered adventurous and admirable for confrontation and physically aggressive behaviour, rebelling against the restrictions and confinement imposed in everyday life. Animals were considered outside of human society, so the menagerie presented a contained world for individuals looking for excitement.

Showmen were also confronted by groups that ranged from those who refused to pay, to mobs intent on dispensing what they felt was rough justice, often on the slimmest pretext. Coup outlined how groups of people posed a regular threat to the American travelling show and menagerie, often with guns. The ‘tough’ elements of some towns were a constant problem and could comprise ‘several hundred hoodlums’ and the show rarely escaped ‘a pitched battle with these desperados’.12 The refusal to pay could reduce income for a show from $5000 to $800. Menagerie workers were defensively on guard and responded to perceived threats by fighting back.

Problems with unruly spectators did occur in all entertainments, and could escalate regardless of whether behaviour was fuelled by alcohol consumption, and these did sometimes develop into situations of confrontation with weapons. In the USA there were newspaper reports of an ejected spectator returning to a permanent entertainment venue to fire a gun, narrowly missing performers, and on one occasion, ironically, shooting at a female performer costumed as the Goddess of Liberty.13 In another report, ‘a man intruding upon the show was beaten by some of its employees and died of his injuries’; one of the employees, despite professing innocence, was arrested for murder.14 Public gatherings, in general, held the risk of violence.

Conklin did not believe that he needed a gun for protection in most of the incidents that he experienced in a travelling circus and menagerie. There were misunderstandings among local townspeople and on one occasion an uninvited group of drunken criminal cowboys had attached themselves to the show.15 One of the drunk cowboys shot a Native American person, and this crime made the performers anxious about their safety. Because the menagerie workers were also considered outsiders by the townspeople, they were therefore guilty by association.

The size of the crowds increased progressively as menageries grew in popularity, as mentioned in reports about touring routes. For example, in Chicago in 1872, Forepaugh’s ‘mammoth tents have been filled to their utmost capacity’.16 Occasionally the crowd was too large to be controlled. The tents became very crowded, sometimes to the point where a performance in a circus tent could not take place, even with an elephant brought forward to clear a space to allow passage.17

In England, similar trouble with unruly spectators was noted. George Sanger describes ‘mob brutality’ from the 1850s onwards and recounts several major mob attacks that included some particularly violent behaviour. He writes about Lancashire:

Crowd gatherings were rough, and could be dangerous. There was a description of a fairground stallholder who was stomped to death by local rioting spectators wearing clogs. Sanger also explains that animals like elephants who were upset by the public became dangerous to keepers.

A young boy who had teased an African elephant called Lizzie was crushed to death at Wombwell’s in April 1872. But ‘[m]any local witnesses came forward to testify that the unfortunate boy had given the elephant great provocation’.19 Apparently Lizzie was usually compliant, even expressing ‘joy’ at seeing a chemist again who had cured her of colic with a potion four years previously. Lizzie’s routine involved walking around the menagerie tent and standing on a raised area. In a separate incident, she accidentally knocked the lighting rope and the skin on her back caught fire, but she healed and recovered. Extreme responses by spectators were only some of the risks facing travelling animals.

Ongoing problems with unruly spectators, however, got to such a point in one city that Edward Bostock applied for police protection for his menagerie. He recounts that ‘we had been in a few rough quarters in England, Ireland, and Wales’, but in Glasgow the company experienced the worst of what he termed ‘hooliganism’.20 The Glasgow authorities provided an older policeman as a watchman, but he proved ineffectual.

The continuing problem of human-to-human fights with locals and with other circus workers has been downplayed in circus history. Peter Verney, however, explicitly writes that ‘the arrival of the circus was the signal for every tough in the district to start limbering up for action, for a good fight against worthy opponents’.21 The word ‘clem’ described ‘a fight on the lot’ and ‘Hey Rube’ meant that a visitor was looking for trouble and to be prepared. ‘Hey Rube’ was called a ‘battle cry’, and used at the end of each stanza in a poem by William Devere about such conflicts that Verney reproduces, claiming that there could be a serious fight at least every two weeks. He continues that even though the law often viewed showmen as ‘undesirable vagrants’, the police ignored conflicts and were often pleased to see aggressive locals challenged. Workers at smaller circuses struggled to defend themselves – George Sanger’s father sat up at night with a shotgun.

Recognition of what was called ‘ruffianism’ in London theatres was outweighed by reports of orderly audience behaviour in most venues and even in the ‘cheap theatres’, despite the poverty in the surrounding area.22 In their major study of audiences in London theatres, Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow present only a few examples of uproar, although disorder was not a focus of their study, dispelling ideas of 19th-century theatre attendance divided and localised by class.23 As indicated, a distinction could be made between entertainments with more regulated entry and seating and a focused stage area for spectators who attended the venue regularly, often more than once a week year-round. The arrangement of the menagerie facilitated unwarranted responses because of its transience.

