Roll up, roll up: the evolution of the circus 10-in-1 show

Roll up, roll up. Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for stepping up to the talks room or the online podcast and thank you for choosing this talk.

Consider it, if you will, your ticket to the greatest collection of physical wonders, magnificent marvels, peerless prodigies, peculiar performers the world has ever seen and not to mention perhaps a few exaggerations and a lot of adjectives.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the 10-in-1 show.

So, what is a 10-in-1 show? It’s a circus side show where you would get ten acts performing together under one roof. Usually before the main three ring circus event.

It contained all manner of unusual acts. You might know it better as a ‘freak show’ although that term tends to have fallen out of popular use. No matter what you call it however, it always had a fascination with the curious.

I’m going to take you through the ten acts of my 10-in-1 show, I hope you like them.

Back in the beginning, 1100 is the first [date] of what is generally accepted to be the first case of conjoined twins recorded. The Biddenden maids were better known as Elisa and Mary Chulkhurst. They were born into a fairly affluent family and they were joined at the hips and at the shoulders, which is quite unusual.

They were close friends, which I think you’d kind of have to be if you were attached at the shoulders and the hips, but they sometimes did disagree and had frequent quarrels and often came to blows. I would have paid to see that I think, quite happily [laughter].

Mary was suddenly taken ill when they were 34 and she died. And it was suggested at the time, quite a forward looking suggestion, that perhaps a doctor should be fetched to try and separate them so that Elisa could carry on living.

Elisa at the time however said ‘As we came together, we will also go together’. In other words ‘No, when she’s gone it’s not worth me hanging on’.

The reason they’re famous is they left a will, leaving parcels of land around Biddenden to the church wardens of the time. It was left in perpetuity and what happened was that the rent for these parcels of land was then used to provide for the deserving and the poor of the area, which was about 20 guineas a year.And that provided quite a lot. They gave out cakes and food and they still to this day, if you go to Biddenden, give out little cakes with pictures of the conjoined twins on.

So, moving on slightly in time we go to my part of the world now and we have the Scottish brothers, another set of conjoined twins. They’re not all conjoined twins. I promise you. These ones were born in about 1490 from what we can tell from the records. They were joined from the hip down so they had one set of legs but two bodies, sort of one and a half men perhaps, if you will.

They were taken to the court of King James IV of Scotland, who was fascinated by these young men and decided that he should do whatever he could to bring them on.

So they were very carefully brought up and they were educated in the Royal Court. The records tell us that they were very accomplished musicians and they were also proficient linguists. By the time they were 20, one or both of them could speak (and I have this written down because it’s a big list) English, Irish, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch Danish, which isn’t bad for a set of conjoined twins.

Unlike the Biddenden maids however, these two fought like cat and dog, constantly. They often differed in opinion, as you can see from this little quotation about them on here [shows image].

They were also prone to telling other people off because they had disorders in their behaviour and actions, whatever that may mean. They died in 1518, which was a reasonably long time of living for that kind of condition in that time period and it’s recorded that one of them lived considerably longer than the other. I’m not sure quite how accurate that is but that’s the way the story’s told.

The royals liked their strange and unusuals. They had dwarves aplenty, strange and curious beings in their courts. The first recording of dwarves at court probably comes from the bar ballad that starts ‘In Arthur’s court Tom Thumb did live’. You might know it, it’s a nursery rhyme, it has about 20 verses. If you Google it you’ll find a million copies of it.

The first English court dwarf appears to have been John Jarvis. He stood a grand two foot high, so he’d come up to about my knee I think, probably. And he was page to Queen Mary I. Mary’s brother Edward VII had his own dwarf called ‘Zit’ (I don’t think that’s the loveliest name for him).

The first English dwarf of whom there’s anything like a history is Jeffrey Hudson. He was around from 1619 to 1682 and he was the son of a butcher from Oakham. He was given to Queen Henrietta Maria as a dwarf and a plaything baked into a pie crust. He popped out, a bit like one of these cakes you get nowadays.

And he led an interesting life. He was captured by pirates. He was appointed captain of a horse. He fought and won a duel (presumably standing on a step ladder or a large box, I’m not sure), he shot a man in the head. He was sold into slavery and he was arrested and imprisoned as part of ‘The Papish Plot’. So he led a fairly interesting life.

The last court dwarf we know of in England was a chap called Coppernin and he was in the service of Princess Augusta of Wales, the mother of George III.

