In the makeshift menagerie in Margaret’s back garden in Bournemouth, the hardier animals were bracing themselves for their third winter in Britain. Across the water in Jersey, the manor house lay empty and shuttered, huddled in the hush of its tree-enshrouded valley grounds, poised – after five hundred years of unbroken rural domesticity and calm – on the brink of a more dramatic and clamorous history.
During the winter the first wave of animals took possession of the manor farm that was to be their home. With the help of Ken Smith and Gerry Breeze, Margaret’s eighteen-year-old son, the cages were loaded up and driven to Weymouth docks to catch the ferry to Jersey. At Les Augrès Manor they were stowed in outbuildings and barns while the serious business of building more permanent enclosures and cages began. Gerald was not there, but he was kept informed. ‘Les Augrès Manor was a scene of frenzied activity,’ he was to record. ‘Carpenters and masons rushing about laying cement, making cages out of everything they could lay their hands on. Cages on legs we called them, made out of untreated wood, chain link and chicken wire. Packing crates were wonderfully converted into shelters and every available piece of iron piping or wrought iron from the junk yard was grist to our mill. We transformed the things people discarded as being of no further use into animal havens and shelters: cages ungainly and ugly but serviceable sprouted everywhere.’
The generally young, unfailingly willing assistants Ken Smith recruited locally or brought over from Paignton to help lay the foundations of what would become one of the world’s foremost zoological establishments included his wife Trudy (who was Head of Mammal Section), Timothy Carr (Bird Section), Nigel Hanlan (Reptile Section), Roderick Dobson (an ornithologist) as carpenter-in-chief, Nick Blampied as vet-on-call, Les Gulliver (maintenance), Michael Armstrong, Kay Page, Gerry Breeze, Nigel Albright and Annette Bell. Jeremy Mallinson joined for a summer job five weeks after the zoo opened, followed by Yolande Wilson, Lee Thomas, Peter Glover, Bill Timmis, Lesley Norton, John Hartley, John (Shep) Mallett, Betty Boizard, Stefan Ormrod and Quentin Bloxam. Of these Betty Boizard (later Renouf), Hartley, Bloxam and Mallinson are still at the zoo nearly forty years later, and the latter was later to become its Director and an OBE.
Ken Smith recruited Michael Armstrong, who had an interest in birds and a talent for poetry, as a junior assistant to help look after the birds in January 1959, when there was not much to see in the way of a zoo. ‘Smith showed me round the place,’ Armstrong recalled. ‘He said, “Well, we hope to have things here and we hope to have things there,” but all I could see was one cage with two Indian parrots in it. It was a particularly nasty day, it was raining, and the poor creatures looked very miserable. And that was that.’ But the work proceeded quickly under Smith’s punctilious direction.
The opening day, scheduled for 26 March 1959, in time for the beginning of the Easter holidays, drew near. The hammering and sawing continued at a feverish pace as cage after cage was run up and the animals moved in. A rudimentary car park was bulldozed, a smart little café knocked up, toilets installed and a pay-box erected at the zoo entrance. Ken Smith wrote the first edition of the Jersey Zoo Park guide. Swallowing his proprietorial pride, he splashed a fetching photo of a youthful Gerald Durrell with a Scops owl on his shoulder on the front of the little booklet, with a blurb that left no one in any doubt that Mr Durrell was as big an attraction as Leo the lion cub. The zoo was still in its infancy, Smith explained – not that any visitor could be in any doubt of that – and both the collection and the gardens would be extended substantially. He was careful to include a mention of Gerald’s credos. ‘The zoo’s special aim is the breeding of rare creatures,’ he wrote, ‘especially those threatened with extinction in the wild state.’ However, there was as yet little evidence of this, for in Gerald’s absence Smith was creating what he knew best, a conventional zoo whose main aim was to attract the public.
Jacquie’s voyage home, sans husband and sans animals, provided a much-needed rest. She had been beset by a nagging sense of guilt at leaving the rest of the expedition behind in Argentina, but the osteopath she saw in London on her return assured her she had done right thing. Relieved, she set off for Bournemouth, once again taking possession of Margaret’s small attic room, and steeling herself for the great change that lay ahead – the move to the manor house in Jersey and the grand opening of the long-dreamed-of zoo.
As soon as she could, Jacquie flew to Jersey to see how the zoo was progressing, and to begin the process of altering and decorating the flat in the manor house where she and Gerald planned to live. Everyone at the zoo was working feverishly to have it ready by opening day, but she was surprised to find that in various respects it was developing in ways that were different from what she had expected. ‘I was a little perturbed to notice that Gerry’s blueprint for the development had not been followed,’ she was to record, ‘but this was not my concern and I decided to leave it until Gerry could deal with it himself.’
