When Buffalo Bill Came to Swansea 🤠

Good morning, Swansea!

In July 1903, four special trains carrying around 800 people and 500 horses rolled into Swansea.

They belonged to Buffalo Bill and one of the biggest travelling shows in the world, fronted by a man whose name was already famous on both sides of the Atlantic.

For two days, Victoria Park became the centre of a spectacle like Swansea had never seen before - and arguably hasn’t seen since.

This week, we're looking back at the extraordinary visit that brought Buffalo Bill and the Wild West to Swansea.

Buffalo Bill was the stage name of William F. Cody, a former scout and buffalo hunter who had turned stories of the American frontier into a huge travelling spectacle. The show had peaked a decade earlier at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, where it drew six million visitors — and by 1903 it had toured widely across the United States and Europe, drawing vast crowds with a mix of horsemanship, sharpshooting, staged battles and riders from around the world.

For Swansea, newspaper adverts promised a "Congress of Rough Riders of the World" and "Mounted Warriors of the World", with two performances each day at Victoria Park on 14 and 15 July.

The advert itself leaned hard into showmanship, billing Cody's outfit as "The One Grand Ruler of the Amusement Realm" and promising "Living Object Lessons" drawn from real frontier life. The roster read like a world tour in itself: Royal English Lancers, Bedouin Arabs, Cuban Patriots, Russian Cossacks, Mexican Vaqueros and American Cavalry. Swansea was sandwiched tightly into the schedule — the show had played Llanelli the day before and was due in Newport the day after.

Once the doors opened, the show followed the format Cody had spent years perfecting: a Grand Review, in which he rode out to introduce every nation and unit in the company, followed by trick riding, roping and marksmanship displays. Annie Oakley, the sharpshooter who'd made those displays famous, had already left the show two years earlier — but the standard she set remained the backbone of the act.

The centrepiece was a staged re-enactment of the Battle of San Juan Hill — Theodore Roosevelt's charge from the recent Spanish-American War, restaged with genuine Rough Riders among the cast, and billed on the Swansea posters as a "Realistic Military Spectacle." With two performances a day and the arena lit at night by "two special electric light plants," it was as much a feat of logistics as of showmanship.

The first day was a sensation. Some 28,000 people watched the opening performance on the Tuesday, according to one American account of the tour — mines, furnaces, rolling mills, shops, schools and churches all found themselves short of custom as Swansea all but emptied into Victoria Park, and the railways laid on relief trains to cope. Cody himself was in no doubt about what he'd witnessed. "I take off my hat to Swansea," he told reporters, "this is the record attendance on my present tour."

The town's tramways carried around 50,000 passengers that Tuesday alone. Wednesday's crowd was smaller but still, in the words of one report, "an immense number" — helped along by fine weather that had the riders' uniforms "seen to their best advantage" under a bright sun.

Cody was given the full civic treatment. On the Wednesday he was entertained to lunch by Swansea's mayor, Griffith Thomas, at the Hotel Metropole, before returning the favour that evening: the Colonel had a special box erected for the mayoral party at the show.

It was there that Cody shared an unexpected local connection. Introduced to the mayor, he mentioned that his grandfather had been an Irishman who captained a vessel trading between the north of Ireland and south Wales — a ship that, by his account, had sailed out of the port of Swansea many times over.

The final performance on the Wednesday night was, if anything, the biggest draw of all. The mayor and Sir Robert Morris were both in attendance, and at the close three hearty cheers went up for Cody, who responded by waving his sombrero to the crowd.

Behind the scenes, the show was already leaving. The machinery for moving on to Newport had been in motion since before the final act finished, yet the performance itself wasn't shortened by a single item. Outside, tents were struck and carted off to the East Dock Station to be entrained even as the crowd inside was still cheering. It was, as one report put it, the perfect organisation that moved this great show with its usual smoothness — and by the time those words were written, the show already stood complete in Newport.

The biggest show Swansea had ever seen nearly didn't happen. Months earlier, Buffalo Bill's representative had to appear before the town's Parks Committee simply to take possession of Victoria Park — and even then, only after the council smoothed over a complaint from the manager of a rival act on the same ground, the "Florodora Boys," a seaside concert party cashing in on the hit musical's name, who objected to having their usual pitch disturbed. It took a council meeting, a solicitor's reassurance and an hour's notice for removal to clear the way for four special trains, 800 people, 500 horses and a re-enactment of the Battle of San Juan Hill to roll into a Swansea park.

I’ll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

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Sources: William F. Cody Archive, University of Nebraska–Lincoln (Charlotte Observer, 8 August 1903); History Today (William Cody biography); Buffalo Bill Center of the West (Annie Oakley biography); Gower Hidden History (Victoria Park, Swansea); South Wales newspaper coverage of the visit (period clippings, incl. Parks Committee report and Buffalo Bill's Wild West advertisement, July 1903)