THE BALLOON MAN

Remembering Merseyside 1950s circus glamour girl Joan Fowles

Dec 24 2011 by William Leece, Liverpool Echo
William Leece discovers the life of circus glamour girl Joan Fowles
IN the cold, cheerless and austere years after the Second World War, Joan Fowles was the Liverpool glamour girl who brought colour, warmth and romance.
Countless youngsters have dreamed of giving up their ordinary life and joining the romantic world of the travelling circus. Joan was the one who stopped dreaming and went out and did it.
When she married in the 1950s, the crowds turned to line the streets as if she were royalty.
It was Liverpool-born Brenda Gilligan, now a solicitor in Lincolnshire, who asked if the ECHO could dig something up on Joan’s history. She had found a reference in an old book of the circus, and was intrigued to discover that Joan, like her, was from Old Swan.
Her first thought would have been to ask her parents. “You know what Liverpudlians are like for knowing each others business,” she said, “but my dad died last September and my mum this June, so I can't.”
In fact Joan Fowles had been brought up in Leinster Road in Old Swan, and had first joined Bertram Mills Circus as a ticket girl and dancer. But she was determined to do more in the ring, and persuaded the ringmaster to give her a try-out riding horses.
READ MORE AT: http://www.southportvisiter.co.uk/southport-news/southport-southport-news/2011/12/24/remembering-merseyside-1950s-circus-glamour-girl-joan-fowles-100252-30004997/