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Celebrity beasts
The statues of five elephants surrounding this part of the cemetery have led to the belief that these and other circus animals are buried here along with the human victims of the Hammond circus train disaster of 22 June 1918.
An 18th-century rhinoceros is the star of a new exhibition at the Barber Institute in Birmingham, UK, and of a lavishly illustrated catalogue with the intriguing title, Miss Clara and the Celebrity Beast in Art 1500-1860.
‘Jungfer Clara’ (‘Miss Clara’, so christened while visiting Würzburg, Germany, in 1748, although nobody seems to know why) was a young female rhinoceros shipped from Bengal to Rotterdam in 1741 by an enterprising Dutch sea captain, Douwe Mout van der Meer. He then took her on a tour of European cities. It took eight horses to draw her specially made wooden carriage from Brussels to Venice, Paris to Prague, Rome to Warsaw, and finally to London – where she died
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