Martin Wainright Says One Last Thing...

Above: Martin Wainwright

I ’VE got an unusual pair of famous Yorkshire personalities to tell you about this month, and neither of them is called Sidebotham or Sykes or one of our other ethnic Tyke names. The first is Pablo Fanque, two words which will resonate if, like me, you remember Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Summer of Love in 1967.

I was 17 at the time, so the love was more imagined than real, but for a teenager that can be the best kind. It was certainly fuelled by the strange and haunting lyrics of the Beatles’ great album in songs such as Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite which added to the magical aura of the time. You can probably still sing them: ‘The Hendersons will all be there, late of Pablo Fanque’s fair – what a scene…’ They owe their power not only to the musical skill of Lennon and McCartney but also to the curiously inspired wording used by 19th century poster writers, one of whom described Mr Kite, the Hendersons and Pablo Fanque for a circus at Rochdale in 1843.

It was a copy of this poster which caught Lennon’s eye in an antiques shop in Sevenoaks when the Beatles were filming a promotional film for Strawberry Fields Forever (the equivalent of today’s pop-videos). He bought it, and reproduced verbatim extracts for the Mr Kite song. So there actually was a Pablo Fanque. But what really interested me, when I discovered it by chance a few weeks ago, is that he rests in peace in Leeds. I called Pablo a Yorkshireman, which is strictly speaking wrong if judged only in terms of birth.

He was originally from Norwich, but his life’s work and his greatest successes came in our county and that is one reason why he asked to be buried here as he lay dying in 1871. The other is that he wanted his body to spend its eternal rest beside that of his much-loved wife, a button-maker’s daughter called Susannah Marlaw, who had finished up in Leeds in entirely different circumstances.

She was a fellow-performer in Fanque’s circus – Pablo himself being a matchless ace at stunt-riding on horseback – but at their gig in 1848, at the Amphitheatre which used to stand on King Charles’ Croft next to the Headrow Centre, the gallery collapsed when 600 people packed in to watch the Fanques’ son do his famous tightrope walk. Mrs Fanque was hit on the head by planking and died; and if you think that heartless crime is a modern thing, note that some miserable lout used the confusion to nick the night’s takings of £50 (£3,700 in today’s money).

 It’s worth going to see the couple’s modest gravestone in Woodhouse Cemetery, part of the campus of Leeds University which I’ve previously urged Yorkshire Life readers to explore. As you stand there contemplate the fact that Fanque was black – his father is thought to have come from Africa and to have found work as a butler in Norwich. Perhaps Martin Wainwright. Photograph: Justin Slee One last thing... By Martin Wainwright If you remember the Summer of Love, then you probably recall a year later, how David Broome with his Prince Charles ears steered this fine show jumper to a bronze medal in the Mexico City Olympics murmur, too, the moving elegy on him at his funeral by Rev Thomas Horne, chaplain of the Showman’s Guild.

‘In the great brotherhood of the equestrian world there is no colour bar, for, although Pablo Fanque was of African extraction, he speedily made his way to the top of his profession. The camaraderie of the Ring has but one test: ability.’ This brings me to my second unexpected Yorkshire star: Mr Softee.

 If you remember the Summer of Love, then you probably recall a year later, how David Broome with his Prince Charles ears steered this fine show jumper to a bronze medal in the Mexico City Olympics. I can, just about. But it took the recent floods in Bentley and Toll Bar to introduce me to the fact that Mr Softee’s skills were nurtured in the very meadows which the Ea Beck and the Don turned into lakes in June.

The valley’s high water table nourishes excellent pasture, which is why the show jumper was stabled there, just outside Arksey, by his owners, the Masserella family who founded their ice cream dynasty in Doncaster in 1860. And here’s another marvellous ingredient to our Yorkshire mixture, which outsiders still sometimes misrepresent as a chauvinistic clique with a deadly contempt for ‘off-cummed ‘uns’.

The original Masserellas were three brothers from the Italian town of Setterfrati who decided to try their luck in the new world of the United States. But as they say on their website, in a sentence which should be reprinted in gold on Doncaster Guildhall: ‘So taken were they by South Yorkshire that they decided to abandon their journey and settle there instead. Sensible guys.

Wandering around the county during the flood crisis reminded me what a lovely and historically interesting place it is. But also guys to whom Yorkshire’s 19th century welcome has paid handsome dividends for all of us. You don’t have to like Mr Softee especially to be grateful for a family who have brought so many jobs (4,000 at the time of writing) to our county and the rest of the UK.