The practices in tamer cage acts may have indirectly incited spectator misbehaviour. An implicit idea that aggressive animals in small, confined cage spaces should fear and obey humans was conveyed by these acts. Combined with harsh animal management, confrontation and submission could be said to permeate travelling menagerie exhibition. As 19th-century circus historian Hugues Le Roux explains, the ‘tamer’s performance’ provided ‘the most valuable evidence of the superiority of man over animals’.24 The tamer appeared to make the lion obey with only a whip for protection. The tamer must ‘astonish the beast and overawe him’ and make him ‘execute from fear of the whip those leaps which he would naturally take in his wild state’.25 Animals should fear the human.

Tamer hunting acts in particular attracted larger crowds and the tamer could earn a big fee. The perception of them, however, could be decidedly critical. Englishman Frank Fillis repeats an oral account about tamer Tom ‘Baddy’ (Batty), who replaced a drunken handler and entered the menagerie lion cage.26 It was probably Thomas Batty, who Carl Hagenbeck describes as an example of a trainer with an unacceptable hunting act in which he fired pistols and antagonised the animals.27 Fillis claims that the popularity of the act caused a rival to offer Batty his weekly £50 fee not to appear, but a replacement handler was fatally attacked, and Batty made one more appearance for £250 to a crowd of thousands. Batty was probably an experienced tamer: the Batty family was involved in the English circus, and the generation after Thomas also presented animal acts. This anecdote reveals that the hunting act, with some chasing action and weapon display, was perceived as an overt display of aggression towards animals. Spectators may not have appreciated that this hunting act was repeatedly staged – Batty’s act did seem ad hoc. As well as attracting large, excitable crowds, tamer acts tacitly encouraged provocative and threatening behaviour towards all caged and restrained animals.

In France, Paul Hervieu was an eyewitness to an accident in which a lion attacked a tamer. Hervieu cynically summarises the behaviour of the spectators. He explains that, firstly, ‘“[a] female spectator never faints until there is nothing more to see”; secondly, those at the back rushed forward and clambered over barriers at the first opportunity; thirdly, women even pushed men aside “to get a better view”’.28 Although he implies that women were more aggressive in their effort to see what was happening, this could mean that he noticed them because, unusually, there was minimal distinction between the behaviour of male and female spectators attending the incident. Certainly such an occurrence could cause a disturbance if not also inadvertently provoke some to discard conventional gender roles.

While circuses with menageries toured widely in their respective countries, they also toured internationally and the impact of national events at a local level may not always have been fully appreciated by such companies (see Chapter 5). In one graphic example that took place shortly after the Prussian siege of Paris (1870), Prussian-like uniforms were worn by the band in an American circus for a parade through the streets of Amiens, France, playing the Marseillaise, so that the ‘utter bad taste of this proceeding raised the just indignation of an excited crowd’, and the circus was forced to leave quickly.29 The military uniforms increasingly used as costumes by circus bands and performers conveyed not only connotations of aggression but specific identities in conflicts.30 Unquestionably some American circuses touring to Europe were more successful than others and it was becoming apparent that the knowledge of the lion or elephant keeper was an increasingly important element of success.31

While there may have been numerous reasons for individual spectator resistance and aggression towards animals in a menagerie and for crowd attacks, they also took place in a socio-political context. The social world of the 19th century could be harsh, with physical impositions within the workplace and also in the domestic sphere for women and children. A hidden problem of domestic violence among entertainers seemed to come to public attention only in extreme cases resulting in death. In one example, a manager, James C Davis, shot his partner, the trapeze performer Mademoiselle La Rosa; he claimed it was an accident, saying the gun had gone off when he moved a cocked pistol at her request.32 There appeared to have been a domestic dispute – two other guns were found in his possession, and apparently the couple were not married as initially claimed.

Outbursts of mob violence that seemed spontaneous during visits to menageries could also expose aspects of class dissension and political frustration that erupted periodically out of ordered social life.33 It might be argued that a latent violence in society more broadly was exposed by the fighting behaviour of individuals and groups. Caged and restrained animals were considered to have come from remote regions perpetually at war and the military forces sent to these colonial regions came from the home country populations, which may have contributed greater complexity to local tensions. There may have been an insidious contagion of violence. Billie Melman points out that the 19th-century crowds in Britain attending these spectacles of violence as entertainment could also attend the public hangings of criminal prisoners until 1868.34 The connections between government systems and violent punishments in public and private spheres might have become more oblique in European and American 19th-century social worlds, but they remained unmistakable in the treatment of indigenous inhabitants in the colonies.35 Confrontational responses by locals were the manifestation of societal conflict already imbued with the violence perpetuated by the official imperatives of nation-states.

