The man who runs one of Britain’s most-loved circuses has revealed how he spent a year being treated in a burns unit after a trick went wrong. Martin ‘Zippo’ Burton started out as a clown 48 years ago.
Now, at 78, Martin still lives “at the circus”, he says. “Today I’m living at Streatham Common, next week I’ll be living in East Ham."
“In July I’ll be living in the far north of Scotland. We travel as far north as Inverness and as far south as Brighton - and we’ll be back in London for Winter Wonderland at Christmas. We all live at the circus; that’s where we live.”
In fact, Zippos closes for just two weeks a year allowing Martin to attend the Circus Festival in Monte Carlo - a far cry from the three months off a year performers got when he started out almost half a century ago.
“The world has changed,” says Martin. “Everybody has bills to pay and can't afford to take winters off anymore.” Martin trained as a middle school teacher at a time when there were only three middle schools in the country, so he became a drama teacher.
“I was a bit out of my depth because I’d never done any actual performing,” he says. “So I trained as a mime to catch up with practical performance experience.”
Unfortunately, Martin wasn’t adept at stillness or body control that’s required, and consequently was “a truly useless mime, dreadful”. However, he discovered clowning - the same slapstick techniques as miming, but being able to speak.
Martin’s parents weren’t pleased by their son’s intentions to quite literally run away and join the circus, until he began busking in Covent Garden, back when it was still just a fruit market.
“I had a mortgage of £71.50 a month and I could earn that with an hour’s busking,” says Martin, “so I proved to myself and my parents that I could sustain myself as a clown.”
Within a year, he was performing at the Roundhouse. Within three years he was looking forward to his first tour in Australia and would go on to Bali, Singapore - all across the southern hemisphere, with one culture after another enthusiastically enjoying the shows. But in his late thirties, Martin’s time performing as Zippo the clown was cut brutally short.
“I was trained as an acrobatic clown, and we started to do nightclubs to diversify,” says Martin. “We used to do a trick which wasn’t clowning at all, where I would escape from a burning box.”
The trick involved setting the box on fire with an aircraft flare. “It was all very spectacular,” he continues. “I’d be in handcuffs, chains, ropes and in a mail sack, and the box would all be roped up. And one day, the aircraft flare - which burned at 2000 degrees centigrade - joined me inside the box.”
The trick went very badly wrong, and Martin spent a year in a burns unit. He describes himself as “very lucky” because the accident happened just a few months after the Falklands war and he was able to be treated in an army hospital.
When he finally emerged from the burns unit, he had skin grafts on every part of his body, so was no longer physically up to clowning.
“That’s heartbreaking,” I say. There is a pause. “It’s ok,” he says. “I’ve laughed all the way through all of it.”
Most people would probably have not then gone on to run a circus - most of us would probably have run from it. But Martin is not most of us, and Zippos Circus has now been going for 48 years and has a strong brand.
“I now get people regularly coming up to me saying, ‘I brought my children to see your circus because when I was six years old, my mum brought me to see your circus’,” says Martin. “I’d like to throttle the people who say that!” Poor Martin - when it comes to being made to feel old, that’s worse than finding out Macaulay Culkin is 41.
Martin has been asked to try to nail down the demographics of people who come to the circus - but it’s proven to be impossible to do. The circus seems to appeal equally to all classes, cultures, and ages, all with “the same affection for the circus” - if anything, the only constant seems to be families.
“If you go to the theatre with your kids and they start running up and down the aisle, talking, munching on crisps and slurping on cans of drink, the usher will politely touch you on the shoulder and tell you to control your kids,” says Martin. "In the circus we don’t do that, so it’s a much better family environment.”
Zippos even employs the great-great grandson of Whimsical Walker, Queen Victoria’s favourite clown.
When Martin met Phillip, who goes by Whimmie, he noticed how much clowning seemed to run through his veins, “He walks like a clown, he talks like a clown - anything he does, in or out of the circus, he’s one of those rare people who just is a clown.”
One thing that has changed in his lifetime is the growth of coulrophobia, the irrational fear of clowns. Martin states, with quite a lot of irritation, that he doesn’t believe it really exists.
“I think it’s entirely manufactured by Hollywood, every time a new Stephen King movie comes out - I am sick to death of people saying clowns are scary. Proper clowns aren’t scary at all.”
But they couldn’t ignore it - especially since around 10% of the entire population claim to be terrified of clowns. One thing that seemed to help was reducing the amount of makeup, and losing the red noses.
“The red nose became a symbol of coulrophobia,” he says.
“We would open shows with a clown coming on with no makeup on, and sit in front of a mirror and put their makeup on to show the kids they weren’t scary. And it always worked.”
Now, after half a century on the road and knocking on 80 years old, Martin ‘Zippo’ Burton shows no signs of stopping - and for a man who laughed all the way through his near-death experience, we’d expect nothing less.
You can get tickets to Zippos via their website .
