Sheffield's jungle fever

As stunts go, it was a good one, and it took place exactly a century ago this month, when the "Sheffield Jungle", a huge travelling menagerie, set up camp in the city. Described as "the greatest zoological garden in the entire world", it boasted a drum-playing elephant and no fewer than 100 lions and tigers, including D'Artagnan, "the Beau Brummel of the leonine world".

On the day it opened, George Senior, a Sheffield alderman, gave a speech of welcome. The portly Mr Senior, who was also the Master Cutler (the city's industrial ambassador), clearly had an eye for publicity: he gave his speech in the lions' cage.

"Daniel in the Lions' Den," trumpeted the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star, under a cartoonist's whimsical impression of the top-hatted Alderman surrounded by admiring animals. Another city paper, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, reported the occasion in great detail, but kept back a key fact until the final paragraph.

As Ian Trowell drily points out: "The cage was empty at the time." The lions had been ushered out before Mr Senior was ushered in.

Ian works at the National Fairground Archive, based at the University of Sheffield. With his colleague, Angela Greenwood, he's researching the "Sheffield Jungle". Also known as "Bostock's Jungle", it made a huge impression at the time, pulling in almost 1,200,000 visitors over its six-month residency, but it has since faded almost completely from communal memory. Ian and Angela want to revive that memory and put this curious phenomenon in context.

They discovered it while researching other aspects of circus and fairground life in the World's Fair, the showmen's newspaper. "We kept noticing references to it," says Angela. "We saw that something was going on, but at the same time realised it was a blind spot."

The name Bostock was already familiar, however. Frank Bostock (1866-1912) was a member of a well-known British family who toured "menageries" – travelling animal shows, somewhere between a zoo and a circus – throughout the 19th century and into the 20th.

With his twirly waxed moustache, he was dubbed "The Animal King of America" after a successful tour there. It was, in the words of the New York Herald, "America's Amazingly Advanced Animal Aggregation". Exotic animals, caged or performing, were the attraction – lions, elephants, pelicans, freakishly small ponies, zebras, llamas, camels, boxing kangaroos, penguins, pumas, wrestling bears, polar bears, racoons, turtles, the weirder and wilder the better.

If an animal moved, it could be exhibited; if it didn't (because it had died, possibly on a long voyage from Africa or India) it could still be exhibited, labelled "sleeping". There are tales of menageries exhibiting "The Only Dead Elephant in Captivity".

The showmen were, after all, ever-resourceful. In the 1830s, a washed-up 95ft-long giant whale was hollowed out and converted into a concert hall , with the creature's ribs presumably providing an elegant vault. Two-dozen musicians played inside, though it's not recorded whether they were called Jonah's Band.

Bostock called his Jungles "a show without parallel in history... worth travelling one hundred miles to see". In the days before David Attenborough, it was, as Ian points out, "the only chance people would get to see such animals".

When such shows started in the early 19th century, crowds gawped at creatures they hadn't even heard of, never mind seen. "The showmen liked to present themselves as educators," says Ian. "Even when they were presenting giants and dwarfs, they tried to put an educational spin on it."

Today, many people frown upon such exhibitions, but as recently as the 1930s, hippos were kept in cages hardly big enough for them to yawn in. When a Bostock show came to Leeds in 1928, a World's Fair correspondent reported: "What I consider pride of place in the whole circus programme is Bonzo the sea-lion. Never before have I seen an animal do the performance this animal is capable of doing. At juggling, it is marvellous."

Human performers suffered similar indignities. When the show moved on to Bradford, the correspondent noted:

"The African Show and African Village were very nice and I was astonished to see Chief Luali dance on broken glass, in bare feet."

The Sheffield Jungle brought together the stars of shows that had toured Europe and the USA. Advertisements promised "the most marvellously trained wild animals on earth" and "a unique entertainment ranging from grave to gay, from lively to severe, that is equally acceptable to the youngsters as to 'Boys and Girls grown Tall'".

It was staged in the city centre, in a 40,000 square ft skating rink said to be Britain's third-biggest building at the time. A few reservations had been aired in advance, but when it opened, one newspaper put them to rest: "All in attendance were greatly impressed by the natural appearance of the animals and by the entire absence of objectionable smells."

These reports form part of the National Fairground Archive's imaginative treatment of its material. The Sheffield Jungle website includes a sort of "vintage blog", a regular selection of what the newspapers were saying about this spectacular show 100 years ago to the day.

The Archive exhibited some of the Jungle material at Sheffield's Kelham Island Museum earlier this year and drew an almost complete blank on information. Apart, that is, from Stanley Gyte, an 80-year-old who remembered his father reciting the rhyme with which the show lured visitors. I phoned Mr Gyte, who cheerily repeated as much of the rhyme as he could remember:

"Wild beast now begins,

Get-in's only 13 pins,

If your pins you have to borrow

I will trust you till tomorrow."

Did Mr Gyte's father ever talk in more detail about the Jungle? "No, we never got round to discussing what happened. Looking back wasn't as common in those days as it is today." Nor is he sure what the "13 pins" were (admission was actually 12 pence, or one shilling).

Some descriptions of the show have survived, however. The World's Fair reported "turtle rides" and that

"displays were given by Madame Morelli, a French lady who has earned the title of 'The Queen of the Jaguars'." She

trained lions to line up in groups – "a magnificent exhibition of human will power" – and her publicity photographs showed her whispering sweet nothings

to jaguars perched on tiny plinths; the jaguars duly snarled back.

Her colleague, Signorita Alicia, "had half-a-dozen pumas sitting on their haunches begging like dogs for a bone", before getting them to form a pyramid over which one of them jumped.

Among the Jungle's human components was a fasting man, who supposedly lived on just cigarettes and aerated water. The show's boast was that "Christmas comes but once a year – The Jungle once a lifetime". Not true. It returned to

Sheffield two years later.

The Fairground Archive is keen to hear from anyone who remembers parents or grandparents talking about the Jungle or about the speech given by Alderman Senior. It clearly made its mark. As the World's Fair reported: "It is not every day that the lions in the adjacent cages see a plump Master Cutler in the arena, and they roared approbation."

Peckishly, no doubt.

National Fairground Archive:

0114 222 7231 (www.sheffieldjungle.com).

YP MAG 20/11/10