HANDY CIRCUS FAMILY - HANDY CIRCUS TROUPE

Find 2 pics and insert them

M. WILSON DISHER - "GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH" - AS PERFORMED FOR OVER A CENTURY AT ASTLEY'S (AFTERWARDS SANGER'S) ROYAL AMPHITHEATRE OF ARTS, WESTMINSTER BRIDGE ROAD - 1ST EDITION 1937 (G BELL & SONS LTD LONDON)

 

THEATRE: Crockett, Lion-Tamer, Performing With his lions at Astley's, 1861

 

Lyceum Theatre

Static Information

London Stage Code	Diane Howard Code	Address in London
0405	476	Wellington Street, Strand

Theatre Names

Year	Names
1794-1799	New Royal Circus
1809-1815	Theatre Royal, Lyceum
1765	The Lyceum
1810	Theatre Royal, English Opera House
N/A	English Opera House
N/A	Royal Lyceum Theatre

No reliable information exists for the Capacity and Cost of the Lyceum theatre.

Management at The Lyceum

Years	Manager
1794	Dr. Samuel Arnold
1795-1809	Handy - Benjamin aka Ben Handy (1795 to 1809)
1795-1809	Handy-Benjamin aka Ben Handy - Various Entertainments, but little drama
1809-1830	Samuel James Arnold (Dr. Arnold's son)
1830	Burns down
1834-1841	Samuel James Arnold
1841-1843	Michael William Balfe
1843-1847	Mr and Mrs Keeley
1847-1855	Madame Vestris and Charles James
1856-1858	Covent Garden Actors used it while their theatre was being rebuilt
1858-1861	Edmond Falconer
1863-1867	Charles Fechter
1867-1871	E.T. Smith
1871-1878	Hezekiah Bateman
1878-1899	Henry Irving

http://people.umass.edu/~a0fs000/1800/0405.html?
The proceding data was found in the following sources: Mander and Mitchenson's Theatres of London 273; A.E. Wilson; Howard's Theatres and Music Halls #476

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Drury Lane King's Theatre The Haymarket Covent Garden 1800-1810 Home Sans Souci Prince of Wales' Theatre Sans Pareil The Olympic Argyll Rooms, Regent Street Sadler's Well Royalty Astley's Amphitheatre Surrey Theatre

 

http://www.4shared.com/office/m6hGC-4R/Handys_benefit_A_pantomimical_.html
http://www.4shared.com/folder/5D8cxrui/free-ebooks-199818859017000.html# -- awaiting file
Handy's benefit. A pantomimical entertainment, a double collection of fire-works,
and an entire change of performances, which Mr. Handy has been at a great expence in getting up, ...
New Circus, Lyceum, Strand. This present Monday, March 2d, 1795

 

FIND MISSING PHOTOS



[ASTLEY’S AMPHITHEATRE.] A playbill for the Amphitheatre du Sr. Astley, Paris, November 1786. 8 1/4” x 10 1/4”; decorative border;
one central vertical crease and lower right corners; light pencil notes to verso.
This playbill announces various equestrian acts (including “les ombres Anglaises” and “ventriloque Anglais”),
a learned pig, the “Hercule du Roi,”
the monkey Général Jaco, and performing dogs.

[CIRCUS.] A lithographed plate, “Gymnastische Kunst.” Düsseldorf: Arne & Cie, [c. 1835]. 15 1/2” x 12 1/4”, plus margins; colored by hand;
gently creased to quarters; a few soft creases; short, closed tear to (blank) upper edge, with early reinforcement to verso.
A lively depiction of a troupe of 19 performers in an exterior circus ring.
The feats are exhibited by rope dancers, equilibrists (one wheeling a dog in a cart up a lengthy tightrope),
acrobats, tumblers, and a clown with his monkey. With naïve contemporary hand coloring.

[EQUILIBRIST.] An engraving, “Representations of the several Surprizing Performances of the Famous Polander,
as they are Perfom’d every Evening at Sadler’s Wells.” [London: n. p., c. 1785.] 19 1/2” x 13”,\
plus margins; contemporary hand coloring; central vertical fold; a few points of surface abrading (two with reinforcement to verso);
some faint embrowning; two soft creases.

This large engraving with original color consists of two dozen vignette illustrations (in four columns of six each) of the equilibrist’s act,
particularly “balancing feats on various intricate ladders, chairs, etc. (Toole-Stott).”
The British Library’s copy of this rare and charming print is hand-dated as from the Morning Herald of 2 August, 1785.
“He, or another equilibrist of the same designation, was still active ten years later when, at Handy’s New Circus - Benjamin aka Ben Handy
at the Lyceum on 10 February, 1795 and subsequent dates, “The Polander,” performed balancing acts “on chairs, candlesticks, and ladders.”
(Highfill, Burnim & Longhams).” His performances at Sadler’s Wells were so popular
the Tiller Clomes marionette troupe included a ‘Famous Polander’ figure.

