Graham spent a very useful couple of days in Oxford, finding five other books that mentioned The Blythe Brothers. Slowly, he built up a picture of what this motley collection of dancers, animal trainers, storytellers and downright freaks had been about. They had been active from around 1700 to 1713, even travelling on continental Europe thanks to hops across the English Channel.
The human side of the show was a mixed bag. There had been a man with three arms, a bald lady, a sword swallower, someone who was referred to as simply ‘a Turkish man’, dancers and acrobats of all descriptions, and several storytellers, fortune tellers, and jokesters.
The menagerie, Graham learned, had originally been the central part of the travelling show, but had lost importance, primarily because the animals died off and were never replaced. They had originally owned a tiger, a lioness, three Egyptian camels, several African antelopes, and even an Indian elephant called Kapu. An ostrich was mentioned by several sources as having taken pride of place in the collection. In the winter, when the show returned to the Midlands of England until the following spring, the menagerie was kept in the grounds of a stately home near Worcester.
Graham read in one bulky tome dating from 1842 called Stories Of Creatures Both Fantastic And Real From The Old Europe of a ridiculous attempt by the Blythe Brothers Show to pass off a skinny horse as a camel, complete with a hump made of straw and mud. Predictably, this had ended in ridicule and no small amount of anger and they’d moved on quickly to the next village.
It was on the Sunday afternoon, an hour or two before he planned to head back to Bristol, that Graham struck gold. He found the most detailed reference to the storyteller he’d yet seen: three paragraphs in a book that was so fragile that it was only viewable on the Bodleian’s microfilm viewer. The book, titled An Essay On A Journey To Anglia And The Continent: Diplomatic Adventures And Our Cultures Compar’d was a turgid effort by an unlikeable, arrogant member of the English aristocracy. In 1708, the author had witnessed a performance of the Blythe Brothers Travelling Show on the northern outskirts of Norwich in the east of England.
He wrote condescending passages about how the “simple working folk of this district passed away an afternoon of vulgar pleasures.” A bear had indeed danced for them and even swam in a nearby river with some of the children. The bald woman was mentioned too, having caused the alarmed men of the town to question her gender. The menagerie at the time must have been more or less complete for Graham saw references to most of the animals he’d read about in other books. Then he saw what he was looking for:
The storyteller placed himself high on a branch of a tree and beneath, a hundred or more listened. This man so tall spake with words that were to my ears mighty peculiar. He told the citizens of Norwich about his world, across the great oceans, he said. In his world, I heared him say, a man can travel faster than ten horses and roast a whole fowl in mere minutes. He spake of things that were too fantastic for normal human reason to investigate, but the folk did not wish him ill fortune nor speak poorly of him. Every soul I witnessed enjoyed the show and his stories caused mirth and merriment. He finished with a sweet melody on the lyre.
Graham leaned back from the screen, stunned. He flew back up to the beginning of the book on the viewer to see again the publication date: London, 1739. He had arrived in Oxford expecting to discover how some deceitful Victorian historian had invented the story in the 19th century, but here, only three decades after the event was supposed to have taken place, was a written account that didn’t deviate hardly at all from the story he’d read in the book found in Salisbury market.
Graham noted every word of what he’d read that was relevant and drove the two hours to his home. There were so few pieces in this jigsaw puzzle, the majority of them lost in the mists of time. Who cared about a small-time travelling show that had moved around one corner of northern Europe for a decade or so three hundred years ago? It was the whiff of that something utterly magnificent within the tale that captivated Graham and held the story at the front of his mind for the next six months.