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The Greatest Show on Earth James Attlee

The final performances by live elephants in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus took place in Providence, Rhode Island and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on 1 May 2016.1 The elephants processed into the spot-lit ring ridden by exotically dressed women, accompanied by the cacophonous cheers of the crowd and the amplified voice of the ringmaster, to perform a repertoire of tricks that had changed little over the 145 years they had been a feature of the Ringling show. It has never been the elephant’s dexterity as a performer that has made it an attraction on such occasions; instead, it seems the mere presence of such a huge and imposing animal so far from its natural habitat is sufficient to elicit a response from its audience. The combination of awe tinged with fear they provoke is not so far from the definition by the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke of the ‘sublime’, which he believed the strongest of all emotions, evoked by Romantic poets and painters through their depictions of wild and rugged landscapes and moonlit seas. In the second half of the 19th century, touring shows and menageries provided not dissimilar excitement for a popular audience; close enough to wild animals to smell them, almost to feel their breath, they were kept safe only by the bars of a cage or the consummate skills of circus professionals. The law of all such spectacles is one of diminishing returns; disappointment stalks closest behind those who make the most extravagant claims. Nevertheless, a circus like Ringling Brothers filled seats year after year for almost 150 years. How did they do it? The clue lies in the decorative headwear the elephants wore for their final performance; in the centre of their foreheads, on a blue 6

INTRODUCTION

leather disk, were emblazoned the words that had decorated countless Ringling Brothers posters down the years: THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH. Circus advertising has always dealt in hyperbole, but one thing is certain – however many acrobats, fire-eaters, clowns and knife-throwers it boasts, a circus could only truly be called great when it included the biggest star of them all. The training of elephants began around 4,000 years ago in the Indus valley. While some were used as beasts of burden, mighty tree-draggers and earthmovers, others spent their lives as richly decorated participants in religious festivals and royal processions, objects of veneration associated with kingship and the god Ganesh. Still others were conscripted into the armies of the Dravidian and Mughal rulers, unleashed to terrify and crush the enemies of empire. This ambivalent status followed elephants that were captured, crated and shipped to lands far from their native habitat. As if to counter the emotions provoked by their sheer size they were put to work giving rides to children in public parks and zoological gardens, perhaps to demonstrate that the least among humans was superior to the greatest nature could offer. Pliny the Elder assures his readers in Natural History, published in the first century AD, that the elephant ‘is pleased by affection and by marks of honour’, suggesting that, if well treated, it will aspire to satisfy its trainer’s demands. Sometimes that emotional connection goes further. ‘An elephant once fell in love with a girl who sold garlands in Egypt,’ he writes, ‘and lest anyone think the elephant had chosen a common sort – this woman was also greatly admired by the famous scholar

Aristophanes. Another elephant is said to have fallen in love with a young man from Syracuse named Menander who served in Ptolemy’s army; whenever he was prevented from seeing his beloved, the elephant showed how much he missed him by refusing to eat.’ Just such a bond existed between Jumbo, the African elephant who arrived at London Zoo in 1865 and became known as the largest elephant in the world, and his trainer – that is, if we are to believe the account in Jumbo’s Biography, by his Keeper and Friend Matthew Scott, published along with Scott’s autobiography in 1885. ‘One of Jumbo’s faults is that when I am out of his sight, or rather when I go away,’ Scott wrote, ‘he knows it, and if I don’t come back at regular times he always makes me aware of it, both day and night. And he is selfish, for if I am an hour or two overdue after the time he is looking for me, he commences to whine and cry, and becomes very naughty, just the same as a child crying after its mother.’ Scott lived in close proximity with Jumbo at London Zoo for over 20 years: he often refers in his book to the elephant as his child, as if he could replace the beast’s natural mother who fell to a hunter’s bullet in his native Sudan. ‘I have nursed [him], the largest, most intelligent and certainly the most powerful living animal in creation,’ he writes. ‘I have been more than a father to him for I have bestowed the affections of a mother. We are close companions and if he lives until my death I verily believe it will break his heart.’ Such complicated relationships – between adult and child, jailer and captive, force and gentleness – are captured in the first photograph in the book. Hand Feeding Elephant Trunk was taken by Garry Winogrand at Central Park Zoo in 1963, part of a series taken at the same location that he published in book form as The Animals. In the photograph, elephant and human reach out towards each other, but we cannot see their bodies, only a hand releasing peanuts and a questing,

