Sunday, May 04, 2014

Powers Elephants #1 (From Buckles)




Posted by Buckles at 5/04/2014 05:35:00 AM

3 comments:

Dick Flint said...

Seen swinging on the trunks of Lena and Jennie on the Bertram Mills lot (or tober in English circus terms) is Lady Eleanor Smith (1902–1945), an English writer, early member of the British CFA, and member of the British aristocracy. Her father was The Rt Hon. Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead, Britain’s Lord Chancellor (the presiding officer of the House of Lords) from 1919-1922, and a distinguished lawyer best remembered today as Winston Churchill's greatest personal and political friend until Birkenhead's death in 1930. (In the year of his death, he published his utopian “The World in 2030 A.D.” with airbrush illustrations by E. McKnight Kauffer, later to draw some Ringling posters in the early 1940s!) The eldest of his three children, she began as a London society reporter and cinema reviewer, but was always enamored of circus life and the Romany ("Gypsy") people. She became a publicist for circus companies and so spent much of her life working and living with circus folk and even appearing in the ring on occasion. Such travels and her fascination with Romany folklore provided much of the material for her popular novels and short stories. Those with circus association in the title are the fictional “Red Wagon: a Story of the Tober” (1931) and “Satan's Circus” (1932), a collection of mysteries about the supernatural. Some of the best chapters in her autobiographical reminiscences, titled “Life's a Circus” (1939), are those about life under the big top, and about the circus folk she met there: Togare the tiger trainer and John Gindl with his the baby elephants, among many others.
Dick Flint
Baltimore

04 May, 2014 18:53
Unknown said...

Back when I was in high school, I read BRITISH CIRCUS LIFE by Lady Eleanor Smith.

05 May, 2014 00:40
Dick Flint said...

Eric, several of her novels were turned in to motion pictures!
Dick Flint
Baltimore

05 May, 2014 07:35

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