CHAPTER FIVE

Penitent Butchers

Brumas was born on 27 November 1949, thirteen days after my own fourth birthday. Son of Mischa and Ivy, and named after his keepers Bruce and Sam, he was the first polar bear to be born and raised in Britain. He was an immediate and lasting sensation. In 1950 he boosted attendances at London Zoo to an all-time record of three million, and inspired a profitable trade in Brumas-themed books, postcards and souvenirs. There was something very odd about it, though. For reasons never properly explained, my use here of the words ‘son’, ‘he’ and ‘his’ perpetuate a bizarre error made in the newspapers and allowed to pass uncorrected by the zoo. Brumas was a girl, but for as long as she lived (she died in May 1958) the public went on believing her to be a male.

I suspect that my memory of her/him is more imaginative reconstruction than genuine recollection (I conjure a vague picture of mother and infant on a rock, and a faint smell of fish) but it is indelible. It is one of many cherished memories of the 1950s. This was not just the decade of the ‘family values’ (board games, side partings and Bisto) that still drive the politics of nostalgia. More importantly, it was the decade in which television sets first began to appear in ordinary homes such as my own. Two genres dominated my early viewing: the heroic adventures of cowboy avengers such as Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger, and wildlife shows. From the middle years of the decade, the much-parodied husband-and-wife team of Armand and Michaela Denis were a regular favourite with their On Safari series. Armand was a burly, bristly moustached, bespectacled and thickly accented Belgian film-maker; Michaela a glamorous blonde English ex-fashion designer. Clamped to their binoculars, they trekked by Land Rover in a never-ending African safari, filming as they went. An early, flickering fragment shows Michaela cuddling a jackal. I discovered only recently that Armand’s earlier credits as a director included Frank Buck’s 1934 film, Wild Cargo. (‘Although it may seem as though several incidents in the screen work were prearranged,’ said The New York Times, ‘they are nevertheless quite thrilling, especially when the hunter depicts the ingenious methods by which he traps wild beasts and reptiles.’)

On Safari now seems every much a bygone as Hopalong and the Lone Ranger, a faintly embarrassing relic of a colonial age in which African people could be captioned on-screen as ‘the Natives’. But there were two other popular shows which, on one young mind at least, would have a deeper and much more lasting impact. One of these was presented by a gawkily handsome, toothy young man whose cheerful disposition reminded me of my favourite schoolmasters – engaging, brimming with enthusiasm but not didactic. The other was (misleadingly, as it would turn out) a more headmasterly figure – bald, somewhat older than the first, and stuffed with knowledge. The handsome young man was twenty-eight-year-old David Attenborough, just hitting his stride with Zoo Quest. The other was Peter Scott, with Look.

As Attenborough recalled in a filmed interview in 2007, animal programmes hitherto had been of two contrasting types. In the first type – a kind of prototype Blue Peter – live animals would be brought to the studio from the zoo. ‘You stuffed them in a sack,’ said Attenborough, ‘and brought them in the middle of the night in a taxi up to Alexandra Palace, and then hoiked the poor things out on to a table covered with a doormat.’ The programmes went out live, and the thrill for the audience was the sheer unpredictability of a bewildered animal with fully functioning bladder and bowels, and a yen for freedom. The risk to the presenter’s dignity made it ‘great television’, but it revealed almost nothing about the animal’s nature.

The other strand was the Armand-and-Michaela-type film of creatures in the wild, shot usually in Africa. This was more informative, but it lacked the immediacy of live animals in the studio. Attenborough’s brainwave was to combine both strands into a single format. The idea was to travel to remote parts of the world to hunt, film and catch rare species never before seen by the public, and – with a modest echo of Frank Buck – to bring them back alive to London Zoo. Hence the title, Zoo Quest. The animals then could be brought to the table to entertain the live audience. The plan was for Attenborough to produce the series, and for his friend Jack Lester, the zoo’s curator of reptiles, to appear on screen.

