Thomas Chipperfield grew up training circus animals, like eight generations of his family before him. Matilda Temperley captures the man whose way of life is about to be outlawed
The circus world, and its tightly woven society, has always fascinated me. To an outsider looking in, the circus appears as a diverse extended family.
The performers are all masters of their own esoteric skills. It was in 2009, while documenting circus showmen in Ireland, that I first met Thomas Chipperfield. Then aged 18, Thomas had just taken over from his father as a fully-fledged lion tamer in Duffy’s Circus.
In January this year I drove to a bleak moor in the north of Aberdeenshire to visit Thomas. I was greeted by his parents, three tigers, two lions, an assortment of dogs, ponies and a parrot.
The family was spending the winter there training the animals and waiting for the summer shows to begin. Thomas Chipperfield is now the only person left in Britain training big cats. He is both passionate and defiant about what is an emotive issue.
“The fear of a ban that would end our way of life, and the threats and violence committed against us have driven many to give up,” he says. “But I won’t.”
Six years after we first met, Thomas’s living wagon was still alongside his cats’. Although more rugged and determined than the boy I remembered meeting in the big top in Ireland, he still lives a life dictated by the cats’ needs.
The Chipperfields have a long family history of working with animals in circuses, as far back as the Frost Fair on the Thames in 1683. For 300 years and eight generations they have worked with wild animal fairs and the circuses that replaced these.
Thomas describes the history of circuses as interwoven with zoos, and speculates that in fact “zoos stopped doing animal shows to distance themselves from the circus”.
Thomas’s great uncle, Jimmy Chipperfield, was central to the development of safari parks in the UK, helping to build the attractions at Longleat, Woburn, West Midlands, Knowsley and Blair Drummond.
Thomas’s first memories were of growing up with Siberian tiger cubs in the 1990s, when his father was breeding up to 30 cubs a year. Many UK zoos today host tigers whose ancestry can be traced back to these cubs.
Thomas was born in the circus, just as his animals were. At 12, he helped his mother, formerly a trapeze artist, with an alligator act. Over the years the family has trained a menagerie of animals, but Thomas always knew that big-cat training was going to be his speciality. He is dedicated to his work and his cats, and is adamant that he could not be without them.
In Scotland I witnessed him training two brother lions, Assegai and Tsavo. As he tickled Tsavo’s stomach with his stick to make him roll over, he explained that his training was based on a reward system, aided by mutual respect and the curious nature of all cats.
Thomas was slow, steady and patient, his father observing the lion’s body language from outside the cage. When asked about reports of cruelty in animal circuses Thomas gave a measured response.
“I can only speak for myself, but no one can forge a relationship with big cats like I have by using inhumane training methods. Only fear and resentment can be formed through cruelty. These animals are my family and friends, and show me love and loyalty.”
When Thomas’s father was young, exotic animals were the mainstay of circus acts. Since their heyday in the 50s, the animals have been replaced by aerialists and acrobats. Today, only two circuses are licensed by Defra in the UK to include animals and these are subject to strict monitoring: Circus Mondao and Peter Jolly’s Circus.
There are no longer any elephants, monkeys, gorillas or chimpanzees working in the UK circus but there is a camel, a zebra, a selection of reptiles and Thomas’s big cats.
Earlier this week draft legislation to ban the use of wild animals in the circus was due for another hearing and, at the time of going to press, likely to pass.
Advocates of the new regulation claim that circuses are cruel, but opponents cite the 2007 Radford Report, which found no evidence that “the welfare of animals kept in travelling circuses is any better or worse than that of animals kept in other captive environments”.
It is clear that trust is implicit when Thomas allows Tsavo, a huge mature male, to lick his face. If he gets this work wrong, he dies.
As Thomas says: “The big cats have to perceive you as the alpha male, but in a way that doesn’t make them afraid of you or resent you. If you’re too soft you’re perceived as weak, and if you’re too hard you’re seen as a threat. Either way you would get hurt.”
When I went to see Thomas and his big cats I expected to be saddened by the sights that faced me. But the visit only left me impressed by the intense relationship and mutual respect Thomas has with his animals.
Whatever the outcome of the current debate on animals in the circus, to me it is clear we should at the very least appreciate the skills of three centuries of animal husbandry, and the understanding that has been passed down the generations.
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