 

GET PHOTOS FROM: http://dramatispersonae.com/RecentCatalog/catalogue114.htm

 

find photo

hanneford handy ?

 

• ROYAL CIRCUS.​
  Attractive etching and aquatint on paper by Rowlandson & Pugin,
  produced to accompany Ackermann's "Microcosm of London" originally published 1808-10.
  Measures 195 x 270 mm.
  Original hand coloured.
  
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  Post last edited Jan 24th
  

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  Buffalo Bill Circus Amar Circus-Buffalo Bill with 2 indians(p263)
  

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• 18th century street theatre
  
  by cannontickler » Thu May 10, 2012 9:08 pm
  
  The Paris foire St Germain, 1763, after the fire of 1762.
  
  
  Nicolet's theatre at the foire St Laurent, 1786.
  
  
  Signora Violante presented entertainments including rope dancing and pantomimes in street booths
  and legitimate 18th century theatres of Ireland and Britain
  
  The Italian impresario/performer Signora Violante (sometimes referred to as Madame Violante) excited audiences
  with her extraordinary rope dances and her introduction of ‘Lilliputian’ theatre featuring juvenile players.
  Rope Dancer Signora Violante at the Haymarket
  Signora Violante (1682-1741) arrived in England in 1720 as member of a company of comedians that presented
  commedia dell’arte pieces and pantomimes augmented with tumbling and dancing.
  
  She appeared first at the Haymarket Theatre, and later at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields playhouse.
  Violante, a graceful, trained dancer famous for her extraordinary feats of strength and agility with high rope dancing,
  met with great success.
  Through subsequent engagements in Europe and again in London in 1726, she amazed her audiences
  as she walked backward and forward on a high rope or danced with a flag in each hand.
  Sometimes, to provide extra thrills for her audience, she danced with a person standing upright on her shoulder, or with a basket carrying a small child tied to each foot.
  While Violante and her troupe travelled and performed in various venues, her husband Signor Violante presented his daring feats,
  sometimes as part of the presentation. In Bristol, England during the summer of 1728,
  he displayed his skills by sliding down a rope from the top of St. Vincent’s Rocks to the opposite side of the river.
  He also flew from the walls of the castle, and accidentally hung himself during a performance in 1733.
  Smock Alley Theatre Appearances
  
  At the invitation of Smock Alley Theatre manager Thomas Elrington, Signora Violante and her company that included her daughter Rosina,
  arrived in Dublin in December 1729. French dancing master Charles Lalauze and ‘Harlequin’ William Phillips performed with her.
  Advertisements hailed Violante as “the most famous Rope-Dancer now living”, and the house filled three times a week.
  
  In late November 1730, Violante contracted for establishment of her own entertainment venue, the Dame Street booth
  located at the back of a banker’s house. With the addition of five new dancers, the company enjoyed great popularity
  from its opening until its summer closing in August, and during the following season.
  Following another successful series of London performances, Violante and company returned to Dublin where,
  instead of playing at the Dame Street booth, they established a larger one in George’s Lane, and another in Fownes Court.
  also there was:
  
  * Margaret (Peg) Woffington 18th-Century Dublin-Born Actress
  * John Gay's Memorable "The Beggar's Opera"
  * Dublin Theatre Royal of Smock Alley
  
  Violante, Woffington, and The Beggar’s Opera
  
  Signora Violante, always ambitious and looking for something new and exciting to attract audiences,
  happened one day to see a shabbily-dressed girl drawing water from Dublin’s Liffey River for her mother’s wash tubs.
  Margaret (Peg) Woffington, age about 12, was one of two children of a poor widow who sold oranges in a huckster’s shop on Ormond Quay.
  The girl helped earn money by walking through the poor streets and calling out to attract customers who would buy the watercress she offered.
  
