The Elephant Who Walked to Manchester

There was a famous postscript to the selling off in Edinburgh of Menagerie Number One by Alexander Fairgrieve. This concerned Maharajah, the Indian Elephant, who at seven foot tall was the largest lot on offer, and was picked up for 680 pounds by James Jennison, who was the proprietor of the Belle Vue gardens in Manchester.

In an echo of Peto the elephant's refusal to board ship for George Wombwell junior in Paris in 1866, Maharajah refused to board the (Northern) British Railway train from Edinburgh to Manchester. The keeper, Lorenzo Lawrence, did not panic. He simply walked Maharajah the two hundred miles to Manchester, where Maharajah died, aged eighteen, in 1882.

Copied from https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/05/10/elephant-walked-manchester/Heywood 

Heywood Hardy’s 1875 painting A Disputed Toll, from Manchester Art Gallery, portraying Lawrence and the toll-collector in dispute. The story was that the elephant pulled the gate up from its hinges, and that the pair marched on.

The story of Maharajah is the subject of a book by David Barnaby.