Marcus le Touche

One of the best things about being a newspaper columnist in Norfolk was opening the morning mail. You never knew what you would get. One day I got a letter from someone who wrote, 'In Burgh-next-Aylsham there is a circus clown who lives in a tiny caravan beside the river Bure, who entertains children.' There was, too.
Marcus was sort-of retired when I first met him, sort-of because he was still honouring occasional bookings for children's parties and garden fetes; and his home made wooden caravan turned out to be about the size of a tiny trailer capable of being towed behind a car. He lived on his own on a meadow in this little caravan beside the Bure with no electricity and nothing but a little stove for warmth and a small dog for company. Yet he gave every appearance of being blissfully content, and he told a wonderful tale.
He was descended from Hugenots, he said, and spent his early youth with a circus in South America. His betrothed, a trapeze artiste, was killed at his feet in the circus ring, and so he never married. Then he went to Hollywood, appeared in some early short-reel films, played cricket for Ronald Colman's ex-pat team, went to Africa with one of the first wildlife film crews (an enterprise which became bankrupt) and ended up touring this country with various shows - now accompanied by a little dog - with an act which appealed mainly to children.
For a time, he said, he lived next door to the violinist Albert Sandler, and remembered him rehearsing in the garden. He said he also appeared in a Royal Command Performance, presumably in the 1930s-1950s (though I haven't been able to trace this), and had by this time become, officially, Clown Roma. Then his appeal dwindled. Television lured away child audiences and vandals attacked his caravan (in Nottingham, I believe). Twice his van caught fire, and by the mid-1980s his showbusiness career was over.
On one occasion Marcus allowed me a glimpse of a pile of scrapbooks crammed with photos and cuttings and old programmes, all of which, I assume, were lost in one of his fires. When I took my youngest son to meet him, Marcus and his dog immediately produced an impromptu performance of part of his act.
And once I recall inviting him to lunch at Jarrold's restaurant in Norwich, a city he visited occasionally. He turned up in a check Norfolk jacket and trousers, a deerstalker-type hat and shiny brown boots, and won over the waitresses with his old-fashioned manners and charm.
'My dear boy . . .' he would say, because Marcus was gentle and charming in what I imagine was an Edwardian sort of way, and utterly comfortable with his lot and his tiny number of possessions.
Then a few years' later he died and I do not know what happened. I lost him then in a sense that I have not been able to find any recorded trace of him. No listing of him having been the official Clown Roma, no reference to any Royal Command Performance, no glimpse of his surname among Hugenot archives or in the records of the Hollywood cricket team.
But he certainly existed. He once insisted on giving me his portable typewriter, as he did not use it any more, and I eventually handed it on to my youngest son, who still has it and who still remembers him. As for Marcus and his legacy, he seems to have packed up his tent and disappeared, just like the circus.