Clara’s Grand Tour by Glynis Ridley, Atlantic Books, £14.99, ISBN 184354010X Reviewed by Roy Herbert
IT IS easy to feel affection for Clara. She was a celebrity, fond of the smells of tobacco and oranges, and drank beer. She was 6 feet in height, 12 feet round the middle and she weighed 3 tons. She was an Indian rhinoceros, a one-horn species.
An enterprising Dutchman, Douwe Mout van der Meer, found her as a baby in Assam, where she had become accustomed to human company, and shipped her back to Europe in 1741 with a plan to put her on show to astonished spectators. Few people knew anything about rhinoceroses, so she was almost a mythical beast and certainly a sensation.
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Van der Meer hauled her around in a wooden cage on a specially built carriage drawn by six horses; on occasion he floated her between cities on rafts along convenient rivers. The amiable Clara’s composure was never disturbed. She was fêted, drawn and painted by eminent artists, sculpted, appeared on medals and clocks and was even modelled by the Meissen pottery.
Van der Meer had solved the problems of keeping her healthy and his skill as a publicist meant that he never failed to pull in the crowds so she made him rich before she died in London in 1758.
Author Glynis Ridley communicates her enjoyment in telling it. Where there are gaps in records she fills them with conjectures that seem reasonable. More pictures would have been acceptable, but it is a jewel of a story anyway.