The Seven Ashtons, Australian 'Risley' acrobats are shown in a US television program of the 1950s, introduced by the famous jazz clarinettist, Jimmy Dorsey.
Excerpt from
CIRCUS: THE AUSTRALIAN STORY
by Mark St Leon
Six brothers and a sister, the acrobatic troupe of the Seven Ashtons, were famous throughout the United States and Europe during the late 1940s and early 1950s. They were the children of Jack and Dorothy ('Dossie') Hay who had married in 1923. Dossie was an Ashton, a bareback rider, and a granddaughter of James Henry Ashton, while Jack was a trumpet player in the Ashton circus band.
During the Depression in the 1930s, things were so hard that Jack used to supplement his meagre circus bandsman's wage by making tin dishes, pots and pans to sell to farmers. Their only taste of meat was the occasional rabbit he caught. With no money but plenty of 'stock' (in the form of eight children), the Hays decided to leave the Ashton circus and develop their own acrobatic act. At Lithgow, they lived in a tent while Jack made a few shillings from busking in the streets and chopping wood. Having moved around so much, Dossie had never heard of child endowment, but when she did, collected £60 accumulated in her favour. The family's improved financial position enabled them to move down to Sydney where they took a little house in Newtown. In the backyard, the children practised spinning brooms with their feet and balancing an old armchair. Soon they progressed to a stage performance where one artist, after a series of somersaults in mid-air, landed on the upturned feet of another. Although their family name was 'Hay', they used their mother's famous name of Ashton for professional purposes.
Seven of the eight children became the Seven Ashtons. Their specialty was a Risley act, named for its originator, the American gymnast, Richard Risley Carlisle, who exhibited these performances in Sydney during his visit in 1861. In a Risley act, one or more performers, lying on his back, juggled smaller members of the troupe with his feet. The act required as many as three 'trinkas', small cradeles in which the heavier acrobats of the troupe lay in order to propel the lighter ones back and forth in a fast and exciting routine. Eminent British circus historian Antony Hippisley Coxe described the Seven Ashtons' act as the best he had ever seen. The Ashtons did a nine-minute routine without a pause, somersaulting, leaping and back-flipping in perpetual motion.
At home, Jack had guided the family but, refusing to follow the family overseas, Dossie took control of affairs abroad. She was a hard woman, an intimidating mother, a ruthless negotiator, and 'hammered' her children into performers of world renown. Whenever she entered into face-to-face negotiations with vaudeville and theatre managers, she always had one of her sons, Stanley ('Hoodie'), close at hand. At some stage, she requested that she and Hoodie be left alone to discuss the detail of the contract. It was then that Hoodie would read the contract to his mother and tell her how to reply. The vaudeville managers did not realise that Dossie could neither read nor write.
The Seven Ashtons toured the United States with Sonja Henie's famous ice show and appeared in a Royal Command performance before George VI at the London Coliseum. The troupe was seen to good advantage on celluloid in the 1957 Red Skelton film, Public Pigeon No. 1. By the early 1960s, work offers began to thin and the family, with wives and children, had become unmanageable. The original Seven Ashtons' act broke up, although some family members continued with their own smaller acts. Several of the family eventually returned to Australia, including Mickey, who found a new focus late in life training the young people of Albury--Wodonga's Flying Fruit Fly Circus before his death in 1985.
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