  Peg and her mother accepted Violante’s offer to apprentice the girl in her productions that would feature a company of juveniles in popular plays.
  The first ‘Lilliputian’ presentation, which delighted audiences, was of The Beggar’s Opera (1732) that was, at the time,
  extremely popular in London. A shrewd and zealous impresario, Violante spared no expense in providing scenery, decorations, and costumes.
  As the character Polly Peachum, the talented Peg Woffington was a crowd pleaser who eventually earned her place
  as a renowned actress in Dublin and England.
  Signora Violante in Edinburgh, Scotland
  
  In 1735, Signora Violante settled in Edinburgh, Scotland where she established a successful dancing school
  and occasionally presented rope dancing and other entertainments. She died there in 1741.
  http://www.livinghistory.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=28923
  

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• Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre
  
  25ThursdayApr2013
  j by London Details in 69 Westminster Bridge Road Division I, nos 4-99
  
  Street View: 69
  Address: 6-7 Westminster Bridge Road
  
  The building you see above is the third on the spot; the two previous ones had burned down. Philip Astley started his circus business in 1768 as just an open-air temporary set-up in St. George’s Fields, on a stretch of land called Glover’s Halfpenny Hatch. The enclosure doubled up as a riding school and an entertainment venue. A few years later, Astley secured a plot closer to Westminster Bridge where he built a more permanent structure, which was roofed over in 1778-9. It was refurbished in 1786 and renamed “Astley’s Royal Grove”.
  It burned down and was subsequently rebuilt in 1794 and renamed “Astley’s New Amphitheatre of the Arts”.
  In 1803, the amphitheatre burnt down once again, but was just as quickly rebuilt and that is the building
  you see above. We would now consider Astley’s entertainment a combination of theatre and circus.
  
  He started out with horse shows, but very soon all sorts of theatrical performances were added.
  
  As you can see in some of the illustrations below, the building contained both a circus area in the middle
  and a theatre stage on one side.
  
  The inside of Astley’s Amphitheatre ©Victoria and Albert Museum
  
  
  The entrance to Astley’s Amphitheatre ©Victoria and Albert Museum
  The entertainment was at first mainly provided by Astley himself and consisted of showing his horsemanship assisted by a clown and some music. According to Peter Cunningham in hisHandbook of London. Past and Present (1850) “transparent fireworks, slack-rope vaulting, Egyptian pyramids, tricks on chairs, tumbling, &c., were subsequently added, the ride enlarged, and the house opened in the evening”. In 1824, The Memoirs of J. Decastro, Comedian were published which contained “an analysis of the life of the late Philip Astley, Esq.” Jacob Decastro had switched in 1786 from Astley’s competitor “The Royal Circus”, run by Charles Dibdin, to Astley’s where he was engaged as performer in various burlesques, musical farces, and pantomimes.
  
  Astley’s silhouette from hisSystem of Equestrian Education, 8th ed, 1802
  Decastro was in an excellent position to note down particulars of Astley’s life and the Memoirs are full of details about Astley. We draw upon it for the following, supplemented by information from the Circopedia and the ODNB.(1)Astley was born in 1742 in Newcastle-under-Lyne as the son of a veneer cutter and cabinet maker. Astley quarrelled with his father and left the family business to enlist in General George Augustus Elliott’s Light Horse Brigade which was based in Coventry. Astley served in the Seven Years War and became an able soldier, but an even better horseman. He had ample opportunity to work with horses in the regiment’s riding school and he decided to make teaching and breaking horses his profession. He obtained his discharge from the regiment and as a reward for past services he was given “Spanish Horse”. Here Decastro inserts a footnote of how wonderful a performer the horse became, allegedly being able to take off his own sadle, fetch the tea service and take the kettle of boiling water from the fire, acting “in fact after the manner of a waiter at a tavern or tea garden”. I leave it to your own credulity whether you believe this or not.
  
  Astley’s system
  
  In Astley’s System of Equestrian Education, published in 1801, it is explained how horses can be trained, and also what to feed them, how to groom them, and how to treat diseases. At the end of the text the author styles himself “Philip Astley, professor of the Art of Riding” and explains that he has retired from his Westminster Bridge and Dublin establishments in favour of his son John Philip Conway Astley, but he could still be found at the Paris Amphitheatre. It is in Paris that he died on 20 October 1814. He was buried at the Père Lachaise cemetery. His son survived him by only seven years and the theatre was taken over by Andrew Ducrow, one of the riders and later manager of the theatre.
  
  Ducrow was born in 1793 and was trained to handle horses by his father who was originally from Belgium and a ‘strong man’, able to lift a table with four or five children on it with his teeth. He performed at Astley’s and was nicknamed the “Flemish Hercules”. Ducrow married twice; in 1818 to Margaret Griffith who died in 1836, and in June 1838 to Louisa Woolford (c.1814–1900), a popular equestrian performer. They had two sons and a daughter, none of whom went into the circus.(2) In 1841, after the publication of Tallis’s Street View, disaster struck once again with yet another fire. This setback was such a blow to Ducrow that he suffered a severe mental breakdown, dying six months later, on 27 January, 1842. Ducrow was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in a tomb designed by the theatrical designer of the circus company, Danson. It was originally painted in pastel colours, but these have faded over time.(3) The amphitheatre rose from the ashes of this last fire once again under the management of William Batty who handed over in 1853 to William Cooke who was to run the business until 1860. It was finally demolished in 1893.
  