interrogative trunk extended over the wall that divides the two worlds, animal and human, as well as the space of the photograph. If we allow ourselves for a moment to see the trunk in the photograph as a kind of animated question mark, what is it asking? As the two species confront each other, questions arise concerning the equitable nature of the bargain being struck: freedom in exchange for a handful of peanuts, the kind of deal on which empires are built. As John Berger has written: ‘In the 19th century, public zoos were an endorsement of modern colonial power. The capturing of the animals was a symbolic representation of the conquest of all distant and exotic lands.’ 2 In Winogrand’s photograph, man and elephant are each represented by the part of the body through which they interact with the world. An elephant’s trunk is controlled by four major external muscles and up to 150,000 internal muscles, known as fascicles – by comparison, there are around 639 in the entire human body – and is said to contain the most sensitive tissue ever studied. It can be used to pick up an object as small as a coin or as large as a tree; detect smells at a distance of several miles; act as a chemical receptor; produce a wide range of sounds; siphon up water or dust; and signal moods from tenderness to aggression. Pliny, with reason, called the trunk a hand, in which case what we are looking at is two hands reaching out to each other; yet it is the human hand that has emerged as victor in the evolutionary struggle to dominate the planet. Endlessly versatile, it is as likely to curl its fingers around the trigger of a hunter’s rifle or pick up a pen and sign away swathes of territory, along with the lives of its human and animal inhabitants, as it is to express tenderness or dispense peanuts. Winogrand’s photographs do not sentimentalise or anthropomorphise zoo animals: the bars, walls and cages that contain them are as much a subject as they and their human observers are. The 7

The Greatest Show on Earth James Attlee

INTRODUCTION

dramatic, cropped composition of Hand Feeding Elephant Trunk captures an inter-species encounter played out in gestures, leaving us with troubling questions about the relationship, spanning thousands of years, that it portrays. Jumbo had reason to be grateful to Scott, if not so much to the species from which he came. The elephant had been captured as a youngster in Sudan after his mother was shot, and then sold to an Italian adventurer named Lorenzo Casanova who shipped him along with a collection of other animals via Suez to Trieste. From there, he travelled on to Germany, finally arriving in Paris where he was sold to the Ménagerie at the Jardin des Plantes. The elephant was only four foot high – the height of an eight-year-old child – but there was great excitement that, as it was an African elephant, the first to join a zoo in Europe, he would subsequently grow very large. Scott was dispatched from London to inspect him. ‘A more deplorable… and rotten creature never walked God’s earth,’ he wrote. ‘The poor thing was full of disease, which had worked its way through the animal’s hide and had almost eaten out its eyes. The hoofs of the feet and the tail were literally rotten and the whole hide was… covered with sores.’ This was the undersized animal he nursed back to health at London Zoo, living on site and attending him around the clock, oiling his skin until he could peel away its ‘leprous’ coating, nurturing him to become one of the most celebrated captive animals of all time. Apart from carrying children around the zoological gardens in London Jumbo performed no tricks: his drawing power lay entirely in his ever-increasing size and magnificence. This is what gained him such extraordinary celebrity status during his own lifetime, which reached such an extent that when he was bought by P.T. Barnum, of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus for the princely sum of $10,000 and preparations were made to ship him to the United 8

