Book description
SEVENTY YEARS A SHOWMAN- Sanger and His Times by Kenneth Grahame. First
published in 1926. INTRODUCTION: SANGER AND HIS TIMES by KENNETH
GRAHAME. RETIREMENT and reminiscence are apt to trot in harness
together, and so, when Mr. George Sanger, the great showman, so
familiar, by name at least, to the youth of the last generation, retired
from the circus business in 1905, he proceeded to set down the simple
yet moving annals of his past career, with the same calm courage with
which he would draw the aching tooth of a favourite elephant. Published
in book form in 1910, under the title of Seventy Years a Showman, these
memoirs hardly attracted at the time all the no tice they really
merited. It is to be hoped that this re issue the book has been many
years out of print may receive fuller attention, for his story is not
only excellently and graphically written, and packed with yarns of the
most vivid character set forth in a per fectly natural and unexaggerated
manner, but it pro vides a reel, so to speak, of moving-pictures
illustrative of a certain period that extending from the early thirties
to the end of the last century during which the rural and provincial
life of England underwent a transformation as complete as perhaps-any
previous period of seventy years could show. It covers, too, the whole
period of Dickens' work, and that of many Introduction, another of
lesser fame, all busy depicting the Early Victorian world in its every
phase and once more, as we read, many of their characters seem to start
into life again, each in his habit as he lived, in the faithful jottings
of this simple and unlettered showman. George Sangers parents wfcre
Wiltshire people his father, press-ganged at eighteen, served ten years
afloat, and fought and was severely wounded in the Victory at Trafalgar
from which event, and his con sequent retirement on a pension of 10 per
annum, we date his entry into the show business, with a self-made
peep-show he could carry on his back. As described by his son, he seems
to have been a man of fine char acter, and his adventures, intertwined
as they are with the writers early years, form as good reading as any
part of the book. But the father, though reaching out at times in this
direction and that, remained faithful in the main to the peep-show with
which he had first challenged fortune. It was young George who was
always the climber, the aspirant, the seeker after new things. While
still a boy, be must needs start his own little show, which, composed of
performing canaries, redpolls and white mice, strengthened later by two
tame hares, bore in it the seed of the mighty circuses and menageries
that were to follow. At eighteen he was on the road with a travelling
van of his own when about twenty-six he entered the great circus world,
and passed from success to success, their cul mination being the
purchase of the famous Astleys Theatre in 187 1. Followed his
Continental tours and triumphs, during which, as he used to boast, his
cir cuses travelled the roads of every country in Europe except Russia
and thereafter he was not so much a man as an institution and a British
institution too. Mr. Sanger, like a good showman, married in the
profession, choosing for his bride the popular Lion Queen of a rival
establishment, somewhat to the dis gust of the rival establishment, who
evidently held, not unnaturally, that showmen ought to marry their own
Lion Queens, instead of poaching on those of other people. She made as
good a wife as she had made a Lion Queen who dares to say that an early
training is ever entirely wasted and when, after forty-eight years of
happy married life, he lost her, his book pays touching tribute to all
that she had been to him, both in solid worth and in affection. Lovers
to the last, he says and that is saying not a little.
