Yes, there really was such a place - the Wigan Casino. The band actually consisted of a pianist and a guitarist, besides the dummer. Yes, he looks bored. Asked once why he didn’t even change his deadpan expression when there was a stripper on stage, he uttered the immortal words: “When you’ve seen two, you’ve seen ‘em all.”
This little black Himalayan bear, whose cage was next next to our caravan in Guernsey, belonged to the circus owners. He was a very charming little fellow, just a baby really, and he enjoyed our scraps and left overs.
But he really wasn’t in the best place to grow up - at the prospect of moving him into a larger cage, the owners decided to sell him instead. he became a popular attraction at Gerald Durrell’s Jersey Zoo, which was just opened in 1959, the year we were in the Channel Isles.
The traveller’s creed is a simple one - if you can’t afford to buy something, do without, or make it yourself. The latter course was the one most often taken.
These swingboats were built by my father when he came back from WWII and took his new bride to Ireland for the first time. They proved, in his words, a `handy earner’ when circus work was hard to get. I was about six months old in this picture, which was originally black and white, but which I colorised to give more of an impression of the work that went into those swinging boats. Each pole in the support, and each boat, was hand carved and painted. This was what the public expected back then, not something mass produced in a factory, but showing all the traveller’s skill and art.
Taken in 1949, this picture shows Little Beaver and Marie, my parents, and me at a fairground near Dublin. I am riding my new prize possession, a three wheeler bike. In the background you can see the wooden swinging boats my dad built, and his prize possession, a Packard tourer painted red and yelow (circus colours).
When it became necessary for me to create my own circus act, I ran into a difficulty unusual among circus children. I was scared of heights. Added to this the fact that I was not very talented at the normal things, like tight rop walking and juggling, that left me with few choices as a performer.
But luckily, in Spain, I ran into a retired roller balancer who had taken up clowning after an accident. He taught me his old act, and gave me his original props, a roller and a balance board, and some hoops, which you can see in the picture above. Thanks to this kind man, I quickly learned an act that brought me a lot of work, een if I wasn’t the most daring or inspired roller balancer of all time.
I had to put in many hours of practice, in shady spots about the bullrings where the circus was camped.
Behind this imposing edifice in Brixton in the UK, lurked one of the most frequented traveller sites in London. An abandoned bombsite, a piece of rough open ground nestling between the surrounding buildings, for many years, travellers accessed the bustling shops and markets of Brixton through the ground floor of the Bon Marche Department store.
Through the 50s, travellers came and went, until one day the council decided to fence it off. We never knew why, but it was generaly believed that a commercial (non traveller truck) left there when the site was empty, was vandalised, causing injury to a local child.
have an idea how we can make a bit o’cash,” my grandmother said.
Kavanagh ears pricked up like alert puppies. It had been a tough season. The Kavanagh Touring Theatre and Musical Comedy Show had barely been making enough to pay for the trip to the next town.
So “the bhoys”, as my grandmother affectionately called her four strapping sons, who were the mainstay performers of the show, were eager to hear any suggestions.
“We need to sell somethin’ in the interval, like them moving pictures do,” grandmother said. “We could sell ice cream.”
The expectant looks turned blank. If moving pictures were a new thing to rural Ireland in the postwar days, so was ice cream. I climbed down off my father’s knee (he was the oldest of the four brothers) and wriggled closer to my grandmother. In all my few years of life, I had never tasted ice cream, but I had seen other, richer kids eating it and it looked delicious. “How are we going to make ice cream?” one of my uncles objected. “You need a great factory for that.”
“Leave it to me,” my grandmother said. “You go to Dublin and get me some of those ice cream cornet things.”
So my uncle took the small amount of money my grandmother gave and set off up the road to Dublin. It wasn’t very far. (In Ireland, nowhere was very far unless you went “across the water”).
Now in the backblocks of Glockamorra in the post-WWII years, there were shortages of just about everything…except potatoes.
My grandmother’s fertile mind had already figured out a way to make ice cream. Mashed potatoes were fluffy, white and if you left them long enough, cold.