States, there was a public outcry. Questions were asked in Parliament and a national movement arose, supported by the Queen, to raise a subscription to buy him back. Jumbo’s companion at the zoo, a female elephant named Alice, often referred to as Jumbo’s ‘wife’ by the press, proved just as reluctant to see him go. As Barnum recalled in his autobiography, she ‘was so sorrowfully excited when my agent attempted to remove Jumbo… that her groans and trumpetings frightened the wild beasts in the great “Zoo” into such howlings and roarings as were heard a mile away.’ 3 As for the subject of her affection, when he was first led out of the Zoological Gardens onto an unfamiliar street he trumpeted with alarm and turned to re-enter, but the gate had been closed against him. In protest, he simply lay down. Barnum’s agent in London sent an urgent cable to New York: ‘Jumbo has laid down in street and won’t get up. What shall we do’? To which the great man cabled in reply: ‘Let him lie there for a week if he wants to. It is the best advertisement in the world.’ The elephants in those final Ringling performances in 2016 had travelled 36,000 miles by train over the previous two and a half years, giving 900 shows in more than 80 cities, retracing routes first established in the 19th century. Their lives, along with those of the many elephants photographed in this book, were all affected by Jumbo: by the journeys he had made before them across North America; the central role elephants still play in zoos across the world; and most importantly, by the impact he had on the human imagination. 1 After years of protests by PETA, along with other animal activists and concerned members of the public, the circus closed for good the following year. 2 John Berger, Why Look at Animals?, London: Penguin (2009), p. 16. 3 All quotations from Barnum taken from Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself, Including his Golden Rules of Money-Making, Buffalo: The Courier Company (1888).

Jumbo, claimed during his lifetime to be the largest elephant in the world, with his keeper Matthew Scott. London, UK, 11 June 1882. 9

An elephant from the Ringling Brothers Circus disembarks from a train carriage on the Bronx railway. The circus performed at Madison Square Garden for 40 days, presenting itself as ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’. New York City, USA, 1 April 1963. pp. 12–13: Circus elephants parade into Manhattan. New York City, USA, date unknown. 11

Lizzie the elephant working for Thomas Ward in Sheffield during World War I. Sheffield, Yorkshire, UK, c. 1915. 88

Downie Bros Circus was the first to rely on motorised transport, allowing it to reach smaller communities inaccessible to circuses solely relying on the railways. Downie Bros was owned by Andrew Downie McPhee. His show was transported on 38 trucks, five trailers, three tractors, and three advance trucks. All the baggage trucks were painted red with gold and silver trim. Location and date unknown. 89

Lizzie the elephant working for Thomas Ward in Sheffield during World War I. Sheffield, Yorkshire, UK, c. 1915. 88

Elephants pulling circus wagons. Location unknown, USA, 1935. pp. 96â€“97: Putting up the tent poles: as in days gone by, an elephant helps set up the big top for Circus Vargas. Denver, USA, 9 September 1978. 94

Man holding a child washing an elephant. Location and date unknown.

Humorist and vaudeville performer Cal Stewart (right) with an elephant. Location unknown, c. early 1900s. 149

Man holding a child washing an elephant. Location and date unknown.

Humorist and vaudeville performer Cal Stewart (right) with an elephant. Location unknown, c. early 1900s. 149

Elephants Remade The human urge to master the largest land animal on Earth by creating its image – a compulsion that has persisted down the millennia from the cave art of our ancestors to the soft toys given to children today – was expressed in the 20th century in graphic form in the animated film Dumbo, released by the Disney studio in 1941. Dumbo is indelibly stamped with the political sensibilities of its time. One notorious scene features a group of black crows that sing and impart their thoughts in a stereotypical caricature of African American speech; their leader is even called Jim and is voiced, in the vocal equivalent of blackface, by white actor Cliff Edwards. However, the film is surprisingly accurate about aspects of circus life in North America, many of them captured in the images in this book. In the film, circus animals travel from place to place by train and take part in parades into town led by a man riding a horse, who lifts his hat to the crowds that assemble. When a train arrives at a railway yard, it is the elephants who disembark under their own steam (like the one leaving the train at the Bronx yard on pp. 10–11), along with the circus workers, or roustabouts. After they have pushed other animals in cages off the train with their foreheads, the elephants join the roustabouts erecting the circus tent (a picture on pp. 96–97 from The Denver Post shows an elephant engaged in just such work for Circus Vargas in 1978). While he and his mother never escape the circus, Dumbo does resolve the paradox highlighted by performing elephants’ tricks: he overcomes his corporeal mass, achieving weightlessness as he takes to the air in flight. The elephants created by IrishAmerican inventor James V. Lafferty in the late 19th century take an opposite direction to Dumbo – rather than being remodelled on a cute, domestic scale, his three elephant-shaped 152

