Today’s post is an image of Carr Lynn, ‘King of Animal Mimics’. He was a famous animal mimic who took Edwardian music halls by storm, before making several appearances on the BBC in the late 1920s and 1930s. Animal mimics like Lynn appeared in variety entertainment shows on the radio, but they also proved useful to producers wishing to procure live sound effects, in the times before the BBC had a proper sound effects library!
The image below is from an advertorial printed in The Music Hall and Theatre Review in 1912, which was intended to promote ‘Dr. William’s Pink Pills’, which promised to help its users to fight ‘nervous exhaustion’:
It included a ‘Special Interview’, which opens with the following description:
His performance appeals to everyone, adults and youngsters alike, whether he is reproducing the wailings of the noc-tural feline or the voices of the farmyard occupants, and it is no small achievement for one individual to hold so completaly the attention of these large audiences. His clever reproductions and amusing patter are ever bright, and excite laughter to such an extent that his quaint device of blowing a referee’s whistle to make himself heard is quite a necessity.
As a bonus, here he is in another advert, this time from 1934, when he was firmly associated with the BBC, and had moved upmarket to sell Vick Vapour-Rub instead:
Secrets of Nature 