10
Popular Culture Review
act is comprised of a sequence of feats or tricks of graduated difficulty, each
trick with an established pattern of movements passed down through generations
of performers; solo trapeze action was invented in 1859 and has an identifiable
international history (Gossard 1994; Tait 2005). Allowing for apparatus
innovations and advances in technique, most tricks can still be viewed in circus
performance today.
Twentieth-century circus programs advertise everything from ointment for
muscular pain to rope and tyres: “Sloan’s Liniment” names wire-walker Con
Colleano and aerialists Ernest Clarke and Patricia Cartier; Plymouth rope names
solo aerialist, Lalage; and “Firestone tyres” names the gorilla, Gargantua
(RBBBC Program and magazines in 1946: 61, 65; in 1950: 36). Cigarette
advertisements were common in 1930s American circus programs and in the
British circus programs of Bertram Mills Circus at Olympia, but mostly without
direct links to the actual performance or performers. Camel was an annual
advertiser with RBBBC, the world’s biggest circus, alternating a drawn strip
with performers and more conventional promotional photographic images such
as a sophisticated woman smoking in the 1941 program, and topically,
uniformed servicemen in 1943 and 1944. As indicated, the Camel
advertisements featured RBBBC’s leading performers of each annual season so
that the male high wire performer, Harold Alzana (Coxe 1980: 164; Fawcett
1949: 97), was featured in two photographs in the 1949 Camel advertisement
working with a skipping rope and walking a 45 degree incline. Subsequent to the
1951 advertisement with Fox, however, Camel RBBBC advertisements used
photographs of major male movie stars like Charlton Heston, a star of The
Greatest Show on Earth, and Dick Powell (RBBBC program and magazine
1953: 17; 1954: 17).
Norma Fox remembers that the RBBBC management arranged the
advertisements, and although the performers received a s