buildings are much larger and weightier than their real-life models (he had obtained the patent for buildings fashioned in the shape of animals in 1882). All three were modelled on Jumbo in an attempt to cash in on his popularity. Only one, originally called Elephant Bazaar and known today as Lucy the Elephant, survives in Margate, New Jersey (p. 163). Lucy was built of wood and tin sheeting in 1881 with the aim of boosting real estate sales: prospective buyers were taken up to the beast’s howdah, 65 feet above the ground, for panoramic views of the area. The building changed hands several times, but by the 1960s it had fallen into disrepair; in 1970 it was moved to a nearby lot and restored by local enthusiasts. The largest of Lafferty’s animalthemed buildings was the Elephantine Colossus constructed in Coney Island in 1885, 18 years before Luna Park opened its gates. A scaled-up version of Lucy, standing 122 feet high, it had seven floors of rooms, including a cigar store in one leg, and during its brief life operated variously as a concert hall, amusement park and brothel. It burnt down in 1896. Jumbo died on 15 September 1885 after being struck by a freight train while crossing a railway line in Ontario, Canada, bringing his perpetual tour of North America to an end. The life-span of circus animals is always uncertain and the ever-resourceful P.T. Barnum had made preparation for just such an event. In October 1883, he contacted Henry Augustus Ward, one of the leading taxidermists and creators of natural history displays for museums in the USA, in order to protect his investment. ‘I shall have my managers understand that should we lose Jumbo (which Heaven forbid!) you must be telegraphed to immediately, and hope you will lose no time in saving his skin and skeleton,’ he wrote.1 Jumbo was far too

valuable an investment for his career to be cut short by an inconvenience like death. Once Ward’s operatives arrived in Ontario and Jumbo’s resurrection was under way, Barnum’s mind turned to the female elephant Alice, left behind in London. As always, he was keeping an eye on the press. ‘When Jumbo was killed, the English newspapers called Alice “Jumbo’s widow” and several of the illustrated newspapers printed pictures of her wearing her “widow’s cap”’, he noted in his autobiography. To capitalise on such public interest he decided to reunite the animals he had divided. ‘Alice joined the Greatest Show on Earth in the early days of her widowhood,’ he wrote, ‘and was exhibited side by side with the skeleton and stuffed hide of Jumbo. This pathetic juxtaposition did not apparently affect her spirits. The dead Jumbo and the living Alice were among the most interesting features of the show season of 1886.’ The show, with its stars both living and dead, travelled that year from Madison Square Garden through 20 states; Jumbo’s remains even made a return visit to London as part of a touring show in 1889. As his drawing power as a travelling attraction declined, his skeleton and hide required permanent homes; after a tussle with the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History in New York eventually claimed Jumbo’s skeleton. His stuffed hide was given to Tufts University in Massachusetts and became a firm favourite with the students who, until a fire in the university building in 1975 reduced Jumbo to ashes, would place a coin in his trunk to obtain good luck in their examinations. The final photograph in the book (pp. 172–173) is of a smaller, arguably less significant man-made animal, yet it sums up some of the complex relationships pachyderm performers have had with human beings over the centuries. The motorised elephant is being filled from a pump with a hose slotted into its abdomen by a grinning attendant dressed in overalls. Its trunk has been positioned reaching out to the

