While searching through the museum history files for any references to elephants from Bristol Zoo, I came across File 278: Museum Tiger.
Inside was a letter from R. I. Pocock (at that time superintendent at London Zoo) to Bolton (the then current Director of the museum). The relevant part of the letter is transcribed below along with a helpful PS:
Oct 8th 1912
Dear Mr Bolton,
I was very sorry to have missed you by a few hours only at Bristol last week. However, I took a good look at your museum and again much congratulations on the progress and improvements I noticed. I see you are getting more space for exhibition of mammals.
May I remind you that in the old days of the museum when it was at the bottom of Park Street and for many years after its removal to the present site, there was a tigress which is quite historical as being the mother of atkins’ lion-tiger cubs? I think she should be preserved, if possible, as an interesting animal on that account. You may have her still and of her history has been lost, I can vouch for what I tell you about her on the authority of my elder brother who remembers her in the old museum with a label giving those particulars. It is only a few years since she was removed from exhibition gallery.
He then ends the letter with:
P.S. you will find an account of atkin’s hybrids in ‘’The Library of Entertaining Knowledge: Menageries (ed 2) vol. 1, p. 192, 1830
So, initially, we have three questions to answer:
A search on Google for the book1 mentioned in the P.S. of Pocock’s letter, followed by a check with Google Books, gave us the name Thomas Atkins.
Atkins found fame in the early 19th century travelling around England, from about 1814, with his menagerie of wild animals.
In 1832 he purchased an area on the West Derby Road in Liverpool and opened the Liverpool Zoological Gardens on the site in 1833. His wife and two sons carried on running the zoo when he died in 1848, but increasing financial pressures led to its closure in 1863.
The Travelling Menagerie is the term commonly used to describe itinerant animal exhibitions that toured the UK, peaking in the mid to late 19th century before declining in the early 20th century. It reflected the interest generated by new knowledge in the natural sciences and the public’s fascination with the exotic and the dangerous.
The word “menagerie” itself was first used in 17th century France, and referred to collections of both domestic and exotic animals by royalty and aristocracy, for entertainment and prestige.
Colonial expansion brought new and unusual animals into Europe, and a trade developed, with animals stocked in dealers’ yards giving another form of animal exhibition. This exhibition of new and bizarre animals was seen as both entertaining and educational.
In the UK private menageries began to be replaced by Zoological Gardens, starting with the “Gardens and Menagerie of the Zoological Society of London” in 1828, which opened its doors to the general public in 1847. However, zoos were fixed in place and not always open to the general public. Travelling menageries, on the other hand, could take the animals to the public, with the result that the travelling menagerie was, alongside portable theatres and waxworks, the great fairground attraction of the nineteenth century.
The menageries were generally found at seasonal fairs around the country, with often competition between rival menageries at the same fair. The shows had a highly decorative front display with the ‘beast wagons’ placed behind in a rectangle, thus forming an enclosed area. There would be a band and often acrobats or other performers to entice the paying public to enter. The animals themselves could be viewed close up and were often made to perform. These “performances” could include staged fights between animals. In 1825 on two separate occasions, one owner staged fights between his lions and six fighting dogs. It should also be remembered that it wasn’t just the performances that were harsh. The animals spent most of the year travelling across the country in all kinds of weather in very small cages, on poor to almost non-existent roads, a fact that Thomas Frost points out in his book “The Old Showman and the Old London Fairs”2
“It is impossible to do justice to animals which are cooped within the narrow limits of a travelling show, or in any place which does not admit of thorough ventilation. Apart from the impracticability of allowing sufficient space and a due supply of air, a considerable amount of discomfort to the animals is inseparable from continuous jolting about the country in caravans, and from the braying of brass bands and the glare of gas at evening exhibitions.”
The 20th century saw the gradual decline of the travelling menagerie. A 1928 edition of The World’s Fair magazine carried adverts for ground to let at North Park Bootle for the May Day where the menagerie is at the head of the list of invited entertainments, and that Wild Beast Shows take up spaces to let at Grimsby Statute and Pleasure Fair. Some travelling menageries began using human acts such as acrobats, trapeze artists etc. to replace animal performances, and increasing legislation regarding animal welfare saw many shows close down completely.
Atkins (and his menagerie) achieved fame in 1824 when his two of his animals produced three unusual cubs.
One of the these animals was a young two year old male lion (born in the menagerie, a cross between a Barbary lion and a Senegal lioness). This lion was, according to one account, “remarkable for the extreme docility of his disposition as for the beauty of his form.”3
Atkins purchased from, a (?ship’s) captain, a tigress that had been given to him by the Marquis of Hastings from his animal collection in Calcutta. She too was stated to be of a docile nature, and was probably hand reared. Date of the purchase is not stated, but can be worked out from an article published in Nature4
This states that immediately after the purchase of the tigress the two animals were placed into the same den, and that they were together for two years before the first cubs were born. Since the first litter was born in 1824, the date of purchase must have been in 1822.
Because of their similar age temperament, the newly acquired tigress was placed into the same cage as the lion. Over the next 10 years they produced six litters of cubs.
Litter one: Born 24 October 1824, at Windsor. Two males and one female. The tigress refused to let them suckle and so the cubs were raised by a female terrier.
They were presented to King George IV on 1 November 1824, at the Royal Cottage in Windsor Park. He declared them, “The greatest curiosities I have ever seen.” They were then, according to Atkins, given the royal blessing with the words “Long may you live and prosper, and be beneficial to your master.”
Atkins left Windsor with his menagerie a few weeks later, but the royal blessing sadly failed, with the cubs dying in less than a year.
