How do elephants keep in touch? Answer, they make trunk calls. Apologies for that old joke. Today, many people would find nothing funny about elephants being exploited for commercial gain and might take offence at the sight of the world’s largest land mammals being paraded through urban streets as an advertising gimmick.
But as you can see from the pictures on this page it was commonplace in days gone by for a line of marching elephants to announce that the circus was in town. Or in city to be more precise in the case of the photo that captures the arrival of Billy Smart’s Circus in Gloucester in 1965.
A dozen strong cavalcade of elephants trudged trunk to tail from the central railway station, up Eastgate Street, over the Cross and down Westgate Street to perform at the big top on the Oxleaze.
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To stage such a stunt with live animals today would be impossible, not least because public taste has moved on and animal liberationists would be up in arms.
But the parade was continuing a tradition that went back decades. The photo from 1904 shows elephants and performers from a travelling circus marching into Church Street, Tewkesbury. This wasn’t the first time such exotic creatures had been seen in the town. In July 1841 Van Amburgh’s circus set up its big top in Swilgate Meadow.
Like all good circuses of the time, Van Amburgh’s featured a performing elephant. Being the star of the show, Jumbo was taken to reserved accommodation in outbuildings behind the Plough Inn, which then stood in the High Street. However, he wasn’t securely tethered.
During the night a breeze got up, wafting whiffs from a nearby brewery into his sleeping compartment and our floppy eared hero finding the aroma much to his liking went walkabout.
The elephant was first discovered some time later in Smith’s Lane snacking on a tree he’d uprooted. Then proceeding in the direction of the brewery, he waded through a row of back gardens knocking down fences and attracting a group of followers who’d come from their beds to see what was causing the commotion.
At last our elephant arrived at the brewery, which had a narrow entrance. In this he stuck fast. The local constabulary was called and with great resourcefulness, plus buckets of soapy water, managed to extricate the elephant and march him back to his quarters.
Something similar was recorded in Cheltenham. In March 1934 a line of jumbos was padding along Albion Street when one of their number sniffed the heady aroma coming from Bloodworth’s, the agricultural merchants. The rich mixture of hay, seed corn, molasses and who knows what else provided a temptation too great for one of the strolling creatures to ignore. Breaking free from its fellows, the elephant strolled purposefully into the shop and ate a whole sack of seed potatoes.
This event, by the way, is recorded in a mural on the wall of the passage that runs off the Strand pedestrian precinct.
On another occasion in the 1930s when elephants were en route for the circus site at Oakley (close to where Sainsbury’s now stands), another incident happened, again in Albion Street.
This time it was the smell of cakes and bread from Leopold’s bakery that attracted the attention of a sweet toothed elephant. Fortunately the animal sensed that its girth was too great for the doorway, so jumbo stood outside the shop and reaching in with its trunk enjoyed a good feed of drippers, doughnuts and Chelsea buns. For years afterwards the logo on Leopold’s paper bags and stationery featured an elephant.
Bertram Mill’s Circus staged an elephant themed publicity stunt on a visit to the town in May 1940. Half a dozen young jumbos were marched along to the Town Hall where a female attendant brought out jugs of spa water for them to guzzle.
The photograph you see here first appeared in the Cheltenham Chronicle and Graphic, but it’s difficult to tell from the expression on their faces if the salty waters were to the elephants’ taste.
One final elephant tale. Squadron leader Bill Waterton joined the Gloster Aircraft Company as a test pilot in 1946. He tested a number of the early jets pioneered by the local company. Some of these, such as the Meteor and Javelin, were hugely successful. Others were not. One of the flops was the E1/ 44, which Waterton dubbed the Gloster Gormless.
The “tubby, trunkless. silver winged elephant of an aeroplane”, as Waterton described it, was trouble from the start. The first prototype was irreparably damaged when it fell off a lorry. Then the next shook so violently in taxiing trials that its nose fell off.
