Elephant man finds solution to a Jumbo problem

The observation that pets often resemble their owners is perhaps an unkind way to begin a story about an elephant keeper. But for Tony Ratcliffe and his beloved African elephant Jumbo, inseparable for 30 years, the comparison seems unavoidable.

Watching 62-year-old Ratcliffe (dressed in stubbies and a straining polo shirt) take his precious charge through her paces around a council domain, one can't help but be slightly awed by the display of bulk, the trumpeting bellow, the leathery, sun-ravaged hide. Jumbo is an impressive specimen as well.

The sight of an 8ft, four-tonne African elephant at Snells Beach, on the outskirts of Warkworth, on a Tuesday afternoon is the sort of thing that draws a crowd. Passers-by gawp and grapple with their camera-phones, as Ratcliffe leads the 35-year-old behemoth on a languid stroll around a small, roped-off enclosure, then back into her trailer.

She has a bit of trouble negotiating the trailer entrance, prompting instruction from her keeper "GET YOUR LEG UP! JUM-BOOO!" before she finally gets it right. Ratcliffe, the recently retired owner of Whirling Brothers, New Zealand's longest-running local circus, disappears into the nearby encampment of caravans. I find him sprawled on a bed in one of them, one leg hoisted high in the air.

"The bloody thing's playing up again," he says, "it's swollen up like a football." He has an appointment with a doctor in a few hours; the leg has been a problem since he impaled it on a tent peg three years ago. "We had a full house, bloody chockablock, at Ruakaka, of all places, and I was taking a chair to an old lady and whacked it and it went right to the bone." The show had to go on; by the time he got medical treatment, he was delirious, the leg poisoned.

The dicky limb is just one of the setbacks which, combined with some soul-searching after the death of his step-brother from a virus last year, has finally forced Ratcliffe to retire the circus he founded in 1977. He has indicated his intentions to do so in countless press articles in recent years, stories that document the steady decline of Whirling Brothers' fortunes: the death of a monkey from heat exhaustion, industrial disputes with performers, the introduction of welfare codes for circus animals, which led to the lions and monkeys being offloaded to wildlife parks.

(Also covered: his joining the circus at 15; his acquisition of Jumbo from Honolulu Zoo in exchange for a shipment of logs; his three previous marriages; his protracted battle with animal rights activists; his two years, nine months in prison for manslaughter, for fatally injuring, with a tent peg, a gang-affiliated 32-year-old who had wanted to take his 13-year-old stepdaughter to the stock cars one day in Napier in 1973.)

And so, after many thousands of performances up and down the country, and stints in Fiji, Tahiti and New Caledonia ("One town's the same as any other; they all want to be entertained"), the Whirling Brothers Circus gave its final performance in Ngaruawahia, of all places, in the first week of November last year.

The crowds were big enough to warrant an extra week of performances, but no more than that. "The circus consumes you; it's like a monster," he says. "You'd have a bag of money today, and it's gone tomorrow. I couldn't cope with it any more. My health was just cracking up. I could face the animals, but when it came to handling the people, it was just too hard." He sighs. "I'd had enough."

What had been 30 years in the making came apart quickly enough. Ratcliffe sold off the big top, seating and vehicles. (A family in Raglan bought much of the infrastructure, and plans to start its own circus, under a new name.) The ragtag crew of performers attached to the circus in its twilight years drifted away with little fuss. All that was left was Jumbo.

Which left Ratcliffe with a dilemma. As his longtime critic, SPCA chief executive Robyn Kippenberger, put it: "There isn't an old people's home for elephants in New Zealand, and you can't just let them off down the Southern Motorway." (The organisation, which opposes animals working in circuses, says Ratcliffe now owes Jumbo a comfortable retirement.) Jumbo was a serious undertaking; she eats five bales of hay and at least $100 of vegetables a day.

Ratcliffe's first strategy, asking $1 million for the beast, met little success. Then, in November, Ratcliffe announced in the NZ Herald that Jumbo was headed to an Australian zoo. He spoke prematurely. The zoo backed off, Ratcliffe says, citing Jumbo's age, and the fact that after a lifetime as a performing animal she would be poorly socialised. They also wanted him to pay the freight costs. His reluctance to be separated from her further complicated things. "They weren't keen on having me around," he explains.

