BILLY SMART Jr, scion of the famous circus family, was a distinguished trainer of horses, but he will be most widely remembered for his ambitious elephant acts, which featured up to 20 full-grown Asiatic elephants.

In his earlier years Smart also had a reputation as a fast-living, night-clubbing arm-candy connoisseur. In the 1950s and 1960s his name was often in the newspapers, associated with such glamorous stars as Jayne Mansfield, Sabrina and Shirley Bassey. Indeed, two of his elephants were named after Sabrina and Shirley, and in 1958 his infatuation with Sabrina led him to give her a leopard as a pet.

The night when Billy’s elephant Birma stepped over Jayne Mansfield at a charity event, holding her huge foot and three-ton weight above the starlet, Billy Smart Sr recalled that his son was so distracted by the pretty actress that he forgot to watch the elephant.

He had no need to worry, however, since Birma was well used to treading carefully over celebrities and in her time performed the “Elephant Walk of Death” over Sir Billy Butlin and five other millionaires, over such stars as Hattie Jacques, Vera Day, Frances Day and the comedienne Hylda Baker, and on Christmas Day 1967 completed a “DJ Dare” over the inert bodies of Jimmy Young and the Radio 1 DJs Tony Blackburn, Keith Skues, Mike Lennon, Dave Cash, Chris Denning and John Peel.

Birma was in fact the Smart family’s favourite animal; she joined the show in 1949 from Wellingborough Zoo and was the only performing animal kept when the big circus closed after 25 years in 1971.

In those 25 years, Billy Smart Sr, an ebullient showman of huge girth, known for his Stetson, big cigar and his charitable largesse, with his sons Ronald, David and Billy Jr, built Billy Smart’s New World Circus into Europe’s biggest and most successful travelling enterprise.

Smart Sr had been a major figure in the fairground world for many years. He started at 15 in charge of a humble hand roundabout at a fairground in Slough, and set himself up as a fairground proprietor in 1914. By 1939 he owned one of the biggest travelling fairs in the country. It was into this environment that Billy Smart Jr, whose real name was Stanley, was born in 1934, the youngest of four sons and six daughters.

As the baby of the family, Billy Jr was the most indulged. It was said that it was on a whim that Billy Sr and Dolly Smart bought him a complete circus while out driving one Sunday — a costly yet typically big gesture of the showman to his youngest son.

The circus opened on April 5, 1946, with a gala premiere at Southall Park, Middlesex, attended by the comedian Tommy Handley and the stars of his hit BBC comedy series, It’s That Man Again.

Billy Smart Jr took his place in the family’s new business at 12 as “assistant equestrian director” to the famous Frank Foster. A year later, he was billed as “Cowboy Billy and his pony Rajah”, and he soon became a talented horseman, showing a dozen Welsh ponies named after alcoholic beverages — Whiskey, Sling, Toddy, Brandy, Pimms, Cocktail, Vermouth, Fizz, Guinness, Shandy, Porty and Sherry — and appearing in a dressage riding display with his younger sister Rosie and the show’s equestrian stars, Manja and Josi Vinicki from Czechoslovakia.

By the early 1950s his older brothers Ronnie and David were showing the company’s growing herd of Asiatic elephants. Their first came from Singapore by ship, but two years later five more were flown to London from Bangkok on a BOAC York freighter, specially converted to provide an elephant lift.

The trip was not without incident. Even before takeoff one elephant broke down the side of her stall, another tried to climb out of the plane, and all five cried blue murder. The youngsters were given sugar cane so that the aircraft could take off, and there was no problem when it landed in Calcutta for a night’s rest, nor when it started out again for Karachi. But after they were unloaded for the night in Karachi and again in Bahrain, pachyderm boredom set in, and the three-year-olds became difficult and mischievous. One kept trying to open the escape hatch with her trunk, and a man had to spend most of the ensuing trip guarding the hatch and averting a real-life version of the adventures of Dumbo the flying elephant.

By the mid-1950s Billy Smart Jr had taken over sole presentation of a big herd of elephants, up to 20 on occasions, and had become one of Europe’s leading trainers, presenters and authorities on the subject. Although he was a horse trainer of note, it is for his elephant acts that he will be most remembered.