Lure of the Big Top

During the austerity years immediately after the Second World War, recreational outlets for youngsters were strictly limited. There was football, of course, cycling, and the cinema. There was also 'exploring,' which in our case meant scrambling for miles around nearby fields using the dry ditches as trails. But as far as I was concerned there was another big lure - namely, the travelling fairs and circuses which regularly came to town.
Of the two, it was circus for me. We would get to know when they were coming and cycle to the recreational ground to watch them hauling up the tent and to get a sniff of the animals. Exciting stuff for a youngster largely brought up on nothing more colourful than black and white Abbot and Costello films, and Johnny Mac Brown, and black and white photographs of footballers in the News Chronicle.
These were the smaller travelling shows, of course. The large ones, the cream - Chipperfield, Billy Smart, Bertram Mills - circled our town but kept their distance. You had to save up your pocket-money and travel in order to see them. But we did. And the kings of them all, of course, were Bertram Mills.
I still have tucked away four or five Mills' programmes from the 1940s/50s, which prod me into recollections of a hair-raising high trapeze, a lion walking a tightrope, a bossy ringmaster, of lights and music, and of the Cumberlands, a highly drilled team of bareback horseriders.
Where did this fascination for the circus come from? Well, we Robinsons have an old family story that my paternal grandfather, who lived in the Cotswolds, actually ran away with a circus when he was a young lad. This would have been before the First World War, of course. And I have always believed this was Baker Brothers' circus, and that they put up with him for a week or so before they sent him home.
The Baker family of bareback riders and performers had a travelling show for many years. Edward Seago, the painter, lived and travelled with them for a time. Then in the 1930s some of the family members finally joined Bertram Mills to form a new bareback act - called the Cumberlands.
It sort of closes a circle as far as I am concerned.
By the way, three of the Baker boys appeared at the Hippodrome, Great Yarmouth, in 1961.