People began to suspect something was wrong when the clown failed to appear. Last year, for the first time in more than 20 years, Tweedy, the anarchic Scottish clown, who, with his pratfalls and pet clothing iron, Keef, provided the glue to every Giffords Circus performance, was not part of the cast. He’d not only left; he’d gone off to form a rival circus.
Tongues began to wag. There was talk of bad blood in the big tent. What was going on behind the scenes of England’s most beloved circus?
Giffords, as it’s known, works its way across the Cotswolds every summer. It differs from other circuses in the same way Erewhon differs from other supermarkets. It’s a self-described “village green” circus, and its smallish big top doesn’t have elephants or lions, but it does have a panoply of Ossetian horsemen, Ethiopian jugglers, Cuban tumblers, and performing dogs and chickens, drawn from circuses across the world. It also has a host of high-profile fans such as Hugh Grant, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Helena Bonham Carter.
Giffords was the eccentric dream of Nell Gifford, an Oxford University graduate who ran away to join the circus in the 1990s and, with her husband, Toti Gifford, ended up creating something both traditional and strikingly modern—a besequinned ensemble of international players, backed by a live house band, traveling through the English countryside in antique liveried trucks, putting on astonishing shows with a new theme—Greek myth! Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace! Arthurian legend!—each year.
It grew in fame, selling out shows from April through September, and continued to do so even after Nell died from cancer in 2019, at the age of 46.
Last fall, a visit to Giffords offered a bucolic vision. The summer was melting away, generations of family members sat at wooden tables, and the ring girls in fishnet stockings and feathered hats handed out programs. Dressed in a simple white shirt and brown trousers, Guy James, the C.E.O. of Giffords, sticks out from the rest of the brightly colored circus crew. He has no background in the circus or performance arts in general—he’s an accountant.
“I first came [to Giffords] in 2013 as an accountant, and the idea was that they would outsource all their accounting functions to me,” he says. “Over a period of time, Nell and I just worked closer and closer together.... I just became her manager.”
Guy describes himself as a “custodian,” whose aim is to look after the circus for the time Nell’s teenage children come of age and can claim it as their inheritance. The circus is currently held in a discretionary trust of which he is a trustee alongside members of Nell’s family. It’s a responsibility he takes “incredibly seriously.”
When it’s suggested to Guy that an accountant is a strange person to have as the head of a circus, he pushes back. “I think your stereotype is wrong,” he says. “I’m on the committee of the Association of Circus Proprietors.... At the end of the day these are guys who are running a business.” And Giffords is a big, complicated business.
There are around 600 attendees a show, 289 shows a year, and 70 touring staff to transport across 13 different locations.
“At the end of the day, I wish [Nell] was still here doing it, rather than me,” says Guy. “Whilst I take a huge amount of responsibility and joy and pleasure and pride in what we’re doing, this is not what I wanted to happen. Never in a million years.”
Yet when I called up Nell’s sister, the writer Clover Stroud, I heard another side of the story. “There is much more to this than what Guy James will have told you,” she says. “It’s incredibly sad.”
A Deathbed Recantation
Nell Gifford died in Gloucester Hospital surrounded by friends and family. Three months after her death, the pandemic shuttered the circus for the entire year. During this fallow period, deliberations began concerning the makeup of the circus’s board and the trusteeship that would run parallel to the board of directors.
The board consisted of Guy James, Lil Rice (Nell’s niece and protégée), and Irene Molodtsov, a former KPMG consultant. But according to Clover, Nell had left a “letter of wishes” in which she asked that Tweedy the clown (real name, Alan Digweed), James Keay, the circus’s musical director, and Nancy Trotter Landry, a regular circus performer and friend, should be brought onto the board alongside them.
It came as a shock, Clover wrote in The Times of London in 2022, when Guy blocked the move to put them on the board. Trustees have to act unanimously to instigate a decision, and Guy was both a trustee and a director. When asked why Nell’s wishes had not been enacted, Guy claimed that Nell had told him, a few hours before she died, that she did not want this to happen. None of the other friends, family, or circus members Air Mail spoke to could confirm that this deathbed recantation had occurred.
By May 2021, Molodtsov had resigned from the board, citing “a toxic environment.” Nevertheless the circus had returned with its first post-Nell tour. It was titled “The Hooley,” a Gaelic word referring to a party or celebration. Lil Rice became the face of the show. “My soul, everything that I am, is here at Giffords,” she told The Times of London. Yet within two months of writing this, Rice had resigned from the board. She left Giffords at the end of that year’s run to form her own dinner circus. Guy was the sole director left.
Nancy Trotter Landry, who had worked with Nell at the circus since 2003, thinks that Guy blocked her appointment to the board because “it would look unprofessional to potential investors” if “artists [were] on the board of directors.” Trotter Landry says Lil Rice (who declined to be interviewed) also sided with James at the time, but stepped down because “it all [became] such a mess, and everyone was arguing.”
Trotter Landry left the circus in 2021, too, after she was offered a contract that saw her pay reduced significantly. She looks back on Nell’s legacy fondly, but regrets she wasn’t able to take a more decisive role in preserving it. “I felt really indignant about Guy acting like he knew what to do with this precious egg, when [he didn’t] even know the first thing about what it’s about.”
The trust remained, but the family members “have been deprived of the status and position [Nell] wanted them to have,” Clover wrote in The Times of London. This affected her greatly. “The failure I feel in being unable to perform that final, simple act for Nell is profound, and has been like losing my sister all over again.”
Last fall, Clover explained that she had made little headway disputing Guy’s singular level of control over Giffords. Feeling defeated, she asked to formally step down as a trustee but says she was asked to sign what was “essentially a non-disclosure agreement” as a condition of her departure. Clover was shocked. “I was happy to keep all trust business confidential,” Clover says, “but Guy insisted Nell’s letter of wishes should be confidential, too, which felt completely inappropriate.... Her wishes were not controversial and shouldn’t have been blocked.”
