blue plaque · Norwich

Pablo Fanque

Photograph at the Pablo Fanque blue plaque

Pablo Fanque (born William Darby; 30 March 1810 – 4 May 1871) was a British equestrian performer and circus proprietor, becoming the first recorded Black circus owner in Britain. His circus was popular in Victorian Britain for 30 years, a period that is regarded as the golden age of the circus. Since the 1960s, Pablo Fanque has been best known for being mentioned in the Beatles song "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" on their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Source: Open Plaques. Geographic data via OpenStreetMap.

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Location records are drawn from open, licence-clean datasets, kept here with attribution and gratitude to the people who maintain them.

  • Open Plaques, dedicated to the public domain (CC0). See openplaques.org.
  • Wikidata, available under the CC0 1.0 Universal dedication.
  • © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
  • Historic England, National Heritage List for England, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. War memorial records are drawn from open community datasets (OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, NHLE) - never from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is excluded.

Editorial descriptions, photography and tribute links are original TributeLegacy work, layered on top of the open data.

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