For some reason they elected to start on the west coast of Africa, in Sierra Leone, 1,700 miles north and west of the point where Hanno the Navigator had turned for home 2,500 years earlier. In the days before intercontinental jets, it still took them three days to fly there from London (the first leg in a Dakota) via Casablanca and Dakar. ‘Sierra Leone’ translates invitingly as ‘Mountains of the Lion’, but the quarry necessarily had to be a bit less daunting than the fabled king of the jungle. London Zoo in any case had had a lion house since 1876, so Panthera leo wouldn’t fit the criteria of rare and unseen. But neither, it seemed, was there much else in Sierra Leone that could satisfy Attenborough’s desire for ‘the ultimate rarity’. The best candidate, it turned out, was a bird. To modern ears, the white-necked rockfowl, Picathartes gymnocephalus, doesn’t sound too much like the stuff of compulsive viewing, or the springboard for one of the greatest careers in broadcasting history. But so it proved, though it was a triumph that grew out of tragedy. In Africa Jack Lester caught a tropical disease from which he was never to recover, and which eventually killed him. He was able to present only the first episode, after which the producer had to step out from behind the camera and fill the gap. As I write, he’s still there.

Peter Scott’s Look series was of the more traditional studio-based kind, though it also made use of film. The very first programme featured a live fox and launched a series that would make Scott, like Attenborough, a household name. Scott might have been remembered for many different things. He was a distinguished wartime naval commander, an Olympic sailor, British gliding champion and a popular artist whose prints – typically of flighting wildfowl – were the only art that many families hung on their walls. He was also an expert ornithologist. For a full account of his extraordinary life, Elspeth Huxley’s biography (foreword by David Attenborough) does a rather better job than his autobiography, The Eye of the Wind. Better than Scott himself, Huxley describes how his feeling for nature developed through his passion for wildfowling, and how by the early 1950s his shocking proficiency with the gun had turned him away from killing. His decisive conversion to the preservation of life is one of the reasons why, today, I receive yet another invitation from the WWF to support a species under threat – this time the jaguar, Panthera onca, largest cat of the Americas. If I prefer, I could choose instead a giant panda, a polar bear, orang-utan, bottlenose dolphin, Bengal tiger, Asian elephant, black rhinoceros, hawksbill turtle or Adélie penguin, and I could receive a ‘gorgeous soft toy’ of my favourite species. The populism and ubiquity of wildlife conservation now would astonish the far-sighted few who got it moving.

Throughout recent history, the name Huxley has been one of the most prominent in contemporary thought. Scott’s biographer Elspeth Huxley was married to a cousin of the writer Aldous and of the evolutionary biologist Julian, grandsons of ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ Thomas Henry Huxley (a younger contemporary of George Perkins Marsh). It was Thomas Henry, inventor of the word ‘agnostic’, who objected to Richard Owen’s Creationist vision of the Natural History Museum, and who opposed Owen and ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in the famous debate at Oxford in 1860. Soapy Sam made the mistake of trying to demolish Darwin by scorn. Was it through his mother’s or his father’s side, he wondered, that Huxley had descended from a monkey? In modern political debate, Huxley’s riposte would be called a zinger. He would ‘not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor’, he told the unfortunate bishop, ‘but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth’. No smirk has ever disappeared more swiftly from episcopal lips, and literal-minded biblical fundamentalism has seldom taken a longer step backwards.

Thomas’s grandson Julian would grow up to share the old man’s taste for controversy. He was, for example, an outspoken advocate of eugenics, a far from easy thing to be in the years after the Second World War. He was president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962, and dispensed from a great intellectual height opinions on the reproductive excesses of society’s ‘lowest strata’. Although he was no racist, the liberal consensus now would find these opinions difficult to swallow or even to forgive. As a scientist he could see no reason why selective breeding should not be as improving to Homo sapiens as it had been to pigs, sheep and cattle. Population statistics continue to be controversial. Generations of scientists and conservationists have seen, and still do see, overcrowding as the most serious threat to life on the planet. (This was the theme of David Attenborough’s 2011 President’s Lecture to the Royal Society of Arts, when he quoted Malthus’s doomy Essay on the Principle of Population, which first sounded the tocsin in 1798.)

