Friday, July 26, 2013

MORE LIONS! #13

3 comments:

Dennis said...

Boggles the mind. How long did it take to seat them all? How many travel cages? How much horse meat a day? Were they all named? Is it a 70 foot diameter arena?

Philip Astley said...

Only 40 ever worked at one time. The rest were just in the menagerie. He chopped and changed the males whenever he had problems with them. From all the pictures and film I have seen of this act, all the animals seem to be young; never any adults.

Jim Clubb

Dick Flint said...

“Captain” Alfred Schneider was a European trainer, celebrity, and circus owner beginning in the 1910s with his unique act. Supposedly, he supplied the lions for an early filming of "Quo Vadis" but I am not fully clear about this.

This picture of the Captain with lions neatly on pedestals might be miss-leading given the frequently seen views and early films of lions walking all about in apparent dis-order while Schneider wanders amongst them, playing with them and often stroking them with Vaseline, it was said, because he believed it kept their fur in best condition.

A young people’s novel, “The Lions Starve in Naples” by Dutch writer Johan Fabricius and published in London in 1934, loosely recounts the difficulties of Capt. Schneider. It tells how a circus went to Naples for the winter where it hoped to recoup its fortunes. A mystery lawyer takes up the case and achieves a modicum of success. It paints a tragi-comedy with a sympathetic portrait of small circus life against the big lawyers.
Dick Flint
Baltimore