IT was an inauspicious start for a lad who was to become a lion tamer, being found asleep in a handcart in Bath Road, Worcester, but then life was never really easy for Arthur Feely.

So it was some achievement to go from living on the streets to entertaining crowds of hundreds, if not thousands, in Victorian England.

Arthur worked for Bostock and Wombell’s Menagerie, which trundled across the country in an assortment of vans, wagons and carts, drawing astonished locals whenever it pitched camp.

They came to gaze in awe at the collection of “wild beasts from across the world” – animals that today may be commonplace, but which back in the 19th century might have arrived from another planet.

Arthur looked after the lions and the elephants – but he could also turn his hand to the hyenas and camels too.

His entertaining story has been unearthed by one of his 21stcentury relatives Geoffrey Younger, who lives in Bournemouth and has been researching the family history.

In the course of this, all sorts of references to Worcestershire have cropped up, although in truth Arthur and his kin lived such a travelling life, wherever he laid his hat was home.

Certainly Arthur’s mother Susan Jones was born in Worcestershire, although exactly where records don’t show. They just reveal “Worcestershire, England” in 1833.

She married Daniel Feely, a bell hanger and gas fitter from Birmingham and the pair were constantly “on the tramp” across the country, picking up work where they could and using their sons Arthur and Alexander to beg for food from farmhouses.

While cash might have been short, it didn’t stop the Feelys from drinking and there are several accounts of times when they got on the wrong side of the law.

At York Castle they found themselves up before the magistrates for “riotous and drunken behaviour”, during which episode the local policeman PC Molesbury suffered a bloody nose.

The court report stated: “The prisoners Daniel and Susan informed the magistrates that their saturnalia was the result of overjoy, young John Feely, who had been away for seven years, having turned up with his better half, and they decided to have a jollification.”

Unfortunately this particular jollification cost them one month in prison with hard labour.

So those were Arthur Feely’s parents. Small wonder then that on May 6, 1882, the Worcester Journal carried the following report: “City Police Court Saturday – before Alderman Barnett, Townshend and Mr Burrow. Vagrancy – Arthur and Alexander Feely, boys, were charged with vagrancy. Early that morning they were found by PC Grubb asleep in a cart in the Bath Road. They informed the Bench that their parents sent them on from Gloucester to Upton-upon- Severn to get lodgings, but as they could not get any they came on to Worcester. The charge was dismissed.”

Despite her weakness for alcohol, Susan Feely was, by all accounts, when sober “a meticulous little lady”. But every so often she would “break out” and sell possessions, including the china she so loved (a favourite of travelling families), to get a drink.

A letter from one of her descendants, written in 1973, said: “Arthur and his brother Alex were often told when they asked for their breakfast, ‘To go and beg for it at the nearest farmhouse’.

The two boys spent much of their time running to the nearest public house, begging the landlord not to serve their mother because if he did, they would not eat anything that day. Susan would beg at the door for the publican to let her in to – as she put it – ‘save life’.”

Arthur probably got into the entertainment business through another branch of the Feely family, who were acrobats with George Sanger’s Circus.

He seems to have joined Bostock and Wombwell’s Menagerie probably in 1899, touring with them for 16 weeks at Crystal Palace during the Diamond Jubilee year of Queen Victoria.

From 1902 to 1904, he worked for ‘Little’ Frank Bostock touring Europe, notably as an elephant trainer/showman in Paris, and was closely associated with Captain Fred Wombwell.

Arthur was a good friend of Anita ‘the Living Doll’, a dwarf-statured woman of Hungarian descent. Anita was frightened of attention outside of the circus grounds and Arthur would carry her under his coat, so people would not stare at her.

Arthur stayed with Bostock and Wombwell’s Gigantic Combination Menagerie until 1915, when he volunteered to become a soldier in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps serving in France and caring for many hundreds of horses until his discharge in 1917 due an injury on his right leg.

He returned to England and rejoined Bostock’s in Aberdeen. As dispensation because of his injury he was allowed to travel in one of Bostock’s carriages instead of having to walk, which was common practice for showmen.

Arthur’s job roles with Bostock’s was as ‘booking agent’, ‘lodgings agent’, ‘descriptive lecturer’, ‘elephant trainer’, and at some time a ‘lion tamer’, for which he was awarded a meritous badge. It is likely he performed under the name of Captain Daniels, the maiden name of his wife Kate.

Probably due to the association of the Biblical character Daniel and his forced imprisonment with a large group of lions and subsequent miraculous escape from this captivity.

Despite being involved in an “entertainment” which would grate with the public today, Arthur had no truck with cruelty to animals and one night when a keeper had a finger bitten off by a hyena he was feeding, the man got no sympathy from him. Arthur knew the keeper had been teasing the beast, so he told him it served him right and to stop his complaining.

Arthur was a lecturer in 1928-1929 with G B Chapman’s Zoo Circus and from 1931 worked as an animal trainer at Grimsby Zoo, specifically with Rosie the elephant and the former Bostock lions.

His nephew ‘Little’ Arthur Feely was a lion tamer also at Grimsby Zoo, which had six of Bostock’s lions after the menagerie was disbanded and sold off in 1932.

When ‘Little’ Arthur was in the cage, Arthur ‘senior’ would stand outside the cage with a longpitched fork, ready to show its point to any rogue lion.

After Grimsby Zoo, Arthur worked at a small zoo in Sheppey, Kent, and then retired in 1939. He died of cancer in 1955 and is buried in Beckenham/Elmers End cemetery at Bromley, Kent.

A courageous man who survived many a perilous event, he always carried with him a rabbit’s foot lucky charm. Which served him just as well before Worcester magistrates as it did in the lions’ cage.