ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS ago this week, Sillo and Elspa, "the infant aerolites", were thrilling the crowds at Allen’s Excelsior Amphitheatre and Temple of Varieties in Darlington - the week that the circus's equestrian star and proprietor died aged only 32, as we told yesterday.
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Sillo and Elspa also have a remarkable story attached to them. They were the proteges of Edward Trevanion, a gymnast who was born in Bolton in 1846. His partner was Cerissa, “the original flying lady”, who was born in Middlesbrough in 1851. Together, they thrilled audiences with their daring high wire act, which climaxed with Cerissa swinging from a high trapeze until she flung herself through the air, falling 15ft or 20ft, until Edward, suspended upside down from a bar, caught her by the arms.
Until he didn’t.
One day in June 1871, at the Alhambra Music Hall in Nottingham, after two successful catches, he dropped her.
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“She was thrown with great force to the front of the stage, her head coming in contact with the footlights, which, being unguard, immediately set her on fire,” an eyewitness told the Nottingham Journal. “In this state she lay for some seconds unable to rise, until she was picked up by her companion, and carried off the stage in an apparently unconscious state, the fire to her having first been extinguished by one of the musicians.”
Cerissa – what a fabulous name! – was seen later that evening in public, her hair a bit singed, and hobbling painfully about the theatre, but she never returned to the stage to complete her act, as had been promised.
Instead, she returned to “Middlesbrough-on-Tees” to recuperate.
There she died on June 19, 1871, about 10 days later, apparently of “smallpox”, but falling from a great height from a high wire cannot have helped. She was only 20.
But the show, as they say, must always go on, and Edward placed an advert (above) in The Era, a stage magazine, of July 16, 1871, looking for a “daring and respectable” lady gymnast “in consequence of Madame Cerissa’s death, his wife”. Applicants are asked to send their pictures to him at 12, Dundas Street, Middlesbrough – presumably the terraced home of Cerissa’s family, which is now beneath the Dundas Street Shopping Centre.
Perhaps Edward was no longer considered a safe pair of hands and so no lady gymnast was daring enough to apply because he next appears on stage with “Trevanion’s Wonders”, two very young gymnasts, a girl and a boy, possibly twins, who had a variety of names, including Sillo and Elspa. It was they who wowed the crowds in Darlington 150 years ago when Sillo was only five-and-a-half years old.
A few years later, the children’s father, a Birmingham publican, forcefully reclaimed them from Edward’s care, and he sent them back out on the road as a double act.
However, in 1881, Sillo, aged 13, eloped with a much older regular from her father’s pub, got unlawfully married and ended up living in America.
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The Darlington & Stockton Times's advert from 150 years ago this week
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