Fritz

In June 1902 Barnham’s circus was passing through the town of Tours in France. One of the performers was an was an enormous 80 year old elephant weighting 7 tonnes called Fritz. Not surprisingly, one day he decided he’d had enough of being a circus elephant. One story goes that he refused to move, the other that he went beserk. The outcome was that he was killed. He was taken to be stuffed and came back to Tours nearly a year later and has been there ever since, here are some 5 and 6 year olds at a workshop at the museum in Tours.

Another auction, another family

I’m sorry that I haven’t found time to post for a while. We attended an Auction last week. It’s the furthest we’ve travelled to an auction so far so we took the opportunity to stay in a romantic hotel and mix business with pleasure. We also bought some beautiful cards. One of the lots came from chateau so I’ve been piecing together bits of information about the family. They owned two chateaux in the middle of France , one of which is up for sale at the moment (that’s why the cards were being auctioned I suppose). Around 1900 a lot of the cards were written to a little girl called Odette. She seems to have passed from chateau to chateau to stay with her grandmother, perhaps while her parents were away. Judging by the wording on the cards she was much loved by everyone. Above is one of the cards she received in 1904.

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