The Australian magician and illusionist Harry Cameron (1881-1944), the son of Scottish emigrants, was one of the leading illusionists of British Variety, as well as a juggler, strongman and circus owner. With his wife and stage assistant, the singer Nellie Lloyd, he joined the Variety show Heller's Entertainers, performing as The Carmos, and travelled to England in 1907. With his second wife Alma, he appeared in America in 1914 with the Le Roy, Talma and Bosco Show, and in England toured as The Great Carmo with his own Variety illusion act featuring wild animals. In 1928 Cameron mounted his first circus, The Great Carmo Circus and Menagerie,in Balmoral Gardens, Belfast, and Bertram Mills featured two of Carmo's acts in his 1928-1929 Christmas show at Olympia - Togare and his Lions, and Captain Ankner's horses.

Despite being billed just as Carmo's Circus, the 1929 summer tour opening in Catford in May 1929 was a collaboration with Bernard and Cyril Mills who used their regular printers W.E. Berry for this poster, and may have instigated the Carmo 'strap line': 'Everything New, Everything Big, Everything Just as Advertised'. The show was advertised lavishly with both pictorial and typographic posters, this one listing the spectacular line-up of acts comprising Emmerich Ankner with four groups of horses; the Belgian musical clowns The Four Bentos; The Nonsens' aerial ladder act; The 8 Canova Girls; the acrobatic jugglers The 5 Balageurs; The Troikas' driving act presented by the sisters Baranoff; The Bonnellys from Australia with a loop-the-loop aerial act; Togare and Carmo’s lions; Courage, the jumping horse presented by Ruth Owen; Los Gabriels, the hat jugglers in clown costumes; Baby Carmo the cycling elephant, The Hansens’ perch pole act; the British rider Mona Connor; The Costellos’ hand balancing act, and The Jaincziks: ‘skating ballet on real ice'.