The Reverend Thomas Horne

Rev. Thomas Horne. From the
Sheffield University Fairgrounds Site.

When E.H. Bostock decided to lend a helping hand to the elderly George Wombwell junior, and provide the funds to settle him in a home, he employed the services of Reverend Thomas Horne.

The Rev. Horne in truth must have been well used to picking up the pieces of the lives of indigent showmen, and knew better than most the perils of the business. He himself came from fairground stock and first appeared on a show-front at the age of three. He was a partner in a ghost illusion show before turning his talents to a not dissimilar career in the church.

Horne was a tireless advocate of the rights of the showmen, and in particular campaigned against the Moveable Dwelling Act proposed in 1889 by George Smith, becoming Chaplain to the United Kingdom Van Dwellers' Association, later to become The Showmen's Guild. He died in 1918.

The Moveable Dwelling Act was not George Smith's first foray into the world of the travellers. In the 1870s, he had been heavily involved in proposing legislation that would ensure the registration of the Victorian canal dwellers with local authorities and ensuring that their children received an education, and that the sanitary conditions of their dwellings were also regulated and inspected. The Moveable Dwelling Act proposed applying the same principles to dry-land travellers, including circus, menageries and the like.

One might have thought that a man of the church like the Rev. Horne would have had some sympathy for such ambitions. Far from it. Horne and the showmen fought indefatigably to keep the authorities out of their lives, and to maintain the nomadic lifestyle they had chosen to adopt. The campaign succeeded and the act was dropped. For the showmen though, it must have been an early signal that their traditional way of life was not going to last forever.