In one now infamous photo, Anne sits on a tub, rearing unnaturally on her hind legs as her owner grins for the camera. In the background is his brightly-coloured van emblazoned with the words ‘Bobby Roberts Super Circus’. It’s a haunting and dated image, a relic from a past era in a world where circuses were primetime entertainment and performing animals their biggest stars. The jolly photo conceals the cruel reality of what animals like Anne, Britain’s last circus elephant, had to endure to become the Big Top’s main attraction. It reveals nothing of the life of performance and exploitation she and other creatures suffered after being snatched from their natural habitats and put to work in the circus.
Anne was once a big circus star and a popular attraction. She and her fellow elephants paraded down the street from the train station to the showground to announce the arrival of the circus in town. Her photo was pasted up on billboards and children queued to have their picture taken with her. But times changed and attitudes followed them. Circuses increasingly abandoned exotic animal acts as discomfort grew over their lives and conditions until Anne was the last circus elephant left in Britain.
Suddenly, instead of the star performer she was a throwback, a symbol of a bygone age when circuses dominated the television schedules and elephants competed with brightly painted clowns and daring trapeze artists for the spotlight. As her movements became more faltering – a legacy of her age and arthritis – the disquiet over her life of servitude and drudgery grew. In around 2006, she was retired from appearing in the main shows, but was still rolled out to pose for pictures for £6 a time during the interval.
As the Robertses’ circus travelled the country, playing to increasingly dwindling audiences, a growing chorus of animal rights protesters followed it and dogged its every move. The moment the circus pitched up in a town, complaints were filed with the local council. These were often successful and Bobby was refused permission for Anne to perform and on one occasion, for photos to be taken of her. It didn’t seem to be an ideal life for our largest land mammal more commonly used to patrolling large areas of forest and jungle in the company of its family. But what was life really like for her in the greatest show on earth?
Every circus season she was forced to perform painful and demeaning tricks such as having to rear up on her hind legs – something vets say causes incredible pressure on the back hips. As mentioned earlier, she drags at least one of her back legs due to arthritis now. She also had to stand on a tiny stool and gallop around the ring with various performers on her back, like dancers and clowns. Furthermore, when the circus closed after the summer season every year, she stayed in crowded winter quarters, shackled by iron chains round her ankles which allowed her to move just a step or so to each side.
When she was touring, the journeys were long and often not broken up, according to ADI, who say they monitored her movements for years. Tim claims that she regularly did eighteen-hour trips in a transporter in which she and the other animals were chained so that they couldn’t move around. ADI claim they saw elephants whipped during a circus performance in 1995, and that they had to live in a car park when the circus visited Glasgow in 2000. After that, they claim that they followed the elephant truck from Glasgow back down to Polebrook and saw the circus stop for the night on the way without taking the elephants out. On another expedition on 16 June 2002 from Blackpool to Carlisle, they claim that Anne spent nineteen hours in a transporter. Bobby and Moira deny these allegations.
And it wasn’t just the performance aspect that would have impacted on her. The realities of travelling circuses are harsh ones for animals. Constantly having to move from place to place, they endure being transported in beastwagons for long stretches of time. They have to be restrained within these trailers and then they must wait to be offloaded. The circuses then set up on whatever land is available, which is often insufficient for their needs given that in the wild they would normally have vast tracts of land to roam. For health and safety reasons, they are usually confined to secure areas in small areas of space, surrounded by electric fence or chained to wooden pallets. Bobby Roberts says he used to take the elephants out at service stations and walk them on the grass verges but that is simply unimaginable nowadays.
During the 1990s, about the time ADI started monitoring Anne, she was touring with the Robertses’ circus with two other elephants, Beverly and Janie. ADI’s Tim Phillips says she would have spent her summer performing and being transported up and down the country in a 47ft trailer before spending the winter locked up in a barn. He says: ‘When an animal travels with the circus, it gets put in there before anything is packed up. It may take the whole evening to pack everything up, which means the animal’s stuck in the transporter overnight.’ He explains that the circus would set off in the early hours, so Anne, Beverly and Janie would be in the transporter together and they’d all be chained up in crowded and hot conditions. Then they’d be moved to the circus site.
‘They’d probably stay in there until they put the whole circus up, with the Big Top and the rest of it,’ adds Tim. ‘Then, if the workers are tired, they may still leave the elephants in there, so they would be pretty disgusting and stinky conditions by then.’ For the next week or two weeks that the circus spent at the site, the animals would live in a small pen, probably not much bigger than ten by ten metres and surrounded by electric tape, he says, adding that they would be chained in there for most of the time.
