The hairdo Nancy lost by a whisker

It was headline news in the Express & Star, the night Auntie Nancy booked in for a hairdo in Wolverhampton. Perched on a stool next to the 20 year-old Goodyear worker, as she waited for her bob and shingle, was a fully-grown lioness called Baby. They didn't get too pally while Nancy waited for the hairdresser and as often happens it was a long wait; but she did pat Baby's muscled flanks a few times as she enjoyed a drink and a cigarette.

In the end it became obvious that no-one's mane was going to be trimmed that night because the hairdresser had decided to cut and run or rather run and not cut, so Nancy finished off her champagne, posed for a few photographs, and left the cage to the cheers of an assembled throng.


A poster for the event.

 My auntie only mentioned it to me once, and showed me the photograph from the Express & Star, it's always stuck in my mind.

Nancy, whose real name was Annie, was "volunteered" for the exploit by her father Jack, which was apparently no surprise to those who knew the local bookmaker and general dealer, whose place of business was whatever town centre pub he happened to be sitting in at the time.

On this occasion he was in Jessup's Hotel, in North Street, when the promotions manager for the famed Bostock and Wombwell's Menagerie walked in. It was the custom for the show to get a local personality to enter the lion's cage on the show's last night, and as they were moving into the town the following week, after a few days in Bilston, he was looking for a volunteer; preferably a woman.
When Jack heard that the volunteer would get a free hairdo and a gold wrist watch for her bravery, he pounced.

Nancy was just approaching her 21st birthday, and Jack must have thought: "What a nice birthday present, a gold watch and a good excuse for a booze-up", so he quickly volunteered her for the event.

Nancy agreed after only a minimal protest, which was great news for the menagerie owner, because all of Nancy's friends and admirers from Goodyears tagged along, as did Jack's many pals from the market and all the pubs he used. As the Express & Star reported: "A lion in the cage is twice the size of a lion seen from the other side of the bars, but Miss Howe coolly stepped forward and patted Baby's flanks."


Jack Howe.


Nancy in the cage with the lion tamer and Baby.

 Baby forgot to be jealous of her trainer, and posed, still as a Wembley lion, for the Express & Star camera man. Champagne glasses were then passed through the bars to the girl and the trainer, and cheerfully flourishing her glass towards friends in the arena, Miss Howe drank the champagne.

The crowd cheered, and awaited the next act, the shingle trim turn by a hairdresser in the cage. But whether the hairdresser had been 'thrilled to death' or not remained unexplained, but it was announced that he had not turned up, so the pair left the cage, embraced on the outside of the "danger zone," and the showman presented Miss Howe with the gold wristlet watch promised her.
When approached by an Express & Star reporter, Miss Howe calmly flicked a speck of tobacco ash from her coat and almost yawned. "Afraid? Why no. Of course I was thrilled."

There were loads of animals where I lived in North Street by the Fox, and all round there. They used to keep the pantomime ponies for Cinderella at the Hippodrome, in the yard at the Fox, and I remember seeing an elephant outside the theatre in Cheapside. Auntie Nancy, who died some time in the 1980s, married Mr Joe Harvey and had four daughters, Eileen, Betty, Josie and Cassie. She lived in Finchfield in Shining White Oak Drive, as we called it. A lot of people from where we came, round Tinshop Yard and North Street, went to live in Finchfield around White Oak Drive after they knocked the old houses down.

There was a sign for Shining White Oak Drive in a soap powder advert on TV, for Daz or something, and they had a shot of the road with all the lines full of shining white washing.
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