Crooks

Misbehaviour motivated by curiosity or hostility happened in a crowded environment, additionally encompassing the less acceptable practices of showmen and the drunken behaviour of workers. Questionable business practices in the USA ranged from organised games to entice spectators to part with as much money as possible and short-changing them on their admission fees, to more blatant activities such as pickpocketing; these may have been less evident in shows in Europe. Janet Davis identifies a carnivalesque element to performer identity and behaviour in American circus and recognises that there were problems with thefts that invariably happened on the town’s seasonal Circus Day.36 In addition, American workers known to be associated with a menagerie did not always pay their bills to hotels and other local businesses. This led to accusations and problems, even if that town was not part of the touring route the following year. Some of those associated with, or who simply attached themselves to, a show engaged in outright criminal activities, such as pickpocketing and stealing.

Performers would often become involved in fights. Amid his mid-19th-century accounts of threatening behaviour from people outside the touring show, such as horse thieves and conmen making false accusations about harbouring escaped slaves, Coup recounts witnessing his first fight among the menagerie workers that caused him to try to leave the show.37 A larger worker was physically bullying a smaller man who seemed to put up with it, but one day he suddenly retaliated, took out a pistol and fatally shot the bully. Coup explains that he and other workers had to be constantly alert to trouble. Workers were also vulnerable to false accusations.

There were numerous confrontations in hotel bars. In one incident several drivers working with Forepaugh’s went for an early evening drink in a saloon in Jerseyville, Illinois, and were joined by others later. At the suggestion of a driver, Jones, they started singing. A town officer, Neece, entered the saloon and ordered the men to stop singing because they were disturbing the peace. The drivers ignored him and when the marshal, James McKinney, arrived, he seized Jones by the collar and shot him with a revolver. McKinney hurriedly left town; Jones later died. The dead worker was described as a quiet, inoffensive person and 400 of the show’s workers, or attachés as they were called, threatened to take ‘dire vengeance upon the whole community’.38 Adam Forepaugh had to intervene to calm down the crowd. In a similar incident, circus men refused to leave a local drinking house when the African-American owner wanted to close, culminating in an altercation in which the owner was shot by one of the show workers, who then disappeared.39

An incident in a hotel may have detracted from a performer’s reputation. For example, in a letter sent to the trade paper where performers advertised for work, one performer gave a disclaimer about his alleged involvement in a fight in which a gun was fired.40 Singer-actor Charles Cochran, who tried unsuccessfully to join Barnum and Bailey Circus The Greatest Show on Earth (BB) in the USA during the early 1890s and later became a manager and show entrepreneur, provided a detailed account of his own bad behaviour as a young man attending the theatre in 1897. He arrived after he had been drinking and was refused entry, but he forced his way inside past the attendants. He claimed that he did not realise he was ‘tight’ and out of control. When a manager tried to physically persuade him to leave, a fight ensued, and the attendants joined in. The five-minute fight was reported in the next day’s newspaper in the language of a boxing match, ‘blow for blow, move for move, in the parlance of the prize ring’.41 By then spectators could also easily attend more formalised displays of fighting in boxing and wrestling shows.

In addition to this type of violent incident, the practices associated with travelling shows could be manipulative, if not outright criminal. The menagerie that accompanied a circus from the 1870s in the USA also contained performers who were not an obvious part of the main show or even an accompanying sideshow, and were specifically attached to the menagerie. George Conklin writes about an African-American man, Jeremiah Backstitch, who rode a ‘meek, innocent-looking’ mule; spectators were invited to ride the mule for $5.42 The mule was trained to move to the signal of a whip, and throw off everyone until Backstitch volunteered from the audience as if he were one of the spectators, and rode the mule successfully. Such practices were designed to maximise revenue. Enterprising workers conceived of all manner of ruses. For example, balloon sellers for the menagerie parade would pop spectators’ balloons with tacks so that they could sell more later.

Conklin explains that the workmen and keepers were constantly looking for ways of making extra money, such as selling fake magic stones with healing properties or miracle oil or even miracle soap. In further examples, one man took the quills out of the porcupines to sell, while another was selling goose eggs as ostrich eggs to farmers.43 Small performances happened wherever crowds gathered and, for example, a sleight-of-hand performer would use cards to entertain and trick spectators. One, Spaf Heiman, would call for a knife from the audience and make it disappear; if it was of good quality, he appeared to swallow it so he could keep it.

There were numerous games and devices that accompanied large live shows, and these were often used to fool the crowd. The ‘fixer’ accompanied games of chance, paying off the police or working in the crowd to calm down a ‘victim’ with sympathetic words or, if that failed, providing payment.44 As well, ‘cappers’ were planted among a crowd to appear to win in order to induce people to take part. In a variation, one crook played a well-dressed doctor who was called if a spectator fainted after losing a large amount of money in a game. This apparently happened regularly, and the doctor was able to get the person carried out of the crowd before there was a disturbance.

Drawing on sociological studies of the 1960s and 1970s, Joseph Rogers defines terms such as ‘grifting’, to denote the more common crooked games played by ‘grifters’, duping members of the public aided by dishonest public officials.45 The bad feeling that a show left behind was called a ‘burn up’ and the discovery of grifting often led to violence and fights.