Tim claims that Bobby used to chain the elephants up and cover the chains with hay. ‘There are photos of that,’ he says. ‘They’d be standing there, looking like they were free, and people would think: “Blimey, they haven’t moved at all during the show.” But people glance and they don’t notice.’ Even if they got some time to wander around in their pens, they would still be chained for most of the time; they’d be chained before and after the performances before being taken to bed after the final one. ‘Then they’ll be on the chains all night and if they’re lucky, they’ll be let off in the morning.’ They might be allowed loose as early as 8am, but more likely 10am. ‘So they get a window of about five hours where they’re not immobilised – a very, very small period,’ he concludes.
Referring specifically to Anne, he says that most of the time she was chained on the front leg and opposite back leg. ‘Bobby would switch the chains over. He wouldn’t even let her walk about,’ he says. ‘He’d just switch from one leg to the other on her front leg and then the alternate back leg. And those chains are stretched out to a pin, which is underneath the board they’re standing on. They can’t tug them out, they can’t move. They’re not stretched out, but it means they can move pretty much one step to the side, one step back, and that’s where a lot of that stereotypic behaviour kicks in, like the rocking you see, because the animal is really, really frustrated and going out of its mind with boredom and it’s also trying to alleviate the pressure.’
Tim says that the three elephants – Anne, Beverly and Janie – always lived together and went into the ring trunk to tail. ‘They would do pirouettes, hind leg stands, all the traditional things. They used to be ridden by three women in the ring. Bobby would present it,’ he says.
Jan Creamer adds: ‘They were forced to do tricks standing on the tub, which looks a bit like a drum. They would do hind leg stands. All of those things which vets now say if you have them standing on their hind legs like that all the time you’re putting incredible pressure on their hip joints and their legs. The other challenge you’ve got here in the UK for elephants is that they’re not designed to live in this climate. It’s damp and cold and they’re suited to the hot and dry with occasional wet but it dries quickly. It has an effect on their joints.’
Meanwhile, trouble was brewing. In 2001, after a decade or so of touring with each other, Anne’s companions Beverly and Janie died suddenly. Bobby says that Beverly was poisoned. Moira Roberts told me: ‘This little boy came to Bobby and said: “A man’s just fed that elephant with poison in an apple.” Bobby said: “Don’t be silly.” She was dead the next morning.’ She says that they had a post-mortem investigation conducted by specialist vet Andrew Greenwood, but it was inconclusive. Janie died of a mixture of old age and pining away, she adds, and the Robertses say they had both elephant bodies cremated. However, ADI were unsatisfied with the explanation as there was no official report. Jan says: ‘We couldn’t find any reports apart from one from him saying they had died and that was it and no one seemed to investigate. I would have thought that someone should have investigated.’ It meant that by the 2000s, Anne was alone on the road, as the Robertses’ remaining elephant.
Circuses were already coming under real pressure. In 1998, ADI carried out a big undercover operation that exposed Mary Chipperfield. Tim reflects: ‘Mary Chipperfield Promotions was the factory for lions and tigers. They supplied over 1,000 tigers for acts across Europe. Then that was gone and, one by one, all the circuses were going and these sixteen elephants that were touring the UK slowly disappeared. Circus King closed down and they had three elephants. Circus Hoffman went and they had six. Mary Chipperfield regularly had five out on the road with different circuses and they all went; most of them went to zoos, some went to overseas. So it was suddenly quite a small industry and it was trying to make itself look better.’
Tim says this change meant all circus owners were more conscious of their image and their animals’ welfare. ‘So now Anne would get the pretty pathetic-looking paddock outdoors during the showtime so she’d be on grass but visitors could see her in there. Then they’d stick her on chains ready for the show and it was pretty much the same routine. These enclosures are pathetic – it’s just a bit of grass,’ he says.
In 2010, ADI again followed Anne on tour, describing her as ‘this ageing exhibit’. By that point, she was travelling with seven Arabian stallions, six Falabella horses and two dogs, which all featured in the circus’s 110-minute performance. Although she was only rolled out for photo calls, they say she still suffered as she needed to be controlled. ‘It is a performance requiring a high level of control just to plod these elephants around children and have them come out on command and do their little circuit,’ Tim explains. ‘For some, that’s the entire act, like for instance at Jolly’s Circus, where a fox sits on a horse and goes round and round the ring. So she would still consider herself to be performing and having this terrible life.’
At about this time, ADI took more footage of Anne in an outdoor area, with three workers trying to get her back to her barn. She is shown ambling along before pausing, engaged by a branch. The workers try to push her so she keeps walking, but she is much more interested in the branch and ignores them. So they get out a pair of pliers and grab her ear with them. At first, she resists, unwilling to move, and still far more interested in the branch – but then they tug harder and, clearly in pain, she has no choice but to walk on. It is only reasonable to assume that the workers had used the pliers on her before, otherwise, why would they have them with them? It’s a sad reminder of the suffering she endured before being set free.