Some of the most famous dwarves at court though are the ones held by Philip IV of Spain. They were a key sight in most of the royal courts, and in fact it was noted at one time that a dwarf was a necessity for every family. So if you haven’t got one I suggest you nip down to ‘Buy-right’ and get one.

We move forward in time a little bit now, to the wonders of Bartholomew Fair. Bartholomew Fair was a London fair, held in Smithfield from about 1133. It had puppet shows, wrestlers, fighters, dwarves, dancing bears, performing monkeys, caged tigers. All sorts of things could be seen at Bartholomew Fair.

Astrologers cast horoscopes, medicines were hawked. It was your general kind of hustle and bustle [with] lots of supplies of toys, foods [and] everything else.

You can even procure a lady if you so wanted, from the nearby street, called Cock Lane. So you can imagine what went on in Cock Lane.

And the fair went on full tilt through the 18th Century. When Wordsworth visited when he called it a ‘parliament of monsters’ some of the attractions included albinos and Red Indians. You could have ventriloquists, waxworks and a learned pig, which while blindfolded could tell the time and cast accounts, clever pig. You could buy glass teacups, blown for thruppence, and crocodiles. Maybe that’s where they all got into the sewer from.

The loutishness and drunkenness of the fair however eventually proved its undoing and in 1855 it was no more. It had to be stopped.

But it wasn’t the end of the curiosities. Our aforementioned pig kept going. This is Toby [shows image] the sapient pig. He’s perhaps the forerunner of today’s reality TV star. Everybody wanted to go and see Toby the sapient pig. He could count, he could read, he could tell you your fortune, all manner of wonderful things. But he was the latest in a long line of performing pigs. Quite what caused the public to become so enamoured with Toby we’re not sure but there are hundreds of accounts written about Toby.

Unsurprisingly probably his trainer was a magician who’d turned to training performing animals and after Toby was seen in the company of a performing goose. I think the pig might be slightly more effective.

In reality they’d [performing animals] been around from about the 18th Century. They’d appeared in all sorts of venues. The Carlton Club was quite a popular one in Pall Mall, who’d often chose things like this. And exhibition rooms and venues up and down the country would show these animals.

After the pigs, well then came learning dogs, talking horses, all manner, although the talking was a bit of an ambiguity, they just used to stamp their foot on the floor, that was about it.

Although none of them, unlike Toby here, had an autobiography. Toby used to sell his for a penny a time whenever he performed. I think that’s really quite a talented pig.

Once we’d got over the feat of the performing animals then we became a bit more interested in the wider world. Exploration meant that we were going out to foreign lands, bringing back trophies. Quite often these trophies were people, maybe put on display for the enquiring public.

I love this idea of two Chinese ladies and it goes on to tell you about their lovely long fingernails and their beautiful eyes. Chinese ladies were often brought back as well as Circassians who were Turkish women who were seen to be the most beautiful of beautiful women. And they did literally sit in a nice big chair as people filed past them to look and see how wonderful they were.

Other kinds of indigenous people were brought back. As I’ve already mentioned Red Indians were seen at Bartholomew Fair. Eskimos and Aborigines all appeared at one time or another in the streets. It was something which later on was monopolised by people like Barnum.

Barnum often travelled with his sideshow with a Circassian beauty who was nothing like the Circassian beauties who had been brought over originally. She was a local girl who’d been recruited, had lots of beer put into her hair, turned into a big afro. There we go, hey presto – Circassian beauty. But you get the idea.

Possibly though the most famous person that we come to think about when we think about people exhibiting is Joseph Merrick, the elephant man. It is believed he had a form of Proteus Syndrome or something else which I can’t pronounce, Neurofibromatosis type 1, I think it’s called. Now the common belief is that it was an element of both of those things that he suffered from.

He was born in 1862 and he was a fairly normal child up until about the age of three-ish,  reports differ between three and five. When the signature lumps began to appear his father and his mother looked after him for a while and then his mother suddenly died. His stepmother came in. Merrick and his stepmother didn’t really agree and he left home. Unfortunately he had a couple of spells in the Leicester workhouse. He just ended up there because he couldn’t get work. Finally however he left the workhouse and put himself on display.

Before long he was being shown in an empty shop in Mile End. The shop’s still there, it’s a Sari warehouse now if you want to go and see it. Frederick Treves saw him there, the surgeon, and left him with a business card hoping that Merrick would consent to some medical investigation to see what was wrong with him.