The flat occupied the two upper floors of the central section of Les Augrès Manor, the grand reception room and other rooms on the ground floor being reserved for zoo offices. It was substantial, but not immense, accommodation, with a light, spacious sitting-room whose high windows looked out over the large gravel forecourt beyond the main entrance, providing fine views over the wooded, undulating grounds beyond. Soon Jacquie was as busy in the flat as the zoo workers were outside. A kitchen had to be installed, fresh paint applied to the dun-coloured walls, carpets laid, furniture ordered, curtains hung, and a room got ready for Mother Durrell, who would be sharing their new quarters.
Meanwhile, to drum up public interest Ken Smith took to going to St Helier and patrolling up and down with a billboard luridly decorated with lions and tigers to advertise the zoo. Later he would picket the airport, waylaying newly arrived tourists with news about the zoo, or calling through the windows of their cars: ‘Are you looking for the way to the zoo? It’s straight on, first right, keep going …’ The local paper, the Jersey Evening Post, took up the cause, and by the time opening day came, no one on the island could have been unaware of the zoo’s existence. Mike Armstrong’s diary logged the events of 26 March 1959 – a day that would one day be looked back on as a historic one in conservation history – from his own point of view:
Fine but fresh S.W. wind. 58°. Up early for opening day of zoo by 7.15 a.m. A rush to open by 10 a.m. First visitor buys in shop 10 a.m. 900 visitors during day and packed out in afternoon … All labels up on cages and quite a good show. Reptile House quite a good show. There is also a large cage of multi-coloured fishes in the Animal House. The monkeys of course are a great attraction. The mandrill succeeded in acquiring a gentleman’s pair of glasses. One or two complaints re the mandrill grabbing at children. However it seemed a good start on the whole and I heard a lot of people who were impressed.
Next day the gate increased almost fourfold, to three thousand, and on the fourth day the attendance reached six thousand. The zoo was up and running. Milling hordes crowded round the makeshift cages and enclosures, peering intently, even excitedly, at the blue-tongued skink and Cameroon clawed frog, the splendid sunbird and Chinese mocking bird, the dingo and quokka, the cunning cat squirrel, slow loris and needle-clawed lemur – ‘brought back from the Cameroons by Gerald Durrell in 1957,’ proclaimed the placard on the cage, ‘and believed to be the only specimen in Europe.’ Apart from Gerald’s Cameroons collection, many of the early denizens of Jersey Zoo were exotic little creatures from all over the world which had been picked and purchased by Ken Smith from dealers’ catalogues for their crowd-pulling qualities – ‘singers and dancers’, in zoo parlance. There were no large animals, no elephants or rhinos; not only were they expensive to buy and look after, but they did not conform to Gerald’s vision of his zoo as a home and sanctuary for smaller creatures of greater interest.
Mike Armstrong summed up the zoo’s first week under Ken Smith’s suzerainty in his diary:
I feel it is a very good little zoo and they have done wonders with it … Mr Smith is a very pleasant man when not worried by the job. He is a good organiser and administrator but allows little personal love towards his animals. I feel it is just a business to him and if the animals are uncomfortable or in temporarily inadequate cages, he is in no hurry to put things right for them, so long as the zoo is presentable as a paying concern.
Jacquie, meanwhile, was dashing frantically back and forth between Jersey and Bournemouth, clearing out the flat in Margaret’s house where so many plans had been made, dreams dreamed and books written, packing up the goods and chattels of one phase of married life for shipment to Jersey and the beginning of another. She was at the quayside to meet Gerald’s ship, the St John, as it nudged into Tilbury Docks, and they greeted each other warmly. During their separation Gerald had undergone a dramatic metamorphosis. He now sported a ginger beard, and looked a bit like Ernest Hemingway in his big-game-hunter mode. He had grown the beard for her, he told her. ‘I did not have the heart to say a word,’ noted Jacquie – for after all, it was she who had first suggested it. ‘Gerry hated shaving, because he had a very sensitive skin and was always cutting himself. In the Argentine he went around with a sort of stubble and I got fed up with it and told him, “Either grow a beard or shave.” So he grew a beard and kept it for ever after.’
