Mark, who was born and bred in Wednesbury, didn’t always dream of being a civil servant. In his youth he did what many of us only threaten to do and ran away with the circus. Mark spent over twenty years travelling the UK as a ring boy and clown as part of many of the UK’s biggest circuses including Gandeys Circus. He then went on to work for an Italian circus in Kuwait as a trapeze artist.

After hanging up his clown shoes over 25 years ago, Mark decided to settle down in his hometown and has been working for Sandwell council for five years – looking after the very parks he used to frequent with the circus. As Gandeys Circus rolled into Birmingham for the first performance in over twenty years and the first circus on Lightwoods Park for over thirty, Mark couldn’t resist a visit to his old stomping ground and as the old saying goes, “You can shake the sawdust from your shoes but not from your blood”.

Mark was also heavily involved in the return of Gandeys, which was known locally as Birmingham’s own circus as it annually toured many of the local parks around the city from the end of World War Two until the 1980s. In this time circus has seen a complete transformation and Gandeys has returned to Birmingham with an out of this world all human production called Gandeys…Your Circus Awakens, playing throughout the Easter holidays until the 10th April.