My model circus as it appears today began life as a toy in 1993. I had recently been to visit Jay Miller’s Circus on the racecourse in Warwick, my home town, and I was hooked! Every toy lorry I had was suddenly a circus lorry! For my 12th birthday my grandad made me a model big top. It could be built up and packed away onto my toy lorries. I have to confess this small show had used to go on tours around the rooms of my house! It was often joked that the novelty would wear off, but that was not the case and the model seen today has evolved from these beginnings.

To start with all the vehicles were in the livery they had been bought, but gradually we adopted a red and yellow colour scheme for vehicles bought specifically for the circus. These began to be collected from toy fairs and car boot sales; anywhere I could get model vehicles cheap enough. My grandad also set about building a trailer mounted ticket office, with fold out panels to make up the show front. Again this was designed to build up and pull down as the real thing would. It was around this point we began adding the name ‘P.J.Tandy’s Circus’ to the models using transfers produced by a local firm, on all the available trucks. The oldest model truck in the show’s fleet still has these transfers, although the rest of the vehicles have been changed or replaced since this time.


The former show front, now laid up at winter quarters!

The circus continued to grow and made its first public appearance at my school fete in 1994, displayed alongside my model fairground ride and a traditional fair organ built by my great, grandad. The following summer I was invited to display my model at the Town and Country Festival at Stoneleigh Park. This was the event at which my circus has made by far the most appearances, although sadly due to an unfortunate set of circumstances this show no longer takes place.

Once exhibiting alongside other circus modellers I received a lot of encouragement and we began to make the circus into a self contained model display. For my 14th birthday, my mum bought the big top seen in the pictures of the layout on this site. This tent was scratch built to our specification by a fellow modeller using the show’s colours of red and yellow to fit in with the rest of the models. We made base boards and assembled these onto a square made up of paste tables. We constantly added more and more vehicles, but we also had the opportunity now to add working features to the model.

First up was the Snake Temple side show, which has smoke coming out of a giant cobra behind the attraction. This caused quite a stir at its first show and a lot of disappointment among modellers who’d been eyeing it up for their trains! Because we had the table mounted display, the smoke was made by a theatrical smoke machine, not really the scale to fit in your average loco! At the same time as my dad was constructing this, my grandad was busy with another attraction, the cyclist on the high wire. This was originally powered by a motor taken out of an air raid siren, although this was replaced a few years later with a low voltage motor. We were asked recently how far he had cycled since he was made which got us all thinking. After totalling up the number of shows, their duration, the distance travelled each time and the number of times this was done in a minute we worked out it was about 60 miles! No mean feat for a figure less than 5 cm tall.

The circus continued to grow from this point onwards, more and more working features followed with the Wheel of Death, rola rola and unicyclist coming from my grandad and a working fire breather and Captain Arbuthnot’s human cannonball from my dad. The model has always involved my family using my grandad’s watch-making skills and my dad’s electronics and computer skills, to get the best of both worlds in the modelling field. My skills developed in painting and finishing the models, adding weathering to the various vehicles etc.

During 1998 we had decided to revamp the base boards for the model, the chipboard and paste tables had not really been up to the job! The new boards were MDF, covered in Artex (the gunk used to make patterned ceilings) which allowed us to create a textured surface for the field, complete with tyre tracks from trucks etc. This was sprayed a mixture of greens and browns and covered with about fourteen bags of Games Workshop flock. The guys in the shop noting the seven foot by eleven foot area as being the largest they’d ever heard of anyone using the product for! The whole lot were nearly wrecked before they were finished by the flooding of Good Friday that year, fortunately we got them upstairs quickly enough, but the chipboard base was completely finished off.  

The next major development in the circus was the construction of the impressive show front. The majority of this was built by my dad over a period of approximately two years. It is controlled by a programmable chip known as a PIC, which were still in their infancy at the time we started using them. This meant the sequence of flashing lights had to be programmed in ‘machine code’. This is a very specific programming language that can make even a professional want to smack their head against the computer monitor when it doesn’t work correctly. My grandad drilled the ninety holes in each of the four circus truck bodies to allow the lights to be mounted inside. Then a circuit of over a thousand solder joints was put in place to make everything work. The show front debuted at the Town and Country in the summer of 2000, completed just hours before we began setting up the display.

The stage lighting in the big top followed a few years later. In this time LED technology had changed. High output diodes were becoming available and these seemed like the perfect solution to changing the colours in the ring, and creating the effect of real stage lighting on a miniature scale. Again the programming for the controller was done using a PIC, but this time programmed in Basic, a much more human friendly programming language! Bright white LED’s could be flashed ten times a second to create the effect of strobes. UV LED’s were also available so we repainted the trapeze artiste’s costumes in glow in the dark paint to create an effect as yet unseen on any other model circus.

Throughout this time my grandad was continuing to produce more working features. As well as acts we began to focus on behind the scenes features as seen in real circuses, but rarely modelled. Features such as the mechanic welding, a lady making candy floss, machines mixing slosh for the clowns, a working all terrain fork lift and so forth were added to the display. He also made moving animals for the circus zoo, an elephant that shook his head and gorillas that moved in their cage. Each new part meaning that there was movement whereever you looked at the layout.

We constantly added new vehicles to the display around all the other developments. Many of the toy vehicles were phased out and replaced with detailed replicas based on vehicles seen with circuses that visited our local area. When I first started the model I decided to use my own name rather than base it on a real show so that I could have free reign over what went into the model. This meant we could take the best examples of real vehicles and re-produce them in miniature for our circus, rather than produce an accurate model of any one show.

Corgi released an ERF EC series tractor unit into its range. The real vehicles were very popular within the circus industry and so it was logical for these to be added to the model fleet. We have tried recently to add greater detail to each new model we make. One of these tractor units now has a driver, a hi-vis jacket on the passenger seat, and a can of coke and road atlas on the dash board. As real shows adopt new transport we try to update the tractor units on the circus accordingly. A fleet of ERF ECS vehicles having recently been acquired for just this purpose as their real counterparts begin to appear on the circus scene.

We’ve also looked at fitting interiors to the vehicles we model. The artiste’s caravans are now furnished inside, the curtain sides and doors are open on trailers so a load can be seen inside, the ticket office even has rolls of tickets and a till inside. All these details are intended to add to the realism of a travelling circus. One truck has a member of staff in the back of the box body smoking, the effect being achieved by mounting a fibre optic cable through the figure’s head to a red light hidden away in the front of the vehicle.


Smoker in the back of the seating truck

The model circus has been a real family achievement and has kept us all busy one way or another over the years. When my dad died suddenly in 2005 I had to get to grips with the electronics side of things to keep what we had working, and began to learn how to wire up the newer models as we went along. Those who know me well tend to go into hiding when they see me with a soldering iron in my hand!

In 2009 my grandad also died suddenly, leaving the mechanical side of the model also down to me. Although I had the knowledge to design the mechanisms and work out how they would operate, I never actually made any of them and so this is going to be my next big challenge. I have the next mechanical feature planned out, although simple by comparison to the rest of the display, I hope it will be the first step towards many more in future years.

Although at present the layout no longer goes on public display I am hoping it will be possible to update this website to show the new developments to those who remain interested in my model. Whenever I am involved in media work with the circus, the question always comes up “when will it be finished”. I think I can honestly say it never will be, as I still have a head full of ideas for new things to add to the model. It has continually evolved since we first started work seventeen years ago and hopefully it will continue to improve and grow for many more.

Paul Tandy 2010