SIT-DOWN STRIKE.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 412, 20 April 1937, Page 2

SIT-DOWN STRIKE.

LION-TAMER IN CAGE. Circus Owner’s Quandary. Sydney, April 10. Sydney has a nomination for the world’s queerest sit-down strike, of the kind now fashionable among disgruntled wage-earners. With a camp, bed and a hurricane lamp, and two lions for company, Captain Flager, lion-tamer, conducted such a strike in the lions’ cage at Wirth’s Circus. II j entered the cage in the main tent and refused to come out until Mr Wirth agreed to let him continue with his tiger act. Mr Philip Wirth, jnr, said that for some months he and his father had asked Flager to put on his lion act, as they thought the public had become tired of the tig r act, which had been showing for four years. Flager would not agree. Finally, Mr Wirth said, he told Flager the tigers would be left behind in Sydney when the circus moved to the South Coast and eventually to Melbourne. Flager said he would not leave his tigers. When Mr Wirth reached the circus one day this Week, he found Flager in the cage with the lion. Prince, and he lioness, Elsie, which he nad reared and trained. The cage was the one used for animal acts and also as an exercise cage for lions and ligers. Flager told Mr Wirth that he thought a “sit-down” strike was the only way to settle ths argument. He would not come out, or put the lions bsfck in their travelling cage, until he had got what he wanted. His contract, he said, stipulated that he vUs to do the tiger act. He said he did not cai;e about being hungry, and the lions would not attack him. “I am afraid to send any of my men in to get him out because he is a big fellow; there would be a struggle and the lions might go for them,” Mr Wirth said. “He has some of the men behind him, t’oo. It is all very unfortunate. I must get him out somehow before the evening, because Hie place has to be got ready for the show. Flager has been wi h us for a long while, and his wife- is companion to my mother.” The strike did not last long. A compromise was effected with the lion-t'amer, and “the show went on ”