But it was not any of this that fixed Julian Huxley in the public mind. From January 1941 he was a panellist on BBC radio’s hugely popular Brains Trust, and in 1946 he became the first director-general of UNESCO. Crucially, though, above all else he was a biologist. From 1935 until 1942 he was secretary of the Zoological Society of London, where his progressive ideas put him in almost perpetual conflict with the Fellows. Echoing his grandfather’s vision for the Natural History Museum, he wanted the zoo to give more emphasis to research and education. He added more informative labelling to the cages, and – in the face of opposition from the Fellows – established the world’s first Children’s Zoo (officially opened by Robert and Edward Kennedy, the two younger sons of the then US Ambassador to Britain). Always he was driven by a mission to inform and enlighten. He wrote popular books about the zoo and its animals, and launched a monthly Zoo Magazine. The Fellows, however, rejected his scheme for a natural history cinema, and blocked his attempt to save money by cutting senior staff. His plan to buy Eric Gill’s nude female statue Mankind for the society’s rural outpost at Whipsnade, on the Dunstable Downs in Bedfordshire, also came to grief. Chimpanzees were one thing, but a kneeling, headless human female au naturel was, in the Fellows’ view, not something to be set before visitors to a zoo. (The statue subsequently was acquired by the Tate Gallery, and at the time of writing is on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum.) The Council was also outraged by Huxley’s freelance activities as a broadcaster, writer and lecturer. After three months’ unpaid leave lecturing in the United States, he resigned in 1942.

By 1960, at least seventy modern mammals, described and known to science, including species of gazelle, deer, moose, bat, wolf, rodent and marsupial, had become extinct. Domestic cattle had long lost their wild progenitor, the aurochs. Tasmania had lost its talismanic thylacine, and South Africa had said goodbye to the quagga. While television might reassure the viewing public that woods, forests, plains and seas were throbbing with life, men like Julian Huxley and Peter Scott were thinking differently. No child of my generation had any idea about species-loss. It did not dawn on me even as a young adult until I read Silent Spring and the world was sensitised by Greenpeace’s campaign to Save the Whale. Working as an editor on The Sunday Times’s environment pages in the 1970s, I was impressed by the work of colleagues like Brian Jackman, who combined a lifelong, unconditional love of nature with an inextinguishable fury at what was being done to it. Week after week in the space we were generously allowed to fill, we excoriated those who saw dying or displaced animals only as unmourned sacrifices to economic growth. Economics was a one-eyed ghoul without soul or vision. Milton Friedman, the most influential economist of the late twentieth century, seemed to have given moral authority to the despoilers by declaring that the social responsibility of business was ‘to increase its profits’. Simply that. To us, no philosophy had ever sounded more amoral; no full-stop more like a muffled drum. As the forests fell, and as fresh water was either poisoned or drained entirely away, so the casualties mounted and the anger grew. In those days it was unusual for newspapers to reserve space for environmental issues. The visionary editor Harold Evans made The Sunday Times an exception, and this allowed us to think of ourselves as pioneers. Speaking for myself, I must confess, nearly forty years on, to the sin of hubris.

Quagga, photographed at...

Quagga, photographed at London Zoo in 1864. It has been extinct for more than a hundred years

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In fact, the ‘conservation movement’ was not as new as I thought it was. For its earliest beginnings we have to go all the way back to the generation of my grandfathers. Even at the turn of the twentieth century it was obvious that George Perkins Marsh had not been crying wolf and that a philosophical divide was opening up. Until then, the idea that nature had a value in its own right was not something that had lodged in the minds of more than a few idealists, aka crackpots. It was one thing for a saint like Francis of Assisi to bind himself in brotherhood to birds and wolves, but for an ordinary mortal it looked like infirmity of mind. Man had dominion over all the beasts of the field. The Bible said so, and not even a saint could interfere with that. Thus began an ideological schism – still evident in almost any collision between man and nature – dividing those who believed wild places should remain pristine and inviolable (we may call them preservationists), and those who thought natural resources should be harvested sustainably (conservationists). The preservationist wing scored an early victory in 1872 with the world’s first legally designated national park at Yellowstone, in the American states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Even earlier, in 1867, the East Riding Association for the Protection of Sea Birds, whose purpose was to oppose the culling of birds off Flamborough Head in Yorkshire, had set itself up as the first-ever wildlife protection body. It was notably led by women campaigning against the harvesting of plumage for the hat trade.

