If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last couple years, you’ve probably seen or
at least heard of the Tiger King, the captivating Netflix documentary that became a huge hit during
the lockdown. The focus of the documentary is Joe Exotic, the cringy, sometimes loveable,
oftentimes hate-able, bad-country-music video-making, tiger keeper slash animal
offender. But throw Joe into a top hat and a frock coat and stick him into Victorian England,
and he might have got along quite well with some other eccentric exotic animal keepers of
the time. Welcome back to Nutty History. Today, we’re exploring a predecessor of Joe Exotic,
Charles Jamrach, the Tiger King of the Victorian Era. It was October 26th, 1857. Charles Christian
Jamrach – no, not that Jamrock, this Jamrach. Anyway, he owned a menagerie in East London,
and had just received a Bengal tiger and several other large cats for his exotic animal collection.
Menageries were kind of like the predecessors of zoos, except smaller and more like shops that were
packed to the gills with all kinds of animals from far and wide. Jamrach’s menagerie was in
a particularly sketchy part of town. Surrounded by the docklands and pubs frequented by sailors,
and all the debauchery that comes with that, his business was booming, and he’d become a
well-respected purveyor of all that was exotic in the animal industry that had sprung up over the
last few decades. So, on October 26th, Jamrach was moving some big cats into their enclosures
in his menagerie. One of these cats was a Bengal tiger – a tiger that was somewhere between 300
to 400 pounds, nothing to be messed with. When it arrived, the tiger was in a wooden crate,
and there was a delicate process involved in transferring it from the crate into its new,
metal-barred, home-away-from-home. But on that day, things went terribly wrong. The
tiger managed to literally kick its way out of the crate with its back legs as they were
trying to transfer it into its holding pen. It then proceeded to storm into the street – again,
a street that wasn’t the most savory of streets. And then imagine a tiger stomping through these
streets as they teemed with all types of people, and then imagine that one of these people happened
to be a young boy named John Wade, who, being an innocent, curious kid, thought it was a good idea
to reach out and try to pet this 400-pound tiger on the back as it was rumbling past him through
the streets of East London. It wasn’t a good idea, the tiger snagged his shoulder and started
dragging him down the street. Jamrach then pivoted from inept zookeeper to hero. He ran after the
tiger with a crowbar, and proceeded to hit it over the head until it let go of the boy. Miraculously,
all parties involved survived – the boy, the tiger, and Jamrach. Some years later,
Jamrach gave an account of the incident to a local newspaper in an article titled “My Struggle
with a Tiger”. Here’s a bit of the colorful bravado with which he described the event:
“One morning, a van-load of wild beasts, which I had bought the previous day from a captain in
the London Docks arrived at my repository in Bett Street…I had given directions to my men to place a
den containing a very ferocious full-grown Bengal tiger, with its iron-barred front close against
the wall. All of a sudden, I heard a crash, and to my horror found the big tiger had pushed out
the back part of his den…and was walking down the yard into the street, which was then full
of people watching the arrival of this curious merchandise. As soon as he got into the street,
a boy of about nine years of age put out his hand to stroke the beast’s back, when the tiger seized
him by the shoulder and ran down the street with the lad hanging in his jaws. This was done in
less time than it takes me to relate; but when I saw the boy being carried off in this manner,
I dashed after the brute, and got hold of him by the loose skin of the back of his neck. I
was then of a more vigorous frame than now, and had plenty of pluck and dash in me. I succeeded
in…tripping him up, and with all my strength and weight…tried to strangulate him. My men had been
seized with the same panic as the bystanders, but now I discovered one lurking around a corner,
so I shouted to him to come with a crowbar; he fetched one, and hit the tiger three tremendous
blows over the eyes.” Game over, right? Nope, the tiger got back up, boy apparently still in jaws,
and Jamrach had to finish the job himself with another blow to the tiger’s head with the crowbar.
So, was Jamrach the hero or the villain? According to the court, he was kind of both. A
legal case obviously ensued, as the boy’s father sought damages for the near-death of his boy.
While Jamrach was clearly at fault for letting the tiger escape, he did also throw his Superman
cape on and literally wrestle the tiger to the ground and save little John Wade.