Gerald’s South American animals were offloaded and entrained for the Southampton steamer that would take them to Jersey. Gerald sailed with them, while Jacquie flew over that evening, so as to be at the zoo when he and the animals arrived on 16 June. ‘Durrell was so excited by everything,’ recalled Jacquie, ‘that he did not know what to do first: look round the grounds or supervise the release of his collection into their various cages.’ The manor house and its grounds had undergone considerable modification since Gerald had last seen them. The fifteenth-century hay barn was now the Tropical Bird House; the cowshed was the Monkey House, with the Quarantine Station on the floor above; the cider press now housed the large and small mammals; the garage had become the Reptile House; and the pig pens sheltered more exotic beasts such as racoons, pumas and dingoes. The little orchard on the bank behind the manor now had a range of paddocks and aviaries, and the apples fell on the plump backs of peccaries, tapir and wallabies. The stream in the sunken meadow had been dammed up to produce a shallow lake dignified with the name the Waterfowl Gardens (but known in-house as the Peter Scottery), where black-necked swans, mandarin duck and other graceful waterfowl drifted slowly by.
‘As I had suspected,’ Jacquie wrote, ‘Durrell was slightly put out that his blueprints for the zoo’s development had not been followed, but this was softened by his delight at having all his African and South American animals safely back with him again.’ The zoo at this point did not match his prior vision of it. ‘Gerry had always had definite ideas for his zoo layout,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘but naturally this had to be modified according to the site, terrain and buildings available. He definitely gave Smith a full and detailed blueprint for Jersey but Smith largely ignored it.’ Smith claimed – and his wife confirmed – that all Gerry had left him by way of a blueprint was a few doodles on the back of an envelope, and that lack of time and money had dictated the result. The fact remained that Ken Smith and his team had created a zoo at Les Augrès Manor where none had existed before – a zoo where at least the animals were fed, sheltered and cared for to the best of everyone’s ability.
Gerald, Jacquie and Mother settled into their new quarters in the manor. Though these were expansive by comparison with Margaret’s flatlet they soon filled up with animal guests, most of them ailing and most of them requiring a room temperature of eighty-five degrees. Cholmondeley the chimpanzee was brought back from his human foster mother after Gerald’s return, with a slipped disc that needed nursing. He was followed by his girlfriend Lulu, who had a nasty abscess behind one ear, a big Aldabra tortoise with a mouth infection, a sick peccary, a ten-foot python with mouth canker, four baby squirrels making loud and irritable trilling noises as they waited for their next bottle-feed, and various birds, including a parrot with a chill which wheezed and bubbled by the fire in a melancholy manner, Dingle the chough and several oiled gulls. Mother, meanwhile, kept a marmoset called Whiskers in her bedroom, along with a huge avocado pear tree, raised from a stone, which had grown up one wall and down another. Of Mother and Whiskers Gerald wrote:
At the moment she is acting as foster mother to an extremely rare little creature, an Emperor tamarin, one of the marmoset family, which are the smallest of the monkey tribe. This diminutive chap was in a very forlorn condition when we got him, and it was obvious that he would not thrive unless he was given a great deal of love and attention. So, inevitably, my mother was chosen to take on the task of nursing the tiny creature back to health and strength.
When he arrived he could fit comfortably into a tea cup, and his skinny little body, combined with the enormous white curling moustache which these tamarins have on their upper lip, suggested not a monkey but an elderly leprechaun. Within a fortnight my mother’s careful treatment of him had worked wonders. He had put on weight, his coat was glossy, and his snow-white moustache so luxuriant and curly that it would have been the envy of any brigadier.
Moreover, from being a timid and retiring creature he had become very self-confident, even cocksure. He rules my mother with a rod of iron, and as soon as he is led out of his cage he takes over her room like a dictator. If she lies on the bed to rest he must either lie with her under the covers or, if he does not feel like a siesta, then Mother has to provide him with amusement by wiggling her toes beneath the bed-clothes, so that he can stalk them and leap on them from what must seem to him a great height.
He talks to her the whole time in a high-pitched, twittering call that is extraordinarily birdlike, and, as my mother has pointed out, it is difficult to get forty winks when you have what appears to be twenty operatic canaries singing volubly into your ear.
Every evening he crawls under Mother’s pillow and settles himself for the night, in the hope that we will not notice his absence from his cage and will leave him there. When he is hauled out and put to bed properly in his own cage his screams and twitters of indignation can be heard all over the house, and it is only when the front of his cage is covered that he reluctantly stops shouting and makes his way into his own bed, which consists of an old blanket and an apron belonging to my mother.
