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Newbury Showman’s mystery murder revisited




WE’VE told the story of Newbury’s great showman ‘Lord’ George Sanger in the past but now is a great time to revisit it, on this, the bicentenary of Sanger's birth.

Don’t miss the upcoming feature in the March publication of magazine Out & About by Chris Barltrop from the Centre for Circus Culture. And this month sees the publication of The Killing of Lord George: A Tale of Murder and Deceit in Edwardian England by Karl Shaw.

he Killing of Lord George
he Killing of Lord George

A new book about a Newbury-born showman revisits a murder that shocked Edwardian England.

Reviewed by The Times newspaper as “Britain’s answer to PT Barnum and Lizzie Borden rolled into one grisly story”, The Killing of Lord George: A Tale of Murder and Deceit in Edwardian England uses unpublished material to reveal the true story behind the death of Britain’s most beloved showman ‘Lord’ George Sanger’.

Lord George Image courtesy of the National Fairground and Circus Archives, University of Sheffield Library>>
Lord George Image courtesy of the National Fairground and Circus Archives, University of Sheffield Library>>

Sanger was an A-list celebrity in Victorian Britain. He travelled the country bringing his beloved circus from town to town, astounding everyone from farm labourers and factory workers to royalty. He got his start as a six-year-old assistant in his father’s travelling peepshow. With all the moving around and performing he had just one day’s proper schooling in his life, and although he taught himself to read, he could never write and was always innumerate.

Luckily, George found great success following in his father’s footsteps and he became Britain’s wealthiest showbiz impresario.

He was a self-declared ‘Lord’ and made much use of the title on his circus’s eye-catching posters, although according to a popular myth had the Queen Victoria gave him a title when he went to perform for her at Balmoral because he let her put her head inside the jaws of one of his lions. Transporting exotic animals around the country was no easy task and Sanger’s circus suffered from several escapes over the years, among the escapees his most prized performing elephants. But Sanger would do anything to stay in the public eye and he once deliberately set free a pack of wolves in south London to generate publicity for his shows.

Lord George's wife 'the Lion Queen' Courtesy of the National Fairground & Circus Archive.
Lord George's wife 'the Lion Queen' Courtesy of the National Fairground & Circus Archive.

Lord George married a fearless big-cat tamer known as ‘The Queen of the Lions’. She was badly mauled several times and performed for the Queen at Windsor. After marrying George Sanger in 1850, she retired from lion taming to manage her husband’s finances.

Every time Sanger returned to his Newbury birthplace he was fêted as though royalty had arrived. The band struck up ‘Home, Sweet Home’ as George and his wife made their entrance into town riding cream-coloured horses.

To mark Queen Victoria’s passing, George gifted his birthplace a statue, erected in the Newbury marketplace on the spot his father’s stall had once occupied, and where George and his siblings once sold fish and fruit. On 24 June 1903, thousands turned out in Newbury’s marketplace to see the unveiling of a rust-brown terracotta likeness of the late Queen, standing on a tall plinth guarded by four recumbent lions.

Sanger circus Image courtesy of the National Fairground and Circus Archives, University of Sheffield Library'>>
Sanger circus Image courtesy of the National Fairground and Circus Archives, University of Sheffield Library'>>

In 1905 Britain’s most beloved entertainer Lord George retired at almost 80 years old and settled on a farm with a collection of his animals. A few years later, tragedy struck. His sudden violent death in 1911was an international news sensation. Newspapers covered every facet of the story until a coroner’s inquest passed its verdict: George Sanger was murdered by a crazed axe-wielding employee. Case closed - until now.

Karl Shaw
Karl Shaw

Using previously unpublished archive material including the original witness statements and police documents, the author Karl Shaw reconstructed the events leading to his death and found a murder mystery involving a jilted lover, an unscrupulous pathologist and a terrible family secret.

The author explains: “I was working on Sanger’s biography when I discovered the strange story of his death. It was only when I began to delve into the evidence in the National Archives that I realised that it didn’t add up. It became evident very quickly that there has had been a terrible miscarriage of justice.

“The Coroner’s decision that Sanger was murdered by an axe-wielding maniac was sealed the evidence given by Britain’s leading medical witness, the famous Dr Bernard Spilsbury, and no-one at the time disputed his expert credentials. He was handsome, articulate, well-respected - and very often wrong. But that would not be found out until later after many false convictions and hangings had been based on his reports. Spilsbury went on to gas himself in his laboratory in 1947 after his life’s work began to be called into question.

Murder headline
Murder headline

“I wrote asking the Attorney General for a judicial review of the coroner’s inquest into George Sanger’s death, I don’t want to waste public money, I ask only that someone revisits the evidence contained in the police files and the Coroner’s inquest transcripts and applies some common sense. It’s never too late to right a wrong and I have a duty to history to report what I believe to be the truth.”

Of his 20th published book, The Killing of Lord George, Karl says; “When the hardback version was published the reviews were good. The Times gave it half a page and found it ‘compelling’ and Publisher’s Weekly said it was “a brilliant reconstruction of a cause célèbre”, so I hope the new more affordable paperback version will give the case wider exposure.”

Karl Shaw is an author of 20 books including the New York Times bestsellers Royal Babylon and Five People Who Died During Sex. The paperback edition of his new book The Killing of Lord George: A Tale of Murder and Deceit in Edwardian England is published by Icon Books on February 27.

Karl lives in North Staffordshire. He has written for newspapers and magazines and worked in advertising, marketing and PR, for a while crafting prose to sell stool sample jars, plus some other stuff that was even more interesting.

He mostly writes humour and popular history, including Royal Babylon, 5 People Who Died During Sex, Curing Hiccups with Small Fires: A Miscellany of Great British Eccentrics and 10 Ways to Recycle a Corpse. His most recent books are The First Showman, a history of the creator of the modern Circus, Philip Astley; Abject Quizzery, and The Killing of Lord George.



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