He (Merrick) decided at that time that wasn’t going to happen and sideshows were rapidly being outlawed in Britain at that time in 1886. So Merrick went to Belgium and performed over there for a little while. However when he was over there his agent, shall we call him, mistreated him and ran off with all his money [and] left him in Belgium.

Merrick slowly made his way back to Britain and eventually ended up in Liverpool Street in London, had an enormous case of bronchial infection, so was finding it hard to be understood. However the police found Treves’ business card in his hat. Treves was duly summoned and came to Merrick’s rescue and took him to the hospital.

The London Hospital looked after Merrick for most of the rest of his life. He had a couple of phases where he went off to the country to enjoy the air, usually undercover in a little secret covered cart. But he lived basically at the London Hospital until he was 27, when he died.

Moving on a bit more now to the ‘Prince of Humbug’. I’m presuming everybody knows who the ‘Prince of Humbug’ is, but if you don’t it’s this man [shows image], Phineas T. Barnum. Barnum is the man that everybody thinks of when you think of a sideshow or a circus.

He originally however was a storekeeper. He seems to have been a bit of a jack of all trades, Barnum. He had his store, he left his store. He went to work selling books, he stopped selling books. He went to work in real estate, he gave up on that and tried the lottery for a little while. Eventually he came round and bought a woman called Joyce Heth who we’ll hear some more about later. And from Heth his showmanship career spiralled.

He was a renowned liberal. He was also a member of the temperance movement and he was completely teetotal and he had been since he came back from London with Tom Thumb.

He was what he called himself a profitable philanthropist. He published his own biography several times and reportedly said it had sold as many copies as the New Testament. I think that might have been a good example of Barnum and his humbug at work.

Contemporaries of Barnum’s were a bit worried about him really. He was a very forward thinking man. He was a member of the debunkers like Harry Houdini and other magicians of the time. And Barnum spent a lot of money and a lot of time looking at the practices of the psychic mediums and then promptly, showing everybody how they did it. So needless to say he wasn’t always a popular man.

So, after he had decided to head into showmanship, he bought Joyce Heth. Joyce was a black slave woman. She was originally sold as the ‘nursing mammy’ of George Washington, which would have made her about 400.

She was originally owned by a chap called R. W. Lindsay who tried and failed miserably to promote Heth. So he sold her on to this whippersnapper called Barnum thinking he’d made a fast buck. Barnum took Heth, she was getting old, probably very old if you were to take Lindsay’s word for it. She was blind, she was almost paralysed, but she could talk and she could sing and she spent a lot of time singing hymns and telling stories about ‘little Georgies’, as she called him.

Heth became a celebrity in her own right and there was a great deal of discussion about how legitimate she actually was. To quash, or perhaps knowing Barnum, to fuel the rumours, he agreed that when she died she’d be subjected to a public autopsy and people would be able to buy a ticket for a reasonable sum.

When she did finally die in 1836, Barnum was true to his word and he did have her autopsied in public, in front of a crowd of 1,500 spectators. The autopsy showed that she was probably no more than 80 when she died. But, Barnum was not one to let that stop him. He put forward a rumour that actually it wasn’t Joyce Heth that had died at all, it was somebody else. They’d autopsied the wrong body. And so the rumour mill went on. It’s a great example of how Barnum was the great bringer of his own fortune, he was able to spin a story as well as you like.

After Heth, well Barnum just kept going up in the world. He bought Scudder’s American Museum on the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in New York. A massive building, he set about turning it into a massive advertisement for itself which was something really that hadn’t been seen before. He painted panels on the outside of it with pictures of what was inside and he lit it up with limelight, which was a very recent discovery in 1841.

He opened the museum on the 1st of January 1842 as a place where families could go for good wholesome entertainment. It was part zoo, part museum. There was a lecture hall, a waxworks, a theatre and, of course, a freak show.

Some of his exhibits included scientific instruments. There were modern appliances. There was a flea circus, a dog which could run a loom, the trunk of a tree under which Jesus’ disciples had apparently sat, a hat worn by Ullysses S. Grant, an oyster bar rather surreally, a rifle range, a set of glassblowers, a taxidermist [and] Phrenologists (people who read the bumps on your head).

He had pretty baby contests. There was Ned, the learned seal continuing the trick of learned animals. He had his famous Fiji mermaid which was, of course, half monkey, half fish and not really mermaid-looking at all.