One of the advantages of a small zoo was that all the animals could receive individual attention and be treated more as pets than merely exhibits. One of the earliest beneficiaries of such intensive care was Topsy, a young female Humboldt’s woolly monkey from South America. Gerald had found her lying half-dead at the bottom of a cage in a dealer’s shop in England. She had acute malnutrition, bad enteritis and a severe chill bordering on pneumonia. ‘She was huddled up in the sawdust,’ he recorded, ‘her arms over her head, breathing stertorously, and when I tapped on the wire she turned to me a small black face with such a lost and tragic expression on it that I knew I had to rescue her, whatever the price … At first, being so young, she wanted something to cling to, but she was too scared to transfer her affections to a human being. A teddy bear was therefore introduced and for three months this was treated as the “mother”.’
Gerald started the little monkey on the road to recovery with regular doses of Chloromycetin and injections of vitamin B12. Within a week she was looking worlds better: her fur was starting to shine, she was eating well, putting on weight and throwing off her various infections. Soon she was too big for the teddy bear and was transferred to an amiable guinea pig with a vacuous expression. ‘At night she slept on top of the unfortunate animal,’ Gerald wrote, ‘looking like an outsize jockey perched on a Shetland pony. Their marriage has been – and still is – a very happy one, but the guinea pig is not getting any younger, and so we are training a young ginger-and-white one to act as a substitute in case of accidents.’
Another endearing waif who arrived very early on was Piccolo, a black-nosed capuchin from Brazil. He was the pet of a sailor who sold him to a restaurateur in Jersey, who in turn gave him to the zoo in 1960. When he arrived he was permanently crippled, for he had been confined in a cage that was too small and fed on a diet that was hopelessly inadequate, and though he received expert veterinary care, his condition was never to improve. But Piccolo was a survivor par excellence, and while he had to be kept on his own because he could not get on with other monkeys, he did like people and had many human friends who visited him regularly. Eventually he became the longest-surviving resident in the zoo, dying only in 1997, rickety, balding and nearly toothless, at the ripe old age (in monkey terms) of around forty-five.
When Gerald first told David Attenborough about his plans to open a zoo of his own, Attenborough had thought he was mad. But he soon changed his mind, and was to write: ‘He laboured tirelessly and practically. He had to an amazing degree the zoological equivalent of green fingers. You could see it in the way he handled animals and in the way they responded to him. You could sense it when you watched him watching them and deducing just what was necessary to make them happy. And he was a wonderful persuader. He gathered around him a team of companions and inspired them with his own enthusiasm.’
Many of the animals emerged as highly individual characters. One such was Peter the Cheetah, who had been presented to Gerald by the film director Harry Watt when he was working in Kenya, where the animal had been hand-reared and kept around the house like a dog. Peter loved to take Jeremy Mallinson out for a run round the zoo, or to put the young man through his paces in a one-a-side football match which he invariably won by means of a variety of devious fouls.
Another animal who displayed a uniquely outsize personality was Trumpy, a grey-winged trumpeter, a South American bird with a bugle-like voice. Trumpy was the zoo’s village idiot, and had the run of the premises and for that matter the road outside. In cold weather he took to dossing down in the Mammal House, one of the warmest places in the zoo. Come the spring, he emerged to strut around the grounds, occasionally opening his wings wide, trumpeting wildly and rushing up to some astonished visitor as though he was a lifelong friend he had not seen for years. Sometimes Trumpy would accompany the last visitor out of the zoo and down the road to the bus stop, where he had to be physically restrained from boarding the bus into town. Trumpy’s most endearing quality was the way he treated new boys. He was the zoo’s chief ‘settler-in’. Whenever there was a new arrival Trumpy would dutifully waddle down and spend twenty-four hours outside, or preferably inside, its cage, till he was satisfied that it had settled in. He did this with the swans, for example, down at their flooded water-meadow, standing up to his ankles in water for twenty-four hours, oblivious to all entreaties to come out.
Not all the animals were so endearing, however, and a few had distinctly unsociable habits, as Gerald noted in an early animal log at the zoo, an inventory of meticulous behavioural observation:
Cherry-crowned Mangaby: Obtained Mamfe, Brit. Cameroons, January 1957. Behaviour: Has typical baby Mangaby habit of sucking penis. This becomes almost obsessional.
Palm Civet: Obtained Mamfe, approx. two weeks old. Behaviour: was always, even when quite young, savage and untrustworthy.
Potto: 1 male, 2 females: Obtained Eshobi. Behaviour: It is possible to sex adult Pottos by smell, for when frightened the testicles of the male give off a quite strong odour like pear drops.
Collared Peccary. Obtained: Jujuy, Argentina, March 1959. True pair. Behaviour: Both of them frequently rub their faces on their mate’s scent gland. When excited they indulge in a ‘waltz’-like action: the male seizes the female’s hind leg in his mouth, and she seizes his hind leg, and then, grunting and squealing, they revolve round and round for a few minutes.
