Frank C. Bostock

[3] Bostock set up his own show in 1889[citation needed] and appears in Newcastle-upon-Tyne as "owner" of a travelling menagerie in the 1891 census.

[4] In 1893 he made his first trip to America, partnered with the Ferari Brothers, beginning with a semi-permanent show at Flatbush, Brooklyn.

The tiger had attacked and killed a young keeper called Nielsen a few weeks earlier.

[6] During his time in America, he befriended Theodore Roosevelt who gave Bostock a pet puma named Alice, who had become too big to handle.

[8][9] In 1908, back in England, he brought American Style razzamatazz to a show Bostock's Arena and Jungle at Earls Court.

In America he had encountered the new craze of roller skating and was among the first to bring this type of show to Britain.

[8] Neil Munro gives a satirical account of a marriage ceremony conducted in the lions' cage at Boston & Wombwell's Menagerie while it was based in New City Road, Glasgow, in his Erchie Macpherson story "A Menagerie Marriage", first published in the Glasgow Evening News of 18 April 1910.