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Introduction
Negus the tightrope walking lion was a star attraction at Bertram Mills’ Circus at Olympia in the 1950-51 Christmas season.
His trainer Alex Kerr spent three or four weeks living with the lions night and day looking after them and speaking to them in a mixture of German and his own Glaswegian dialect. In this way he got to know each of the lions’ personalities and the lions became familiar with him.
It took six months of patient training to perfect Negus’s tightrope walking act. A four centimetre thick cable was laid on the ground until Negus realised it did not hurt him to walk along it.
Then day after day, tempted by pieces of meat, Negus learned to walk step by step across the rope.
Next the ropes were raised off the ground - at first by 15 centimetres and then by half a metre, and so on up to the final height of nearly two metres. On the extreme right of this picture of Negus we can see the trainer’s stick telling the Lion where to put his next step. If you look carefully you can see that Negus is focused completely on this stick
