Last time we finished with Mr Pat Collins’ “Giant Nottingham Geese, All Alive and Kicking” but some surprisingly exotic, and indeed, unusual, animals made their appearance at Goose Fair.
Smallest of them all were the performing fleas:
Look at what they could do:
And don’t worry:
“Each flea is Securely Chained”
In 1899, for their last visit to Goose Fair, Bostock & Wombwell produced a special poster, which listed all of their animals.
Their rivals, of course, boasted about their own animals which included “Novelties never owned or dreamt of by any other Menagerist.” There was the “Great Pongo Baboon”, the “Hamadryas, or Sacred Baboon”, the “Leucoryx Antelope or Gemsboc”, a “Brindled Gnu, or Horned Horse”, a “White Silken Sacred Yak”, a “Puma”, “Jaguar”, a “Bison, or Wild Prairie Bull” and the “Monstre Nennock”.
Here we are:
There was also a huge elephant christened “The Mighty Mastodon”. We still have photographs of him apparently pushing and shoving his way through the Goose Fair crowds, apparently unsupervised, making his way back home to his trailer. Don’t worry about safety, though. Only two years before the council were discussing whether it was dangerous to have brown bears in Upper Parliament Street. Talk about re-wilding!
Even more frightening, apparently, was “Madam Jumbo”, an elephant of, well, elephantine proportions. It could actually lift people down from the second floor of the Post Office in Queen Street. Just look at the size of it. Look at the baby elephant in comparison, or the horse:
Amazingly, in King Street, “The Royal Monster Whale” was on exhibition for Goose Fair week, and for the week after that. It cost only threepence, with children half price. A “Royal Monster Whale” must have caused a great many difficulties for everybody, not just when it was delivered on a handcart, but in providing thousands of gallons of seawater in a city more than fifty miles from the sea. However, that may have been the least of their problems. As Monty Python so rightly said:
“Where are we going to get forty-four tons of plankton from every morning?”
An insoluble problem, unless, of course, “The Royal Monster Whale” was stuffed.
At least one lion at Goose Fair was personally supplied by the great Cecil Rhodes, the diamond billionaire who established the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford University, the oldest graduate scholarships in the world. Every year, 102 full postgraduate scholarships are granted to students across the world. Here’s his lion, serving a life sentence by the look of it:
Sedgwick’s Menagerie had some baby lions, “Performing Elephants”, “Alphonso’s Group of Educated Lions”, “Lorenzo’s Performing and Talking Bears”, “Lorenzo’s Performing Wolves” and then you could see “Lorenzo performing with Nero and Brutus, the largest full-grown untameable African Forest Bred Lions”. Another threepence well spent, children half price.
One of Sedgewick’s chief attractions was “Blonko Bill”:
The first Goose Fair of the new twentieth century starred “the Mafeking Monkey”. During the Siege he had rung a bell every time the Boer artillery shelled the town:
I still don’t see what’s so smart about him, though. Every time the town is shelled, he rings a bell to tell people that they’re being shelled. How is that helpful?
Alongside “the Mafeking Monkey” were “Professor Burnett’s Fencing Booth and Military Tournament”, “Walls Electric Boer Warograph” and “Twigdon’s Electric Palace.” There was also a hairless or “rubber-skinned” mare from the Transvaal, a horse with a mane and tail 21 feet long, a giant horse over 20 hands high and a miniature horse and mule both only 24 inches high. In addition, there was the “smartest boxing kangaroo” in the world and, sadly, allocated to the animal section,”the giant negro Aaron Moore who is 8 feet in height.” In actual fact, Aaron is known to have been more like 7 feet 3 inches. He was from North Carolina, and, from the photographs I have seen, seems to have worn nearly all the time, a 9 inch high pillar box hat:
John Knifton 
Excellent series of posts John, I have enjoyed them. From the moment I moved to Derbyshire I have always dreaded Goose Fair and then Il’son fair shortly afterwards.
Yes, and the situation hasn’t really changed very much. Last year, Goose Fair was the usual four days, but this year, an extra week has been added to it.
Most of us have countered by organising a large scale Rain Dance!!
How our attitudes have changed
And hopefully, most of those attitudes have changed for the better.
The one I felt sorry for was poor “giant negro Aaron Moore”, who was allocated to the category of animals.
Ideas and attitudes were very different back then, but it doesdn’t mean to say that they were particularly correct!
Exactly
I think fairs will always have an attraction for people. There will always be changes. I don’t think people of these times will be interested in what was fascinating earlier.
Well, I certainly hope that I have succeeded in interesting one or two of the people who have read my blog posts about Goose Fair. Certainly over the years, the people of Nottingham have all been most enthusiastic about this annual celebration of their lives and activities in the area.
Excellent post John. So much went on during these fairs but thanks goodness we don’t have such an approach these days. Treating ‘unusual’ animals and indeed people, as freaks, was rather tasteless and cruel. But I suppose, like everything, for the time it was acceptable and ‘normal’ behaviour.
I’m glad you enjoyed it! I console myself with the thought that sometimes the people who “exploited” the freaks actually treated them the best of anybody in their lives, whereas the ones we might have thought were kind, were actually not.
In the real life of “The Elephant Man”, the circus owner was the kindest person he ever met, but the surgeon, Treves, was of questionable morality,
When the Elephant Man died, therefore, he had been looked after really well by the circus owner. The surgeon though, rushed round, gave the circus owner a large sum of money and bought the corpse. He then had it boiled down and set up as a scientific specimen at an exhibition he put on for his colleagues in the hospitals of London.
Nothing like that though, happened to Aaron Moore, as far as I know………
What a truly horrible man the surgeon was. Let’s hope someone had him boiled down and stuck in a jar for all to see. What terrible way to treat a human being regardless of whether he was dead or not.
Wow, the Goose Fair sure had it all! I’m trying to imagine someone training fleas: Crazy! Madam Jumbo would’ve been a must-see for me, though from a safe distance 🙂
I still have no idea how a flea circus works, I’m afraid.
I’m with you, though, for Madam Jumbo, who looks to be a “must-see” at the Goose Fair.
Elephants, of course, are actually very gentle and careful with people or animals smaller than thenselves.
I know that they mourn their dead, and I recently saw a video where the elephants in a game park had crossed the road and the last elephsant thanked the waiting traffic……
How amazing that the last elephant paused to thank the waiting traffic!