A crowd of between four and five thousand people lined the banks of the Tyne one Monday afternoon in January 1845 to witness a bizarre spectacle on the river. A clown from the Theatre Royal called Edward Wood had announced he would sail from the King’s Meadow to the Tyne Bridge in a washing tub drawn by four geese. A poster advertising the event has Wood’s name misspelled on it.
It was a publicity stunt for a benefit night being held for Wood at the theatre the following Monday, members of the Clasper family of oarsmen lent their support by leading the way in a skiff. The Rose Inn on Pudding Chare also benefited from the event, two of the geese were roasted by the landlord and eaten by his customers.
The feat wasn’t unique, it was first done in 1818 by a clown called Mr Usher of London’s Coburg Theatre. He sailed from Blackfriars Bridge to Westminster Bridge for a bet in a washing tub drawn by four geese, and then proceeded to the theatre in a cart pulled by four cats. Usher was quite the daredevil, he was also known as ‘The Anti-Combustible Man Salamander’, dancing on sheets of red hot iron and in a cauldron of boiling lead.
Unsurprisingly, the geese weren’t always willing participants. In 1824 a juggler attempted to sail down the River Cart in Scotland but the creatures refused to budge, the crowd became rowdy and was eventually settled by a display of sword-swallowing. A clown called Arthur Nelson from Cook’s Circus fared a little better on his 1842 voyage at Glasgow, but according to a newspaper report, “the geese evidently did not like the job, and by their frequent efforts to regain the shore, showed more sense than their driver.”
Nelson repeated the feat on other rivers and had several imitators, including a clown called Mr Barry from Astley’s Circus in London, but the fad came to a tragic end at Great Yarmouth shortly after Edward Wood’s voyage on the Tyne. On the second of May in 1845 an immense crowd gathered on the Yarmouth Suspension Bridge to watch Nelson’s voyage, whereupon the chain on the bridge failed and hundreds were plunged into the river. 79 people drowned, 59 of whom were children, the youngest of which was just two years old.
Nothing is known about the Newcastle clown Edward Wood’s subsequent career, although there are suspicions about why his voyage on the Tyne was more successful than efforts by other clowns elsewhere. His washing tub and four geese were probably towed by a line attached to the Claspers’ skiff and would have ploughed through the water at a cracking speed, the Clasper brothers became the fastest oarsmen in the world after winning the Thames Regatta later that year.
