A large crowd gathered outside a shop near the corner of Clayton Street and Nelson Street on the morning of April 28th 1904, and watched in amusement as a troupe of fifteen monkeys scaled the outside wall and ran around on the roof of the Grainger Market. The creatures had escaped from Harris’s Trading Menagerie, and were recaptured by Charles Harris and his assistants with some difficulty.
Charles Harris opened the shop in 1897, selling African Grey Parrots and an assortment of other birds, beasts and reptiles. You could buy a mongoose for thirty shillings, which Charles claimed was ideal for clearing out rats from your home, and he recommended his chameleons for eating grubs off plants in greenhouses. The stock was enlarged to include wolves, leopards and hyenas.
In 1902 Charles opened a Lion Department on the top floor, with the arrival of a breeding pair from France. None of his employees had dared enter their cage for a fortnight, during which time the animals had become very ferocious and no doubt extremely hungry. Charles went in to feed them and had his back torn open by the male lion and his nose was almost ripped off.
The shop was a very popular attraction in Newcastle, with people queuing to see curiosities such as a two-headed cow and the largest dancing bear in the north. Charles Harris was regarded as an expert on wild animals and helped establish a zoo and pleasure gardens at Shotley Bridge. He also helped a lion tamer called the Great Marcus Orinzo to retrieve one of his beasts that had escaped down a drain in Birmingham and was roaming the sewers.
Charles moved to London and opened a shop on Bethnal Green Road, and during the First World War he was given a contract to supply the government with half a million cats. He placed adverts in local and national newspapers saying “Common cats wanted – any number”, and the RSPCA also provided him with the 30,000 stray cats they destroyed annually. He told a Daily Chronicle reporter that War Department trucks arrived at his shop and took the creatures to the Western Front.
The cats were effective in ridding the trenches of rats, but there was an unexpected bonus. When they weren’t engaged in claw-to-claw combat with their furry foes, their acute sense of smell meant they were also useful for detecting gas attacks. They began to whine and their hair stood up on their backs long before the deadly clouds reached the soldiers in the trenches, and it’s also said that they gave the same reaction to German airships approaching the British lines.