Oscar Carré

Carré initially used a temporeary, wooden circus building, which had to be demolished in 1880 by order of the municipality due to fire hazard.

Through bonds, he managed to raise the required construction fees of 300,000 guilders; in April 1887, pile driving began and the building was completed eight months later.

[1] Carré's career is described in the work De bonte droom van het Circus, which was published in 1956 in a very large print run by the Nederlands Zuivelbureau.

In it it is recounted that in 1897 in Scheveningen, after the death of his second wife and in the face of bankruptcy (due, among other things, to increasing competition from the variety show), Carré could not tolerate that his cherished Trakehner stallions would end up with strangers, and that he therefore led them to the dunes and shot them.

It is reported that Empress Elisabeth of Austria received riding lessons from him when she was in the Netherlands for treatment of her arthritic complaints at the Amstel Hotel located a stone's throw from the theater.

At the turn of the century, Oscar Carré had selected the Hees estate (in Nijmegen) to rest with the entire circus after the touring summer months.

The building in Nijmegen (Hees) was reused for other purposes soon after Oscar's death in 1911, including storage shed, brick factory, garage business and car parts store.