While these types of behaviours were duplicitous, some practices associated with travelling shows in the USA were unmistakably criminal and unquestionably gave travelling shows a bad reputation. Thus the shows that upheld honest practices became individually known. In the USA, travelling shows were almost expected to be the epicentre of illegal activities. Some managers accepted dishonest practices as inevitable, while others tried to stop them. Conklin writes that during the 1860s and 1870s, ‘[t]he gambler, the pickpocket, the short-change artist, and the faker travelled with the show and in return for goodly sums of money, paid to its owner, were left undisturbed to prey on the crowd which the circus brought together’.46 Conklin writes of two performers with O’Brien and then Cole’s circuses; Pat Ford got into more fights than anyone else, and Jack Rogers was ‘an all-round crook’, who would sneak through town while the show was happening and steal clothes from washing lines.

Cochran describes attending the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 where ‘crooks had gathered from all over the world’.47 Some awareness that con artists would be present in the crowd did not deter spectators, and it may have added to the thrill for some, and encouraged others to take licence. There was great excitement among the public but the crowd made the fair seem wild. Cochran considered the spectacle and electric lighting displays extraordinary. Even though they were show workers themselves, Cochran and a companion spent their last US$100 during their first visit, so he found a job at the fair selling fountain pens.

At travelling shows and fairs, the games were commonly rigged to allow spectators to appear to win at first and then to lose. Lorenz Hagenbeck recounts trying to sell the Hagenbeck elephants to the American showman, Benjamin Wallace, well known for show grifting. Wallace replied, in colourful language, that he did not want the elephants because they cost too much to feed and because, ‘[i]f ever I want to earn some dollars, I think up a new game.’48 Lorenz claims that the games he saw in the USA were unknown in Germany. He explains:

Spectators were duped by the ease with which the planted fixers initially appeared to win and they continued to buy tickets or to play the game, often with all the money they had. Lorenz was dissatisfied that the Hagenbeck name became associated with the business practices of Wallace when he bought the Hagenbeck circus in 1906. Certainly illegal business practices may have been less tolerated at the local level in Europe, but the menagerie show was theatrical entertainment and prone to duplicitous exaggeration.

A 1910 newspaper article suggests that teams of ‘fakers’ associated with some circus and menageries might number 30 out of 80 workers.50 There was clearly a theatrical element in that highly experienced fakers might dress poorly and appear inept at the trick to dupe suspicious members of the public who came expecting trickery. By that time, however, such tricksters were only really effective in smaller towns since the public in the cities were now familiar with crooked games. The heyday of such scams coincided with the peak in the popularity of the travelling menagerie. 

Educational animal fights

Wild animal exhibiting in the second half of the 19th century was often justified with rhetorical statements about educational value, with performers even adopting the title of ‘professor’, no doubt intended to offset a poor reputation. Some claims about the merit of the study of natural or ‘animated’ history in zoological displays for young people seemed to be sincere, although the elevation of menagerie practice to schools for the ‘cause of science’ with declarations that ‘education has triumphed over ignorance and the great door of knowledge’ revealed hyperbole that was more about business marketing than pedagogy.51 Ferguson stipulates that: ‘[T]he moral effect . . . improves the mind, instructs and enlarges the common fund of human knowledge, and may be looked upon, as the only pure and correct school’.52 The idea that observing animals could be beneficial for children did become entrenched and was proclaimed extensively by menageries and circuses through succeeding decades.

Animal exhibitions in menageries were sometimes accompanied by talks and lectures, and the delivery of these was more theatrical than scientific. A crowd gathered around the menagerie cages listening to the lecturer, who greatly embellished the commentary. Lecturers appealed to the predictable sentiments of the viewing public, and baby animals were particularly popular with crowds. While a menagerie lecture might have provided the public with some basic information about an animal species, it was often framed by a human melodrama of struggle and loss.

Conklin recounts how the display of menagerie camels had a roster drawn from camel attendants who were mostly Irish, but who dressed each day as Arabs. The lecturer (John) Childers elaborated on the life of the costumed Arabs with the camels in the desert, adding more details with each successive lecture. One day he recounted how they spent their days huddled together in sandstorms, ‘saved from dying of thirst by killing one of the faithful animals and drinking the water stored in its stomach’.53 The attendants quit the show together to avoid what they perceived as further humiliation from make-believe stories.

A commitment to delivering menagerie shows with some educational value was undermined by the exploitative attitudes held by showmen, since the more sensationalist aspects of animal life could attract a crowd. The organisation of animal fights and ‘animal-baiting’ had been legislated against in Britain by the mid-19th century.54 There were still covert animal acts that promised fighting when incompatible animals were placed together, as when, for example, a lamb or small dog was placed in a lion’s cage. Additionally, fights between animals arose because of the conditions under which they were kept; the keeper’s lack of knowledge about animal behaviour meant the keepers were often taken by surprise. Two leopards with Van Amburgh’s had been in an act with Lester for four years, and lived in the same cage.55 All concerned were left stunned when the leopards had a serious fight that left them both badly injured.

