| Biography | Seven of the eight children became the Seven Ashtons. Their specialty was a Risley act, named for its originator, the American gymnast, Richard Risley Carlisle, who exhibited these performances in Sydney during his visit in 1861. In a Risley act, one or more performers, lying on his back, juggled smaller members of the troupe with his feet. The act required as many as three 'trinkas', small cradeles in which the heavier acrobats of the troupe lay in order to propel the lighter ones back and forth in a fast and exciting routine. Eminent British circus historian Antony Hippisley Coxe described the Seven Ashtons' act as the best he had ever seen. The Ashtons did a nine-minute routine without a pause, somersaulting, leaping and back-flipping in perpetual motion.
At home, Jack had guided the family but, refusing to follow the family overseas, Dossie took control of affairs abroad. She was a hard woman, an intimidating mother, a ruthless negotiator, and 'hammered' her children into performers of world renown. Whenever she entered into face-to-face negotiations with vaudeville and theatre managers, she always had one of her sons, Stanley ('Hoodie'), close at hand. At some stage, she requested that she and Hoodie be left alone to discuss the detail of the contract. It was then that Hoodie would read the contract to his mother and tell her how to reply. The vaudeville managers did not realise that Dossie could neither read nor write.
The Seven Ashtons toured the United States with Sonja Henie's famous ice show and appeared in a Royal Command performance before George VI at the London Coliseum. The troupe was seen to good advantage on celluloid in the 1957 Red Skelton film, Public Pigeon No. 1. By the early 1960s, work offers began to thin and the family, with wives and children, had become unmanageable. The original Seven Ashtons' act broke up, although some family members continued with their own smaller acts. Several of the family eventually returned to Australia, including Mickey, who found a new focus late in life training the young people of Albury--Wodonga's Flying Fruit Fly Circus before his death in 1985. |