There was a menagerie of exotic animals. He had Beluga Whales in aquariums in the basement. He had giants, midgets, the famous Chang and Eng, the Siamese twins, Grizzly Adams’s trained bears and a whole host of performances, from magicians to ventriloquists to The Black and White Minstrels Show. There was adaptations of biblical tales and even a rendering of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

It all came to an end suddenly however. On July 13th 1865 The American Museum burned to the ground. Barnum tried to open another museum soon after that but that also burned down. Barnum’s life was dogged by fire. Three times his museums were burned down. His house burned down and quite often his tents would go on fire. General theory suggests it might have been prohibition runners, it might have been anti-government protestors, it could have been all sorts. Barnum made lots of enemies and lots of friends. But eventually he started what came to be known as The Greatest Show on Earth, which I’m sure everyone’s heard of.

He joined up with a chap called Cooper and started with The Barnum and Bailey Show. They had elephants, they had all sorts, and of course they had Jumbo the biggest elephant supposedly in the world. He was bought from London Zoo.

It was the first circus that used trains to travel, before that they’d used wagons, everybody would be crowded in and away they’d go. Now they have trains, they developed box carts that could be taken off the rails while the carts wheels still stayed on the rails.

And he had all sorts, things that had never been seen before in parts of America. Giraffes particularly were a really rare commodity.

The circus ran for ten years before Barnum died. When he died his partner James Bailey bought the circus out from his widow and continued to run the tours, all the way through the eastern United States and over into Europe.

On the 27th of December, just after Christmas, 1897, The Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth started a European tour which lasted until 1902.

Here are some of the worthies [shows image]. This is a typical picture of Barnum’s freaks and curiosities as they were called. It’s worth noticing at this point actually that Barnum never ever called these people ‘freaks’. That was a name that was thought up by Mr Bailey and the freaks objected immensely to it. Barnum preferred to call them ‘prodigies’, which I think is quite a lot nicer.

The freaks objected to the word ‘freaks’, obviously, and many of them held meetings when they were in London. Eventually there was a consensus that they decided that they’d be called ‘prodigies’ or ‘curiosities’ rather than ‘freaks’. And that was the case going forward although occasionally it did still sneak in.

Let me introduce you to some of these people a little bit more. We have the fabulous James Morris. James was born in New York with a thing called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome which basically means the collagen in your skin doesn’t work properly. It makes very stretchy skin. I’m sure you’ve seen these people who can all pull their ears out six inches and that kind of thing. Well James could stretch his skin up to 18 inches. He was capable of grabbing the skin on his neck and wearing it like a polo neck up around his nose. It gives me the willies but there we go.

He joined Barnum in 1882 after he’d been a barber and he’d been in the army. And Barnum showed him all over America and all over Europe. There’s a lot of pictures of him everywhere. He was a very, very famous man and seen pretty much as the best elastic skinned man of his time, however you define that.

He did however have a tendency towards drink and that meant he tended to live with the sideshow a lot longer than most of his contemporaries who had by that time had gone off and retired somewhere. But it’s worth noting that he earned a reported $150 a week with Barnum. That in today’s money is about $3,000 so that’s not a shabby thing. I’d quite like to earn that much every week, that’s for sure.

Now we have this hairy fellow who’s called Moung Phoset, I think that’s how you say it. Monug Phoset came from Burma. There was a whole family of hairy people who lived with the king in Burma. They were all looked after, they were showered with gold, they had fabulous palace rooms and they lived a fairly good life however. But there was a revolution in Burma and we, the British, deposed the king. The palace was set on fire and the hairy family, as they were known, had to run for their lives. Eventually an Italian soldier went off and found them living in a forest near where the palace had been and suggested perhaps that they should go and tour round, make the most of their strange appearance.

And they did. They came to England, France, they went to Follies Bergere and they appeared in America. They joined the ranks of Barnum for a little while and toured for a year with him. And generally they were described as very well educated and understandable. What that says about what people thought they would be like I’m not entirely sure.

Sometime after 1889 the family disappeared. We know that some of them died while they were on the road but some didn’t and it’s believed that they went back to Burma and just faded away into insignificance, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Now we have a lovely lady here, I know Karim has a particular fondness for this lady. This is Annie Jones, the wonderful bearded lady. Annie joined Barnum at the very, very young age of nine months. I can only presume that she was a very hairy baby. But her family saw the benefit of selling her to Barnum and so they took a salary of $150 a week, the same as James Morris got, I think that was a fairly standard fee for his sideshow performers.

