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Bristol’s link to The Greatest Showman
Still wowing audiences on the big screen – including in a singalong version at three Bristol cinemas this week – The Greatest Showman is one of the major movie successes of the last 12 months.
A newly published book about Bristol Zoo now uncovers Bristol’s link to the man whose life the film is based on – the American showman and politician PT Barnum.
In 1894, a female Bengal tiger was loaded onto a passenger train at Clifton Down station bound for Paddington. Once in London, the animal headed onto New York to join Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth.
is needed now More than ever
Bristol Zoo is now a world leader in breeding and conservation, but it used to form part of an international trading network that included circuses and travelling menageries.
The zoo is still home to two lions but they certainly would not send brothers Kamran and Ketan or any of their other animals to the circus today – a changing relationship between people and wild animals that the new book explores.
The Wild Within: Histories of a Landmark British Zoo by Dr Andy Flack, a teaching fellow in modern history at the University of Bristol, is the result of three years spent exploring the zoo’s archives.
Dr Flack’s book examines our attachment to animals as commodities and spectacles, for scientific knowledge and emotional bonds.
The book is the biggest ever historical study of Bristol Zoo and the first academic study of a UK zoo outside London.
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Dr Flack reveals how animals at Bristol Zoo used to routinely be fed wine or stout in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; how visitors could be cruel to animals by firing catapults or poisoning them; and that the zoo regularly took donated animals from the public that even included lions and monkeys.
“As well as revealing so much fascinating detail about the zoo’s history, I also found that by looking at the zoo and its past we could learn an awful lot about our own attitudes to animals and the wider world today,” said Dr Flack.
“In some ways this book is a story about what it means to be human in the modern world.”
Dr Flack will be hosting a public lecture organised by the Bristol Historical Association at the Coutts Lecture Theatre within the Wills Memorial Building on Wednesday, March 21 at 7.30pm. There will also be a tour of the zoo hosted by Dr Flack on Wednesday, March 28 at 3.30pm.
For more information and to book places for either event, contact Mary Feerick via email maryfeerick58@gmail.com or visit bristolha.wordpress.com.
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