Great dynasties of the world: The Chipperfields A circus entertainer with dreams beyond the big top

Ian Sansom The Guardian, Saturday 15 May 2010
Article historyAccording to contemporary accounts, during the Great Frost of 1683-84, the river Thames, frozen solid for two months with ice a foot thick, became like a city. "The Thames before London was ... planted with booths in formal streets, all sorts of trades and shops furnished ... bull-baiting, horse and coach races, puppet plays and interludes ... so that it seemed to be a bacchanalian triumph or carnival on the water." One of the entertainers at this extraordinary carnival was a young man named James Chipperfield, with his menagerie of performing animals.
And so the Great Frost saw the beginning of a long line of Chipperfield family performers, who entertained crowds up and down the country for many years with their fortune-telling ponies and wrestling bears. There have been other famous English family circus clans: the Sangers, the Fossetts, the Rosaires, the Purchases. But none of them ever achieved the fame or fortune of the Chipperfields. That the Chipperfield name survives to this day is largely down to the hard work and daring of Jimmy Chipperfield – born in the top bunk of a touring caravan in 1912, died a multi-millionaire in 1990.
In his autobiography, My Wild Life (1975), Jimmy recalls the family circus as it was at the start of the 20th century. "Not only did members of the family own the show and run it: they were the clowns, the acrobats and the animal trainers; they built the tent and pulled it down; they made and painted the ornate facade and even played enough instruments to form a band ... for a child brought up in this tightly knit circle it was impossible to imagine the existence of another, bigger world outside."
But Jimmy could imagine another, a bigger world. He was restless. He had ambitions. In the early 1930s, Jimmy married Rosie Purchase, of the Purchase family travelling menagerie. When Rosie's father was mauled to death by a lion, the two shows amalgamated, with Jimmy's father and then Jimmy himself, effectively becoming the head of the two clans. The combined circus started touring abroad. Jimmy – who wrestled bears – started working with The Crazy Gang at the London Palladium.
The second world war should have put paid to the Chipperfields: their equipment was requisitioned; they couldn't afford to feed the animals. Jimmy joined the RAF and became a fighter pilot, but he knew he would one day return to the family business: "I was determined not just that we should revive the show, but that we should make it one of the biggest and best circuses in the country," he said. Sure enough, by Easter 1946, the Chipperfield circus was back on tour.

At this stage, there were four members of the family running the show: Jimmy, his brother Dick, younger brother John, and their sister Marjorie.
In order to expand they started bringing in other acts. They bought elephants, employed clowns. And, as Jimmy had dreamed, by the mid-1950s Chipperfield's circus was the greatest in the land. They employed 250 people and their tent, the biggest in the world, seated nearly 9,000 people. The Chipperfield children went to private schools. Jimmy drove a Rolls-Royce and had his own private planes. But in 1955, at the height of their success, Jimmy walked away, leaving the family business to his brother Dicky. Again, Jimmy was restless. He was ambitious.
After years of what he called "fumblings-about" – training animals for Walt Disney, farming, organising showjumping trials – Jimmy hit upon the idea of a drive-through safari park, of a kind that then existed only in Africa. The Lions of Longleat opened in 1966. The Chipperfield Circus ceased touring in the 1990s. Performing animals can still be seen on Britain's Got Talent.