Look at this photograph. Two Victorian clowns, smiles permanently painted on their faces, musical instruments in their hands, posing for the camera in 1876. It looks innocent. It looks like just another record of Victorian era entertainment. But this image captures the final days of a duo that would become synonymous with one of the most disturbing episodes in the history of British freak shows.
What happened at Choke and Chuckles last show wasn’t forgotten because it was insignificant. It was forgotten because it was so viscerally traumatic that Victorian society preferred to completely erase its memory. But the records survived, and the story they tell is far worse than you could imagine. The clowns you see in this photograph were known only by their stage names, Choke and Chuckle.
Their real names were deliberately obscured in official records, a common practice when Victorian authorities wanted to distance individuals from public scandals. What we know comes from fragments. Newspaper accounts that were quickly censored, judicial testimonies that remained sealed for decades, and memories of people who were present that night and carried the trauma until their final days.
The duo began their career in 1872, working in the freak shows and music halls that proliferated in England’s industrial cities. They weren’t traditional circus clowns. They were what Victorians called grotesque musical clowns, a peculiar category of entertainment that combined exaggerated physical comedy with musical performances.
Choke played the violin with surprisingly competent technique, while Chuckle accompanied on guitar. Their routines mixed music with pantoime, clumsy acrobatics, and violent physical humor that was characteristic of Victorian popular entertainment. The nicknames came from a peculiar observation made by the audience.
During their performances, spectators eating popcorn or other snacks would begin choking simultaneously, coughing and laughing uncontrollably. It wasn’t just one or two people. It was dozens. The phenomenon became so associated with the duo that promoters began advertising them as choke and chuckle.
The clowns that make you gasp and laugh. Newspaper advertisements in Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham between 1873 and 1875 promised an experience the audience would never forget, and they kept that promise, though not in the way anyone would desire. The most likely explanation for the choking phenomenon was simply psychological.
The exaggerated physical comedy, the dramatic falls, the sudden scares made people laugh while eating, leading to natural choking. But in the Victorian mentality, always fascinated by mystery and supernatural explanations, the phenomenon gained almost magical contours. Some claimed there was something in the frequency of Choke’s violin that affected people’s throats.
Others suggested that Chuckle’s movements created some kind of hypnosis that triggered involuntary physical reactions. The truth was more mundane, but the legend was more profitable. In the first 3 years, the duo had considerable success. They were hired regularly, received decent payment by the standards of the time, and built a solid reputation in workingclass entertainment circuits. But there were signs that something was wrong.
Signs that people preferred to ignore because the show was profitable, and the audience kept coming. Reports from promoters suggest that choke frequently arrived drunk to performances. Not the kind of social drunkenness that was common and even expected in Victorian men.
It was severe, destructive alcoholism that progressively affected his ability to function as a human being. Chuckle presented different and perhaps more disturbing problems. Witnesses from the time described behavior that modern medicine would recognize as symptoms of bipolar disorder with severe psychotic features. periods of manic energy where he wouldn’t sleep for days, talked incessantly, picked fights with other performers for no apparent reason, followed by depressive episodes where he remained completely isolated, refusing to leave his room, sometimes for an entire week. And there were the hallucinations. He reported seeing
people who weren’t present, hearing voices that commanded his actions, experiencing alternative realities that only he could perceive. In an era that didn’t understand mental illness, Chuckle was simply considered eccentric, part of his clown persona. Chuckle’s most disturbing behavior happened outside the shows.
Residents of various cities where the duo performed reported to local authorities a disturbing phenomenon that would become urban legend in the following decades. During the night after performances, a clown was seen walking through the streets. Not making noise, not directly interacting, not openly threatening, just following people, especially women alone and children, maintaining a distance of a few meters, makeup still applied, complete clown clothes simply walking behind them in absolute silence.
Emma Hargrove, a seamstress from Manchester, provided detailed testimony to police in March 1875 that would become the most complete account of this phenomenon. She was leaving work late at night when she noticed a figure following her.
Initially, she thought it was her imagination, the kind of paranoia that Victorian women developed out of necessity on dark streets. But when she looked back, she saw clearly a clown with white makeup and painted smile. Maintaining a constant distance of approximately 10 m. She quickened her pace. The clown accelerated equally, his steps echoing on the sidewalk stones. She stopped abruptly, turning to confront the figure.
The clown stopped too, remaining completely motionless, just watching. When she finally reached her residence and knocked desperately on the door, the clown remained standing in the street, watching until she entered. Then he simply turned and disappeared into the darkness, leaving only the sound of his shoes growing distant.