Clover said she’d been “bullied and belittled” by Guy and earlier this year was hospitalized from stress, which she attributed to the battle over the circus. Giffords, which Nell had created to be about community, art, and love, appeared to be crumbling.
“A Very Weird Thing to Do”
Rick Stroud, Clover and Nell’s father, is an award-winning film director, a historian of World War II, and a former chairman of the Chelsea Arts Club, a private members’ club for artists, which dates back to 1890. He raised his daughters in a bohemian atmosphere in the small Wiltshire village of Minety, alongside his gleefully chaotic wife, Charlotte. There were ponies cantering through the garden and parades with homemade costumes, and the occasional renowned actor, such as Albert Finney, could be found visiting. However, in 1991, Charlotte fell
from her horse and suffered irreversible brain damage. Nell fled her home to join Circus Flora in the United States.
Charlotte eventually died, in 2013, and Rick now lives on a houseboat on the river Thames with his second wife. Rick recalls how just hours after Nell died, he and his wife were walking across the hospital car park when they were intercepted by Guy, who said to Rick’s wife, “I don’t think Nell meant for Clover to be a trustee.” Rick was upset and confused. Not only did he think that what Guy said was untrue, but he found it “a very weird thing to do with [Nell] dead two hours before.”
After Nell’s death, Rick wanted to retrieve some of Nell’s belongings from a storage unit. But Guy had been given power of attorney over Nell’s financial and property affairs and was also one of the executors of her will. Rick says that Guy accompanied the family to the storage unit, “bossed us around,” and “wouldn’t leave us to go through things quietly.” Prior to Nell’s death, an auction of her paintings had been planned, but after she died, Rick and Clover wanted to keep some of the paintings. Guy, however, allegedly declared it would be better to realize as much money from the estate as possible. Rick says he’s since come to bitterly regret allowing this to happen.
Though Rick was sure that Guy would make the circus a financial success, “it’s not the circus that Nell had wanted.” The family atmosphere between management and performers has weakened, and the shows—while still ingenious—have re-used jokes and songs from previous years. Rick says that it was Nell’s bad management “based on bad advice from her solicitors” that allowed Guy to become both a trustee and a director. He said he had heard from other shocked circus proprietors that Guy had been describing Giffords as “my circus.”
“Guy has put himself into an unassailable position that Nell did not want [him to have],” Rick says. “As her father, I object to that.” Rick showed Air Mail texts from Nell’s phone sent in the months before she died. One message, sent from Nell to Molodtsov, read:
“I am up against it and constantly in hospital. In my absence Guy has kind of been in charge and to be honest things have gone a little hay wire [sic]. He has a very blokey aggressive way about him at the moment and is not sophisticated enough to replace me in my absence.”
(Guy James did not reply to Air Mail’s multiple requests for comment.)
A Circus Miracle
A common theme in a Giffords Circus show is redemption. With his tuft of red hair, twisted mouth, and wiry body, Tweedy the clown often begins the show getting trapped in a deck chair, or having his baggy trousers repeatedly drop to the floor. He tries to join the more spectacular acts, but is chased away from them by the Master of Ceremonies.
One year, having attempted and failed throughout the show to join the Hungarian horsemen—who perform stomach-churning flips on the backs of their horses—he finally made a break for it and leapt atop the back of a thundering horse as it cantered round the tight circle of the ring. Tweedy, the clumsy clown, steadied himself, licked his lips, and turned a perfect somersault atop the horse, bringing the house down. Giffords Circus is a place where miracles happen, 289 times a year.
In the run-up to this year’s season, a similar sort of miracle occurred. In tandem with Toti Gifford, Nell’s former husband and co-founder of the circus, Clover approached Guy yet again to express her serious concerns about his management. According to Clover, after multiple talks, Guy miraculously agreed to step down as a trustee. Toti is to take on the role of C.E.O. and chairman of Giffords “for the future of my children,” and Guy, after seizing the spotlight, is to revert to being the account manager.
“We’re all very grateful for Guy James, who has looked after the show and the business,” says Toti, but the circus is “moving forward. The past is in the past, and forgive and forget.”
Guy’s sudden change of heart may seem out of character for someone who meticulously took it upon himself to wrest control of the circus from the family, and who only a few months ago was—according to Clover—seemingly immovable. Equally strange is that, after all his alleged skulduggery, he’s still with the circus, albeit back in the shadows of the accounts department.
It’s possible that Guy had naturally arrived at the conclusion that Giffords would be better run by an actual Gifford, so that the family spirit of the circus would continue. It’s also possible legal threats forced his hand—although neither Clover nor Toti would confirm this. According to a statement from Giffords Circus, “the past few years have not been easy for anyone. Not only were Nell’s family (both circus and biological) experiencing profound grief after her passing but we also faced immense challenges during the pandemic. Through it all, our extraordinarily dedicated team carried the circus forward and we’re very grateful to them.”
The only decisive reaction we received to the twists and turns of the Giffords saga was from Rick Stroud: “I never want to go anywhere near Giffords Circus ever again in my life.”
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the circus. Its first show, in 2000, was held at the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts, where a few dozen onlookers sat on plastic chairs and were entertained by a juggler, a contortionist, and a violinist who danced on a rope. This summer, the crowds will come from miles around to see acrobats on hoverboards and high-hoop diving, all performed in front of the raucous live band. The theme is Laguna Bay, which aims to channel the “buoyant and sunny era of 1950’s America.” And Tweedy the clown is back.
Miles Ellingham is a London-based journalist