The most spectacular (and expensive) beast in residence was N’pongo, a young lowland gorilla born in the Congo, who had been purchased from a dealer in Birmingham and at the beginning spent most of her time on Mother’s lap. Later she was to become the favourite playmate of Caroline, Ken and Trudy Smith’s two-year-old daughter, whose nickname was Moonbeam. Gerald noted:
Although the young ape is bigger than Moonbeam, and tremendously powerful (it takes three adults to get her back into her cage if she doesn’t want to go back), when playing with Moonbeam she is astonishingly gentle and tolerant. To watch them sharing a bag of candies is a sight worth seeing. Both sit there, looks of extreme concentration on their faces, while Moonbeam carefully opens the bag and rations out the candies into N’pongo’s immense black paw. When the candies have been equally divided they will sometimes sit back to back, like a couple of bookends, while they eat, both of them occasionally spitting the semi-masticated sweets out into their hands to have a close look at them.
N’pongo loved nothing better than a game of tag. If she played with Gerald she usually managed to bring the zoo’s Honorary Director to the ground with a determined rugby tackle. If it was Moonbeam, however, she would content herself with plucking at the little girl’s clothes in a teasing, gentle way. ‘Both love to be tickled,’ Gerald observed, ‘and they will roll about in the grass hysterically when you do it. Moonbeam’s shrill giggles contrasted strangely with N’pongo’s gruff laughter.’
Since there were no funds to finance the purchase of N’pongo, Gerald had rung all the wealthiest people on the island, inviting them to buy a share in the first gorilla at the zoo – Gerald’s first foray into begging-bowl fund-raising, an activity that would preoccupy him for much of the rest of his life. Among those he approached was the Earl of Jersey, who recalled their first encounter vividly.
When we met, Gerry asked for a subscription to a fund to raise £1000 to buy the gorilla N’Pongo. I was sure he would never do that in subs of £25. On the other hand I felt that if the island was to have a zoo it had better be a good zoo – and a good zoo must have a gorilla. In the event I guaranteed him an overdraft for £1000 so he could get’ N’Pongo at once. As a baby N’Pongo was great fun and gurgled like a human if you tickled her tummy. I need hardly say that when the bank wanted to close the account I had guaranteed, I was presented with a bill for £900 – and a few pence. Gerry had no sense of money. He had an almost pathological antipathy to people he thought of as Bankers. He seemed to picture them sitting at large mahogany desks wearing bowler hats and saying ‘No.’ (Incidentally I myself was also a Banker.) Discussing some new venture I would tell him: ‘We will have to wait till we can save enough money.’ He would scoff at this. ‘Oh! Nonsense,’ he would say. ‘Pennies from Heaven. We’ll start at once.’ Maddeningly, of course, pennies did always seem to come from heaven.
The zoo occupied every minute of Gerald’s waking thought. He was absorbed by it, lost in it, utterly enthralled. It was a world of its own, always engaging, idiosyncratic, full of incongruities, as he was to record in an account of an average day written during the first year:
If you lie with half-closed eyes in the first light of dawn, you sometimes wonder exactly where you are in the world, for robins and blackbirds are endeavouring – not very successfully – to out-shout seriemas and crested screamers from South America, glossy starlings from Africa, and the jay thrush from Asia … It is very wearing to the nerves of even the most ardent ornithologist to be awakened at half-past five every morning by a chorus of peacocks under his bedroom window, all yelling ‘Help … help … hel … l … l … p!’ in harsh and despairing tones …
One of the chief difficulties of living in your own zoo is that there is so much going on the whole time that you are constantly being lured away from the stern duty of writing articles or books. A message is sent up to you that one of the rare lizards is indulging in a courtship display, and so you have to rush down to watch it. Someone tells you that the bushbaby is giving birth, and so, casting the typewriter aside, you dash to gloat over the smug mother and a baby the size of a walnut – and apparently composed entirely of eyes – that muzzles into her soft fur.
In many ways, evening is the best time in the zoo. The public has gone, the sun has sunk, and all the night animals are on the prowl. The slender, elongated genet, in its handsome gold coat spotted with black, performs miracles of acrobatics among the branches in its cage; the bush-babies are awake, staring at you with enormous eyes, taking prodigious leaps about their cage, landing with as much sound as a piece of thistledown.
Now is the time when you can take a tinful of succulent snails and go down to the Reptile House. There the Guiana dragon awaits you, his mouth curved in a perpetual and benign smile. His great, dark eyes watch you anxiously as you tip the snails out into his pond, and then he slides into the water and mumbles one of them into his great jaws. He throws back his head, half closes his eyes in ecstasy, and scrunches the unfortunate snail to bits, with a noise like someone walking very slowly over a gravel path.
