St Giles Fair was as much of a blast 150 years ago as it will be this coming September.

Victorian newspapers report fantastic scenes. Giants and dwarfs take centre stage alongside lions, tigers and elephants.

At the 1878 fair in Oxford, a South African savage brandished the leg of his sister. At Sanger’s Moving Waxworks – a popular annual attraction – crowds saw an automated gorilla playing the violin.

Here are just a couple of the colourful characters you could have met on 19th century streets.

We all know the famous Chipperfield’s Circus. It dates back to a Norfolk entrepreneur named James Chipperfield.

For his 1866 exhibition, Chipperfield showcased a “living skeleton”. Those in the medical profession may have been dismayed. But this didn’t stop punters queuing up. The living skeleton was 24-year-old Robert Tupney, from March, Cambridegshire. Tupney weighed 3½ stone, stood at four feet six inches, and had wrists the width of a modern 10p piece.

Yet his act – which included lifting four stone weights in each of his hands while chatting up the crowds – packed them in across England and France for 17 years.

Tupney refused to leave Chipperfield’s employment. He ate well, drank heartily and smoked his pipe. Until in 1879, he fell ill, and was carried off to the workhouse to die.

Chipperfield had other ways to attract punters and began acquiring animals from the 1890s onwards.

He’d got his own start in the trade with George Wombwell’s Menagerie of Wild Beasts, who paid a notable Oxford visit in 1863.

Oxford residents were “highly satisfied with the exhibition and the admirable way in which it was conducted”.

Wombwell’s “wild beasts” numbered a lion by the name of “Sewer Jack”, who a few years later would wisely escape from his cage on the outskirts of Birmingham. And then there were the lion tamers. Including, back in 1850, the “Lion Queen”.

Who better, Wombwell might have thought, to stick in a cage with a lion and tiger than my own niece? And so it was that 17-year-old Ellen Bright walked into the lion cage in Chatham, Kent at around 9pm on a cold January evening, swishing her whip.

She tamed the lion for a good two minutes. Then finding the tiger in her way, struck it. The tiger pounced in retaliation, stuck his teeth into her chin, and gobbled poor Ellen alive.

The most famous lion tamer in Britain was Martini Maccomo, who was attacked by one of Wombwell’s lions. The lion, whose name is Wallace can still be seen, stuffed and on display at Sunderland Museum. Such sights and sounds we can only imagine.