Ornithologists have been the single most important group in the conservation movement ever since. I confess I am not one of them. Though I enjoy looking at birds in the garden and keep a pair of binoculars handy for the purpose, my occasional attempts at serious birdwatching have always failed through impatience, observational incompetence and intolerance of damp and cold. The failure is especially gross since the part of Norfolk in which I live – a waterscape of creeks, mudflats, sandbars and coastal marshes – is a fabled birdwatching hot spot. I’m not entirely hopeless. I can distinguish common-or-garden tits, finches and corvids, the commoner species of wild geese and some of the ducks, gulls and waders. My garden seethes with woodpigeons, collared doves and pheasants, and I am in thrall to the barn owl – Titus alba, titular parent and historic regurgitator of the Somali golden mole – which hunts across the neighbouring hayfield. But that’s about it. I’m useless with anything small and brown, and (this time really to my chagrin) with almost all birds of prey save the hovering kestrel. My naturalist friends necessarily treat me like some kind of imbecile.

We pay attention to the birdmen now, but at the turn of the twentieth century they had the whole world to wake up. More than anyone, they understood the meaning of ‘ecology’ – a word then newly minted – and of the critical importance of habitat. George Perkins Marsh had given full and prescient warning of the consequences of deforestation, but it was the effect of hunting on African mammals that had begun to focus political minds and had united the birdmen in their cause. It is important to understand how different the world now is. During the game season, Norfolk sounds like a re-enactment of the Boer War (which in the early 1900s would have been an all-too-recent memory in southern Africa). But for all their sound and fury, the pheasant shoots are more social gatherings of like-trousered friends than serious assaults on nature or any pretence of backwoodsmanship. As the great Australian zoologist Tim Flannery has said, most of us now live in a state of civilised imbecility, less able to fend for ourselves than any man, woman or child in any society before our own. To catch, kill, paunch, skin, joint and cook an animal is as far beyond the scope of most adult males as online banking would have been to Billy the Kid. At a time when we need more than ever to mend our relationship with the world, we continue to breed generations of what Flannery calls ‘poxed, inadequate weaklings’, for whom a shift to self-sufficiency would be a sentence of death. Modern man can skin a client, but not a rabbit. Back in the 1890s it was different. No gentleman would have been unfamiliar with sporting guns or squeamish in their use. It was indeed English gentlemen – and English gentlemen of the highest sort – who gave impetus to the world’s very first international environmental organisation, the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire (SPWFE), in 1903.

By then the damage was obvious. Erosion caused by deforestation and burning of the veldt was setting off alarms in the minds of a prescient few, but it was the staggering loss of shootable game that worried the gents. Then as now there was scepticism at the hunters’ self-justifying claims that they were conservationists committed to the well-being of the very species they liked to take aim at. Nevertheless, just as we are obliged to admit that wildfowlers and game shooters in modern Britain have protected acres of habitat that would have been lost without them, so it was that the sportsmen of the early nineteenth century did rather more than just safeguard their private interests. The ivory trade had already played havoc with elephants. In the Eastern Cape, none had been seen for seventy years. In Natal, exports of ivory had collapsed from 19 tons (950 elephants’ worth) in 1877 to 66 pounds in 1895. After 1880 so few elephants remained that ivory-hunters south of the Zambezi had to look for new employment. My figures are third-hand (from John McCormick’s The Global Environmental Movement, quoting John Pringle’s The Conservationists and the Killers), but they are easy to believe. In 1866 a single company in Orange Free State exported the skins of 152,000 blesbok and wildebeest. In 1873 it shipped out 62,000 wildebeest and zebra. With the added impacts of big-game and specimen hunting, fears of extinction – local, if not global – had begun to seem somewhat less than fanciful. The blaubuck had long gone, and so by now had the quagga. It was events in the Sudan that finally prodded the English gentlemen into action. When he learned that a well-stocked nature reserve north of the Sobat River was to be abandoned in favour of poorer territory to the south, the Verderer of Epping Forest, Edward North Buxton, gathered signatures for a letter to Sudan’s Governor-General, Lord Cromer.