Then you make your way back to the manor house and as you pass beneath the arches you hear the lion quietly trying out his new trick: roaring. Then, from the cage by the archway, comes a soft, sweet voice saying ‘Goodnight, darling,’ and you wish the cockatoos ‘Goodnight.’
No, it’s not much like being a country squire, but it’s a lot more fun.
Though funds were low and Gerald had a publisher’s contract to fulfil, he found it hard to lock himself away in a room to finish his infinitely neglected book about his Cameroons expedition of over two years before, A Zoo in My Luggage, let alone to embark on a new book about his recent expedition through the Argentine. It required ceaseless nagging on Jacquie’s part to extract even a minimum of words from the recalcitrant author. It didn’t help that Sophie Cook had had to resign in order to go and look after her gravely ill mother.
Lesley Norton, who as a teenager fresh from school had come to the zoo in its first months, took over as Gerald’s secretary (her mother, Betty, was a great friend of Gerald’s mother). ‘He’d make every excuse, every excuse,’ Lesley recalled, ‘not to write a word or go near his typewriter to type a word. I mean, days on end would go by and you’d be trying to shuffle the pages under his nose, but he obviously found writing very, very difficult at that time.’ Working for Gerald, Lesley found, was like being an intern in a hospital. ‘It was like working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.’
It says much for Gerald’s professionalism that A Zoo in My Luggage was to prove one of the most popular and enduring of all his books, and was received with enthusiasm by the critics when it was published in England in 1960. The Daily Telegraph’s reviewer spoke for most of them: ‘He describes the individual personality traits of his captive creatures with a hilarious fondness, and though an ape is an ape, one such as Cholmondeley St John (otherwise referred to as “you bloody ape”) soon becomes a very deep anthropoid friend of ours … He has a novelist’s ear for dialogue and a poet’s sensitivity to the mood of the African landscape. He has, too, a genuine humorist’s awareness of the incongruous and tells many very funny stories.’
It puzzled the zoo’s staff that they saw less of the establishment’s founder than they had expected. At first this was put down to Ken Smith’s proprietorial pride. As Superintendent his job was to keep the place running with military precision, and he achieved this using the factory-style working practices typical of many zoos at that time. It was Smith who rang the zoo bell for work to start and work to stop. It was Smith who made it a habit once or twice a day to tick someone off or dress someone down pour encourager les autres. During the first few months after Gerald took up residence at the manor, Smith discouraged him from involving himself in the day-to-day running of the zoo or having much close contact with its staff. Gerald Durrell was a famous author who wanted to be left alone to get on with his own work, Smith explained to his workers, which was writing, not zoo-keeping, and under no circumstances was he to be disturbed. So the affable Gerald, to whom the zoo owed its entire existence, was seen at first as a remote founder figure who remained mostly holed up inside the manor house and was very rarely spotted outside in the zoo of his creation.
Meanwhile, ‘the zoo of his dreams’, built on a shoestring, left much to be desired. The cages were for the most part makeshift and rudimentary, cobbled together out of any material that came to hand. Inevitably, from time to time animals fells sick, and a few died. Though holiday-makers continued to pass through the turnstiles in a steady stream at two shillings a head, money was desperately short.
The staff lived on a pittance. Even some years later, when Quentin Bloxam joined the zoo as a live-in helper on £5 a week, he found himself having to work seven days a week, with two afternoons off, in extremely primitive and labour-intensive conditions. ‘There were no hoses to wash down the yards, for instance,’ he recalled, ‘and we had to carry the water around in old metal milk churns instead. Even shovels and wheelbarrows were unobtainable, as all the money went on food and veterinary services for the animals. Staff turnover was high, and this wasn’t helped by the fact that we had to live three to a room in very damp conditions. But a small nucleus of people stayed on, out of loyalty to Gerry and a kind of missionary zeal arising from a belief in what we were doing.’
To run a zoo properly – that is to say for the benefit of the animals to the utmost possible degree – is a colossal undertaking, requiring tremendous expertise, ceaseless care and vigilance, and not inconsiderable sums of money. Gerald Durrell wanted to have the best small zoo in the world, a zoo moreover that was dedicated to the welfare and salvation of animals and the enlightenment and understanding of man. In the early days it was a steeply uphill struggle, partly because he was finding his way, and partly because there was never enough money.
