Tony Lord: When the Circus came to Clifton, summer of 1944

The summer of 1944 found me finishing my training at a Royal Naval hospital near Bristol.

During the evenings my mate Sid and I would hitch-hike into the much bombed city, pick up a couple of girls and take them to the pictures at the cinema which had fortunately escaped destruction three years before.

Sid was a bit of a smoothie and would chat up the young ladies while I hovered in the background because I was ugly, wore glasses and was prone to getting pimples on my face.

There was one embarrassing occasion when we hadn’t got the price of admission to the Odeon so we wandered up to a circus which had pitched its tents on the Downs at Clifton.

As well as the big top there was a roundabout, a helter-skelter and a small tent which housed a freak show.

The man in charge looked at our uniforms and let us in for nothing.

He probably thought we’d been dive-bombed, torpedoed or had spent a week in a lifeboat before we were rescued.

Inside the tent was a two-headed sheep in a big glass jar and a lot of faded sepia photographs of the World’s tallest man (7ft 2ins), an asset to any basketball team I would have thought.

There was a bearded lady, Siamese twins and the famous Tom Thumb, perfectly proportioned and only two feet two inches tall.

Sitting at the end of the tent was a couple, a man and his wife, whose combined weight was 62 stones.

We stared at them and they stared at us.

The woman mutely held out a postcard sized photo of the two of them.

“Only sixpence”, she said. I felt so sorry for them that I bought one and then we got out of the place as fast as we could.

I’m sad to say that I’ve lost the photo over the ensuing 75 years.

I gave it to my mother to keep safe while I was away on the other side of the world helping John Wayne win the war against the Japanese invaders. She sold my bike too.

Somebody who would have made these two look skinny was ‘Billy Bonno’ (real name Jessie Baker) who toured with Bostock and Wombwell’s travelling circus as the heaviest man in the UK.

He was a genial man, had a flow of entertaining conversation and weighed 44 stone.

In March, 1904 the circus was in Lancashire and Billy decided to visit friends in Blackburn.

Unfortunately he caught a chill on the journey which turned into pneumonia.

He died in Blackburn infirmary aged 37. He was buried in Preston cemetery. A suitable coffin had to be made to accommodate his body.

His neck measured 27 inches, chest 69 inches and his waist an astonishing 73 inches. The coffin was seven feet in length and three and a half feet in width.

The gravediggers at Preston had the hard task of excavating an eight foot by five foot grave in the bone-hard icy ground.

Despite the cold weather there was a large gathering to say ‘Goodbye’ to Billy as 14 men lowered the coffin into the grave.