author
Frank Charles Bostock
1866–1912
Born into Britain’s famous Bostock and Wombwell menagerie dynasty, this animal trainer and showman turned a family tradition into an international spectacle. He became widely known in the United States as "The Animal King" and built a reputation for grand wild-animal exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic.
1 Audiobook
The Training of Wild Animals
by Frank Charles Bostock
About the author
Born in Darlington on September 10, 1866, Frank Charles Bostock grew up in a family deeply tied to travelling menageries and animal shows. Following that tradition, he became an animal trainer while still young and eventually developed his own large-scale entertainment business featuring exotic animals.
He toured in Europe and later expanded to the United States, where his shows helped make him famous under the nickname "The Animal King." Archival and reference sources describe him as an entrepreneur as well as a trainer, and his career reflects the huge public appetite for animal exhibitions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Bostock died in London on October 8, 1912. Remembered as one of the best-known showmen of his era, he remains closely associated with the Bostock and Wombwell name and with the spectacular, complicated world of historic travelling menageries.