The shadow of bankruptcy was always just around the corner. One day, a year or so after the zoo had opened, all the staff were summoned to a meeting. The ship was almost on the rocks, they were told. Maybe it would sink, maybe it would not, but anybody who wished to leave should do so now. Nobody volunteered. Instead they rallied to keep the zoo going by all possible means. Peanuts dropped near the monkey cages by one lot of visitors were gathered up, rebagged and resold to the next lot. The island’s rubbish dump was rummaged over for discarded park railings, wire netting and old packing cases that could be recycled as cages. A local cabaret duo called Tony and Dot (stage name ‘Katinga the Queen of the Snakes’) devoted all their spare time to scouring St Helier’s market for junked fruit and vegetables for the animals. With meat for the carnivores in short supply, John Hartley and Shep Mallet would rush out with knives and food bins whenever they heard news of the death of a carthorse on a farm, cutting up the carcase and sawing off the legs and head, half asphyxiated by the stomach gases. Even Gerald’s elderly mother joined the battle. ‘Mother was frail but very anxious to help,’ Alan Ogden recalled. ‘Gerry suggested to her that if she really wished to assist, she could look after the ladies’ loo and take the money, as that part of the complex generated a better cash-flow than any other.’
The survival of the zoo that had been founded to save animals from extinction was itself under threat, and for the first few years it was a far cry from its founder’s revolutionary vision. ‘There was a big credibility gap,’ Jeremy Mallinson recalled of that time. ‘We thought about the things Gerry was saying, we even talked about them, but he’d have had a hard job matching his vision with any signs of it at the zoo.’
The gruelling zoo routine was broken now and then. Sometimes a keeper got bitten. Old Etonian Tony Lort-Phillips was bitten three times by the monkeys (‘They all wanted to bite his bottom,’ a colleague recalled), but it was Mike Armstrong who was the most accident-prone. Early on he put his back out for three weeks when he jumped off a high wall while in pursuit of an escaping goliath heron. Later he was bitten on the behind by N’pongo (‘She wasn’t being nasty,’ he recalled, ‘it was just play, really’) and half squeezed to death when Bali the female orang utan got him in a love hug while she was on heat. Finally he suffered a straight left to the nose when he tried to give a temperamental chimp called Beebee her milk. ‘It was a terrific punch,’ he remembers. ‘It nearly floored me. I staggered out of the cage with the milk bottle and Beebee ran off somewhere, and do you know my nose has never been the same since. I’ve got what boxers get. My nose is much narrower on one side than the other and gets all stuffed up at night.’
More often some creature escaped. Birds were the most frequent absconders, usually just vanishing out to sea, but Chumley the chimp was the most accomplished. He had little difficulty with locks and cages, and he and his girlfriend Lulu soon found a way of unravelling wire mesh like knitting. Before long Chumley was often to be seen making his way across to the manor, where he would lollop up the stairs for a cuddle with the ever-patient Mother. One evening she heard a loud bang at the door and found both Chumley and Lulu on the stairs, looking cheerful and expectant. Nothing daunted, she invited them in, sat them down on the sofa and opened a large box of chocolates and a tin of biscuits. When Gerald remonstrated with her for letting them in, she protested: ‘But dear, they came to tea – and they had jolly sight better manners than some of the people you’ve had up here.’
One Christmas Chumley led all the other chimps in a mass breakout, totally wrecking the staff’s Christmas Day lunch. The first anyone knew about it was when an American student peered in and asked: ‘Do the chimps always go out for a walk every day?’ Chumley was finally caught in a bedroom over-excitedly rummaging through the drawers, and was eventually pacified by John Hartley in a rather novel way. ‘I discovered,’ he recalled, ‘that if you put your hand behind his back legs and held his balls in the palm of your hand, it had a calming effect.’
But it wasn’t just the chimps. One day the crashing of glass alerted the keepers to the fact that a spectacled bear had got out and was smashing its way through the cold frames in the zoo grounds. The first member of staff to encounter the bear took one look at the charging beast and locked himself in the zoo’s pay-box. Claudius the tapir got out one night and romped around a field of gladioli in a thunderstorm – ‘chomping all the flowers up and eating them like anything’. The New Guinea bush dogs were out for three days, and when Major Newgate, a wallaby, escaped, people were ringing the zoo to say: ‘Something strange has just hopped past – we think it must come from your zoo.’
