The Daily Mail, January 4th 1897

In 1897, Queen Victoria was to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee. It was also the year when the very first conviction was issued for drink-driving, the year Oscar Wilde was released from prison and Marconi sent the very first wireless communication. Over in Africa, the British Army responded to insurgence in what is now Nigeria, by burning the entire historic city of Benin to the ground. The Marquess of Salisbury was Conservative Prime-Minister, the very last Prime-Minister to lead the government from the House of Lords. 

New Year had just dawned in 1897 in London in this era of transition and change when an enterprising Daily Mail reporter caught up with George Wombwell junior, and made him the subject of an extensive profile, detailing his journey to fame and glory and back into poverty and humiliation.

It would almost certainly have been one of Hetty Jane Owen's Bradley relatives who cut the story from the paper, and added it to her family scrapbook, from where it made its way eventually into Harold Eldridge's box-file. 

Courtesy of the Mail, which even in 1897, seemed to have a highly developed penchant for sensationalism and rhetorical hyper-ventilating, the story of George Wombwell junior can be told as least to some extent in his own words.