In another example, when a group of ostriches showed a capacity to fight one another, Coup regretted that this fighting capacity had not been predicted and presented to a paying audience. He suggested that ostrich fights might rival the appeal of a bullfight. Two males among 40 ostriches were identified by the keeper, Delaney, as ‘“spoiling for a fight”’ and Coup describes how ‘their mouths were wide open, their eyes red and hideous, and their magnificent plumage ruffled, until the spectators, while deploring the fight, could not help admiring the splendid appearance of the birds in their rage’.56 Coup describes how the fighting birds circled each other with loud screams, delivering body blows. Delaney risked injury when he tried to stop the fight to save the animals, and eventually delivered two heavy blows that forced one ostrich to the ground, while the other assumed the position of victor and walked away followed by the female birds. Yet it was human vandals who broke into the menagerie and destroyed these birds. Within 12 hours of the fight, the male ostriches had been completely plucked, their feathers stolen for profit. Thus menagerie animals were also at risk of unscrupulous opportunistic attacks from outside.

Coup’s aquarium business with Charles Reiche was completely unprepared for a fight between alligators crowded into a tank. He writes that the attendants were ‘paralyzed [sic] with fear’, because the alligators ‘would snap at each other so violently as to break each other’s jaws’, with a noise like a gunshot.57 Once the fight subsided, to prevent a recurrence or escape, the adult alligators were shot in the eyes and buried.

A report about fights between animals in 19th-century newspaper coverage under an entertainment subheading made clear the assumption that fighting displays were of public interest. A report about tiger fighting in Java, Indonesia implied that it was a common practice to stage a tiger against a buffalo in a bamboo cage; although the buffalo was usually the winner of the 20- to 30-minute fight, few survived the fight more than a few days. The fight was stimulated by throwing boiling water over the buffalo and poking the buffalo with nettles tied to the end of a stick. The animals had to be harmed to make them fight. In Java, the tiger tried to avoid the fight until ‘goaded by sticks, and roused by the constant application of burning straw,’ after which the tiger was gored by the buffalo.58 In this instance, animal fights manifest ideas of colonial struggle. ‘The Javans are accustomed to compare the buffalo to the Javan, and the tiger to the European’.59 While this report describes a staged animal fight during the colonial era, the tradition of a buffalo fighting a tiger or humans attacking a tiger with sticks was a ritual developed under Javanese kingship and allowed rulers to confirm their power.60

There was a contradiction between the proposition that simply viewing animals in menageries was educational and the existence of less acceptable, surreptitious animal displays on which promoters sought to capitalise. While animal fights, accidental or not, might have held the promise of quick box-office gains to a showman, it was animals that offered a capacity for spectator–animal interaction that gained affectionate popularity and often acquired the largest following of fans. Even so, supposedly placid animals could become the centre of considerable controversy and conflict.

Fans of Jumbo nationalism

In 1882 the African elephant Jumbo became famous in Britain through newspaper publicity about Barnum’s purchase and proposed removal of him to the USA.61 Barnum’s agent approached the secretary of London’s Royal Zoological Society, who accepted an offer of US$10,000 (£2000) for Jumbo. The events surrounding what became a popular movement to keep Jumbo in England, and which became known as the ‘Jumbo Craze’, were underpinned by a newspaper campaign to stir up controversy (and sell newspapers). The campaign made Jumbo into a national figure. Why did an elephant imported from eastern Sudan via France become central to an emotionally charged public campaign that made him into a figure of national pride in Britain? As events unfolded, it became clear that the animal management concerns that motivated the sale were not widely known. Instead, Jumbo appeared stoic in public, popular with children and therefore imaginatively endearing.

Paul Chambers provides a detailed biography of Jumbo’s life, and explains the importance of the keeper, Matthew Scott, to his wellbeing. Jumbo’s increasing popularity during his decades in the London Zoological Society Gardens came from his capacity to provide rides for children on a specially built howdah, belying the ongoing concerns of zoo staff regarding Jumbo’s behavioural problems. Direct contact with Jumbo galvanised public opinion: adults who had taken rides on Jumbo’s back as children wanted their own children to have the same opportunity, preferably on the same elephant. When the Royal Zoological Society’s secretary, Mr Sclater, tried to publicly explain that when elephants reached adulthood they were subject to what was termed ‘bad’ or ‘uncertain’ temper, this was rejected because Jumbo had benignly given rides to children for years.62

The Jumbo controversy provided a further example of the undeniable connection between exhibited animals and newspaper publicity; this was initially escalated by the Daily Telegraph and sustained by its editor, who was known to be critical of the London zoo.63 Disagreement among the Fellows of the Zoological Society about the sale of Jumbo unfolded in letters to the editor of The Times, escalating the controversy. The news that Jumbo’s sale had been completed led one of the Fellows to write an anonymous letter to The Times under the pseudonym ‘Penitent Fellow’.