By the age of five she’d grown what was called a very impressive moustache and sideburns, she was known as the bearded girl. As an adult she was well known as one of the world’s top bearded ladies. She also acted as a spokesperson for the freaks, as we mentioned earlier and when she was speaking out about the usage of the word said ‘Freak means something like fright and I do not consider myself the position of a beard made anybody a fright, and if a beard made a lady a fright then it must also a man, and no man possessing as fine a beard as mine would call himself a fright’ [laughter].

In her later career Jones went to Russia and she reportedly turned down several painters who wanted her to pose as Jesus [laughter]. I don’t see the likeness myself. She married in 1881and then divorced to marry her childhood sweetheart in 1895. And then alas she died in 1902 of tuberculosis. But she was a very outspoken lady and rather a lovely lady despite the large fur on her chin.

We have this wonderful pairing now. This is Charles Tripp and Eli Bowen, they’re a very unlikely pairing. [People] would really not believe their eyes, these two dapper gentlemen riding a tandem and then you would look closer and you realise the gentleman at the front has no legs and the gentleman at the back has no arms. So ideally paired to ride a tandem.

Charles Tripp was born without arms in 1855 but he soon managed to adapt and carry on with his life normally. He used his feet for everything. He was a very accomplished writer. He was a fantastic photographer and apparently he used to take photographs of the customers at the carnival and the circus during the intervals. Lots of people had pictures taken of them.

Bowen on the other hand was born with a couple of flippers instead of feet and he’s actually on your big picture of the circus sideshow, you can see him on there. Very early though he learnt the art of walking on his hands rather than his feet. He developed a phenomenal amount of upper body strength and became an acrobat of all things.

He joined the circus and then mastered the trick of climbing a pole (remember he has no feet, only with his arms) this ten foot pole and swirling round the top of it before landing on the top and balancing on one hand. So he had an astonishing amount of skill.

But Barnum being Barnum saw the trick, when they started to get a little bit older thought ‘I know, we’ll take these two men and put them on a bicycle’. Who else would think of something like that?

This is a lady after my own heart, slightly taller than me but this is Anna Swan and Martin Van Buren Bates. They were and still are the largest married couple in the world. Their combined height was fourteen feet, 8 inches. Anna was slightly taller than me at seven feet, five and a half inches and her husband was a little bit shorter at seven foot, two and a half.

Anna originally worked for Barnum way back in the days of the American Museum, if you remember I said he had giants on display, Anna was one of them. In fact she was trapped in the fire of 1865 and very nearly didn’t get out. They realised quite quickly with the state of the fire that her weight, which was said to be about 400 pounds at that time, wouldn’t have gone down the stairs. So they had to take the front wall of the building off to rescue her with a cherry picker.

She met up with Van Buren Bates in Europe after she’d left Barnum. They went on a tour and became the darlings of Queen Victoria. She loved them, Queen Victoria had a great passion for slightly unusual people. She had the Bates’. She also liked Tom Thumb who was Barnum’s very famous midget and she quite often lavished them with gifts. When these two decided when they were in London to get married, which they did at St. Martin in the Fields, she gifted them both jewellery. Anna Swan wore a large diamond cluster ring, which was given to her by the Queen and Mr Bates wore a large timepiece, kind of like a digital watch nowadays except you wound it up and it chimed on the hour, quite an unusual thing.

At the time when they got married Anna’s wedding dress was reportedly made out of an enormous amount of material, it was just huge. And eventually when once they’d toured Europe they retired to a farmhouse, a purpose built farmhouse with very large ceilings, but a farmhouse in America.

But they came back out of the woodwork, reappeared, sometimes to help Barnum when he was running out of money, sometimes just because they were running out of money a bit.

After the decline of Barnum a little bit they move on to Coney Island. Everybody’s heard of Coney Island. Most people from Stephen Fry and QI when he talked about the elephant. But Coney Island was a massive place full of theme parks and amusements. Dreamland was just one of them. It became famous when Samuel W. Gumpertz opened Lilliputia, a whole community of little people and he recruited them from all across the country and all across the world.

They retired out of circuses and came to live in Dreamland, which was quite nice. They had their own miniature fire department, they had police officers, they had all sorts and they put on displays every day for people. And just to heighten the effect a little bit more Gumpertz would pay giants to come in and walk around the little people just to make them look extra short, which I’m sure they really appreciated.

