Some national stereotypes are true. But the British being deeply introverted is not one of them. We Brits know that when we walk the streets of any city, or visit the county show, we will be bombarded with people showing off, usually because they need to make a bob or two and don’t fancy office work.
Nothing sells tickets, books or seats like a stunt. A picture says a thousand words and if you are publicising a circus, why not circulate a photo of an elephant with a keeper in its mouth? Tightrope performers, acrobats, escape artists, they are all here. So too is a market vendor balancing a towering load on his head. They’re all evidence of the British public’s passion for the unusual, the daring and the charismatic.
As for world record attempts, they are two a penny on this sceptred isle. Where the rest of the world sees a new model of car, we see an opportunity to get in the record books. We are told we now all dream of being a star but looking at these photos I reckon it was ever thus.
GENTLE GIANT An elephant from London’s Earls Court Circus lifts its trainer by his head on 1 December 1928. It took the pair months to perfect this bizarre trick
HEAD TO HEAD Two members of the Chaludis acrobatic troupe provoke gawps from onlookers as...
STEADY NOW! Alfred Bailey, a stallholder at London’s Covent Garden fruit and veg market, balances an impressive 15 baskets on his head on 10 July 1933 as he practises for the Herne Hill basket-carrying contest in south London
IT’S MAGIC Magician Robert Harbin shows his skills, apparently making a sunbather levitate, on the beach at Eastbourne, East Sussex, on 12 September 1956
HIGH FLYERS Times were hard for South Yorkshire miners in the depressed 1930s, so the Davis family decided to retrain as circus artistes. Here 15-year-old Elsie Davis balances on the shoulders of her brother Harold, as he performs a highwire act on a...
THE GREAT ESCAPE Escapologist Timothy DillRussell, the stunt advisor to the West End musical Man Of Magic – about Harry Houdini – hangs upside down over the Thames in 1966
CAR-AZY Here is the popular Mini car filled with 14 miniskirted maidens, plus one in the boot, in the summer of 1966 in a successful world record attempt for the most people in a Mini