Oddlet: Bobby Leach · 1 min read
Oct 22, 2026
Queen Street
The second person to survive Niagara Falls in a barrel spent fifteen more years chasing bigger stunts, then was undone by a walk down Queen Street in Auckland.
Bobby Leach spent ten years telling the customers at his Niagara restaurant that he could top Annie Taylor. On July 25, 1911, he climbed into an eight-foot steel drum and went over the Horseshoe Falls. He came out with two broken kneecaps and a fractured jaw. Pulled from the wreckage, he asked for oxygen. Then, before anything else, a cigar.
Twenty-three weeks in hospital did not settle him. He toured with the barrel and the scars as props. In his sixties he was still trying to swim the Whirlpool Rapids, and had to be pulled out again. When both countries banned his plan to ride a giant rubber ball over the Falls, he proposed dropping it from a plane instead. The Falls had by then done everything a waterfall can reasonably be expected to do.
In 1926 he took his wife and daughter to New Zealand for a four-month speaking tour. On February 26, walking down Queen Street in central Auckland, he slipped on a piece of orange peel and fractured his leg. Complications set in. The surgeons at Mater Misericordiae amputated. He died on April 28.
The barrel is in a museum in Niagara. Bobby is in Hillsborough Cemetery, 8,700 miles from the Falls he outlived.
Know someone who’d love this?
- Wikipedia — Bobby Leach — Overview of his English origins, Barnum and Bailey career, 1911 stunt (steel barrel), injuries (two broken kneecaps, fractured jaw), six-month hospitalization, whirlpool rapids attempts, and death in New Zealand; burial at Hillsborough Cemetery, Auckland.
- RNZ — 'In loving memory of Bobby Leach' — Detailed New Zealand-side account: four-month speaking tour with wife Sadie and daughter Pearl, Princes Street flat, February 26, 1926 slip on orange peel on Queen Street, amputation at Mater Misericordiae Hospital, April 28, 1926 death, death-certificate causes (osteitis fibrosa, sarcoma of femur), grave inscription.
- Niagara Falls Info — Daredevils: Bobby Leach — Barrel dimensions (2.4 m steel drum), 1910 Whirlpool Rapids trips (four attempts, first-attempt rescue by Red Hill Sr.), other stunts (Upper Steel Arch Bridge parachute July 1, 1908; airplane parachute jumps July 1, 1920 and October 10, 1925).
- The Cornish Bird — Bobby Leach — Investigates the disputed Cornish claim; cites Leach's own 1914 Sheffield Weekly Telegraph statement that he was born in Stalybridge and worked in the mills at Stalybridge and Bolton; notes he left England at about 18, joined Barnum and Bailey circa 1880, family (Sadie, Pearl); death April 1926 in Auckland; also details post-plunge 'asked for a cigar' moment.
English in Heaven
In 1922, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle explained that Houdini's dead Jewish mother must have learned English in heaven.
The Horses and the Eels
In March 1800, Alexander von Humboldt drove thirty wild horses into a Venezuelan pool to exhaust the electric eels, then waded in barefoot and dissected one while it kept shocking him.
The Bear Went First
Sam Patch's final act opened with him shoving a bear cub off a hundred-foot waterfall in front of eight thousand people.
Wonder, delivered.
A fresh Oddlet in your inbox every morning, a full day before everyone else. True, strange and under a minute.
Free forever. Unsubscribe anytime.