On occasion the urge to escape was almost as strong in the humans as it was in the animals. In the early days the zoo owned a huge reticulated python by the name of Pythagoras, twelve feet long and as thick, as Gerald put it, ‘as a rugger blue’s thigh’. Normally it took three keepers to clean out Pythagoras’ cage in the Reptile House – two to restrain him and another to do the cleaning out – and the golden rule was that on no account should any member of the staff attempt the job on his own. One evening at dusk after the zoo had closed Gerald happened to walk by the Reptile House when he heard a muffled cry for help coming from inside. When he investigated he found John Hartley, then a new recruit straight from school, and built (as Gerald put it) ‘on the lines of a giraffe’, bound but not quite gagged in the coils of the giant python. ‘John had done the unforgivable,’ Gerald was to record. ‘The great snake had thrown its coils around him and bound him as immobile as if in a straitjacket. Fortunately, John still had hold of his head, and Pythagoras was hissing like a giant kettle.’ Wasting no time, Gerald seized the creature’s tail, but no sooner had he unwound a few coils from Hartley than the snake rewound the coils around Gerald. ‘Soon we were both as inextricably linked as Siamese twins,’ Gerald wrote, ‘and we both started to yell for help. It was after hours and I feared that the staff would have gone home. The idea of standing there all night till someone found us in the morning was not a happy one.’ So Gerald, John and Pythagoras remained entwined together coil by jowl in the hushed island dark. It was pure good fortune that eventually a member of the mammal staff heard their cries and came to the rescue. The experience of being jointly throttled by a giant snake evidently created a kind of bond, and eventually Hartley was to become a key member of Gerald’s team.
Gerald had never run anything in his life before, and it did not come naturally to him to administer anything. He had little grasp of money or business affairs, and his approach to his subordinates was to become comradely and sociable rather than managerial. It was Jacquie who provided the modicum of steel, and she did not shirk tough action when it was required. Gerald’s nephew Gerry Breeze, who was at the zoo for the first eighteen months of its existence, recalled: ‘Uncle Gerry had a heart of gold, but Jacquie was the captain. Handing out orders was not his way of doing things. He was only concerned with the animals, not with administering anything. But if he was going to do something he would do it, and nothing could change his mind. Not even Jacquie.’
Despite the zoo’s financial problems, Gerald was boyishly bullish. ‘We’ve got some nice new stuff,’ he wrote to his Cameroons companion Bob Golding in July 1960: ‘Pigmy Marmosets and Olingo, Emperor Tamarin and so on. Among the reptiles the Bafut Skinks are still doing wonderfully well and the babies have grown like mad. Our lovely trek Boa (the New Guinea one) is doing well, thank the Lord, and also our Madagascan Green Gecko. Perhaps the best new arrival we have had are four baby Aldabra Tortoises. I am very pleased with these as normally they won’t let you have more than a pair, but I spun the old bull about preservation, and they let me have the four.’
But four years of struggle were to follow, as Gerald and Jacquie battled desperately against the odds to establish the zoo on a firm footing. Every new problem – veterinary, cash flow, personnel, personal – was an exercise in crisis management. Through all this time, failure and the dissolution of Gerald’s lifelong dream was but a breath away.
Gerald’s first and most urgent task was the overriding question of funds. Though he always had difficulty with detailed accountancy, he had a visionary’s grasp of strategic finance. It was clear to him that the zoo had to raise more capital. It was still a new venture, and it would take a little time for it to become an established attraction for the island’s holiday-makers, who represented its only significant source of income at that time. Gerald therefore decided to approach the bank again for another £10,000 loan, and once again Rupert Hart-Davis agreed to guarantee that sum.
Jacquie was horrified. Their total indebtedness now amounted to £20,000 – almost a quarter of a million pounds at today’s values. Night after night she would lie awake wondering how the money was ever going to be repaid. This burden was compounded by the fact that from the outset Gerald had insisted that his position as Director of the zoo should be entirely honorary, and that the zoo should not be encumbered by having to pay him and his wife a salary. All they would receive would be the flat to live in and free electricity to run it, while Gerald supported them entirely by his writing, which would also serve to publicise the work of the zoo and to spread the word of Gerald’s long-term, worldwide mission. All he asked was that the zoo in its turn should be solvent and self-supporting.
Confronted with this financial imperative, Gerald began to write in earnest. During 1960 and 1961 he followed his Cameroons book with two children’s books – Island Zoo (in collaboration with the celebrated photographer Wolf Suschitsky), a Disneyish, highly anthropomorphised collection of stories about some of his favourite animals in the zoo, and Look at Zoos, a young person’s guide to zoo-going – and an account of his Argentine venture, The Whispering Land. To these he added various radio talks and television appearances on television, a series of articles for the Observer and an anecdotal portrait of a favourite animal for a children’s magazine called June every week for a year – a task so interminable that Jacquie took over the writing of the last few.
It was not all toil, though it mostly was. And there was respite ahead, for Gerald was planning to return at last to the idyll of his youth.