Is this a happy tiger?

Mary Chipperfield claims it is, but activists secretly filmed her at her farm training animals and now she is facing cruelty charges. Jack O'Sullivan reports. Portrait by Justin Leighton

Mary Chipperfield emerges from the house, watering-can in hand. Strong, sinewy and sun-tanned, with a long mane of golden hair tied back, she doesn't look her 61 years. Indeed, she could easily be mistaken for Virginia McKenna in her Born Free days, although she doesn't have McKenna's girliness. Years of being alone in a ring keeping eight adult tigers in order knocks some of that out of a woman. Her father, the late Jimmy Chipperfield, had that same hard-driven look and physical presence, as did her brother, Richard, tall, tough, charming, his father's anointed successor until he died in a car crash in Uganda in 1975. It then fell to Mary to lead the next generation of circus supremos.

We are on the patio at Chipperfield's Hampshire farm. Through the sliding doors is a front room full of knick-knacks, family photos and animal memorabilia. Frank, a massive Harlequin Great Dane as large as a Shetland pony, roams around menacingly. Mary Chipperfield and her husband Roger Cawley are in trouble. Last week, summonses were issued against them relating to their treatment of certain animals, allegations they vigorously deny. The charges followed infiltration by campaigners from the pressure group Animal Defenders, who secretly filmed life with the Chipperfields.

Further hearings are expected over the summer, so sub judice rules prevent a detailed examination of the claims. However, they arise against a background of protests about conditions in circuses in general. The International Fund for Animal Welfare is campaigning for animal circuses to be banned.

"The use of performing wild animals in the big top is as anachronistic as bear baiting," says Cindy Milburn of IFAW. "We are concerned that animals are subjected to brutal training methods designed to cow them into submission. Anyone who has visited a circus behind the scenes will have seen that the animals are kept in confined conditions that are totally alien to their normal environment and lifestyles. We want tighter regulations and enforcement to ensure that wild animals are given the protection they deserve."

The Chipperfields have long been a well-respected family in the British circus world. We have no evidence to suggest that animals in their care have suffered such maltreatment. But the momentum against their way of life is gathering. More than 130 MPs have signed an Early Day Motion supporting a ban on animals from circuses, and there are calls to bring training centres under much tighter supervision.

It all used to be so different for the Chipperfields, so glamorous. In 1980, Prince Rainier invited Mary to the Monte Carlo Festival, the biggest circus festival in the world, and crowned her La Dame du Cirque. The good old days of the Seventies, when Mary Chipperfield was pounced on by Eamonn Andrews for This is Your Life, seem long gone. Today, she feels, all she gets from the media is a mauling, but she is standing her ground. "It's good live entertainment," she declares in her clipped, matter-of-fact way. "Nothing smutty. Adults can enjoy themselves and bring children and know there will be no swearing, no rude jokes. It's good family entertainment."

But shouldn't we feel ashamed of using wild animals in this way? Certainly not. Shame is one thing that Mary Chipperfield does not feel. It is, she says, the zoo owners who should feel ashamed when they feed animals Prozac to keep them sedated. Likewise, the race-horse owners, who race yearlings which will not be mature until they are five.

"You don't see those horses having much fun other than being dragged out with the ladies for a while and then put back in their boxes again," she says. "Circus lions live in groups. They mate when they feel like it. Our animals live a lot longer in the conditions of the circus than in the wild and in normal zoos. Our horses are still working at 28 or 29. You won't find a flat-racer who is still going at that age."

It's a big issue for Mary Chipperfield, this comparison with zoos. Ironically, given the charges she faces, she feels that she is, in fact, part of a movement that has improved the lives of captive animals. Her father abandoned the circus world in the Fifties, splitting from his brother with whom he had created Britain's largest circus. Jimmy's big idea was the safari park. In the Sixties, it was revolutionary.

Jimmy Chipperfield opened the first park at Longleat with the Marquess of Bath, and another at Woburn with the Duke of Bedford. "When he first let the lions out, they ran like mad," says Duff Hart-Davis, who helped him to write his autobiography, My Wild Life. "They were terrified of the open because they had never been out in the open before. Jimmy said, `I don't know what the hell I've done, but I've given myself the most fantastic thrill.' Jimmy hated conventional zoos and he caused huge controversy by continually accusing them of having ghastly conditions."

