This child’s body harness, used for stage flying ca.1920, was made and used by the Kirby Company. It has armholes, is fastened at the front and under the legs with leather straps and metal buckles, and features a leather back panel originally fitted with a device to hook and unhook the wearer into a flying line. The master stage carpenter George Kirby supplied the flying effects for the original production of Peter Pan at the Duke of York’s Theatre that opened on 27 December 1904. The realistic flying of Peter and the Darling children was essential to the effectiveness of Barrie’s play, and the company Kirby founded went on supplying flying effects throughout the century.

Flying effects had long been a feature of masque and stage performance in Great Britain. Originally performers were simply lowered and raised on ropes, later they were flown across the stage and back. In 1875, the machinist Walter Dando, who specialised in working stage machinery, patented apparatus for flying effects using a windlass and rubber cords. In 1877 HE married Letita Barry, ‘the original flying dancer’. Late 19th-century technological stage developments facilitated ever more ambitious effects. The German Grigolatis Troupes, founded by Friedrich Zchiegner and named after his wife Preciosa Grigolatis, who was one of its first flying dancers, made a name for themselves in New York and London in the late 19th century. They specialising in aerial ballets, including the one performed in Drury Lane’s 1887 pantomime Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

Having worked with the Grigolatis, whose flying effects needed four stagehands to raise and traverse one performer, in 1898 George Kirby filed a patent for a drum and shaft-based stage machine and began a business specialising in flying effects on stage, organising the routines and supplying the equipment and performers. Kirby went on to provide flying effects for plays and pantomimes, ballet and opera all over the UK and the USA, flying Maude Adams in Washington and on Broadway in the first transatlantic production of Peter Pan in 1905. After the death of his father in 1919, Joseph Kirby took over the family business and expanded its operations worldwide. In the early 1920s, he developed the Kirby somersault harness and improved on the quick release mechanism for attaching the wires to the harness.