Similar cases were reported in at least seven different cities between 1874 and 1876. The descriptions were disturbingly consistent. a nocturnal clown who followed people but never touched them, never spoke, just watched. The police investigated superficially but never managed to capture the person responsible.
There was no definitive evidence linking Chuckle to these incidents, but multiple witnesses identified the clothes as identical to those used in the duo’s performances. And on one occasion, a victim reported that when she finally entered her house and looked through the window, the clown was laughing silently to himself, his shoulders shaking with mute laughter.
Florence Pritchard, who worked as an assistant in one of the music halls where Choke and Chuckle performed regularly, provided disturbing insights into the dynamic between the two that help understand how the final tragedy became inevitable. She described that Choke treated his alcohol dependency with the blasé indifference typical of advanced alcoholism.
He kept bottles hidden in multiple locations around the music hall, in dressing rooms, behind curtains, even buried in the small back garden. He drank constantly throughout the day, starting as soon as he woke up and continuing until he passed out at night.
He frequently vomited before performances, his hands shaking so violently he could barely hold the violin. But he managed to function on stage through pure mechanical practice. His fingers executing melodies through muscle memory. Even when his consciousness was obscured by alcohol, Chuckle, according to Florence, lived in a reality partially disconnected from the world around him.
He conversed with invisible people, maintaining complete dialogues with empty air. He laughed at jokes that no one else had told. Occasionally he entered catatonic states where he remained completely motionless for hours, his eyes open but unfocused, as if his consciousness had simply shut off.
But paradoxically, these characteristics made him an effective clown for the Victorian audience. His genuinely bizarre behavior, neither rehearsed nor staged, created comedy of discomfort that audiences found simultaneously disturbing and fascinating. People laughed, but it was nervous laughter, uncertain, the kind that comes from not knowing if something is funny or terrifying.
The duo’s deterioration accelerated drastically in 1876. Fights between them became more frequent and violent. Choke, in states of extreme drunkenness, accused Chuckle of sabotaging him, of stealing his drink, of conspiring with promoters to replace him with another performer.
Chuckle responded with manic hostility, sometimes physically attacking Choke, other times laughing uncontrollably for hours without apparent reason, the sound of his laughter echoing through the empty corridors of the music hall. Promoters began to hesitate to hire them, the erratic behavior was becoming more risk than it was worth, but they were cheap, always available, and still attracted curious audiences.
In August 1876, the duo secured a contract for a series of performances at a small music hall on the outskirts of Birmingham. The establishment wasn’t prestigious. It was a third rate venue that catered mainly to industrial workers seeking cheap entertainment after shifts in metal and textile factories.
The owner, Charles Ellsworth, agreed to hire Choke and Chuckle, mainly because no other performers were available on those dates and he needed to fill the schedule. He had heard rumors about the duo’s problematic behavior, but profit beat prudence, as frequently happened in the brutal economy of Victorian entertainment.
The performance was scheduled for the night of August 23rd, 1876. The audience consisted of approximately 80 people, including families with young children. The show’s format was typical and predictable. Choke and Chuckle would perform music while executing physical comedy routines and then invite volunteers from the audience to participate in simple interactive games.
It was straightforward entertainment designed to make tired workers laugh for an hour before they returned to their cramped homes and difficult lives. From the beginning of the performance, it was clear to any attentive observer that something was terribly wrong. Choke climbed onto the stage visibly drunk, staggering in a way that wasn’t comical but worrying, openly holding a bottle of gin in his left hand.
It wasn’t uncommon for performers to drink before and during shows, but keeping the bottle on stage during the performance was considered vulgar, even by lowclass music hall standards. He placed the bottle on a small wooden side table along with some clown props, tattered dolls, and juggling balls, and began playing his violin. The notes came out off key, his bow sliding irregularly across the strings.
Chuckle was in an obviously manic state even to lay people. His movements were frantic, uncontrolled, without the timing that physical comedy requires. He jumped for no reason, spun violently, produced shrill sounds that weren’t comical, but genuinely disturbing. His laughter was constant, but without connection to anything funny happening.
The audience initially reacted with laughter, somewhat unsure if this was part of the performance or something genuinely wrong. Some families began to consider that it was just an act, an unconventional beginning. During each pause between songs, Choke walked to the side table and drank directly from the bottle. Long swigs that lasted several seconds, his throat visibly moving as the liquid went down. Each time his coordination deteriorated noticeably.