ADI weren’t the only ones monitoring her. Chris Draper, of the Born Free Foundation, says he too spent time following the circus around and noting her condition. He remembers seeing Anne and worrying about her arthritis. ‘I’d seen her several times on the road and I’d always been very concerned about her gait in particular. I remember years and years ago watching her really slowly clambering down a grassy bank in order to do a photo shoot with Bobby Roberts while I was sitting in a car park outside the circus. I remember thinking just how sort of torturous that was for her to do that given what was already a problem with her gait and her legs, which looked very much like arthritis at the time.’ He says this would have been around 2005–7 and though she managed to ‘lumber’ down the bank, she clearly wasn’t on good form.
Chris says despite her care, her gait hadn’t significantly changed as it was likely that the damage done to her body from performing was permanent. ‘It hasn’t changed much, it’s still the same, the dragging of the feet,’ he says. ‘But that implies to me that she’s not a mobile animal and needed proper care for her arthritis rather than to be loaded into a van each week and shipped off here, there and everywhere.’
Chris also believes that Bobby used some kind of implement on Anne to ensure she behaved – something Bobby vehemently denies. Chris recalls a time in 2008 when he says he saw Bobby use it on her while she was posing for photographs. ‘During a performance, Anne was led into the ring in the interval. She got to stand there while he stood next to her, while kids came up and positioned themselves next to her on the other side and a photo was taken. It was like a conveyor belt of kids having their photo taken on Polaroid for a pound a pop. Anne was vaguely interested in some tufts of grass that were sprouting through some sawdust in the ring and was just idly picking at them with her trunk. Bobby didn’t like that. I remember him yanking her trunk away a few times and she sort of stood there, looking a bit dejected. Then she’d go back to it either absentmindedly or like, “stuff it, it’s worth it”. He got increasingly angry, smacking her, shouting at her and pulling her ear. Then she obviously did it one time too many and all I can say is that I witnessed his hand go into his jacket pocket on his chest, pull out some item – I don’t know what it was – and basically jab it very quickly behind her ear, to which she recoiled. That’s all I saw. I suspect it was something sharp and he jabbed it behind her ear because she was misbehaving in his view.’ Chris believes he also saw Bobby use the sharp instrument when leading Anne into the truck to be taken away to Longleat, though Jon says he didn’t see it. Again, Bobby strongly denies this.
Chris adds that although he was pleased that her suffering came to light, it shouldn’t have to take a shocking video to rescue an animal from a bad life. ‘Although it’s great that the footage of the abuse came to light, and it’s appalling and absolutely disgraceful that she was subjected to that, I’m almost disappointed that it has to rely on an animal getting the crap beaten out of it for something to be done,’ he says. ‘The issue as I see it is how she was being kept and how she was living her life day to day, week to week, year to year. That was the primary issue and it’s sad that groups have to do undercover footage and have to prove abuse before anything’s done.’
However, not everyone agrees that her life was all bad: Anne’s osteopath, Tony Nevin, who has treated some 200 elephants both in Britain and abroad in the last twenty-odd years, has an interesting insight into her life at the circus. He treated her in 2007 when she had retired but was still touring with the Robertses. Her arthritis had attracted a lot of ire from animal rights activists who had started protesting at the circus while it was at Cheltenham Racecourse, near his practice. One of Tony’s customers gave Bobby Roberts his number. ‘Bobby rang me up and said: “We’ve got an elephant and people have been saying that she’s elderly and shouldn’t be travelling and that. Could you come and have a look at her?”’ Tony recalls. But unlike the animal rights campaigners who say she suffered a miserable life on tour with the circus, Tony actually thinks Anne was doing rather well. He describes her circus accommodation as the ‘lap of luxury’ – ‘She didn’t sleep in the trailer. She had a whopping great marquee and a giant straw bed made up for her. It was like going in to some Bedouin camp when I saw her.’ After doing a consultation with vets, he found it was all ‘above board’ and ‘she was great’: ‘She was suffering all the symptoms of older age, wear and tear and osteoarthritis, and so we did some work with her. Apart from having arthritis she was in very good shape, she was fit. Mentally, she was much more content than most zoo elephants. It was only later on that she started stereotyping, she certainly wasn’t stereotyping when I first met her. I probably put that down to the fact that she had such a varied lifestyle so she got to swim in the sea, she got to go on beaches, go across moorland… All sorts of stuff she’s done over the years. Then you look at most zoo ones and they’re plodding around the same paddock.’