[4] Gerry Cottle was educated at Rutlish School, Merton Park, south London and left home in 1961 at the age of 16 to join the Robert Brothers Circus.
[5] Cottle started by doing menial tasks, but worked his way up to have his own juggling act, billed as Gerry Melville the Teenage Juggler,[6] and then to own his own show,[7] which opened in July 1970, with just five performers.
[8] In 1995, he co-created The Circus of Horrors with Doktor Haze which debuted at the Glastonbury Festival and has toured the world since then.
[13] In 2003 he auctioned off much of his circus paraphernalia in order to concentrate on running Wookey Hole Caves, a tourist attraction in Somerset.
[15] Gerry Cottle's Circus originally toured with a variety of animals including horses, zebras, elephants, lions, tigers, monkeys, and llamas.
[22] Cottle died in hospital in Bath, Somerset, in January 2021, aged 75, after contracting COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom.