Note 425 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY (continued 4)

Philip Astley, the great equestrian, was inspired by the feats of Johnson and others at the Three Hats Tavern, Islington, to give his exhibitions in an open field near the Waterloo Road. The price of admission was sixpence. Astley started with only one horse, given him by General Elliott, in whose regiment he had served. A clown named Porter supplied the comic relief. In 1770 he moved to the foot of Westminster Bridge, where his famous Amphitheatre took shape. He is said rarely to have given more than five pounds for a horse, troubling “little for shape, make, or colour; temper was the only consideration.” His circus was repeatedly burnt down, but it became one of the recognised sights of London. On September 12, 1783, Horace Walpole writes: “I could find nothing at all to do, and so went to Astley’s, which indeed was much beyond my expectation. I do not wonder any longer that Darius was chosen king by the instructions he gave to his horse; nor that Caligula made his a consul.”

After Astley’s death in 1814, his manager, the great Ducrow, became the head of the circus business. The Ducrow family monument is a striking object in Kensal Green cemetery, where also is seen the monument of the Cooke family, whose head, Thomas Cooke, owned a circus in Astley’s time, and took it to Mauchline in 1784, where it was visited by Burns. The writer of an interesting article on the Cookes in the Tatler of July 29, 1903, says: “The aristocrats of the sawdust, they have been entertaining for at least 120 years, and to-day wherever there is a circus there is a Cooke.”