A fight between visiting circus performers and volunteer firefighters becomes a retaliatory riot. Toronto’s police response creates a scandal of its own.
The first fight settled nothing. It merely arranged the following day’s programme.
On Friday, 13 July 1855, a Toronto crowd attacked a circus because local firefighters had lost a fight to clowns the night before.
The chronology matters.
On Thursday night, performers from S. B. Howes’ visiting American circus went to a King Street brothel. Members of Toronto’s volunteer Hook and Ladder fire company were there too.
A dispute became a brawl.
The clowns won.
The first fight settled nothing. It merely arranged the following day’s programme.
On Friday, a crowd gathered around the circus grounds at Fair Green, near the waterfront east of St. Lawrence Market. The confrontation escalated from threats and fighting into the destruction of the circus itself.
Circus wagons were overturned and burned. The Hook and Ladder company arrived with its equipment, but not to put out the fire. Its members joined the attack and helped pull down the circus tent.
The performers escaped. The mayor eventually called for military assistance before order was restored.
The riot was bizarre on its surface. Underneath it sat a serious civic problem.
Toronto’s volunteer fire companies were powerful social organizations, and many firefighters and police constables belonged to the Orange Order, which exerted extensive political influence in the city.
Police officers at the scene were accused of standing by instead of stopping the destruction.
Seventeen alleged rioters later appeared in court. According to the historical account assembled from municipal and contemporary newspaper records, the constables could not identify any of them as participants.
The response produced public outrage and a City Council investigation. Its committee condemned the force’s lack of efficiency and discipline and recommended fundamental changes to how Toronto’s police were organized and appointed.
Reform took several years and had more than one cause. In 1859, the existing force was dismissed and replaced under a new police commission structure.
The Circus Riot did not single-handedly create modern policing in Toronto. It became one especially vivid piece of the evidence that the existing system was compromised.
A Thursday-night brothel fight had become a Friday-the-13th circus riot.
The clowns left town. The scandal stayed.
A fight between clowns and firefighters generated a retaliatory attack in which firefighters helped destroy a circus while the city’s police were accused of watching their associates do it.
The clowns won the brawl. Toronto inherited the investigation.
Evidence status
Sources
Municipal heritage
Original language: EnglishDocumentary police history
Crime & Punishment in Canada — History of the Toronto Police, 1850–1859
Original language: English