The Penitent Fellow ends his letter with the claim that a subscription would raise the funds to save Jumbo. This polarisation in the Zoological Society offered Jumbo’s supporters a stronger case, based on the sentiment that Jumbo was loved by all. They deemed Jumbo’s sale akin to selling a family member to the USA. An attempt to encourage Jumbo into a large box on wheels for transport to the Millwall Docks was unsuccessful due to his resistance. Jumbo’s following increased once it became widely known that he was the largest elephant in the Zoological Gardens, and seemingly the first African elephant to survive there. The elephant should therefore not be sold and shipped to the USA.

Leaving aside the legacy of elephants in sentimental theatrical pantomimes, the patriotic dimensions to the possession of this particular elephant stirred up public opinion by intersecting with a collective nostalgia for childhood experience. There were numerous letters from the public sent to newspapers to protest the removal of Jumbo from the zoo, ‘as if Barnum had purchased an English institution’; in poetic jest it was suggested Barnum exchange Jumbo for William Gladstone, the British Prime Minister.65 Even Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales had taken rides on Jumbo and they, too, contributed to the protest about the sale. The saga played out in newspapers throughout Britain.66 For The Times, Martin Skeffington wrote an eight-point rebuttal of Sclater’s explanation of the sale, arguing that it was clearly motivated by the ‘excessive price’ and asking why, if Jumbo were so dangerous, a sale had not been initiated earlier? Additionally, why had children been allowed to continue to ride on him.67 Conversely, William Agnew writes that based on his 34 years of experience as a magistrate in Goalpara, India, where he had ‘owned’ an elephant that became dangerous and ‘did great mischief while loose’, elephants should not be kept in zoological gardens.68 He argued that the passengers on the ship transporting Jumbo needed protection.

Certainly the public did become protective of individual animals. Jumbo, as well as Zafara, a giraffe in France facing a similar fate,69 became national emblems because they were inadvertently caught up in a legacy of political events and national rivalries. But Jumbo’s biography also illustrates the manner of the trade between institutions; he had arrived in London in 1865 in poor condition from the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, in exchange for a rhinoceros from India and having been originally traded to Paris from Africa by Johann Schmidt in 1861.70 Zoo superintendent AD Bartlett describes Jumbo arriving in London in a ‘filthy and miserable condition’. He continues:

The keeper Scott and Jumbo became inseparable companions, with Jumbo seemingly depending on the loner Scott, and possibly vice versa; Bartlett resented Scott’s proprietary control over Jumbo.72 Jumbo’s behaviour depended on one person and this was unacceptable. There were struggles at a personal and a national level enacted about this particular elephant.

By 1881, Jumbo was causing ongoing concern with attendants because he was unpredictable, regularly trying at night to break out of the elephant house – that is, out of confinement. Selling him on was a pragmatic decision that reflected the common practice with difficult large animals – a better option for an elephant, given how others were killed (see Chapter 6). Meanwhile Barnum understood the special appeal of elephants in the USA, especially since Old Bet had produced notable financial gains. It has been argued that Jumbo gained more attention internationally with this controversy than had any of Barnum’s previous business ventures, including those that had toured to Europe since the 1840s.73

There was mounting public indignation at the prospect of depriving English children of a chance to ride an elephant considered a pet by many. The Jumbo craze illustrated how an idealised animal figure that was placid in contact with the public could attract affection. A committee was formed to prevent the Zoological Society’s sale of Jumbo, proclaiming his value to science and zoological study, and this led to a highly publicised court case. The Zoological Society disputed the scientific worth of Jumbo on account of the increasing availability of African elephants in the preceding four decades, as well as the commercial worth of the animal against the cost of keeping him. Justice Chitty ultimately upheld the Zoological Society’s right to sell him, noting the hypocrisy of those who traded their horses without qualms.74

The delay in the departure of Jumbo meant that in the intervening time he attracted more than 10 times the usual number of visitors per day, so that there were thousands, instead of hundreds, visiting Jumbo.75 When Jumbo was finally transferred to the ship on 25 March 1882 he was saluted and celebrated as if he were royalty, and most of his chains were removed so that his ‘head, body, and trunk were thus entirely freed’ to assist his stance during the voyage.76 There was also a plan to send back messages about his health in bottles dropped at sea. The party who came to farewell him at the docks included Bartlett, members of the aristocracy, and Mr Tallett from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. A description of the process of settling him on deck took up most of a column in The Times.

The publicity surrounding Jumbo was invaluable to Barnum’s efforts to make him a distinctive attraction. Les Harding writes that Jumbo was not a performer, even though he appeared in the circus ring: ‘Jumbo did not do anything.’77 As a celebrity in the USA, he made Barnum a fortune, becoming a household name and featuring in advertisements for household goods.78 Unfortunately there was a tragic accident just a few years after his arrival in the USA. Jumbo was being moved across a rail line when he was hit and killed by a freight train on 15 September 1885. Another smaller elephant called Tom Thumb survived with only a broken leg.79 Barnum, however, kept a noted taxidermist and businessman Henry Ward, on call; Barnum regularly donated specimens to museums and had already been involved in discussions about Jumbo with the Smithsonian National Museum for two years. Thus was Jumbo’s fate decided. Ward was assisted by the young Carl Akeley, who pioneered the realistic mounting of taxidermied animals in natural settings. They took six months to create two Jumbos, one of skin and one of the skeleton.80 Both Jumbos toured for two years with a live female elephant, Alice, billed as Jumbo’s widow. The popularity of his skeleton, which was later displayed at the American Museum of Natural History, confirmed that elephants continued to be good business even in death.

