Fanque gave numerous benefit performances in aid of local charities or even individuals who found themselves in distress, including an 1843 performance in Town-Meadows Rochdale that was billed as ‘BEING FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR. KITE’. Despite the fame he enjoyed in the mid-nineteenth century, Pablo Fanque would be almost completely forgotten today were it not for a bizarre, chance happening. In 1967 a poster advertising the 1843 Rochdale performance of ‘Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal’ was bought from an antique shop in Sevenoaks, Kent, by John Lennon, who was there to film a video for the Beatles’
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