Monday, November 09, 2009

Barnum & Bailey #12


Scan12392, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

Nice wide track for the Chariot Races.
Probably as exciting then as Nascar today!.

6 comments:

Mike Naughton said...

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=48548

Chariot Races on Chipperfield's Circus in 1953. The commentator remarks, "...more dangerous than speedway racing."

Can anyone ID any of the people in this video?

Anonymous said...

Looks like a 190 or 200 round with five 50-foot middles housing three rings and two stages. Looks like sometime about 1903-1907, after the return from Europe.

JIM ELLIOTT said...

Can you imagine trying to move a set of seats, of this magnatude, with todays labor force. They would tell you to drop dead.

Richard Reynolds said...

This is one of a series of photos taken on Barnum & Bailey around 1905 by Charles Andress, who saw service on both that and the Ringling show.

Bailey wanted to improve his seating and give a more comfortable experience for his grandstand audience. Here we see the new grandstand. I think it had metal stringers and seats. It was very heavy and difficult to move. Fred Bradna mentioned this in his book.

The ramp is the set up for the “Limit” an aerial automobile sensation in which Miss Isabelle Butler plunged downward in an automobile to loop the gap.

Harry Kingston said...

So this tent is 450 long plus or minus some???
I would love to see what the dead man looks like on either end of the tent with all the stakes driven to hold this monster in place.
The poor folks in the very end blues wished they had bought the front reserves when the performance started.
What helped it must have taken to get this monster up and down every day, WOW.
Great days of the circus the way it used to be.
Richard Reynolds, your great comments always add so much to the photos and we feel like are there seeing all this.
Harry
Harry

Anonymous said...

The tent is not identified, but a pretty sturdy "dead man" is in Fox's book "Ticket to the Circus," page 90. It's possibly a RBBB photo taken by Fox, which would likely make it 1938 or later. His first circus photos were HW, about 1932.