His notes on the violin became progressively more offkey. He began cursing under his breath. Profanities that were audible in the first three rows. Chuckle seemed not to notice or not to care, continuing his antics with increasingly manic energy that had a desperate quality. After approximately 30 minutes of increasingly uncomfortable performance, the moment arrived for audience interaction.
This was the part of the show where normally children would be invited to the stage to participate in harmless tricks. Chuckle jumped from the platform and began pulling people toward the stage. Most resisted or politely declined. And then there was a child, a boy of approximately 8 years old sitting in the third row with his mother.
He was fascinated by the clowns, his eyes shining with the typical excitement of children who had never seen a live show before. Chuckle took the boy by the hand and pulled him onto the stage. The mother hesitated for a moment, her maternal instinct alerting danger, but allowed it, assuming it was a normal part of the presentation and not wanting to cause a public scene.
The boy was smiling, apparently happy to participate, completely unaware of what was about to happen. It was common for children to participate in these routines, usually leaving with candy and applause. Chuckle positioned the boy in the center of the stage and began executing clown tricks around him, making exaggerated faces, producing funny sounds. That’s when it happened. The boy, nervous with the attention and excited by the proximity of the clowns, moved clumsily near the side table. His arm hit the gin bottle.
It toppled, rolled across the table surface in apparent slow motion, and fell to the wooden floor, shattering with the sound of breaking glass that echoed through the silent music hall. The liquid spread quickly, the pungent smell of cheap alcohol permeating the air, mixing with the odor of sweat and tobacco smoke that characterized these establishments. Choke stopped playing instantly.
He stared at the broken bottle on the floor, at the transparent liquid spreading between the wooden boards. The silence in the music hall became absolute and oppressive for perhaps 5 seconds. That seemed like eternity. No one moved. No one breathed. The entire world seemed to freeze. And then choke dropped his violin. It fell to the floor with the discordant noise of vibrating strings.
He turned slowly toward the boy. His expression, even under the white clown makeup, transformed into something that later witnesses would describe as pure animal fury. Absolute and irrational rage. He crossed the stage in three quick steps, his clown shoes producing heavy sounds against the wood.
The boy immediately began to cry, instinctively understanding that he was in mortal danger. And then choke began to strike him. These weren’t theatrical slaps or staged violence for comic effect. These were full force punches from an adult man using closed fists targeting the child’s face and body with clear intention to cause maximum damage.
The audience rose simultaneously in a wave of collective movement. Screams of horror filled the hall, but no one moved immediately to intervene. There were those few crucial seconds of disbelief where the human brain refuses to process that what the eyes are seeing is actually real, not performance, not an elaborate trick.
Men began running toward the stage, but they were far away. They would have to cross the entire hall between the rows of chairs, and Chuckle began to laugh. It wasn’t fake or stage laughter for the audience. It was genuine, hysterical, uncontrollable laughter that rose from somewhere deep in his fragmented psyche.
He jumped around Choke and the boy, applauding with exaggerated enthusiasm, making faces at the audience as if he were presenting the grand climax of the show in his fragmented and distorted reality. This was brilliant performance. It was the culminating moment that the audience had paid to witness. It was art.
Choke’s first punch hit the boy’s nose, breaking it instantly with the sound of cartilage cracking. Blood gushed immediately, splattering the black and white striped costume of the clown, creating spray patterns. The second punch hit the mouth, breaking at least four teeth white fragments flying. The third blow struck the forehead, opening a deep cut that bled copiously.
The boy stopped screaming, his voice simply ceasing as he entered a state of physiological shock. His body became partially limp, sustained only by choke’s hands holding him by the shoulders. Later, witnesses in judicial depositions would provide graphically detailed descriptions that would be partially censored from public records.
The blood didn’t just drip or trickle. It spurted with each heartbeat of the child, creating arterial spray patterns on the clown’s clothes, on the polished wooden floor, on the side table. The boy’s face became progressively unrecognizable. Facial features deforming under repeated trauma. Soft tissue yielding under bone impact.
And through all of this, Chuckle continued laughing, spinning, celebrating, his mind completely disconnected from the reality of what he was witnessing. Men from the audience finally reached the stage and jumped onto it, their heavy boots hitting the wood.
They grabbed choke, five of them necessary, pulling him away from the boy with combined force. He resisted with surprising strength that alcohol and adrenaline provided, trying to continue the blows even as he was dragged backward. He was screaming something completely incomprehensible, a mixture of obscenities and incoherent accusations about the broken bottle, about respect, about having been disrespected.
