Betty Fossett, Gerry’s future wife, who’s father owned James Brothers Circus

Send in the clowns – but no elephants

Gerry Cottle’s Circus was the last to feature animals in the acts, writes Peter Gruner

CONFESSIONS OF A SHOWMAN– MY LIFE IN THE CIRCUS by Gerry Cottle and Helen Batten.
Vision Paperbacks, £16.99.  order this book

ONCE upon a time there was a circus, which had no performing animals apart from a duck who would quack to the sound of a trombone.
A musician would play a single base note, there would be a pause, and then the duck would respond with a deep and satisfying quack.
Now this used to bring the house down, or the big top down as it was a circus.
But in the late 1970s local authorities throughout the land were banning all performing animals. And that included any duck, which had got in through the back door, so to speak. So a council official was hastily despatched from Haringey to order that the animal be removed from the show or the circus would be banned.
Circus impresario Gerry Cottle was reminiscing about this true life incident at the Camden Roundhouse this week.
He was illustrating what he described as the great contradictions or hypocrisy in “politically correct” Britain.
Cottle was at the theatre in the Roundhouse – scene of many triumphs and disasters in his distinguished career – to promote his new book, Confessions of a Showman (My Life in the Circus).
“It’s funny,” he said. “You can eat them and wear their skins. Ride them in races, take them out on leads and exhibit them in zoos. But don’t put them in circuses because that’s demeaning and cruel.”
Cottle’s life story is very much tied up with the extraordinary changes to circus life in Britain. He did the romantic thing and ran away from his well to do upper middle class parents in stockbroker belt Surrey at just 15 to join a circus in Newcastle.
His first job was shovelling elephant dung and playing the back half of a pantomime horse. Today young hopefuls go to circus school to learn juggling and clowning and in Britain, at least, will rarely witness a performing animal.
When Cottle’s career started life for the traditional animal circus hadn’t changed for hundreds of years. Then came the rise of animal rights in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Animals, it was declared, were “sentient” beings and felt and experienced suffering like humans. It “demeaned” them to make them perform.
Cottle said: “We always argued that our animals were well cared for, well fed and loved. If they were unhappy they could never have performed.”
But in the face of huge protests and threats of violence by animal activists one by one local authorities banned animal circuses.
However, there were plenty of examples of double standards. Ken Livingstone, when in
charge of the old Greater London Council (GLC), had banned animal circuses. However, it didn’t stop him hiring Rani the elephant from Cottle to parade at the opening of the Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park.
Cottle has fond memories of animal circuses at the Roundhouse. So also do many of the older residents who remember the excitement and smells.
“Everyone loved the elephants,” he said. “We had girls sitting on the elephants’ backs in what was a real spectacle. They paraded around together and then went in opposite directions.
“They stood on tubs and a girl would balance on their backs. When an elephant comes into the ring with the right music it’s a real wow effect.
“Then a performer would lie down on the ground and an elephant would walk over him or her. People would say how was it done? How come the elephant didn’t tread on the person? But elephants, like horses, would never step on a human. It’s just bred into them not to do it”.
With the ban on animal circuses Cottle moved on to all people events in the 1980s. He teamed up with John Hayes, who was experimenting at university with the Circus of Horrors involving weird and wacky stunts with midgets and pop music along with traditional fire-eating, sword swallowing and magic acts.
At the Roundhouse Cottle staged the largest custard-pie fight in the world. A chef was employed to make hundreds of flan bases and two concrete mixers were used to mix the custard.
Jeremy Beadle officiated, with the event, involving two teams of ten including members of the audience, making a huge mess. It even made it into the Guinness Book of Records. I should mention here that as a reporter for the Evening Standard I spent a weekend covering an international alternative circus in the Pyrenees organised by Cottle. In fact he gives me a mention in his book.
He describes the trip – a complete farce from beginning to end but a lot of fun. He writes: “We were offered a drink in an old gypsy caravan where poor Peter Gruner was wrestled to the floor and kissed by an exceptionally drunk gay strongman.”
He later describes how I had to sleep on a haystack in a barn and woke up to find myself snuggled up to a man in a gorilla costume.
Today Cottle travels no more. He’s “had it up to here” with circuses – mainly because of all the red-tape and paper work.
“The real thorn in my side was the local authorities,” he said. “Every year they became more of a pain. We were asked to attend site meetings for places we’d been going to for years. We’d fill in 60-page forms when two sides of A4 had done before.
“I had to make statements about how many ethnic minorities, women, and people with disabilities I employed, when we had all of the above employed in the circus for years in the natural course of things. There was no respect for what we did.”
He now runs Wookey Hole caves in Somerset and has settled down with his huge family of children, grand-children and an ex-wife with whom he is still on friendly terms.
In the 1990s in Britain there were 20 circuses, but today there are not more than a dozen.
Cottle still hankers for the old life but believes the days of circus could be numbered.
He said: “I think it’s all part of this country’s peculiar snobbery against the circus. In the rest of Europe circus is seen as a precious art form, which is ironic as circuses started in Britain.
“Here we are seen as barely better than gypsies, and we all know how they are treated.”