This is a deflating tale, kept here because it shows how a London big cat report could start. Kent Big Cat Research quotes a vanished Surrey website page: in the 1920s Carmo Manor in Shirley served as winter quarters for Carmo's Circus, and the Great Carmo's menagerie lived there. Circus men washed the elephants in the estate pond and exercised bears in the grounds.
A woman telephoned the police station to report an escaped leopard that she had seen force its way through a hedge and jump a fence. The duty sergeant was about to organise a full scale armed leopard hunt when he stopped to check and rang Carmo's, who said they had no leopards.
The account says the dusk light had turned a circus Dalmatian, slipped out during training for a new act, into a vision of a leopard. It is an explained misidentification, tagged dubious, and the pin is just the Shirley area.
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