In spite of its’ many draws however, and hundreds and hundreds of people came to Dreamland from New York, it struggled to compete with nearby Luna Park which was the far more famous of the parks on Coney Island.

And it suffered, as is its wont in the sideshow business, a fire in 1911 and after that the park was shut down. The midgets retired and they moved on.

The sideshows started to decline in the 1930s, they weren’t as popular as they were. This film had a lot to do with it. ‘Freaks’ is the tale of a sideshow with all the wonderful characters you get in it. The trapeze artist falls in love with the midget, so to speak, except she doesn’t, she wants his money and in marriage tries to kill him. It’s a very standard story apart from the fact that half the cast are three foot tall, some have got one arm, that kind of thing.

It was directed by Tod Browning who was more famous for his work on Dracula. And he took the unusual step of casting real sideshow freaks, as he called them, into the parts. He felt it would give an authenticity that there wasn’t beforehand. The test screenings of the movie were a disaster. He’d been told to make it scary so he did. Unfortunately one woman claimed the film had caused her to have a miscarriage and because of this the studio took the decision to cut the film from 90 minutes, which it was, down to 64, chopping out quite a lot of content. Although the original cut was released for a little while, and it was a great success, eventually it was the 64 minute cut that came out.

Many of the freaks who had been in the film publicly disassociated themselves because they felt the cut then showed them in a bad light. They felt it showed them as monsters whereas the original had tried to show them almost in opposite.

The film was banned in large parts of the world. A lot of states in America still ban it to this day and we in Britain had it banned for over 30 years although it was rediscovered in the 1960s and has developed something of a cult status now. In fact it was picked by the United States Film Registry as being culturally, historically and aesthetically significant, so it’s had a bit of a resurgence.

But it all helped with the decline of the sideshow, as did these chaps, they fought it these chaps. Sealo, Pete Terhune and Otis Jordan were again all sideshow performers. Sealo, as you can see suffers from a thing called phocomelia which is where you have little tiny bones or no bones and basically flippers. And he and Pete Terhune were charged with exhibiting themselves. Basically that’s the same that a pornographer would be charged with. But it was an old statute on the books of Florida and they felt the need to challenge this, so they did and they won, they sued the state of Florida and they were allowed to keep performing. But it was very much a sign of things to come because we notice Jordan who’s the chap at the bottom decided to come on and start performing again.

A woman named Barbara Baskin decided that it was a shame that he should be allowed to perform and it should be stopped, he shouldn’t be forced to perform and so she took the case to court. She won, he was made to stop performing and it took him two years to get back to performing again, before it all came good.

Sealo had a wonderful attitude to this, he said people often felt sorry for him and his reaction was always ‘Why do they need to save me? If I wanted to I could have lit cigars with five dollar bills’, presumably to quote how much money he was making. It certainly wasn’t a luxury he would have had if he’d been in an institution where unfortunately a lot of these acts went after the disbandment of the circus sideshows. They either retired and were placed into institutions. Some of them made it into a wonderful place in Florida called Gibsonton which is where, from what I can tell, palmy people go to retire. It’s full of elephants and all sorts.

But after the decline they’re making a degree of a resurgence now, funnily enough, although more so with a self made freak. Self-made freaks are people who’ve got body modifications, tattoos, implants, piercing, rather than a physical deformity that they had previously. Mainly that’s because the physical deformities aren’t there anymore, science has moved on. We know how to treat these things and they can be dealt with so the people who have stretchy skin or missing limbs now have prosthetics, drugs they can take.

But there’s still a call for the sideshow and slowly but surely there is a degree of freakish coming back. Jennifer Miller is a knife juggler and an escape artist who also happens to have a beard. And the Black Scorpion is a comedian who also has lobster claws syndrome where he has few fingers; he only has two or three.

In the modern day where circuses using live animals are frowned upon now, perhaps once again there will be a rise in a sideshow of sorts and we are on to our final act, The Blow Off.

Early in the days of Barnum’s American Museum he realised that people weren’t coming through at quite the rate they should have been. They were standing around for ages which meant that people weren’t coming in the door. Obviously the more people in the door, the more money he made. That wasn’t happening so Barnum put some signs up pointing them to what they thought was a new attraction.

So without further ado ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to follow the signs� That’s all I have for you ladies and gentlemen.

[Applause]