  Ducrow’s tomb
  Charles Dickens wrote one of the Sketches by Boz on Astley’s theatre, not commenting so much on the actual performance, but more on the spectators and discrepancy between the glamorous outfit the actors wore on the stage and the threadbare appearance of their clothes when they are standing outside the stage door in between performances. He also mentions one of the equestrian performers by name, Miss Woolford, who, I assume, is the later wife of Andrew Ducrow.(4)
  
  Astley’s Amphitheatre in 1807. Aquatint print by Pugin and Rowlandson for Rudolph Ackermann’s Microcosm of London
  
  
  Punch, vol. 18, 1850
  
  See for a handbill of Astley’s Riding School the excellent blog post by the Georgian Gentleman on 18th century handbills (Astley’s is the bottom one) and for more information on Philip Astley himself the post: 20th October 1814 – the death of a great showman. And if you want to know even more, why not buyAstley’s Circus, the Story of an English Hussar by Mike Rendell? See the blog post on the book by the Georgian Gentleman here.
  (1) Marius Kwint, ‘Astley, Philip (1742–1814)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008.
  (2) Laurence Senelick, ‘Ducrow, Andrew (1793–1842)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008.
  (3) See for other pictures of the tomb and a portrait here.
  (4) C. Dickens, Sketches by Boz, new edition, 1839, http://londonstreetviews.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/astleys-royal-amphitheatre/?pp. 64-67.
  
  
  

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• 
  FRANKLIN, THOMAS, JR. Rider. Was with his father, Thomas Franklin, at Ricketts’ circus, NYC, 1797.
  Also, with his father, had a short-lived circus venture,
  1799. Operated a circus company in conjunction with a Mr. Lattin, rider and clown, 42 South Fifth Street, Philadelphia, spring 1802.
  In July, was performing at Vauxhall Garden, NYC. Combined with a Mr. Robertson in a circus venture
  (who could have been the balloonist), February 1803, at Newport, RI. Thomas Stewart’s, Boston, 1809, Cayetano & Co., Canada, fall 1811.
  FRANKLIN, THOMAS, SR. Clown. Father of rider Thomas Franklin, Jr. Member of English troupe (Breuning), \
  1786; Benjamin Handy troupe (UK, Breuning),
  1788; Handy & Franklin,
  1789; Handy & Franklin,
  1792; Franklin’s,
  1792; Hughes’ (UK),
  1793. With Ricketts’ circus, New York City,
  1797, and a southern tour with Francis Ricketts that same year.
  Thayer credits him with taking out the fourth multi-act circus in America, in association with a Mr. Johnson (or Johnston), an actor.
  They exhibited their equestrian skills in a piece called The Peasant of the Alps at a location that had once been the site of Lailson’s circus.
  Began in NYC, February 8, 1799, and continued until March 19. Also made other stops but apparently was soon disbanded. Lattin & Franklin,
  1802; Langley & Co.,
  1802. One of Franklin’s feats was that of balancing a horse on which his son was seated, perhaps by holding up a platform while on his hands and knees;
  however it was accomplished, must have been a man of great strength. Died in America.
  FRANKLIN, W. E. (March 3, 1853-March 29, 1936) Agent. Born near Lexington, IL. In charge of reserve seat privilege for Joel E. Warner,
  1874; show closed before the end of the season; Franklin went with Doc Hoffman’s. Agent, Pullman & Hamilton,
  1875; general agent, Shelby, Pullman & Hamilton, 1876-1881; agent, King, Burk & Co., 1883-1887; King & Franklin,
  1888. Following King’s death, Franklin operated the show alone. Railroad contractor and excursion agent, Barnum & Bailey, 3 years; general agent,
  Walter L. Main’s, 1895; John Robinson’s, 1896-97; 1897-98. Went out with Robinson & Franklin Shows; then joined Hagenbeck-Wallace as general agent,
  with which he remained 9 years. Followed with an engagement with Sells-Floto, 1909-10.
  Then retired from the business to Valparaiso, IN. Died at his home, St. Petersburg, FL, age 73.
  http://www.circushistory.org/Olympians/OlympiansF.htm

 

moved from old forum - http://thuban.spruz.com/forums/?page=post&fid=&id=643F0B23-19D1-4A2C-A778-FAE6A868B0D1&pageindex=8

 

(missing a few photos - if anyone else finds the missing ones i'd appreciate if you can post them)