pump as if, given the opportunity, it would suck up the petrol itself and spray it back over its head as an elephant does at a waterhole. Doing so would douse the young woman sitting on the miniature wooden howdah on its back who is busying herself with a different kind of refreshment, raising a filled glass of champagne in one hand and holding the bottle triumphantly out to the camera with the other. In its working life, the mechanical elephant moves between the two worlds the pump attendant and the young woman represent, of physical labour and aspirational glamour, as performing elephants always have. The photograph was taken in 1972 in Ramsgate, then a somewhat rundown seaside town on the Kent coast in England. The woman is the epitome of early ’70s chic: dressed in a bikini, she is heavily made-up around the eyes, her hair piled in a bouffant on her head. She and the elephant are both animated advertisements – a role that both the women and the elephants in these photographs are often required to fill. The original name painted on the side of the howdah on the elephant’s back has been partially covered by a new, handwritten one, reading NERO’S. For a moment the viewer might wonder whether this unlikely creature was among several the Roman emperor is said to have owned, including one, according to legend, that could walk up and down a tightrope – but it seems there is another explanation. Nero’s was the name of a long-vanished Ramsgate nightclub that occupied the end of the seafront, known in its day for the disco balls that hung glittering from its ceiling, the free drinks vouchers dispensed to the queue, its low entry prices and the fights that broke out around closing time. A place in other words, like many others captured in these pages, much in need of the exoticism and razzmatazz that only an elephant could provide. 1 Barnum to Henry A. Ward, 9 October 1883, Ward Papers, University of Rochester, New York.

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Elephant balloon at Macy’s Christmas Parade, Amsterdam Avenue, between West 108th and 109th Streets. New York City, USA, date unknown. 156

Elephant balloon by Tony Sarg, Macy’s Christmas Parade. New York City, USA, 1927.

Elephant balloon at Macy’s Christmas Parade, Amsterdam Avenue, between West 108th and 109th Streets. New York City, USA, date unknown. 156

Elephant balloon by Tony Sarg, Macy’s Christmas Parade. New York City, USA, 1927.

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Van Mierlo, Nijmegen, The Netherlands ISBN 978 94 6388 715 9 D/2020/11922/18 NUR 653 © Hannibal Books, 2020 Hannibal Books is part of Uitgeverij Kannibaal bv, Veurne, Belgium www.hannibalbooks.be

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PHOTO CREDITS

Alamy Stock Photo (pp. 8, 18–19, 28, 35, 37, 52, 68, 73, 116, 131, 136, 170–171) AP Images (pp. 10–11, 16–17) Belga Image (pp. 32, 38–39) Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection (pp. 24, 50, 62, 71, 94–95, 116) Bridgeman Images (pp. 158–159) Bridgeman Images / SZ Photo (pp. 84, 93) Bridgeman Images / Underwood Archives / UIG (p. 123) Bridgeman Images / Agip (pp. 20–21, 63) Bridgeman Images / Gerald Bloncourt (p. 65) Bridgeman Images / Universal History Archive (p. 86) Chicago History Museum (pp. 78–79) Collectie Huis van Alijn (pp. 40, 48–49) Getty Images (pp. 22–23, 33, 41, 42–43, 54, 64–65, 66, 67, 75, 76, 77, 81, 90–91, 96–97, 103, 105, 106–107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 124–125, 137, 150–151, 169, 175) Library of Congress (pp. 26–27, 44–45, 51, 60, 98, 99, 114, 117, 118–119, 116, 120, 121, 138–139, 143, 146–147, 149, 154, 156, 157, 160–161, 162, 163, 164, 165) Library of Congress © Eadweard Muybridge (cover, p. 59) Nationaal Archief Nederland, Fotocollectie Anefo (pp. 29, 30–31, 47, 72, 126, 128, 141, 168), Nationaal Archief Nederland, Fotocollectie Elsevier (pp. 92, 134) National Archives (p. 89) Patrick A. Burns / The New York Times (pp. 12–13) Reddit (p. 46) Shutterstock (p. 148) South East Archive of Seaside Photography (pp. 172–173) The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (pp. 4–5) Unknown (pp. 25, 53, 58, 85, 87, 88, 122, 155, 166) University of Sheffield Library, National Fairground and Circus Archive (pp. 36, 144–145)