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The Sandow Family Circus Variety History – Part Twenty.
Sandow’s Super Clowns Slapstick Theatre 1979 – 1980 seasons.
As we see, mostly full houses of appreciative patrons. Again for the technically minded! It has been voiced around social media – who do not care for my views (!) that ‘Tom Sandow is well out of date when it comes to modern circus management and the modern public.’ (!) What can one say to these small minds other than this. We see circus now in 2017 unloading vehicles in the rain with seating etc. One will see that our theatre design allowed the flat stage trailer to be placed inside the structure with the seating aboard to be unloaded and fixed all dry and precise. Logic in 1979!
Arts Subsidy.
I would like to stress, that by nature I am a ‘profits’ person! All our tours, be it within Civic theatres or touring under canvas, we paid rents to the venue or site owner. In the case of Civic theatres – whatever the charge might be we have met with it. Under canvas local authorities have been generally kind but when we say ‘sponsorship’ this has been within the North West and one or two others. Even so, we have always done the forward promotion ourselves, supplying posters, flyers and postering at our expense. We are proud to say, that although these authorities guaranteed our agreed salaries along with the artistes engaged, every venue we played returned a good profit to the authorities involved. For this record we are most happy. I would also like to stress, that for all the fine acts we employed in all circumstances all received full payments as per contracts.
Toward the close of our 1980 season things were not too good nationally. Austerity was really the case in those days. The government doubled the rate of VAT and this caused a real slump in spending. In fact, it was not until about 1985 that the economy got going again. We could not wait five years! The theatre needed another 50p increase in ticket prices but the general public were actually spending less. So our beautiful little theatre had to close. I had no wish to find funding from the Arts Council (I am not sure they would have supplied any anyway). During the winter of 1980 – 1981 we actually sold the whole theatre to an Evangelical Church! We thought this was most fitting. Overall our ‘under canvas’ experiences were most pleasing and profitable – even with the theatre. We also had the wonderful opportunity to meet with the founder of the newly formed CLIC Trust for child cancer, Mr Woodward, who supplied one excellent site facility and suggested it would be free of charge should we send a donation to his founded charity. We were more than pleased to donate the expected hire fee and further suggested that all our future clown promotions would assist, via a Gift Aid Agreement, to donate annually. This we did until 1987 when the Sandow Clowns Slapstick Theatre was registered and we then made the agreement that all future profits would be donated. Our shows ran, as we see, until 2015 and the total sent to the new CLIC Sargent amounted to £30,000 including daughter Nancy’s Peruvian 12,000 ft Inca Trail trek in 2005 to Macchu Picchu.
