Circus Hours

A Bostock production from 1928, illustrating that the menagerie had become, in truth, a circus.


This brings to an end this brief glimpse into the days of the Wombwell and Bostock menagerie. It is a remarkable story, and as far as Hetty Jane Owen’s ancestral roots are concerned, the whole connection was sparked by an apparently chance meeting in the late eighteenth century between a simple Essex farmer and a girl from Downpatrick of far more distinguished origins but intent on escaping something in her recent Irish past. 

Settled in Stoke Newington, the couple raised their two children and played an ancillary role most likely in the logistics management of the menagerie enterprise. Richard Wombwell, the first cousin of George Wombwell, died in 1833, too late probably to benefit from the incomes that his wife Maria West was about to receive from her newly acquired Irish fee-farm rentals. Comfortably off by this point, Maria would not have needed to concern herself too much more with elephants and tigers and boa constrictors and the like.

She lived on in Stoke Newington until 1846, long enough to see the birth of most, if not all, of the nine grandchildren that were to emerge from the marriage of Harriett Wombwell and Charles Robinson.

And a century and a half-later, when their descendants had lost track of their Irish origins, and much else besides, they were still talking about the Wombwells and their menagerie.