Long into the night, grandmother had the family scrubbing, peeling, boiling, straining and mashing potatoes. “It’s like being back in the army,” my father grumbled.
But she soon had mounds of fluffy white spud, to which she added a few drops of vanilla and some sugar. It really did look like ice cream. I clamoured for a taste, but grandmother shook her head.
“If we make enough money out of this, I’ll buy you a real ice cream,” she said.
My uncle got back from Dublin with a dusty carton of ice cream cornets.
“I searched the whole town and this is all I could find,” he said. “Your man said they were a bit stale but he let me have them cheap.”
“Never mind,” grandmother said, unpacking the cone-shaped biscuits. “They’ll do.”
“ice cream” was piled into metal buckets and taken to a nearby stream. With the fresh spring water chilling the buckets, the ice cream would be nicely chilled by showtime. The are where the tent was pitched was outside the town, and had been quiet most of the day. But by showtime a sizeable crowd had gathered, mostly farmers with their wives and children.
My parents, and my uncles, changed into their stage costumes and the show started. I sat in my usual spot in the audience. My job was to be a “gee” for the audience participation segment of the show, running up on stage to encourage others if the local children were too shy to move. But this was a good crowd and didn’t need any encouragement to enjoy themselves.
I watched my grandmother instead. She had set up a table near the stage, and was busy pinning a sign to it that said “Ice Cream Cornets Twoppence”.
In the interval she stood proubly at her stall dishing out the scoops of “ice cream”, which sold like hot cakes. By the time the interval was over, the buckets, and the carton of cornets, was empty. My grandmother was beaming, because her apron was full of pennies.
There was not even enough left in the buckets for me to have a lick. I wandered sadly out of the tent and hoped grandmother would not forget her promise now she had all those pennies to spend.
Next morning, one of my uncles came knocking on the caravan door.
“Come and look at this,” he said to my father. We followed him out to the tent.
Under every seat was a small, neat mound of potato ice cream. ”Will ye look at that,” my uncle said, grinning. “That stuff tasted so bad they preferred to eat the stale cornet by itself. We’d better pack up and leave, man, before they come looking for their pennies!”
I couldn’t resist…I had to dip my small finger into a mound of the discarded “ice cream” to taste it.”
It tasted just like cold mashed potato with vanilla and sugar.
In Spain, circuses have an advantage when it comes to hit and run one day stands without the palaver of building up the tent every day.
Almost every town, no matter how small, has a bullring, the local Plaza de Toros.
(In places like Australia, the town is more likely to have a pub, but that’s another story…)
So one of the best circus venues is already in place, with a ring, seating and plenty of parking for the wagons.
Of course you might have to work around the bloodstains from the last bullfights, but usually the attendants are thoughtful enough to clean it up for you…
Except at Malaga, where they proudly point out the spot where the famed Manolete bled to death, and I suspect, replenish it with red dye every year.
This is also the bullring where a blood transfusion unit was first introduced, following Manolete’s demise. You can see how this rough and ready facility looked in the 60s in the picture, right].
It is quite wonderful to work under the stars in a bullring, all reservations about bloodstains aside.
[bullringshow0001.JPG]
For aerial acts it is one of the most spectacular settings imaginable.
Some of the bullrings are huge, but the Plaza de Toros de Monumental in Barcelona makes them all look tiny.
[tent in bullring0001.JPG]
It was so big that the owners of Circo Americano were able to put up a six pole tent in the ring, which was a blessing because there was no shade otherwise from the hot sun.
Because they have to compete with the sought after bullfight posters that collectors prize, the Spanish circus posters display incredible artwork.
The poster that heads this article is the one that featured my father, marksman Little Beaver, the year we toured there.
So if you would ever ask me where the most magical circus setting is, I would say in Spain, where the magic of the circus never dies.
What can the Circus teach you about life?
Not much, some outsiders may think. It looks like a fantasy world, where people get paid to travel about and have fun. Hardly the stuff life’s hard lessons are made of.
