Harriett Wombwell and James Edmonds

This Harriett Wombwell is not to be confused with Harriett, the daughter of Maria West. 


Rather, she is the second daughter of William Wombwell, and grand-daughter of George’s elder brother, Samuel. Harriett was born in 1815 in Braintree. She married James Edmonds. It was to this Harriett that George Wombwell was to bequeath Menagerie Number Two in his final will. 

And so under new management, the caravan wheels rolled on, the census returns scattered over the atlas of Britain, women giving birth on the road, and - in this strangely egalitarian community - assuming roles from the bottom to the top of the organization. 

Below in the 1881 census, is Harriett, aged sixty-six on the road in Grantham, Lincolnshire.

James himself had worked his way up through the menagerie hierarchy. There is a report concerning him from 1866, albeit not of a particularly impressive nature:


This was the very same year that George Wombwell junior had been dispatched to Paris to replace one of the menagerie elephants that had just died, and the very same James Edmonds who had purchased Jamrach's famous Bengal tiger, the tiger that 'ate the boy on the Ratcliffe Road'. 

In 1884, the management of the menagerie passed to the son of James and Harriett, James Charles Edmonds, Coincidentally, James Charles had married, in 1879, Albertina Jamrach, daughter of Charles Jamrach, properly, Johann Christian Carl Jamrach, for the owner of the famous East London animal emporium was in fact an immigrant from Hamburg, Germany.