Jacques-Laurent Agasse, 1767–1849, Swiss, active in Britain (from 1800), Group of Whelps Bred between a Lion and a Tigress, 1825, Oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.7.
Litter two: Born 22 April 1825 at Clapham Common. Three cubs, but sexes not recorded. The tigress raised these, and all subsequent litters, but again they lived for only a “short time.”
Litter three: Born 31 December 1826 or 27 at Edinburgh. The confusion over the year is because the date of 1826 is given in a catalogue in the possession of John Atkins (Thomas’ son) with all other sources quoting 1827. One male and two females. All three cubs died after a few months. A skin from one of the cubs was given to the Science and Art Museum in Edinburgh, and another to the British Museum.
Litter four: Born 2 October 1828. One male and two females.
Litter five: Born May 1831 at Kensington. Three cubs, sexes not recorded. These were presented to the Queen, Princess Victoria and the Duchess of Kent, and were taken in 1832 on a tour of Ireland.
Litter six: Born 19 July 1833 at the Zoological Gardens, Liverpool. One male and two females. The male lived for 10 years in the gardens. No life spans recorded for the two females.
Other reports also suggest that there is a (badly) stuffed cub, about a year old, that was given to the Museum of Salisbury4, and another stuffed cub (although the age given in the reference is 6yrs old) at Cambridge Museum5.
It should be noted that Atkins was not the first person to cross breed a lion and tigress. That record can be traced to India in the late 18th century, when a female Bengal tigress was crossed with a male lion, the result of which were three cubs. In 1798, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) made a colour plate of the offspring.
As stated above, the hybrids were given the name Lion-Tigers by George IV. This term seems to have stuck until the 1930s when the term Liger (and Tigon, for the cross between a tiger and a lioness) was introduced.
Well, that seems to answer our first three questions, but it still leaves us with two important follow-up questions:
and the most important of all
One of the first things I wanted to find out was there a record of Atkins’ menagerie ever visiting Bristol? So that meant a trip to the Central Library and a search of the online newspaper archives.
These revealed that the show visited Bristol on several occasions in the 1830s. The cubs would have been on display, but they also revealed numerous other stories and articles about the tigress, the various litters and individual cubs. These animals were 19th Century reality stars!
While I was digging through the written records, Rhian (Bristol Museum’s Natural History curator) was digging through the museum stores to see if she could find some more solid evidence. Pocock’s letter does not state what the tigress specimen was exactly (skin, skeleton, or stuffed mount). But her efforts were rewarded with two potential items:
1. A photograph of a cabinet with two stuffed tigers (no information re: date of photo or cabinet). The lower tiger is that of a man-eater that was in the museum’s collection, and is posed snarling and ready to pounce. The upper tiger on the other hand, is in a peaceful repose, suggesting a more ‘docile’ nature. Could this be our tigress?
2. A tigress skeleton, with no information attached and no record of it in the specimen database. The way it is mounted and the type of base used are consistent with the methods used to display specimens from the mid 19th century to early 20th century.
So, we have a possible photograph of the animal and a potential “body”. But nothing that definitely states the museum had the actual tigress. That is until Rhian found this entry in a museum acquisition book which clearly states:
Tigris
The Tigress remarkable fine
specimen the Mother of
Atkins’s lion tigers
Sadly there is no information regarding who the donor was or the date of the donation. In fact there are no dates at all in the book for any donations that are listed.
And that was how the situation stood until the end of the year, and then we had help from the geology department!
Poly Bence, a PhD Student, was examining a scrapbook belonging to Miller, the first museum director, in the Bristol Archives and took some photographs of several pages.
These were given to Deborah Hutchinson (Geology curator), who seeing this entry, immediately contacted Rhian:
has purchased for £ 8 a fine Tigress from Atkins’s show menagerie . –
She cost him 7 years ago £260, now the Mother of 3 Broods litters of Lion-tigers & one of Tigers. – She died at Upton on Severn. – She makes an enormous fine stuffed specimen & her Bones now in maceration will probably make a splendid Skeleton
Sadly there was no date on the page, but I made a follow up visit and searched through the scrapbook. This page was part of one of the annual reports Miller made to the Museum Committee and the year’s date was easily readable.
However it, and some newspaper archive articles and dates leads to a twist in this tigress’s tale! Stay tuned for the next chapter.
After the bombing of Bristol Natural Sciences Museum in 1940, many specimens and their records were lost. In some cases, only the specimens themselves remained. The collections at Bristol have also been moved many times (across sites and around the current museum). This has resulted in records ending up misplaced or lost. It’s one of […]
‘Museomics’ is the genetic study of ancient (aDNA) or historical (hDNA) museum samples. Methods of analysis include DNA barcoding and shotgun sequencing. DNA analysis shows genetic variation across geographic distributions, allowing identification of species’ origin. Museomics can provide information on specimens and their life histories. This information has relevance in education, conservation, and advancing genetic […]
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery’s Natural History collection is made up of about 650,000 specimens including taxidermy, skeletal material, shells, pinned invertebrates, pickled specimens and beautifully preserved pressed plants. These are complemented by a rare books library, field note books, archive documents and photographs. Built up by donations from local people, curators, and groups including […]
The Geology collection contains more than half a million rocks, fossils and minerals. Its quality, size and diversity make it one of the most significant regional collections in the UK. Specimens in this collection reveal the amazing and diverse geology of Bristol and the South West of England. Fossils give a glimpse of life in the […]
The bones of the Bristol dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus antiquus, (or ‘Theco’ as he’s known at the museum) were discovered by quarrymen in 1834 in Triassic rocks just up the road from Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Scientific research has revealed that herds of Thecodontosaurus roamed Bristol about 210 million years ago, when it was a landscape of small tropical islands. […]