Annie Duplock Stood Still at 99 While Zippos Circus Threw Knives Around the Birthday She Waited a Lifetime to Spend in the Ring

Most people who are about to turn 100 ask for a card, a lunch, and a chair that does not move. Annie Duplock of Sharnford, near Hinckley in Leicestershire, asked to be the target. On the night of May 12, 2023, at the end of a Zippos Circus show on Hearsall Common in Coventry, she walked into the ring with a walking aid, stood against the board, and let knife thrower Toni Novotny outline her in steel. She was 99. Her hundredth birthday was in August. She had been waiting, she said, her whole life for somebody competent to throw knives at her.

The request did not come from a stranger in the front row. About three decades earlier, when she was 70, Duplock had worked on the circus’s advance publicity crew, the unglamorous job of getting posters onto walls before the tent arrived. She knew the show from the side where the glamour is mostly thumbtacks and weather. When Zippos came back through the Midlands she watched it again, then had her daughter, Sandra McGuckin, write to the founder. The man who answered is Martin Burton, who has spent a career under the name Zippo. He said yes, and he told the crowd why.

“Annie worked for me 30 years ago, putting up posters,” Burton said that night. “She was 70 years old then and she is 100 years old this August.” He told them she had seen the show the night before, thanked him, and then asked to stand in front of a knife-throwing board as the treat. Novotny, Burton had already told reporters, would handle it professionally. The show was listed for 7:30 p.m. The person in front of the board was not a trained target assistant in sequins. She was a former bill poster with a frame and a very specific idea of a good time.

Knife throwing, done properly, is a geometry trick with consequences. The thrower is not aiming at the person. The thrower is aiming at a memorized pattern of wood, with the person as the negative space the pattern has to respect. Distance, rotation, and the same knives in the same order are the whole act. A moving shoulder is how people get hurt. Duplock’s job was the hardest one in the ring for someone her age: stand still, on a frame, in front of strangers, while steel arrived. The BBC’s Dan Martin reported the next day that she had “really enjoyed” it. Her own line, given to more than one reporter before she ever stepped out, was simpler. “I’ve always wanted to have knives thrown at me.”

After the applause she was not finished with the idea. “I’m ready for the next one,” she said. USA Today caught her a few days later sounding almost bored by the danger, which is its own kind of bravado. “I’m always doing dangerous things,” she said. “I’m used to things like that. I didn’t take any notice. I didn’t care. I enjoyed it.” She joked that the Globe of Death, the motorcycle cage that has been a Zippos signature for years, might be the next request. Nobody booked it. The knives had already done the job she asked them to do. They stuck in the board.

What the wish was actually about

British circus still runs on a contradiction. The art form is sold as family nostalgia, bunting and interval ice cream, and it survives only if someone in the ring is doing something the ice cream cannot explain. Duplock had spent her seventies on the side of that contradiction that does not get a bow: the advance crew. At 99 she decided the bow was overdue, and she did not ask for a walk-on with a clown. She asked for the act that makes parents put a hand on a child’s shoulder. Burton’s yes mattered more than the knives. A founder who remembers the person who put his posters up is running a circus with a memory. A founder who puts that person on the board is also making a bet that the thrower is as good as the legend.

Novotny’s name is the one attached to the Coventry night in the circus’s own account and in the Coventry Telegraph’s preview, which ran the day of the show and quoted Duplock’s lifelong line before a single knife left his hand. The preview is useful because it kills the idea that this was a stunt invented after the fact for a video. The ask was in writing, through her daughter, to her old boss. The date was a Friday on a common in Coventry. The walking aid came into the ring with her because that is how she walked. The photographs do not tidy that up, and they should not.

Public life after that night has been quieter than the night itself. Duplock did not become a touring act. What continued was the circus that made the exception. Zippos, the trading name of World of Clowns Ltd, marked a 40th anniversary tour from March through October 2026, still under Burton’s name as the creative lead. The company’s own pages in late September still listed the kind of bill that makes a Globe of Death joke legible: riders in the cage, a crossbow act from the Phoenix Rebels, aerialists, contortion, a unicycle, clowning. The tour’s southern dates put the tent at Peckham Rye from September 24 through September 27, 2026, then Palmers Green at Broomfield Park from October 1 through October 5, Bexley’s Hall Place from October 8 through October 12, and Redhill’s Memorial Park from October 15 through October 18. A Christmas run on Hampstead Heath was already being teased. The show that let a 99-year-old former bill poster borrow its finale is, three years later, still packing commons and parks from Scotland to the edge of London.

That itinerary is the unsentimental half of the story. Circus in Britain is a lorry, a license, a common, and a week. Hearsall Common was one square on a map that also includes East Ham, where the company once priced grandstand seats at £8 to mark VE Day, and Twickenham, where Burton has been handed clowning honors by Clowns International with Norman Barrett and the rest of that old guild in the frame. The knife act Duplock joined sits in a tradition those people still argue about: how much danger a family show is allowed to keep before it stops being a family show. Her answer was personal. She did not ask the audience to approve of knife throwing. She asked to be the person the knives were thrown around, once, before the birthday cards arrived.

Why the clip still circulates

The Zippos Circus TV recording of the night is barely two and a half minutes, and it is better than a recap because Burton’s introduction is in it, slightly rushed, the way ringmasters talk when the next cue is already walking. He tells the crowd she is a hundred this August. He tells them she worked for him at 70. Then he hands the ring to Novotny with the only safety instruction that matters, delivered as a joke and not as a joke: do not hit her. The throws are fast. The board does what boards are for. Duplock, on the microphone afterward, does not perform gratitude as a speech. She sounds like someone whose evening went to plan.

There is a temptation to turn that into a lesson about aging, the kind of headline that congratulates old people for still having a pulse. Duplock’s version is ruder and more interesting. She had a specific professional fantasy left over from a job she did in her seventies, and she used her daughter and her old employer to book it. The walking aid was not an obstacle to the dream. It was how she arrived at it. The dangerous things, in her telling, were not a new personality she discovered at 99. They were a habit. The circus, for one night, was the only institution in Leicestershire prepared to take that habit literally.

Martin Burton’s company has spent 2026 selling a 40th anniversary as zest and craft, and the press lines it still posts, a Telegraph verdict about life-affirming zest, a Guardian line about feeling like an awestruck child, are the family half of the brand. Annie Duplock is the other half, the reason a child goes home talking. A woman who used to hang the posters stood where the poster promised danger, and the danger behaved. The knives hit wood. She said she would do it again. The tent moved on to the next common, which is what a touring circus is for, and which is also why a single Friday in Coventry can still be the whole biography the public has of her. She did not ask for a documentary. She asked for a board, a thrower she could trust, and a birthday that arrived with steel in it instead of a quiet lunch.

The AEGIS Alliance has a shelf of stories about people who refused the version of a life they were offered. Nearby are Banksy’s girl with the red balloon, which shredded itself and a British pub that hosted the world gravy wrestling championships. More lives in odd news and international news.