TALK to for any length of time and it becomes hard to resist the urge to scratch. Cockerill is an entomologist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge and a passion for an insect most people regard with horror – the flea. He is also a circus performer, which makes his next career move a bit obvious. “Insects plus circus equals… flea circus,” he says.
If Cockerill’s plans work out, next year he will open the UK’s first working flea circus in half a century. And yes, it will feature real fleas.
The first recorded flea circus dates back to the early 1820s, when an Italian impresario called Louis Bertolotto started advertising an “” on London’s Regent Street, then a brash new neighbourhood bustling with shops and sideshows.
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Bertolotto’s show wasn’t so much a circus as a satire on daily life through the medium of fleas. It featured “a ballroom in which fleas dressed as ladies and gentlemen dance a waltz”, a “mail-coach drawn by four fleas” and a re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo featuring Wellington, Napoleon and the Prussian field marshal Blücher – all played by fleas. Admission: one shilling.
It paid off handsomely. “He was the hot ticket of Victorian London, and he toured the world,” says Cockerill. Bertolotto’s show spawned many imitators, and the flea circus became a standard fixture at sideshows and fairgrounds.
These flea circuses are widely believed to have been a trick, a contrivance of mechanical devices with the appearance of being operated by tiny creatures. Cockerill thought so too, until his grandmother swore blind she had seen a real one in her youth. So he started researching flea circuses – and got bitten by the bug. “I started collecting ephemera – picture books and postcards you would have bought when you went to see the flea circus. A lot of them had photographs of real fleas. That was confirmation.”
Bertolotto didn’t invent the idea of the flea circus from scratch. In the 17th century, jewellers and watchmakers would flaunt their skill by making minuscule chains, cogs and other devices, which they put on display to the paying public. One craftsman is reported to have boasted that he could make a 15-link chain so small it could be dragged by a flea – a telling way of showing off just how tiny it was. (The human flea, Pulex irritans, is about 2 millimetres long and would have been annoyingly familiar to the punters.) Bertolotto put two and two together and made the fleas, rather than their props, the stars of the show.
Flea circuses were still a hot ticket within living memory. But along with sideshow culture, they had gone into decline by the middle of the 20th century. The nail in their coffin was the post-war spread of the domestic vacuum cleaner, which choked off the supply of the circuses’ most vital asset – their performers. Today, a handful of genuine flea circuses – one at the Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany – are the last survivors of a long and glorious tradition.
“The vacuum cleaner choked off the supply of the circuses’ most vital asset – their performers”
Before he can revive it, Cockerill must first get hold of performers. Around 2000 species of flea have been described, most of them adapted to live on a particular host creature. The smallest are about the size of a poppy seed; the largest are up to 12 millimetres long. There appears to be little correlation between host size and flea size. The 12-mm giants are found on the north American mountain beaver, and the 8-mm mole flea has a secondary host in the pygmy shrew, which is itself only 5 centimetres long. “It’s been likened to a human infested with Jack Russells,” says Cockerill.
Human fleas are distinguished in their own right: they are the endurance athletes of the flea world. Most flea species spend their lives lazily nestled in their host’s fur, but our relative lack of body hair means our guests live in bedding or upholstery, emerging daily to feed on our blood. All that action endows them with strength and stamina far in excess of what most of their feebler cousins can muster. “They’re big and chunky,” says Cockerill.
But not easy to get hold of. Bertolotto was always advertising for recruits, paying sixpence per flea, despite the fact that Londoners of his day were crawling with them. Today, it’s a different matter. “They’re incredibly rare, pretty much extinct in households,” says Cockerill.
Although he hasn’t given up on getting hold of human fleas, which still pop out of the woodwork occasionally, Cockerill is currently picking up waifs and strays from a hedgehog sanctuary. “Hedgehogs are famously infested, so the fleas are easy to get hold of, and they’re quite strong,” he says.
The next step is to educate them. Fleas are prodigious jumpers: an elasticated cuticle in their rearmost pair of legs enables them to leap many times their own body length. For a circus, though, you don’t want them to jump; you want them to walk.
So they have to be tamed. The ringmasters of old put fresh recruits into a small glass box, so that every time they jumped, they banged their heads. After a few days they learned not to. Thus broken in, they were ready to go to circus school.
Or so the story goes. Cockerill says it is probably showman’s baloney. “I’ve never used the glass box. In reality it’s a mixture of choosing the right kind of flea – individual fleas do different things – and fleas just getting used to it.”
By “it”, he means being permanently yoked with a collar, traditionally made of gold wire, looped around a constriction between the flea’s first and second pair of legs. A broken-in, yoked flea can be taught all sorts of tricks. The most basic is walking a tightrope. The ringmaster picks the flea up by its collar and puts it on a length of twine slung between two poles. The flea walks along. Ta-da!
Fleadom or death
Then there’s juggling. The flea is positioned on its back, waving its legs in the air. The ringmaster places a small ball of lint onto the flea’s legs, causing it to “walk” and spin the ball around. Hey presto!
True, it’s not exactly juggling. “There was a bit of showman’s licence,” says Cockerill. To make up for the fleas’ deficiencies, the ringmasters were brilliant entertainers. One favourite routine was to say “A flea has disappeared!”, search among the crowd for a fine-looking lady, pretend to pick a flea off her, say, “Oh no, that’s not my flea”, and put it back.
Educated fleas can also be made to pull chariots, ride tricycles, turn carousels, fly on trapezes, draw buckets from wells, fight a tug of war and operate windmills. The only limit is the imagination of the ringmaster and the skill of the prop-maker. Cockerill has a set of props he made himself, including four chariots, a tricycle, a tightrope and a trapeze. Having rehearsed the tricks with real fleas, his next step is to open to the public.
For the fleas, it’s all a bit of a drag. Once hitched to a prop they stay hitched, even when off duty in the felt-lined cigar box that, following tradition, serves as their performer’s caravan. And that’s their lot for the rest of their surprisingly long lives. Bertolotto claimed to have kept fleas that lived for several years. That seems rather far-fetched, but there is an authenticated report of a cat flea living in captivity for 18 months.
That is just as well: a typical flea circus requires between 10 and 20 artistes, plus understudies. “You need a second set for when the first ones get tired,” says Cockerill. “They might do 20 or 30 performances in a night. Eventually they just stop performing, and that’s when you need to give them a feed.”
And that is when a fleamaster really sweats blood. Fleas have only one reliable source of nutrition. “You have to feed them on your own blood,” says Cockerill. When his charges are hungry he pops them onto his forearm, still attached to their props, and lets them have a nibble. “As the old saying goes, I live off them, they live off me.”
Despite this symbiosis, the reality of snatching living creatures from the wild and keeping them in bondage has led some to ask Cockerill whether he thinks it is cruel. It’s an idea he sends away with a flea in its ear. “I was a bit surprised when I first heard that,” he says. “Most people hate fleas.” He points out that insects probably don’t feel pain in the way a mammal would, that his fleas are always well fed, and that he saves them from a gruesome insecticide-induced death at the hedgehog sanctuary.
“You could say that I’m running a flea rescue service,” he says, with a fleeting grin.
