In the Spotlight
CYRIL BERTRAM MILLS
Howard Campbell, a distinguished journalist and a fellow "spook" at MI6 (the British Secret Services) during the Second World War, summed up Cyril Mills as "an enterprising, perceptive, obstinate, opinionated, cheerful, loyal, delightful and wholly lovable man." Praise indeed for one of the greatest circus proprietors of the twentieth century. Cyril Mills (1902-1991) and his younger brother, Bernard (1908-1985), continued, after the death of their father, Bertram W. Mills, in 1938 to direct the great circus he had created in England in 1920—until its closure in 1967. The Bertram Mills Circus was started by Bertram Wagstaff Mills, a former RASC Captain in the First World War, who was a coach builder, an international horseshow judge, and ran a very successful undertaker’s business in London. As the story goes, Mills, who had many influential friends in high places, attended a performance of the Great Victory Circus and Allied Fair at the Olympia exhibition hall in London during the 1919/1920 winter season; when pressed for his opinion of the show, he is recorded as having said, "If I could not give the people a better circus than that for their money, I’d eat my hat!"... (
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