The court took this into account, and went easy on the Victorian tiger king. Jamrach
was forced to pay around 60 pounds compensation to Wade’s family, the equivalent of around 7,000
pounds today. But the biggest hit to Jamrach’s wallet actually came in the form of legal fees,
which ended up totaling around 240 pounds – more than 28,000 pounds today.
The lawyers seemed to be the only winners in the whole fiasco. Little John Wade was scarred,
both physically and mentally. He would apparently wake up in the middle of the night screaming, and
started biting kids at school. The tiger probably had it even worse – in addition to probably having
brain damage, it ended up swapping one cage for another when it was sold to another menagerie
owned by a guy named George Wombwell. Wombwell was actually another winner in the story. He put the
big cat on display as “The Tiger that Swallowed the Boy”, and people came from far and wide to
see it. A bronze statue of the tiger and the boy was even put up near the site to commemorate the
idiotic-slash-heroic-slash-nearly tragic event. If you were living in the UK around the time of Joe
Exo – sorry, Charles Jamrach, you could certainly go pay a bit of money and check out all the exotic
animals your heart desired. But if you had even more money, you could just go ahead and buy one…or
four…or ten. That Bengal tiger that almost ate little John Wade, can be bought for somewhere
around $12,000 U.S. dollars today. You could buy a polar bear for even less, a mere $1,100 dollars.
King Henry III did just that way back in 1252 in maybe one of the first cases of international
animal thievery. He was gifted a polar bear by the King of Norway, and it apparently was allowed
to swim the river Thames and hunt for fish…and any people who might have been unlucky enough
to be near it while it was. By the Victorian Era, London was awash with all kinds of exotic animals,
and the rich couldn’t get enough of them. They became status symbols. The more exotic your
collection of pets, the higher up society’s ladder your reach went. All kinds of the elite kept all
kinds of animals. The Earl of Shelburne, who would later become prime minister,
had an orangutan. Sir Robert Walpole had a pet flamingo. Sir Hans Sloane had a one-eyed
wolverine, a possum, and a porcupine. Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III, had an
elephant and a few zebras. The list went on. It’s no coincidence that these Victorian-era menageries
like the one owned by Charles Jamrach popped up around the time of peak British imperialism.
Well, a bit before actually. The real peak of the British Empire came right after World War I,
when it became the largest empire in history, controlling a whopping 24 percent of Earth’s total
land area. But the empire wasn’t too shabby in the 1800s, either. The British had their fingers
stretched all over the globe – from India to Africa to the Caribbean. And international
trade began flourishing. As a result, all kinds of new, exotic goods began flooding into the British
Isles, animals included. Menageries became a kind of symbol of the empire’s global reach. You could
find kangaroos and bears and elephants and hippos and boa constrictors – and yes, Bengal tigers,
fresh from India. But a Bengal tiger on the loose in the streets of London had another special kind
of symbolism, particularly one on the loose in 1857. 1857 was the year of the Indian mutiny
against British colonial rule there, a mutiny called the Sepoy Rebellion. Indian soldiers
serving in the British military – known as sepoys – had enough of their foreign overlords, and they
revolted in a series of conflicts that quickly spread across a lot of northern India. The British
cracked down, and they cracked down hard, but the rebellion would plant the seed for an almost
century-long movement towards Indian independence. All this elitist animal posturing basically turned
London into a big zoo during the Victorian era. You could walk down some streets around this time
and hear lions roaring. And Jamrach’s tiger attack was no isolated event. There were many attacks on
the streets of London during the 18th century, and many of them were fatal. And it wasn’t even
the only tiger that escaped from Jamrach’s care! He had another escape a few years later. And even
if they didn’t escape, there were all kinds of instances of people’s hands and arms being
torn by big cats while they were behind the cage and onlookers got too cheeky and tried to touch
them. The legacy of the exotic animal trade in Britain still lives on. Between 2000 and 2006,
over 10,000 exotic animals were spotted around the UK, including big cats, monkeys, wallabies,
and even piranha in the Thames. Charles Jamrach was an entrepreneur. He capitalized on capitalism
and built a successful business out of it. He caged cats, sometimes unsuccessfully,
and saved a boy from his own mistake. This tiger king of London was a man of his time, for better
or worse. As always, thanks for watching. Let us know what you think in the comments and what
topics we should cover next. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more Nutty History!