Ratcliffe parked up his $80,000 trailer home on his parents-in-law's land in Tuakau while he pondered what to do next. (He married Vicki, his partner of 17 years, at Easter last year: "We just went down the road, had a meal together, came home again.") They were accustomed to touring 11 months a year; standing still for four months, watching the grass grow, felt unnatural.

"I wasn't sleeping properly. I used to sit up all night till 4am. I had a pretty hard time of it," he says. "I kept going out in the morning, I'd look at the paddock and think, what am I doing here? It was a weird feeling."

Jumbo, he believes, felt the same way. "She wouldn't sleep either. You could see she wanted to get back on the road. It's a way of life, you know."

What were the two antsy retired circus animals to do? After months of mulling it over, Ratcliffe found a solution. In March, he and Jumbo (with Vicki in tow) upped sticks and joined the circus again, this time, for their former rivals, Loritz. They did two weeks at Papakura, then Snells Beach. Documents were signed, transferring ownership of Jumbo to Loritz, although no money changed hands, according to Ratcliffe.

The deal centred on Loritz providing her with improved facilities; work is nearly completed on the $300,000 trailer, complete with shower and sunroof, which Jumbo's new owner Harry Loritz promises will be "the best mobile elephant house in the world". They plan to set up an enclosure on a 10-acre property in Cambridge to house her for the three or four months a year she is not touring.

Ratcliffe will stay on and train and present Jumbo for as long as he likes ("They told me I can retire here, with the circus," he says) and Loritz is negotiating to bring over a Kenyan elephant keeper to gradually take over her care.

Ratcliffe considers it a great solution, and counts himself lucky: "How many businesses do you know would take in their former competitors?" Then he nods off. Ten seconds later, catching himself snoring, he jolts upright, sending a shudder through his Teddy boy mane. "I'm not done yet," he says, with genuine conviction. "I can still perform, if they want me to be a clown or something. I'd rather die in the business than on the side of the road somewhere."

Retirement, semi-retirement; it looks very much like business as usual. "It's an era gone," Ratcliffe corrects me, returning to the caravan from a slash outside in the drizzle. Things are different now. With Loritz, he's no longer required to put in the backbreaking day's labour of erecting the big top. His retirement has also broken up the colourful, transient community centred around the circus, which had provided a family of sorts for people who, for various reasons, had difficulties finding a niche in society.

There was Butch, a 69-year-old sickness beneficiary who did a bit of clowning and collected tickets in exchange for a place to camp and free electricity for the past four years. There was Sam, a talented 21-year-old juggler, who is autistic. "They've got a place in society, too," declares Ratcliffe, with the kind of misguided magnanimity that makes you suspect that that place, wherever it may be, is far away from him and his circus. But Sam's mother says circus life was great for her son, providing a supportive living environment, and giving him a bit of independence.

These days it's just Ratcliffe, Vicki, and Jumbo. "We keep our own counsel here," he says. He's working on an autobiography, to be self-published in October. He writes longhand, and pays a couple of typists to come in and "get stuck into it". The book is a motley collection of yarns from his years in circuses and zoos: the time Jumbo ate a policeman's hat, the night a sheila in Matamata got the wrong end of the stick and knocked on the door of his caravan, asking his wife if her dad was ready for their dinner date. "There's a lot of bloody fun in it," he says.

He has more serious intentions as well. "The big thing is that people have a good memory of circus," he says, a desire motivated by the knowledge that, despite his promise that there will one day be a "resurgence" of the medium, his world is vanishing.

A mock-up of his book cover arrived the other day, but he has mislaid it, and turns the caravan upside down in his search. He flicks through folders, shuffles files, picks up another circus memoir by an Australian counterpart, called Sawdust and Headaches. "I think this guy sums it up; how true, how true," he chuckles. After about 10 minutes, he finds what he is looking for, sitting on a pile of manila folders in a corner. "Fancy that! Sitting right on top, of all places." He picks it up and admires it: the Tony Ratcliffe story, in his own words.

"The Elephant Man: the true story of a New Zealand Circus Icon," announces the blurb, in breathless, run-on sentences: the foghorn prose of the ringmaster. "His love of all animals, Big and small, Follow the growth of his Whirling Bros Circus, Meet his family, Experience his many ups and downs, One man battling against all odds ... From Elephant Boy to the Big Top King, The Real Circus Man."

- © Fairfax NZ News