Chuckle, still laughing, began to dance around the group of struggling men as if this were a new phase of the spectacle he was narrating to an invisible audience. The boy collapsed on the stage floor like a ragd doll. His mother had managed to reach him, pushing through the crowd with the desperate force of a mother protecting her child.
She fell to her knees beside the small body, trying to hold him, trying to make him breathe, her hands slipping in the blood that covered her son. But it was too late. The blows had been too brutal, too prolonged, too directed at vulnerable areas. The child’s skull had fractured under repeated impact, bone fragments penetrating the brain, massive internal hemorrhaging, catastrophic and irreversible brain trauma.
The boy died right there on the bloodied stage of a third rate music hall in his mother’s arms, while Chuckle continued laughing in the background, his brain unable to process that he had witnessed a murder. Women in the audience screamed with intensity that hurt throats. Children cried uncontrollably, traumatized by what they had seen.
Some spectators vomited directly where they were sitting, unable to process the grotesque violence they had witnessed. The dead boy’s mother released anim animalistic moans that weren’t completely human. Primal sounds of pain that no language could adequately express. Embracing the lifeless body of her son, her dress soaked with still warm blood.
It took six men to completely subdue Choke. They pinned him to the wooden floor, faces pressed against the blooded boards while someone ran to call the police. And during this entire chaotic process, Chuckle continued his performance.
He picked up Choke’s abandoned violin and began playing it horribly badly, producing dissonant sounds painful to the ears while jumping around the bloodied stage, his shoes leaving red footprints. He showed no understanding that something catastrophic and irreversible had happened. In his altered and fragmented reality, the show simply continued as it always continued. The police arrived within 15 minutes, their heavy boots announcing their arrival.
They arrested Choke immediately, handcuffing him very tightly. They arrested Chuckle as well, although he seemed completely confused about why he was being detained, continuing to smile in congruously. The boy’s body was covered with a heavy tarp that someone brought from the back of the establishment, hiding the carnage from view.
His mother had to be physically removed by two women, refusing to let go of her dead son, her nails leaving marks on the arms of those trying to pull her away. The doctors who eventually examined the body hours later, when it was finally transported to an improvised morg, documented with clinical precision the extent of the trauma.
Multiple skull fractures including significant bone depressions. Massive cerebral hemorrhaging with bleeding in multiple areas. Four upper teeth broken at the base. Deep laceration in the scalp with partial exposure of cranial bone. Extensive bruising covering face and upper torso. The official cause of death written in precise Victorian calligraphy.
Fatal cranial trauma resulting from intentional assault. The music hall was closed by police as a crime scene. Ropes were tied across the doors. Witnesses were detained to provide statements that would take hours. And while this was happening, while the slow machinery of Victorian Justice began processing what had occurred, something notable was happening among the audience that had witnessed the murder.
They were experiencing what we would modernly recognize as acute collective psychological trauma. Edgar Pritchard, Florence’s brother, and one of the spectators present that night, provided one of the most detailed descriptions of the collective emotional response in the following days.
He described that after the police arrived, after the boy was covered and taken away, people simply sat back down in their chairs, they didn’t converse, didn’t move to leave. They remained seated, staring fixedly at the empty and bloodied stage as if hypnotized. Some cried silently, tears flowing without sound. Others trembled uncontrollably despite the stifling heat of the music hall.
Children hugged their parents with force that hurt, and all shared the same facial expression. Absolute horror and fundamental incomprehension of how something so grotesque could have occurred in a space intended for entertainment. The trial of Choke and Chuckle occurred 6 weeks later in a Birmingham court. Choke’s defense argued severe drunkenness and temporary insanity induced by alcohol.
Chuckle’s defense claimed complete mental incapacity due to documented psychiatric illness, presenting evidence of his extensive history of psychotic behavior. But the prosecution presented something absolutely irrefutable. Eyewitnesses. 80 people had seen the brutal murder of an innocent child on stage.
There was no ambiguity, no room for reasonable doubt, no alternative interpretation of the events. The prosecution argued that Choke had committed first-degree murder with extreme and shocking brutality, significantly aggravated by the fact that the victim was a defenseless child who had been invited to the stage.
As for Chuckle, although his mental condition was undeniably severe and evident to any observer, he had participated in the show knowing of his own deteriorated psychotic state. consciously putting the audience at risk. More importantly, in the legal argument during the murder, he not only failed to intervene, as he would have had a moral obligation to do, but continued the performance, laughing and celebrating while a child was beaten to death a few meters from him.
