Queen Victoria – Author Sarah Angleton

It was sometime in about 1840 or so that Duchess of Bedford Anna Maria Russell found herself getting a little hangry. At the time, surging industrialization had begun to transform the daily schedule of the English, the wealthiest of whom tended to eat breakfast around 9:00 in the morning, luncheon around noon or so, and then dinner not until around 8:00 PM. There might also be a late morning coffee or tea break referred to as elevensies, which I recently learned is not just for Hobbits. That still left a long stretch of time between meals in the afternoon and into the evening.

Anna Maria wasn’t having it. As a lifelong friend of Queen Victoria, serving as a Lady of the Bedchamber (which because my knowledge of aristocratic life comes only from The Crown and Downton Abbey, I assume is just the officially recognized BBF to the queen), she didn’t have to just accept her fate. She was a pretty important lady, so she decided to so something about it.

The duchess began ordering herself a cup of tea and a light snack sometime in the mid-afternoon, and soon found that made her day a lot more pleasant. It became such a habit that she started inviting other important ladies to join her. They liked it, too.

When Anna Maria occasionally took leave of the queen and traveled back to her countryside home in Wobrun, Bedfordshire, she continued enjoying afternoon tea, invited her countryside pals to join her as well, and the tradition of afternoon tea was born.

Then one sunny August afternoon in 2024, a group of pretty important ladies in the United States decided it was high time they participated in the grand tradition of afternoon tea, too.

Okay, so these ladies might not be BFFs with royalty, but they are pretty important to me. I do also realize this may not have been the first time afternoon tea was ever served in the United States. In fact, I remember participating in a version of it in my eighth grade social studies class.

All I really recall from that experience was that we had to wear fancy clothes, had to eat kind of gross cucumber sandwiches right after lunch that I’m assuming consisted of rectangular cafeteria pizza, were warned not to add both milk and lemon to our tea, and had to take at least one no thank you sip. It was a highly educational experience.

When more than three decades later, one of my pretty important friends decided to invite a bunch of her equally important friends to afternoon tea, I didn’t entirely know what to expect. Thankfully, eighth grade social studies had prepared me for such a time as this.

I donned fancy clothes, including a big hat of the variety rarely worn these days by American ladies unless they are either going to the Kentucky Derby or to high church on Easter Sunday, and they happen to be six years old. I enjoyed my tea with milk, and no lemon, and I ate delicious goodies including some cucumber sandwiches that were excellent and very welcome after I failed to eat a lunch of rectangular cafeteria pizza. Truth be told, by the time afternoon tea rolled around, I was getting a little hangry.

In 1820, nineteen-year-old Isaac Van Amburgh accepted a position with the Zoological Institute of New York, as the cage boy whose job it was to clean out the cages of the exotic animals kept by the traveling menagerie. To say it was his dream job would probably be a bit of a stretch, but like most of us, Isaac had to do some grunt work before he got his big break.

That break came just a year later when one of the owners of the menagerie saw that young Isaac had a way with the lions. It turned out he had a knack for training them. He would eventually go on become the person most often credited with beginning the art of lion taming for show, an act that would become as linked with the circus as clowns, elephants, and P.T. Barnum.

For this reason, when my oldest son realized a camp he attends would have a circus theme this year and for one of their special events, he would need a circus-themed costume, he chose to be a lion tamer. And because he’s an extremely clever kid with a quirky sense of humor, he decided to be a lion tamer who is allergic to cats.

I love the way he thinks, but he may be overconfident in my skill as a costumer. I like to believe I’m fairly clever, too, and I can be crafty when called upon. Like my own mother always did, I keep a few pieces of poster board stuffed behind my dresser just in case one of my kids suddenly remembers the science fair is tomorrow. And I barely batted an eye when he came home from school earlier this year needing an Egyptian pharaoh costume for a social studies speech the next day. Thank goodness bathrobes are so versatile.

But then after weeks of asking him if he had a handle on his lion tamer costume, he finally told me a few days before camp, all he needed was a lion and a red tuxedo jacket, preferably with sequins.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to find a red tuxedo jacket for a twelve-year-old on a poster board budget and with two days notice, but it’s not exactly an easy task. What we came up with was a red raincoat that with a great deal of red duct tape and some shiny gold craft tape looked kind of okay from a distance.

lionyawn — He did what? Evidently Van Amburgh was not allergic to cats. Or very large teeth. photo credit: valentinastorti Lion – yawning via photopin (license)

And really, keeping a lion tamer at a distance probably isn’t such a bad idea anyway. Because lions are wild animals, and unless you are Isaac Van Amburgh, they may bite off your head. Actually it’s surprising they didn’t do just that to Van Amburgh, who earned himself a great deal of fame and wealth by becoming the first man to stick his head inside the open jaws of a lion.

We’re talking the kind of fame that won him the attention of Queen Victoria, who even became a groupie of his for a time, taking the time to catch his act about half a dozen times in a matter of weeks. And this was even in the days before YouTube.

The queen was so taken with the performance that she commissioned a painting of her favorite daring (and incredibly stupid) animal trainer. In it, Van Amburgh is pictured wearing a Roman gladiator ensemble, his preferred costume since shiny red tuxedo jackets can be challenging to find.

A man who stuck his head inside the mouth of a lion and lived to tell the tale. — Isaac Van Amburgh and His Animals, By Edwin Henry Landseer – Web Gallery of Art: Image Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6185738

Van Amburgh’s show did receive a fair share of criticism, too. He was, according to his publicity agent, terribly abusive to the large cats, basically beating and strategically starving them into submission. Had he gotten his head chomped by one of them, he’d probably have gotten what he deserved.

Instead, Van Amburgh had a heart attack and died in his bed in 1865. He was only 54 at the time, but for a guy who made his living putting his head into the open mouths of angry, hungry lions, I’d say he lived a pretty long life.