Even over 150 years ago there were tigers and all kinds of exotic animals in
19th Century London, and I’m going to tell you an outlandish story
attached to a very peculiar Victorian shop and one of its escaped animals.
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The Ratcliffe Highway in the East End of Victorian London could be found in a
neighbourhood of less than savoury reputation. Known for vice and crime and,
even decades later, still nursing the hangover of the
notorious 1811 ‘Ratcliffe Highway murders’.
Located on the Dockland fringes and thronging one of the main roads leaving
the city, this was a dangerous and run-down district
characterized by seedy businesses, dark alleys and dilapidated tenements.
One of the most bizarre stories of the late Victorian era originates from
one of its businesses. The Ratcliffe Highway was home to Charles Jamrach’s
Animal Emporium, of which he was the proprietor from 1840. Charles Jamrach was
a trader in wild beasts and his shop would become the largest in the world.
It would seemingly have been an incongruous sight to the working classes
here, but it was well located to make use of shipping routes to import and export
animals, and was at the disposal of sailors returning to shore with curious animals and
trinkets to sell. His was a profession we find unpalatable and cruel today,
but by contemporary accounts was thought of as mysterious and exotic.
One local Clergyman of the time, Harry Jones (and a neighbour of the emporium),
remarked of Jamrach “there is no other place in the world where a domesticated
parson could ring his bell and send his servant round the corner to buy a lion”.
He was said to have had ‘mystic’ powers with beasts, which he kept in a menagerie
on Betts Street, and his customers were all of the zoological museums of Europe,
menageries and private collectors - the Sultan was one of the largest buyers
of tigers. Apparently the price listed for a tiger was £200.
An incredible story is attributed to Charles Jamrach and one of his beasts – a tale now
commemorated by a bronze sculpture of its two main protagonists,
which can be found not far away from the incident in Tobacco Dock.
In 1857 a fully-grown Bengal tiger escaped from a box at Jamrach's Emporium
into the neighbourhood of Commercial Road. The story is recounted by Jamrach
himself in a periodical from 1879. The tiger had just arrived from the East Indies
and no sooner than it was being unloaded into a den, there was a big crash.
The tiger had pushed out the wooden boards of the back part of the den with the
strength of its hind-quarters by applying its forepaws to the grill in front of it.
On gaining his liberty he proceeded to walk down the yard and into the street
– to the astonishment of an on looking crowd. The tiger swiftly picked up
and carried off a boy of about nine years-old, who had approached the tiger and tried
to pet the animal on its back - having never seen such a big cat before.
Local residents watched aghast at the spectacle. Jamrach came running up
and, having got a hold of the beast by the loose skin on its back
(and dragged along himself for a time), thrust his bare hands into the tiger's throat
and prised open the animal's jaw – thus forcing the beast to let his captive go.
The tiger was forced back to whence it came by Jamrach’s men. The boy was taken
to hospital, but luckily is said to have received no serious injuries beyond a
scratch and a fright. Jamrach called on the boy’s father, a tailor by profession,
and offered him £50 in compensation for the alarm sustained. However,
the boy’s father brought legal action against Jamrach and was awarded £300 in
damages – of which the father received £60 and the lawyers £240 of the total in costs.
Charles Jamrach died in 1891 having passed the business on to his sons
William and Albert. The Emporium continued trading until Albert died in 1917
before finally closing in 1919. And the tiger?
Well, Jamrach found a purchaser for the tiger just a few days after the incident.
Having read a report of the event in the papers, a Mr Edmonds of
Wombell’s Menagerie came to London at once to capitalize on the publicity
- paying £300 for the now infamous tiger -considerably more than the original listing
price. He exhibited him as ‘the tiger that swallowed the child,’
and by all accounts made a small fortune doing so.
So ends one of the more curious events of Victorian London.