Clubs

If you thought the only time London hosted a freak show was when Peter Crouch came to town, think again. This week, Circus of Horrors will bring ‘grotesque oddities and bizarre acts’ who’ll dislocate joints and put vacuum cleaners on their penises in front of an appreciative audience. Last November, the Texas Chainsaw Travelling Horror Picture Show nailed themselves to crosses. Next month, Paul L Martin starts his own London freak show. Feature continues

All this is very much in keeping with a noble London tradition of public exhibitionism and vaudeville sideshows. Try these characters for size: Chang and Eng the Siamese twins, Jo Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, Hairy Mary from Borneo, the Irish Giant (whose skeleton is on display at the Royal College of Surgeons), Zip the Pinhead, Mary Anne Bevan the World’s Ugliest Woman and the Balloon-Headed Baby. Sounds like the cast of a Tom Waits song, but it’s actually a list of freak show attractions who appeared in and around London during the genre’s heyday in the nineteenth century. Such displays were legion and immensely popular: at the huge Egyptian Hall, a music hall masquerading as an Egyptian theatre on Piccadilly, a ‘living male child with four arms, four legs, four feet and two bodies’ was exhibited to popular acclaim in 1837; in 1829, Chabert the Fire King appeared at the famous Argyll Rooms on Regent Street, swallowing phosphorous and boiling oil before sitting in an oven cooking steaks and singing a song. Sure beats ‘Chicago’.

In 1806, a fat man of 32 stone was exhibited at Piccadilly – ‘The Annals Of London’ says he was ‘A stupendous mass of flesh, whose thighs are so covered by his belly that nothing but his knees are to be seen.’ Take that, Channel 4.

While London’s freakshow tradition dates back to the Georgian era, it took PT Barnum to elevate it to theatre. The circus man’s first great London success came with General Tom Thumb, a five-year-old boy called Charles Stratton who hadn’t grown since he was six months old and so stood at 25 inches tall. Barnum pretended Thumb was ten years old and taught him to sing, dance, do impersonations, drink wine and smoke cigars. Thumb came to London in 1844, and Queen Victoria requested an audience; Thumb survived an attack from the Royal poodle to entertain the Queen at Buckingham Palace, cementing his fame and Barnum’s fortune.

Demeaning though their treatment was, Barnum’s exhibits at least had the shadow of glamour hanging over them and Tom Thumb died wealthy. Not so some of London’s other unfortunate freaks, most infamously the grossly deformed Joseph Merrick, who in 1884 was exhibited at the back of a shop in Whitechapel as the Elephant Man. Soon after this, freak shows were banned in the United Kingdom, and their popularity gradually diminished as attitudes towards the disabled softened. That said, Tod Browning’s sympathetic 1931 sideshow film ‘Freaks’ was still deemed too shocking and was banned for 30 years.

The freak show renaissance came in the 1990s, when the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow started performing in Seattle before touring with Perry Farrell’s Lollapalooza. The artists were expected to perform outrageous, eye-watering stunts rather than just stand there to be stared at – so Rose employed Torture King, who speared himself with skewers, and most famously, the Amazing Mr Lifto, who lifted weights with his cockring. This has now become the template for modern freakshows, which mix gothic and horror elements with extreme human behaviour. Anything goes. Especially if it involves the penis. Barnum would be proud.

‘Circus of Horrors’ is on Jan 23 and 24 at the Hackney Empire.