Miss Young incurred no such risk; if she had fallen into the river, she would have found it soft, and so many boats were on its surface that the risk of drowning could not enter into the calculation. Leotard practised his aerial somersault over water before he performed in public; and it would have been well for Miss Young if she had confined her rope-walking feats to localities in which she had the water beneath her. The experiment at Cremorne served its purpose in recommending her to the attention of managers as a rival of Blondin on the high rope; but it was not long before she met with an accident which rendered, her a cripple for life, while another young woman, whom her success led to emulate her lofty feats, fell from a rope at Aston Park, in the environs of Birmingham, and was killed on the spot.
The great attraction of the Cremorne season of 1863 was a tournament, got up on the model of the one which attracted so large a proportion of the upper ten thousand to Eglinton Castle in the summer of 1844. There was a grand procession to the lists, and an imposing display of banners, and all the pomp and pageantry of bygone times; and then the encounters of the armoured knights, for which the lists at Cremorne afforded much more scope than the stage at Astley’s, or even at Drury Lane. Doubtless there were some dummies, as I have seen in the tournament scene in Mazeppa; but the living knights acquitted themselves very creditably, and the spectacle proved a powerful source of attraction.
The Queen of Beauty was a lady whose ordinary business was to ride in entrées, and who was known professionally as Madame Caroline. If she did not, like Thackeray’s Miss Montmorency, live in the New Cut, she had her abode in the vicinage of that thoroughfare, in the somewhat more westerly region which receives, after midnight, so large a proportion of those who, in various ways, contribute to the amusement of the public. Yet there may have been some of the critical spectators of the Cremorne tournament who, looking upon Madame Caroline, may have felt the force of the remark made by Willis as to the comparative suitability of Lady Seymour and Fanny Kemble to have occupied the throne of the Queen of Beauty at Eglinton Castle.
‘The eyes,’ said Willis, ‘to flash over a crowd at a tournament, to be admired from a distance, to beam down upon a knight kneeling for a public award of honour, should be full of command; dark, lustrous, and fiery. Hers are of the sweetest and most tranquil blue that ever reflected the serene heaven of a happy hearth—eyes to love, not wonder at—to adore and rely upon, not admire and tremble for. At the distance at which most of the spectators of the tournament saw Lady Seymour, Fanny Kemble’s stormy orbs would have shown much finer; and the forced and imperative action of a stage-taught head and figure would have been more applauded than the quiet, nameless, and indescribable grace, lost to all but those immediately around her.’
Wallett, the clown, on his return from his second American tour, having acquired some money, was taken into partnership by Newsome, whose circus was, in the words of the former, ‘one of the most complete concerns ever seen,’ They opened at Birmingham, where good business was done for a few months, after which they started on a tenting tour, with a stud of forty horses. They returned to Birmingham for the winter, and showed their thousands of patrons one of the finest amphitheatres ever opened in this country. The ring, instead of having saw-dust or tan laid down, was covered with pile matting of cocoa-nut fibre for the horses to run on, while the central portion, where the ring-master cracks his whip and the clown his ‘wheeze,’ boasted a circular carpet. The decorations of the interior were rich and tasteful, and it was illuminated by a chandelier by Defries, which had cost a thousand guineas.
The association of Wallett with Newsome continued for two years, after which the circus was conducted by the latter single-handed, and the former joined Pablo Fanque’s circus as clown. He is next found engaging the talented Delavanti family for a tour, and afterwards coming with them to London, where they were all engaged at Drury Lane Theatre, then temporarily open for circus performances, under the management of Spence Stokes, an American.
In 1865, Hengler’s company and stud came to London, and gave a series of performances at the Stereorama, temporarily converted into a circus for the purpose.
On the termination of these performances, and of William Cooke’s lesseeship of Astley’s, London was without an amphitheatre for several years, with the exception of a few months, when a small temporary circus was opened in the back-slums of Lambeth Walk, by James Talliott, formerly well known as a trapeze performer. The company and stud, which were on a very limited scale, were supplied from Fossett’s circus, which tented at fairs during the summer, and Talliott erected a temporary circus for them on the yards at the back of a row of houses belonging to him.
During the time that Astley’s ceased to exist as a circus, the music-halls of the metropolis, which were now springing up in every quarter, supplied the seekers after amusement with a constant succession of performers of those portions of a circus entertainment which can be exhibited upon a platform. The fatal accident which befell a gymnast named Majilton at the Canterbury caused the proprietors of those places of amusement to discountenance the flying trapeze for a time, and the rising school of young gymnasts who intended to transcend the feats of Leotard began to practise on the fixed trapeze, single or double, the horizontal bar, and the flying rings. The gymnast known professionally as Airec made balancing the distinctive feature of his performances, and exhibited it on the trapeze in every position. Others gave to their feats on the trapeze the sensational character which was so striking an element in the performances of Leotard and Victor Julien by exhibiting what is called ‘the drop,’ in which one of the performers falls headlong from the bar, as if by accident, and is caught by the foot by his companion, who himself hangs from the bar by his feet, which are locked in the angles formed by the bar and its supporting ropes.
The gymnasts known as the Brothers Ellis, and sometimes as the Brothers Ellistria, were two of the best performers on the horizontal bar that I ever witnessed. The slow pull-up of James Ellis was inimitable; but in feats in which ease and grace were displayed more than strength he was excelled, I think, by his partner, who, after their separation, assumed the name of Castelli. I must here remark that gymnastic and acrobatic ‘brothers’ seldom bear the relationship to each other which the designation conveys. Though it exists in some instances, as in the case of the Brothers Ridley (both, I believe, now dead), they are the exceptions; the Brothers Francisco, who performed in numerous circuses and provincial music-halls several years ago, but have since retired from the profession, were cousins. The Brothers Ellis, the Brothers Price, and many other professional fraternities that could be named were not even partners, one of them making engagements and receiving the salary, taking the lion’s share for himself, and paying a stipulated sum to his companion, in or out of an engagement.