Performing with a Monster Menagerie: A Circus Bandsman’s Perspective

Born into a labouring-class community of Birmingham metalworkers, Teddy King (1867-1942) became one of the myriad professional musicians accompanying popular touring entertainments throughout nineteenth-century Britain, Europe and America. Teddy’s career as a circus bandsman exemplifies how urban industrialisation and technological advances opened new routes into the music profession. Itinerant entertainments blurred cultural class boundaries by bringing arrangements of continental opera, oratorio and symphonic works, as well as traditional, music hall and dance hall favourites, to socially mixed urban and rural audiences; while global colonialism and imperialism shaped the forces and repertoire of touring bands through a drive to exhibit ‘exotic’ animals and people within a soundscape evocative of their distant origins, and through the employment of military instruments and immigrant or ex-military performers, including disabled veterans.
This chapter demonstrates the application of a novel research methodology to interpret and corroborate unique primary archives of Teddy’s professional life in light of civic records, printed memoirs, newspaper reports, ephemera and archive photographs. It further illustrates how circus musicians’ repertoire, musical skills and playing style can be reconstructed with reference both to manuals and descriptions of animal-taming and other acts, and to published sheet music composed to replicate the circus soundscape. Teddy’s eyewitness account of opportunities, hardships and dangers encountered while travelling with circus and menagerie bands also offers rare personal insights into the working conditions which motivated contemporary movements towards the unionisation of musicians, whose ‘aristocratic’ appearance and high-quality performances, combined with glamourised reporting of fatal or injurious accidents, concealed the precarious, physically demanding nature of their employment from dazzled audiences.