Gerry Cottle obituary

For half a century from 1970 onwards, the circus impresario and showman Gerry Cottle, who has died aged 75 of Covid-19, took a big top across Britain and beyond, bringing the circus to small towns and television screens. Gerry Cottle’s Circus was the biggest in the country, seating 1,500 and broadcasting the BBC’s Seaside Special from the tent on Saturday nights (1975-78). When that ended, in the 1990s, he took the Moscow State and Chinese State circuses to local parks.

Yet even at the height of his success Cottle displayed no grandeur. Although a middle-class grammar school boy, he exhibited a kind of classlessness. Working in the circus meant he was liable to be tagged as “a bit of rough”, while circus people themselves nicknamed him “Posh Boy”. He was a cocaine user throughout his 40s, but his biggest addiction was to risk, both professionally and personally.

His shows opened and closed at an alarming rate as he invested huge amounts of money for little return. Circus on Ice (1974), the Gary Glitter Rock’n’Roll Circus (1981) and the Zincalli Gypsy Circus (1993) all had very short runs. Cottle’s restlessness was financially disastrous, and he was continually forced to sell his assets, including elephants, baby bears, baboons, lions and crocodiles. He was declared bankrupt twice.

Cottle’s relationships were just as rocky. He often left his wife, Betty, a circus performer he had married when she was a teenager, to satisfy his sex and drug addictions, only to move back into her caravan the following year, promising never to stray again.

He could do this partly because he had great charm. There was no better person than Cottle to sit next to at a show. He would spend the performance whispering his opinions in your ear, holding back with neither the praise nor the put-downs. He was no admirer of contemporary circus, but would pitch up to circus-industry conferences just to feel the ripple as he entered the room. He enjoyed the drama of disagreeing. When Brexit arrived, threatening the circus industry with being unable to bring in European performers, he was one of the few in the industry who supported it.

Cottle also had a keen eye for a good press story. His first stunt, in 1970, was to get his daughter Sarah christened in his ring. In the 1990s he started working with the PR man Mark Borkowski, and together they dreamed up various stunts. In 1992 he employed the American clown Danise Payne for his Wembley Christmas show, declaring that he had had to import her as “British clowns are no longer funny”. When Payne landed at Heathrow airport, she was greeted by a group of faux-outraged, placard-waving clowns, all employed by Cottle. Such japes led to comparisons between him and the great American showman PT Barnum, but Michael Hurll, the producer of Seaside Special, characterised him as the “Arthur Daley of the circus world”.

Cottle had a childlike quality and never grew out of his dreams. Forever on the lookout for the next big idea, in London he bought a joke shop in Chiswick, a lido in Wandsworth and, in 1990, what was then the world’s longest limo, a 75ft (23-metre) Cadillac with a jacuzzi. He sought the superlative. In 1976 he built the world’s largest caravan, 55ft long with seven rooms. “I do like to be the biggest … and to annoy the old circus families,” he said.

Born in Cheam, Surrey, Gerry was the son of Reg, who worked in the City, and his wife, Joan (nee Ward), a former BOAC flight attendant. Gerry claimed he first wanted to become a circus proprietor at the age of eight, when he saw Jack Hilton’s Circus at Earl’s Court in London. “The women were beautiful and sexy, the men rough and macho,” he wrote. “They did not look like my parents.”

The experience launched a lifetime of running away from his parents’ suburban respectability. By 15 he had left Rutlish grammar school in Merton Park, south-west London, to join the Robert Bros Circus in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he was put to “shovelling up elephant shit”. But even at that stage Cottle wanted to be boss. Aged 16, he was already recording in his diary the population of each town they pitched at.

In 1968, by which time he had become a clown called Scats, Cottle married Betty, a 16-year-old rope-trick performer and the daughter of the circus proprietor James Fossett. In 1970 he teamed up with the logistics entrepreneur Brian Austen to launch Cottle and Austen’s Circus, which ran for five years. Gerry Cottle’s Circus followed, alongside Circus on Ice (1974), Flying Circus (1976), Rainbow Circus (1981) and Continental Circus Berlin (1991). Sometimes he had two or three shows on the road at the same time, touring to countries as far away as Oman and Iran.

He had a longterm relationship with Anna Carter of Carter Steam Fairs and other girlfriends. In 1983 one of them introduced him to cocaine. Nine years later he was convicted for possessing 14 grams and fined £500, but the habit continued and his business suffered as a result. A failure to pay VAT led him to be declared bankrupt for the second time in 1994, and by that year he was convinced, in any case, that there was no future in circus due to the movement against performing animals.

In 1993 he sold his last elephant and brought the Moscow State Circus, followed by the Chinese State Circus, to Britain. Although a lifelong Conservative and traditionalist, he had a keen eye for the new and exotic. In 1995, he went into partnership with a fellow showman, Dr Haze, to tour the Archaos-influenced Circus of Horrors, which still runs today. Cottle’s daughter Sarah was one of the first vampires.

In 2003 he decided to give up circus for good (for the second time) to build an antiques centre in Addlestone, Surrey, but after forking out £30,000 he failed to get planning permission for the venture. Later that year he came up with perhaps his best investment, and greatest achievement, buying Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset. He revived the attraction, opened a small circus museum of his personal collection on the site, and established a successful circus school there. Many of its pupils went on to become professional circus artistes, some of them joining Cirque du Soleil.

A few years later, despite having declared that he had given up circus for good, Cottle set up a new show, Wow, and took it on the road with his three daughters. But it soon closed down. Only really happy if he was about to build up a big top, just a few days before his death he was chatting to Dr Haze about reviving a Seaside Special circus in Weston-super-Mare in Somerset.

He is survived by Betty and their four children, Sarah, April, Polly and Gerry Jr.

• Gerald Ward Cottle, circus impresario, born 7 April 1945; died 13 January 2021