In the view of Victorian law, which didn’t recognize nuances of mental illness as a complete defense, this constituted criminal complicity and homicide. The jury declared him guilty of first-degree murder with aggravating circumstances. Choke showed no visible emotion upon hearing the verdict, his face and expressionless mask.
Chuckle continued smiling in congruously, apparently without understanding the significance of what was happening around him. The judge in pronouncing the sentence spoke for 20 minutes about the absolute depravity of the crime, about the necessity of justice for the innocent murdered child, about the example that needed to be established to protect society from such monsters.
Both were sentenced to death by public hanging, the maximum sentence available under British law. The execution would be carried out in 6 weeks according to standard Victorian protocol for capital crimes that allowed time for appeals and spiritual preparation.
The executions occurred in October 1876 at a prison on the outskirts of Birmingham. Public hangings had been abolished in England in 1868 after decades of argument about civilization and decency. So the executions happened within prison walls, witnessed only by required official authorities and some carefully selected journalists. Choke was hanged first at 8:00 in the morning.
Official records from the executioner indicate he died quickly, the calculated drop breaking his neck instantly at the second cervical vertebrae. Chuckle was hanged 15 minutes later after Choke’s body was removed. Until the last moment, as the hood was placed over his head, he seemed not to understand what was happening, smiling confusedly at the executioner, murmuring something about the next show.
The music hall, where the murder occurred, never reopened its doors. Charles Ellsworth, the owner, tried desperately to sell the establishment, progressively lowering the price over months, but no one wanted to buy it. The place had become synonymous with tragedy and horror in the region’s collective consciousness.
Eventually unable to maintain property that generated no revenue, Ellsworth sold the land for demolition. The building was completely demolished in 1880, its wooden boards burned, as if fire could purify what had happened there. The land remained empty for decades. No construction erected on the site. Local residents avoided passing by, especially at night.
They said they could hear clown laughter floating in the air, offkey violin music playing songs that no one recognized, a child’s crying echoing from the shadows. The site became a cursed space in the city’s mental geography, a void that represented collective trauma.
The murdered boy’s mother never psychologically recovered from what she witnessed and lived through. Parish records show she was admitted to a psychiatric asylum 3 months after the murder, suffering from what Victorian doctors called deep melancholy with manic features, what we would modernly recognize as severe depression combined with acute PTSD. Newspaper editors received discreet visits from officers suggesting that additional coverage would not be in the public interest. Families of witnesses were discreetly encouraged, sometimes with more explicit pressure, not to
discuss the event publicly or with reporters. And gradually, systematically, over months, the story was erased from official public memory, filed in sealed judicial records, though it remained alive and bleeding in the traumatized memories of those who were present that night. It remained in the memory of people who witnessed the horror that day.
They told their children in low voices who told their own children decades later. And thus the story survived as local urban legend, distorting through generations until it became almost unrecognizable from its original form. Later versions claimed the clowns were literal demons sent from hell, that they had killed dozens of children in multiple cities, that the boy’s blood had supernatural properties that cursed all who touched it.
The real truth documented in judicial records that remained sealed by court order until 1926 when they were finally opened for historical research was simultaneously less fantastic and more disturbing than any supernatural legend. It was simply the story of two profoundly sick men, one destroyed by alcoholism and the other by severe mental illness, allowed to continue performing until the inevitable tragedy finally occurred.
The story of Choke and Chuckle isn’t just about two disturbed individuals who committed a monstrous act. It’s about how Victorian society dealt with, or more precisely, failed to deal with mental illness and addiction. It’s about how obvious signs of danger were systematically ignored because entertainment was profitable and the audience kept buying tickets.
Choke was a notorious alcoholic whose behavior was visibly deteriorating. Chuckle demonstrated manifest psychotic behavior that included following people through the streets at night. Both were allowed to continue performing for audiences that included vulnerable children because Victorian popular entertainment operated with minimal supervision and practically non-existent regulation.
No one checked the mental sanity of performers. No one monitored alcohol consumption. No one protected the public until something catastrophic happened. If this story deeply disturbed you, if it revealed uncomfortable aspects about entertainment, about normalized violence, about how societies selectively choose what to remember versus what to deliberately forget.
That discomfort is psychologically valuable. It’s a sign of moral consciousness functioning appropriately. These dark stories need to be told and retold, not merely to shock or sensationalize, but to recognize the complete humanity of everyone involved.
There are many other photographs waiting in the shadows of the archives. Each one preserving memories that official history tried to erase.
