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I had the same problem.  I have found that if you right-click on the image and then save you just get a blank, but if you click on the down arrow in the saved box in the top right hand corner and then click 'save to your computer' it works properly.   If this still doesn't work, use PrtSc in the top row of keys on the keyboard and it should either save the screen image in a file called 'Screenshot' or give you a screen image which you can paste onto Paint.

Here is Thomas:

Glad you liked the photos.  Here are two others that may be of interest.

This one shows Mary with two of her daughters - very blurred but a nice photo all the same.  The daughters themselves don't look like spring chickens so I guess the photo was taken not so long before Mary's death in 1920:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/41746676@N05/4568594175/sizes/o/

Mary had fourteen children (maybe fifteen we're not completely sure) - it is probably Alice and Annie in the picture tho again we're not absolutely sure.  Alice and Annie both had Wimbush surname, as they married two brothers - a third sister, Kate, married another Wimbush brother.

Here is Mary's husband, John Rowland Hill, father of the daughters - photo probably at the same time as the earlier one I sent of Mary before.  A very good baker and cakemaker in Birmingham Horsefair and a keen spiritualist, apparently:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/41746676@N05/4388359722/sizes/o/

Jim:

Thank you for bringing this thread back to life after some months. It would be wonderful if you could supply some information.

Actually we don't know if anyone was killed by lions, but this is the story that has been handed down.

What we know is:

Joseph Phillips married Ellen Halliday in Bromsgrove 1855, aged about twenty and eighteen, and they had two children.   We know the children were brought up by their grandparents in Dodford and Birmingham.  No record reference to either Joseph or Ellen can be found after the children's birth records, the second being in 1860.  In the 1861 census or any later we can't find Joseph or Ellen, nor have we yet found death records for either of them.  In the records we have, Joseph's profession is described as 'musician'.

The local historian of Dodford interviewed the late Alfred Dolphin, great-grandson of Joseph and Ellen, about twelve years ago.  He told her that his family story was that Joseph and Ellen's children had been brought up by grandparents as their parents were circus artists, Joseph being known as 'Major Phillips'.  |The story was that 'Major Phillips' had died in the ring of a heart attack and that Ellen had been killed during a stunt when she put her head in a lion's mouth.

This is the story we have been trying to authenticate or otherwise.

The reason that I have brought John Cooper into the thread is that there was a family connection with Joseph Phillips - this might explain how Joseph got involved in the circus in the first place, or conversely confusion in the family's mind with John Cooper, a famous lion-tamer, might have led to a dramatic story about Joseph's death being dreamt up and improved over the generations.

The connection was that John Cooper's brother Charles was married to Joseph Phillips's sister Susannah.  John Cooper certainly did not die in the ring as in 1911 he is alive and well in retirement, recorded as living with Charles' Cooper's widowed son-in-law Thomas Stead. (To add another quite irrelevant dramatic death to the thread, Thomas was the nephew of the editor W.T.Stead who was to die in the Titanic the following year).

If you can help with any information or clues about the deaths of Joseph and Ellen, it would be much appreciated.

Best wishes,

Mark