Jumbo’s reputation was established before the Jumbo craze and Barnum’s decision to obtain him was no doubt indicative of this pre-existing prominence. In England, Jumbo’s prominence galvanised sentiments derived from memories of pleasurable leisure activities, underscored by beliefs about differences in national attitudes towards animals. The Jumbo craze only evoked public sentiment about the fate of an individual animal, since that popular movement was not contesting the fate of all elephants in captivity.

The co-option of Jumbo’s name followed. Edward Bostock recounts how Wombwell’s acquired a young elephant, also called Jumbo, in 1880 from William Cross in Liverpool. This elephant proved so energetic and noisy that the menagerie could not contain him. Bostock recounts: ‘One moment he was on his hind legs, the next on his fore, and anon he seemed to be clear of the ground altogether.’81 Once, untied, Jumbo took off, but stopped when he spied Wombwell’s older elephant, Lizzie. He headed to her side and was quickly tied to her neck. Soon after, Wombwell’s decided to return this young, unmanageable Jumbo to Cross. He was sent by rail in a wooden box, breaking a tusk on the journey. He, too, was eventually sent to the USA.

Interest in elephants also extended to scientific attention to their emotional attributes. Elephants had acquired a reputation as ‘models of domestic virtue’ with the capacity to fall in love.82 Charles Darwin was told that the Indian elephant had been observed to weep in times of grief and upon separation from other elephants. But he found conflicting accounts and he asked Bartlett to arrange an experiment with elephants trumpeting to see if the contraction of the muscles around elephants’ eyes produced tears as it did in humans.83 The results were inconclusive, as were investigations into other physiological similarities in displaying emotions. Regardless, life in captivity may have distorted the elephant’s emotional reactions. Nonetheless the elephant’s reputation for human-like emotional qualities persisted, serving both entertainment and scientific inquiry. The capacity of individual animals to arouse strongly felt human sentiments was irrefutable.

Whitewashed elephant wars

Competition between American menageries to maximise entry fees after the 1870s encouraged a relentless search for novel exhibits. Elephant attractions were especially favoured and, accordingly, new acts were quickly copied. In an interesting twist, however, it was a copy of Barnum’s 1884 elephant exhibit that attracted the most spectators. As so-named white elephants reveal, fake animal attractions also proved profitable.

In 1883, before Jumbo was accidentally killed, Barnum acquired the elephant Toung Taloung, after prolonged negotiations. Taloung was one of a scarce number of ‘white elephants’, inhabiting the region of Burma (Myanmar) and Siam (Thailand), where they were revered in religious traditions. Taloung, eight feet (2.4 metres) in height, turned out to be a pinkish, pale grey with blotches, rather than a distinctly white colour by European standards. It is probable that Barnum’s elephant displayed albanism, indicative of sacred elephants, but publicity suggesting that the elephant’s skin would be white raised unrealistic expectations in audiences. Such a misleading advertising campaign may have contributed to this unsuccessful venture. Barnum’s competitors, however, sought to present unmistakably white elephants.

In Britain, in a characteristic display of entrepreneurial opportunism, Sanger’s National Amphitheatre, Hippodrome, Menagerie and Great Pantomime advertised that a perfect specimen of a ‘prodigious sacred white elephant’ would be on view in the Christmas pantomime before ‘its departure to America, to join Adam Forepaugh’s gigantic show’, and before Barnum’s Taloung arrived in London.84 According to Sanger, the Prince of Wales came to see his white elephant, whereupon Sanger confided in the prince that the animal was whitewashed, and was rewarded for his honesty with Indian jewellery.85 In the USA, Forepaugh presented an elephant as the ‘Sacred White Elephant’, possibly the one imported from Sanger’s.86 Ringling Brothers Circus also acquired an albino, Kheddah, seemingly named after the system of bamboo enclosures that entrapped wild elephants in India.87 Yet it was Barnum’s Taloung who was branded as a fake because the elephant was not expressly white, even though Taloung may have at least been an appropriate religious icon.

