We knew there were long forgotten Spiegel Palaces still sitting in trailers and barns across Europe but how could we find them? We knew that what usually happened is at the end of one season the whole tent would be packed up in a barn (to protect it from the winter rains) ready to re-emerge the following year and get back on the road; but sometimes the family would decide they had had enough of touring and moved on to new ventures, sometimes the death of the family Matriarch or Patriarch put an end to the family trade of taking entertainment to the masses; either way we knew there was one constant.... The tents had been placed in a barn for safe storage.
As time passed memories of these magnificent travelling ballrooms faded and as generations passed they changed from "Dad's Spiegel Palace" to "Grandad's old tent" and finally "That pile of wood and metal at the back of the barn" as all direct links with these touring venues passed. We knew that we couldn't just take out an advert asking "Have you got a Travelling Ballroom for sale?" as in most cases the current owners of the barns had no idea what the pile of junk was, they just knew it was filling up a barn and they wanted to get rid of it; there was only one thing to do - advertise across the continent that this group of crazy Brit's were looking for forgotten Spiegel Palace's and if you had a pile of "weird stuff" in a trailer or barn to get in touch with us! Not surprisingly we weren't exactly flooded with offers however slowly and surely farmers, grandchildren, neighbours started calling us with tales of where they thought a tent might be hiding; 2-3 times a month a few blurry photos of piles (of what can only be described as STUFF) at the back of sheds and barns came in and we began analysing the photos; sadly most of what we were sent was junk, old bits of machinery, offcuts of wood and in one instance quite literally pieces of a barn packed up and stored in a barn. Whilst every approach gave us a flicker of excitement it soon turned to disappointment as the months passed and not one single tent was found. It was almost time to give up....
In Spring 2018 we were approached by a farmer about 40km east of Paris, a decade before a friend had parked the trailer containing his Spiegel Palace in a spare barn and retired; was this what we were looking for? The few photo's he sent us to illustrate what he had were better than we could ever have hoped for; there was no doubt this was exactly what we had been looking for - glimpses of wooden floorboards polished by decades of dancing feet, corners of bevelled mirrors, sweeping curves of metal there was no doubt at all this was exactly what we had been looking for! For 2 weeks in broken French & English we negotiated a price and booked flights to visit the barn and undertake a final survey to make sure everything was as expected; a few days later Duncan flew into Paris, rented a car and drove to a barn in the middle of nowhere to verify that this was what we had been looking for. There are some thing you just can't tell from a photograph and one of them was the smell that hit when the lorry doors were opened; not the rich aroma of seasoned exotic woods but rather the strong damp smell of rot and decay. With the help of the farmer he started removing some of the pieces from the lorry and at that moment it became clear what was causing the smell; The old barn didn't have a very good roof, the trailer didn't have a very good roof but very watertight floor and walls so that over a decade of intermittent rain every single drip that had landed on the roof of the barn had found its way into the trailer and stayed there. A decade of waterlogging was too much for any varnished wooden panel to deal with and the hand painted (but not galvanised) steel and iron girders were little more than rust held together by the paint that crumbled as you touched them. Whilst the first few metre's of the trailers contents looked dry and solid it quickly became apparent that the elements had won - what was once a grand ballroom was now a rotting, rusty mulch in a trailer which was itself now suffering the side effects of holding a decade of stagnant water. It was clear that apart from the ends of the boards and mirrors closest to the door that were so tantalising in that first photo there was nothing left to be saved - we were all heartbroken after coming so close to saving an iconic forgotten tent and having the opportunity snatched from us because of a leaky roof. Duncan thanked the farmer for contacting us and flew back to the Uk after years of searching and coming so close to finally finding the perfect Spiegel Palace to rescue it seemed that we had been beaten by nature. What had seemed such a simple challenge at the start was rapidly turning into a nightmare.
