Nicolai Poliakoff

Nicolai Poliakoff OBE (Latvian: Nikolajs Poļakovs, Russian: Николай Петрович Поляков, romanized: Nikolay Petrovich Polyakov; 2 October 1900 – 25 September 1974) was the creator of Coco the Clown, arguably the most famous clown in the United Kingdom in the mid-20th century.

Biography

Nicolai Poliakoff was born in 1900 to a Jewish family in Dvinsk (today Daugavpils), Latvia which was then part of the Russian Empire. His family were poor and worked at the local theatre to supplement the money his father earned as a cobbler. When his father was conscripted to the army in the Russo-Japanese War the five year-old Nicolai started singing for food to avoid starvation.

1908—Nicolai “ran away and joined the circus,” as the saying goes. He travelled 300 miles by train to Vitebsk, in Belorussia (today Belarus), where he persuaded a circus owner to give him a job, telling him that he was an orphan with no one to look after him. The director bought his story and placed him under the charge of Vitaly Lazarenko, a clown and acrobat who would become a major circus star in the Soviet Union after the Communist revolution.

Nicolai eventually persuaded his father to allow him to follow a circus career, and he was apprenticed for four years to Rudolfo Truzzi (1860–1936)—son of Massimiliano Truzzi, the founder of the great Russian circus dynasty of Italian descent. With Truzzi, Nicholai studied the fundamentals of acrobatics, trapeze, horse riding, and an array of circus disciplines. Russians are particularly fond of nicknames, and Nicolai was called Kokishka by Truzzi, a diminutive of “koshka” (cat in Russian), which in time became abbreviated to Koko—and rendered as Coco when Nicolai arrived in the United Kingdom.