Bizarre end of a showman

WHAT made a West Cumbrian lad give up coal mining to join a travelling show? That was the question posed to us by a Scottish local librarian for an item on BBC Radio Scotland.

A newspaper report of the death

Their documentary show, Past Lives, allows members of the public to request investigation of family history myths and mysteries. Our case featured Wilfred Cape who met a bizarre death in Aberdeen in 1899.
His beginnings seemed ordinary enough. He was born in Frizington in February 1869. His father, Wilfred senior, was a plasterer born in Cockermouth. His mother, before her marriage, had been Isabella Simpson, a domestic servant from Whitehaven. Perhaps the search for work led the family to move on. By 1871 Wilfred, Isabella and Wilfred junior’s four sisters were living in the Elswick district of Newcastle on Tyne.
Wilf senior had certainly known tough times. The 1851 census shows him aged 10 living with his widowed mother Dinah, age 28, and both were employed at a flax mill in Cockermouth. Perhaps this hard childhood accounted for his premature death; Wilf senior died in Maryport Infirmary in 1878, when he was only 36.
By 1881, Wilfred junior, now 12, was living with his widowed mother and four siblings and three boarders, all schoolchildren, in Eaglesfield Street in Maryport. Ten years later, Wilfred was boarding at the Morpeth Arms at Halton Lea Gate, Northumberland, and was working as a coal miner. Meanwhile his mother had moved in with her married daughter and son-in-law, a coal miner, in Maryport. A little while later, Wilfred had a radical change of career. He joined a travelling show owned by Mr John White ‘The King of Showmen’ and was operating a strength-testing machine.
In May 1899 the shows owned by George, John and James White arrived in Aberdeen and encamped on the esplanades north and south of the River Dee. On the evening of May 3, Wilfred “expressed a determination to the neighbouring showmen and onlookers to swim across the Dee”. He was “in liquor at the time” and had to be “restrained by the bystanders”. Wilfred was not to be dissuaded and plunged into the Dee “clothes and all”.
He managed to swim half way across and then decided to turn around and make his way back. Unfortunately a few yards later “he threw up his hands and sank”. The onlookers and the police launched boats but searched in vain. His lifeless body was discovered a couple of hours later.
Mourners from the travelling show fraternity in all parts of Britain came to Aberdeen for Wilfred’s funeral. As was customary, all the shows on the ground were covered up in tarpaulins and the mourners and show owners assembled with the coffin in a tent.
Wilfred left a widow, Annie, and their daughter later married into the Evans show family.
We will never know why Wilfred made the change from miner to showman. Perhaps his father’s early death had made Wilfred want to live for the moment. Possibly some incident during his own experience of mining had made him want to escape.
Whatever it was, Wilfred, the showman from Frizington, lived and died as he wanted: on his own terms and without compromise.

Your local Archive: Cumbria Record Office, Scotch Street, Whitehaven, CA28 7NL. www.cumbria.gov.uk/archives gives further details and opening hours.