Black Victorian Circus Owner Should Be Taught In Schools, Say Academics

He was one of 19th-century England’s most famous circus owners and greatest showmen. Pablo Fanque put on some of the era’s most lavish spectacles in some of its grandest big tops.

- Colin Drury

As an acrobat and horse handler, he was considered unrivalled. “We have never seen his skills in equestrian surpassed or equalled,” wrote the Illustrated London News in 1847.

So loved was this entertainer that when he died in 1871 thousands of people lined the streets of Leeds for his funeral. Almost a century later, he would be name-checked in the Beatles song “Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!” Yet there was something else notable about Fanque’s success in Victorian Britain: he was a man of colour.

The Norwich-born performer – thought to be the son of an African or Caribbean servant and an English mother – was the world’s first black circus owner. Now, as Black History Month begins, a string of top academics are calling for his remarkable life to be included in the national curriculum. They reckon that his story should be used as a vivid and engaging starting point for a new syllabus area exploring the oft-ignored diversity of working-class British history.

“Fanque’s life was absolutely fascinating,” says Dr Richard Maguire, senior lecturer in history at the University of East Anglia and leader of a new research group reviewing how black history could be better integrated into the syllabus. “His story is one full of triumph and tragedy, and I think that would make it very appealing to young people. But he is also just one example of the rich diversity that has been inherent in British communities dating back at least to the mediaeval period.”