“by his own industry and talent, he got together as fine a stud of horses and ponies as any in England,” at least one of which was purchased from Queen Victoria’s stables. Fanque was capable of turning out horses that “danced” along to well-known tunes, and it was said that “the band has not to accommodate itself to the action of the horse, as in previous performances of this kind.”

You are correct to say we know nothing certain about Fanque’s mother. Most sources imply she was British in suggesting that she married a man who had been brought to Norwich as a servant (which one might expect would mean alone, or at least not with a female); we do know from church records that her name was Mary Stamp. The reference to Fanque appearing with his father may well be an error, in which someone else has been mistaken for Darby senior, but it cannot have been Lionel, who was not born until 1835. (He became a well known equestrian clown and lived until 1919.)

The birth date is also interesting. There is a record from St Andrew’s workhouse in Norwich recording the birth of a William Darby to parents of the correct name in 1810, and Fanque’s death certificate states that his age was 61, which looks more likely for a hard-living circus performer with a child aged 15 than an age of 76, and backs up a birth date of 1810. This would certainly seem to chime with the fact that Fanque makes no appearance in the record as a circus performer until c.1828 (when he would have been aged more than 30 if the date generally given for his birth is correct.) However, all the main sources, including Turner’s detailed biography and the article he wrote on Fanque for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, give the 1796 date. Turner notes, from the International Genealogical Index, that Fanque’s parents married in 1791, which would make the 1810 date look extremely late for a family in which Fanque, in Turner’s account, had two older siblings and a younger sister. Turner also provides a cite for The Era of May 14, 1871, which says that Fanque was born on February 28, 1796, and baptized within hours because his parents did not expect him to live out the day.

It might be noted Turner’s work was completed before modern digital archives made such investigations vastly easier.

@ David

You are absolutely right. A great spot, which eluded me. There’s a photo of Lennon with his original here, and there are clear differences, though I’d go so far as to say that whoever set the modern version has done his best, without worrying too much about typefaces, to follow the rough layout of the original.

I know that copies of the poster are made available for sale to Beatles fans, so I’d guess the modern version may originally have been produced for a commercial motive.

Does’t affect the real topic, but I’m not convinced by your poster image.

1.The word “SOMERSETS” looks set in Arial to me, see the curve in the “R”; also the vertical strokes are narrower than the horizontal, as if the word had been squashed (rather than using a true condensed font.)

2.”BENEFIT OF MR. KITE” is also in a modern font (name escapes me right now)

3. “THE CELEBRATED SOMERSET THROWER” is in Impact.

Besides all that, using sans-serif (or “sans-surryph”) fonts at all would probably have been too avant-garde for Rochdale in 1843. Some examples here http://typophile.com/node/51985

It may well still be a mockup / “reimagining” of a true original, of course.