We have shown that a remarkable range of performers who were touring Britain and abroad, week-in and week-out during the last decade of the nineteenth century turned up to perform on Midsummer Common or in Auckland Road. Coming to a little circus in Cambridge was just a small part of their lives. This section comprises brief biographies of some of those women and men who found real fame elsewhere, or who were particularly brave, foolhardy or bizarre.
A name in an advertisement or an account in a local press review would be the gateway to this dramatis personae whose lives crop up in academic and popular accounts of circus history, in the regional newspapers and in the pages of The Era. How else would one even begin to learn about the Lady Clown, the Man Fish or the Human Arrow?
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William Tudor's Circus 