Early Life
Though there is some uncertainty due to the characteristic embroidering of sideshow performers' stories, by his own account Horace Ridler was born into an upper-class family living outside London, and enjoyed a relatively privileged childhood, marked by travel, private schooling and comfort. There are two competing theories about his young life. In one version he is said to have gone on to Oxford or Cambridge, graduating with honours. In the second version, he instead pursued a career in the army and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Soon after receiving his commission, his father died, leaving him a substantial inheritance. But (again according to the second version) he rapidly frittered his inheritance away on parties, gambling, entertainment and poor investments; and these and other circumstances led to his resigning his commission.
When World War I began, Ridler, now 22, enlisted and was decorated for his outstanding conduct and gallantry when serving in Mesopotamia. Demobilized at the end of the war with the rank of major, with a small pension and few prospects, but willing to take chances, he decided to become an act at the Odditorium. In 1922 he received his first few pictorial tattoos, and began exhibiting himself in small sideshows. This afforded him a meager living, but was not the success he had hoped for.
Read more about this topic: Horace Ridler
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“An early dew woos the half-opened flowers”
—Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.
AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)
“Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)