A moment afterwards, the lion snapped its formidable jaws, and bit off the keeper’s head. Such was the story; but it is contradicted by the fact that Manchester Jack left the menagerie with a whole skin, and for many years afterwards kept an inn at Taunton, where he died in 1865.
Nero’s tameness and docility made him a public favourite, but the “lion,” par excellence, of Wombwell’s show, after the lion-baitings at Warwick, was Wallace. At the time when the terrible death of the lion-tamer, Macarthy, had invested the subject with extraordinary interest, a narrative appeared in the columns of a metropolitan morning journal, purporting to relate the experiences of “an ex-lion king,” in which the story of these combats was revived, but in a manner not easily reconciled with the statement of the man who communicated his reminiscences to the “special commissioner” of the journal in question, that he knew the animals and their keeper.
“Did you ever,” the ex-lion king was reported to have said, “hear of old Wallace’s fight with the dogs? George Wombwell was at very low water, and not knowing how to get his head up again, he thought of a fight between an old lion he had—sometimes called Wallace, sometimes Nero—and a dozen of mastiff dogs. Wallace was as tame as a sheep; I knew him well—I wish all lions were like him. The prices of admission ranged from a guinea up to five guineas, and every seat was taken, and had the menagerie been three times as large it would have been full. It was a queer go, and no mistake! Sometimes the old lion would scratch a lump out of a dog, and sometimes the dogs would make as if they were going to worry the old lion; but neither side showed any serious fight, and at length the patience of the audience got exhausted, and they went away in disgust. George’s excuse was, ‘We can’t make ’em fight, can we, if they won’t?’ There was no getting over this, and George cleared over two thousand pounds by the night’s work.”
According to the newspaper reports of the time, two of these lion-baitings took place; and some vague report or dim recollection of the events as they actually occurred seems to have been in the mind of the “ex-lion king” when he gave the preceding account of them. The combats were said to have originated in a bet between two sporting gentlemen, and the dogs were not a dozen mastiffs, but six bull-dogs, and attacked the lion in “heats” of three. The first fight, the incidents of which were similar in character to those described in the foregoing story, was between Nero and the dogs, and took place in July, 1825; at which time the menagerie was located in the Old Factory Yard, in the outskirts of Warwick, on the road to Northampton. This not being considered satisfactory and conclusive, a second encounter was arranged, in which Wallace, a younger animal, was substituted for the old lion, with very different results. Every dog that faced the lion was killed or disabled, the last being carried about in Wallace’s mouth as a rat is by a terrier or a cat.
Shows had been excluded from Greenwich Fair this year, and Bartholomew’s was looked forward to by the showmen as the more likely on that account to yield an abundant harvest. Hone says that Greenwich Fair was this year suppressed by the magistrates, and the absence of shows may be regarded as evidence of some bungling and wrong-headed interference; but a score of booths for drinking and dancing were there, only two of which, Algar’s and the Albion, made any charge for admission to the “assembly room,” the charge for tickets at these being a shilling and sixpence respectively. Algar’s was three hundred and twenty-three feet long by sixty wide, seventy feet of the length constituting the refreshment department, and the rest of the space being devoted to dancing, to the music of two harps, three violins, bass viol, two clarionets, and flute.
According to the account preserved in Hone’s ‘Everyday Book,’ the number of shows assembled in Smithfield this year was twenty-two, of which, one was a theatre for dramatic performances, five theatres for the various entertainments usually given in circuses, four menageries, one an exhibition of glass-blowing, one a peep-show, one a mare with seven feet, and the remaining nine, exhibitions of giants, dwarfs, albinoes, fat children, etc. Of course, the theatre was Richardson’s, and the following bill was posted on the exterior, and given to every one who asked for it on entering:—
⁂ Change of Performance each Day.
RICHARDSON’S THEATRE.
This day will be performed, an entire new Melo-Drama, called the
“Wandering Outlaw;
or, the Hour of Retribution.