Mary shares her father's disdain. "The animals," she says "are constantly in the same environment, with the same feeding time, whereas in the wild they would constantly be thinking about where their next meal comes from. In a circus, they are taught tricks so they are constantly having to think. They are working every day so they keep physically fit. People say that travelling isn't good for them. But, like family pets, you find that once they have done it three or four times, they're fine about it."

But how could she defend keeping big cats in small cages? "When they get to a destination the exercise enclosures are put up and they come out." Yes, but these small spaces hardly compare with the wild. "A lion in the wild," she retorts, "eats and sleeps and that's a great day. The bigger the animal, the less they move around. A lion is very lazy. The only time they get up any speed at all is when they are very hungry and they see their food. Otherwise, they are lying down."

I'm beginning to feel like one of the lions which Mary Chipperfield can subdue with little more than a lightning glance or a sharp word. We walk around the farm. Chipperfield supplies animals to circuses all over Europe. If you have seen a Disney film in recent years, it's probably featured a Chipperfield animal. All the farmyard varieties in 101 Dalmatians came from here. So did the dogs in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. For Greystoke, some of Mary Chipperfield's chimps were shipped to Africa and dressed as gorillas.

Today, most of the menagerie is away, performing. There is Sheena, however, a 20-year-old retired Bengal tiger, confined now to her cage and an exercise area. Mary rubs noses with her through the mesh and steps into the cage, bearing nothing but a bamboo cane. But she is not some latterday Dr Doolittle, just a very strong disciplinarian, who never goes too close, has never, she confesses, been brave enough to place her head inside a big cat's mouth. I then spot Harry the bear, captured long ago in Canada, now heading for his 30th birthday. He is cooling himself in his cage in a trough of water. I begin to feel like I'm in an old folks' home.

Is there, I'm left wondering, a soft side to Mary Chipperfield, a moment when she relaxes that iron grip of self-control? There is some light banter about the sick sea lion who lived in the family bath. Then there was the baby hippo who slept in a dog kennel in the yard and went for walks with the dogs. Her daughter, Suzanne, 27, recalls a birthday party when she was a child when three chimps joined in, allowing her to blame the mess on them.

But Mary Chipperfield's taut features don't loosen. She is not one for romantic anthropomorphism. She is simply addicted to the life. She walks me over to the edge of a quarantine area, where she is bottle-feeding a nine-day-old white Bengal tiger cub, saved from a mother which attacked her litter. It's got no name yet: the family prefers to wait until they know whether it will survive. There will be several weeks during which Mary Chipperfield, circus ace, will get up in the night, every three hours, to feed the cub.

We return to the patio. Perhaps it's just the oppressive heat of the afternoon, but there is a sense of the end of an era. Suzanne is there. A lion-trainer herself, she paces up and down, protesting at what the animal-rights people are doing to circuses. She certainly has no time for wimps. Why, she asks me, didn't the paper send someone who knows about animals - someone who could recognise that the horses come to her mother because they like rather than fear her? I stumble a response and, as she takes me over to her prize horses, explain that I'm allergic to them. But it's OK because I've brought some antihistamines. Contempt for the townie is palpable.

And then there is the elderly lady, Mary's mother, just out of hospital after an hip operation, sitting quietly in a wheelchair. "Are you Rose Purchase?" I ask her. She nods and smiles. The same Rosie Purchase who danced as a 16-year-old in the lions' cage. A woman whose youthful beauty made her as famous as a film star in her day. The same Rosie Purchase, now 86, who caused great scandal 64 years ago when she eloped with Jimmy Chipperfield. She had seen her own father, Tom Purchase, killed by a lion. Tom accidentally backed into a lion, who, out of surprise, nipped his artificial leg, and, so the story goes, got such a surprise at biting metal that he went berserk and mauled him.

It was not the first, nor the last such tragedy. Yet, none of these incidents has been enough to deter a family that is inextricably linked to circus life. Now they face the courts and possible political challenges to their lives. For them, there is no question of giving up the circus. "Our lives are our animals," says Suzanne Chipperfield. "Without them, we haven't got a life. It's all we have ever known"