But those in the circus know better. The circus is a world in itself, a multicultural world where people of different cultures, religions and backgrounds learn to get along because they have a common goal.
You will rarely find overt expressions of prejudice on a circus, and if it does surface, it is quickly dealt with.
Circus people, after all, know they are different from the rest of the community. Many have suffered prejudice because they are travellers and will not stand for prejudice and bigotry within the circus world.
So the first thing Circus teaches you is an easy tolerance for the community’s diversity. This is a tight, closed community, with little opportunity to put down roots, so for the season at least, these people are your neighbors and work mates. You better get along.
There is no more fascinating picture of cultural diversity than a circus camp. A tumbling troupe will be preparing to feast on curry, while the Italian jugglers in the next wagon are dishing up the pasta.
The kids flit between them both, sampling everything, and stopping to grab a chunk of the home made black bread the aerialists have just received from Germany.
A polyglot of languages fills the air. How do all these people communicate? By picking up words and phrases in each other’s language (usually the cuss words first!) and using the time honored method of sign language.
It can look funny, but it is wonderful too.
Humor is universal, so there is a lot of laughter on the circus. This is not to say no one ever loses their temper, or has a beef about something, but we can’t always understand what people are angry about. On the other hand, we always laugh at the same things.
The clowns come from all over the globe, but once in the ring, their blend of pantomime and slapstick humor makes audiences of any language see the fun.
And the breathtaking skill of the artists needs no translation.
I’ve never known a circus performer who seriously studied languages. I’m sure there are some, but most of us learned to get along in foreign countries by listening, picking up the language as we went along.
When you have to live in a country and do your daily shopping, you soon learn the words for milk, meat, potatoes and so on.
a poor language scholar like me learned enough to get by and hold a fairly legible conversation.
The next important lesson you learn from growing up in the circus is to take life in your stride. This isn’t the most predictable lifestyle you could choose.
Anything can happen, and usually does. What do you do when the tent blows down, for example?
You clear away the torn canvas and perform in the open air. If only all the problems life throws at you were solved that easily.
Circus folk are very resilient, and have to think on their feet. We never knew we were lateral thinkers until people started talking about it!
Life with the circus does breed a special kind of toughness. Circus folk perform with broken bones and broken hearts, but never with broken spirits.
And that perhaps is the most important thing you learn on a circus.
It is all about Spirit.
21 is a major event in anyone’s life, but I remember my 21st for a very special reason.
We were travelling the South of England with a small Circus owned by Charlie Waite and his family.
For a small dog and pony show it was well set up. Charlie had two talented children who performed a number of fine acts and we were touring one of the nicest parts of England.
The show even had a performing goat, something I had not encountered before. The only trouble was the the goat liked to eat everything within range. This included clothes on the washing line, and one one memorable occassion, the wiring under one of the trucks.
The route took us through Kent to delightful seaport towns like Ryde. But it was a small show, requiring all hands on deck for work and so we were very busy, day after day.
The day of my birthday I thought everyone had forgotten. No one said anything to me and as it was show day as usual, we had two shows, a matinee and a night show.
The weather was very fine for an English summer. In the few times we had to real we would all lie around on the grass and swap yarns. It was certainly one of the friendliest and happiest shows I have ever known.
Most days we did a matinee and a night show, on a string of one night stands, which meant a very intensive day of building up, showing and pulling down before moving onto the next place. Fortunately the distances between towns and villages was very short.
I did my act in the night show as usual, then, as I was taking my bow, Charlie Waite came into the ring with the mike and announced to the audience that Jojo (me) had turned 21 today and the whole audience was invited to help celebrate!
You should have heard the cheer that went up…I never got such good applause in my life!
The circus crew and performers brought on a birthday cake and they had me blow out the candles in the ring. The audience came pouring into the ring to congratulate me.
There was a huge cheer when my father handed me the key to the caravan tied with a big pink bow. I had been coming and going as I pleased for years, of course, but the audience loved it.
It was great…I had many happy time with the circus but I will never forget the night the audience came to my 21st birthday party.