Taloung’s journey between Siam and New York was broken by a brief stopover at the London Zoological Society Zoo between January and March 1884. Perhaps Barnum was attempting to continue the newspaper furore over Jumbo when he placed an advertisement in The Times promoting ‘the first and only genuine white elephant ever imported’. In her analysis of Taloung’s presence in London, Sarah Amato finds a wider set of discourses that were current in the culture at the time, and a correlation with racist ideas of whiteness. Amato notes that stories of white elephants had already been brought to Britain by travellers and circuses. She argues that the ensuing disappointment in Taloung’s apparent lack of whiteness had parallels with ‘anxiety about the maintenance of racial purity and white privilege’.88 This alignment was made explicit when white elephants appeared in advertising for Pear’s Soap – advertising that also presented racially marked human bodies to denote that whiteness was equated with ‘cleanliness’. When two monks were introduced to perform Buddhist rituals near the elephant, the ensuing debate prefigured relations between Britain and the South-East Asian colonies.89

National rivalry once again manifested itself in relation to different religious beliefs. The controversy about the elephant’s pink-grey appearance was compounded by questions in newspaper stories about the monks’ authenticity. The slippage around the word ‘white’ may also have indicated the difficulty of conceiving of an elephant (or any animal, for that matter) as god-like within a Christian framework with notions of purity. Rituals of reverence towards animals may further have been unacceptable to those holding traditional ideas of religious practices.

Opportunistically, Barnum and his press agents ran a poetry contest with a $500 prize about the arrival of Taloung in the USA – as he had when the celebrity soprano Jenny Lind had arrived 30 years earlier. The poem ‘The sacred white elephant – Toung Taloung’, by Joaquin Miller, was one of three to win the prize, encapsulating narratives about Taloung that assumed that the West had conquered the East. Miller explains that spectators perceived the elephant as embodying the East and foreign ways, and that they identified the material achievements of the West as better than the tyranny and mysticism evident in elephant homelands.

The poem depicted the arrival of the white elephant as signifying cultural conquest and confirmation that the West was superior to foreign countries, characterised by tyrannical repression. Public reactions to the Taloung competition poems included a number of witty satirical send-ups.91

Despite this competition and other masterful pre-publicity stunts by Barnum, his animal exhibit did not lead to expected box office returns. Barnum obtained testimonials to confirm that Taloung was a sacred elephant, including by one knowledgeable Captain Richelieu who wrote that the Siamese divided elephants into categories.92 Barnum admitted that American audiences might find Taloung disappointing, as if part of a dream or myth, although this recognition was potentially also part of a publicity ploy. Despite the publicity, Taloung did not become an exhibit to rival Jumbo, and once crowd numbers dwindled, Taloung was retired to a barn in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Instead it was Adam Forepaugh’s fake white elephant, called the ‘Light of Asia’, who proved highly effective in drawing large crowds. The year 1884 became known as the ‘White Elephant Year’ because of the rivalry between the two elephant attractions. Forepaugh advertised that the Prince of Siam had visited Forepaugh’s ‘white elephant’, although the prince and his entourage left quickly, possibly shocked by the sight of the whiteness.93 It was known to some behind the scenes that Forepaugh’s white elephant was created with white paint. In the circus ring tent, the elephant appeared on a stage and a performer in a black suit, called a ‘professor’, proclaimed that this was a genuine sacred elephant. Apparently the painted elephant would recognise the performer (possibly the keeper), forcing the professor to evade the friendly overtures to avoid getting paint on his dark suit.

Coup gives an account of Forepaugh’s white elephant that suggests a more harmful and permanent substance may have been applied to the elephant’s skin to achieve undeniable whiteness. The elephant was covered with a black velvet cloth and, as Coup writes, ‘the trunk had been manipulated in such a way that visitors could touch it, and as no colouring matter came off on their hands I presume that part of body had in some way been “sized” or enameled [sic]’.94 Such faked whiteness would have almost certainly been injurious to the animal.

The ‘show warfare’ between Barnum and Forepaugh had supposedly ended by mutual agreement in 1882.95 But as the Taloung competition indicates, Barnum may have been vindicated in his continuing distrust of Forepaugh’s agreement. Accordingly, Barnum created a third exhibition with an elephant called Tip who had whitened skin and marched in a street parade with Barnum and a banner proclaiming ‘The White Fraud’. Barnum also wrote to the newspapers that Forepaugh’s white elephant was an ordinary elephant who had been painted in Liverpool and shipped to the USA.96

Eventually, in 1890, the combined Forepaugh and Barnum elephant troupe would contain 60 elephants, and, in 1903, they became part of circuses under Ringling Brothers management, who claimed to be exhibiting half the trained elephants in the USA.97 Barnum’s Taloung tragically died in a fire in Bridgeport in 1887. Forepaugh’s hoax white elephant, however, probably survived into old age performing as a boxing elephant.98 Show hype for white elephants persisted well into the 20th century.99

Manipulative show practices did not improve the reputation of menageries, and competitive businesses generated an environment of risk in which questionable dealings were commonplace. Public responses to menagerie animals ranged from affection to abuse, both responses ignoring the plight of countless animals kept in captivity for entertainment. The elevation of a few individual animals to celebrity status could not compensate for the plight of many. While public victimisation of animals belongs within a continuum of human bad behaviour towards other humans in and around menageries, the exposure of an aggressive impulse to animals in vulnerable circumstances also sets it apart. There is no doubt that a few spectators went hunting for opportunities to taunt helpless animals in the menagerie.