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Other names
George Ramo Samee
Ramaswamy
Ramosamme
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
Place of death
London
Date of time spent in Britain
1819–50
About
Ramo Samee was an Indian juggler and sword-swallower who was a notorious performer in London in the mid-nineteenth century. He performed in London in 1818 and, following a tour of America in 1819, settled in England until his death in 1850. He was feted by critics and writers such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Mayhew and William Hazlitt. In 1822 Samee was the main attraction in Vauxhall Gardens in London through the organization of the entertainment manager Frederick Gye. Ramo Samee performed across England including at theatres in Swansea in 1823, Cambridge in 1831 and the Theatre Royal Hull in December 1838. His main place of residence and performance was in London. His act included stringing beads with his mouth.
Ramo Samee sometimes used the first name George when in England. He was married to Ellen and they had three children: two daughters, Ellen (born in Wales) and Clara, and a son, Thomas, born in 1827. In 1849, at the age of 22, Thomas died when he injured himself attempting to swallow a sword. Ramo Samee died in 1850 in London in extreme poverty. His widow did not have enough money to bury him. Following donations, he was buried in St Pancras Churchyard on 1 September 1850.
Banerjee, Sumanta, ‘The Mysterious Alien: Indian Street Jugglers in Victorian London’, Economic and Political Weekly 46.14 (2011), pp. 59–65
Hazlitt, William, ‘The Indian Jugglers’, in Table Talk (1828)
Lamont, Peter and Bates, Crispin, ‘Conjuring Images of India in Nineteenth-Century Britain', Social History 32.3 (2007), pp. 308–24
Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and London Poor (London: Griffin, Bohn & Company, 1861)
Natarajan, Uttara, ‘Styling the Other: Hazlitt's "The Indian Jugglers"’, in Charlotte Grant and Alistair Robinson (eds) Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration (London: Bloomsbury, 2024), pp. 41–8
Singh, Amardeep, ‘The Story of Ramo Samee, the Indian Juggler’, Amardeep Singh (26 May 2006), https://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2006/05/story-of-ramo-samee-indian-juggler.html
British Newspaper Archive
England Deaths & Burials Records, 1538–1991
Images, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Banner image credit
Thurston Hopkins/Picture Post/Hulton Archives via Getty Images
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
