1. Industrious family
My great-grandparents owned coal mines in Ashington, Northumberland. I love this painting that my great-grandmother bought by one of the Ashington Group, known as the Pitmen Painters. They were mine workers with no formal art training who painted everyday life as they saw it around them. My father’s side owned a boiler-making factory in Wakefield. Maybe starting a pottery works was in my genes.
2. Sister act
My mother Charlotte (left) and her younger sister Theresa adored each other’s company. They were generous, hospitable and great entertainers
It fills me with happiness thinking of my mother Charlotte and her younger sister Theresa shrieking with laughter. That’s Mum on the left in the photo. Two wonderful women who adored each other’s company, they were generous, hospitable and great entertainers. Mum was severely brain-damaged after falling from her horse in 1991, when she was 52; she never recovered but lived on for 22 years. I�
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Lil Rice, who now runs Giffords, performing in The Hooley
Credit: Alastair Muir
“Mud and sequins,” says Nancy Trotter Landry, sitting amid the sawdust in the Giffords big top at Fennells Farm in the Cotswolds, where only 20 minutes ago she was performing an intricate dance with eight hoops in front of a rapturous (socially distanced) audience. “That’s what sums up the circus for me. And probably what I’ve missed the most. Well, the sequins at any rate.”
There is certainly a lot of mud today at Fennells, the permanent home of Giffords ever since a wide-eyed, 24-year-old Nell Gifford established it in 2000 with the dream of creating “a miniature village green circus, bursting at the seams”. It’s now open again to the public for the first time in 12 months. There are also plenty of sequins, glinting away on Nancy’s fairy costume, and on those of the ushers, trussed up in nude fishnet tights, wine red leotards and, er, Wellington boots, as they usher out excite
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