Odd this day
This particular Tuesday was the “Grandest Night of the Season!”, apparently, and (in a curious phrase) “positively the last night but three!” It was the date when Pablo Fanque’s circus would visit Town Meadows, Rochdale, according to a poster John Lennon bought in an antique shop in Sevenoaks in 1967.
(31 January 1967, to be precise. The Beatles were filming the promotional video for Strawberry Fields Forever at the time at Knole, birthplace of Vita Sackville-West.)
You probably know that when the time came to be writing material for Sgt. Pepper, Lennon sat at home looking at the poster and — either on his own or with Paul McCartney, depending on whose account you read — and plucked whole phrases from the text to create lyrics. Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite! was born.
Famously, Lennon wanted a backing track in which he could “smell the sawdust”, and George Martin combined harmonicas, harmonium and
a tape of Victorian steam organs and calliopes cut up and edited into a kaleidoscopic wash.
That quote is from Ian MacDonald’s (deservedly) legendary Revolution in the Head. A calliope is another kind of steam organ, sending gas or compressed air through large whistles. MacDonald also tells us that Lennon’s desire to ‘smell the sawdust’ was actually one of his more reasonable requests:
He once asked Martin to make one of his songs sound like an orange.
This is all fairly well-known, of course. What’s less so is that Pablo Fanques was born William Darby in Norwich in 1810 and joined the circus at the age of 11, becoming a rope-walker, acrobat and equestrian performer, and ultimately Britain’s first Black circus owner — and one of its most successful, operating for 30 years during circus’ Victorian ‘golden age’.
If Lennon had happened upon a different poster of Pablo’s, the song might have been about
The Lilliputian Wonder, GENERAL TOM THUMB … riding … One, Two, and Three Horses at one time, in the Character of the COURIER OF ST. PETERSBURGH!
…and a horseback juggler, “Asmodeus, or the Devil on Two Sticks!”, culminating in
a Laughable Ballet d’Action, entitled THE THREE SENSIBLES!
Thankfully, he didn’t, and instead — of course — Henry the horse danced the waltz.