This was no ordinary public petition. Signatories included the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, the future foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, Philip Lutley Sclater (for forty-two years Secretary of the Zoological Society of London), the explorer Sir Harry Johnston and his recent antagonist Professor Ray Lankester, director of the Natural History Museum, who had mocked him for believing in the okapi. Also lending his name, perhaps more significantly, was the Natural History Museum’s favourite marksman, Frederick Courteney Selous. This was the group that would form the SPWFE and would develop rapidly into one of the most exclusive institutions in the English-speaking world. Its vice presidents included Lord Cromer; Lord Milner, Governor of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner for Southern Africa; Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India; and Lord Minto, Governor-General of Canada. President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a keen big-game hunter, was among the honorary members, as were Lord Kitchener and Alfred Lyttelton, Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies.

Another important signatory was the zoologist Oldfield Thomas, who described and catalogued some 2,000 new mammals for the Natural History Museum. It might be supposed that he at least would have had some knowledge and understanding of the golden moles and other tiny basement-dwellers that lurked in the southern dark, and there were perhaps a few others whose knowledge of birds would have given them some understanding of how species related to each other. But it is difficult to imagine that many of these great men would have felt much concern for nature’s lower orders. Their interest was selective. What they sought to ensure was a continuing supply of species big enough to be shot at, not the sort of creature that might turn up in an owl pellet. It earned them a sobriquet – ‘penitent butchers’ – and set a precedent which, even now, conservationists find hard to live down. The white man helps himself to Africa’s wildlife, and blankets the earth with greenhouses gases, then tells the rest of the world it must not do the same.

The Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire nevertheless deserves our gratitude. Though it saw itself somewhat disingenuously as ‘a modest and unpretentious group of gentlemen’, it did aim to put its influence to good use, urging the protection ‘from appalling destruction’ of wild animals throughout the British Empire. As the Empire at that time covered a quarter of the globe, and as the gentlemen themselves were nothing if not influential, this was no mere token. The society since has been through various name changes. After the First World War it dropped the ‘Wild’ to become just the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire. In 1950 it became simply the Fauna Preservation Society, then extended its interests in 1981 to become the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society. Over time it has metamorphosed from an elite club of colonial administrators into, now, the thoroughly modern Fauna & Flora International, one of the world’s most effective champions of biodiversity.

Even so, it was not until 1948, forty-five years after the foundation of the SPWFE, that George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature was supplanted as the pre-eminent published authority. Again the writer was a distinguished American – Fairfield Osborn, president of the New York Zoological Society. Again the message was desperate, and again the book – Our Plundered Planet – was a bestseller endorsed by the intelligentsia. My own copy (a London edition) bears encomia from Eleanor Roosevelt, Aldous Huxley and Albert Einstein. ‘Reading it,’ said Einstein, ‘one feels very keenly how futile most of our political quarrels are compared with the basic realities of life.’ Well, just so. The timing was both significant and symbolic. In his introduction, Osborn explained that the inspiration for the book came towards the end of the Second World War, when it seemed to him that mankind was involved in two major conflicts. ‘This other world-wide war, still continuing, is bringing more widespread distress to the human race than any that has resulted from armed conflict. It contains potentialities of ultimate disaster greater even than would follow the misuse of atomic power. This other war is man’s conflict with nature.’

In recent years I have read and reviewed some nightmare visions of catastrophe. Yet none of them conjures a picture more apocalyptic than Fairfield Osborn’s. ‘Blind to the need of co-operating with nature,’ he writes, ‘man is destroying the sources of his life. Another century like the last and civilisation will be facing its final crisis.’ This was, remember, 1948. Like Marsh, Osborn was a blunt-spoken polymath not much inhibited by sensitivity. His views on the need for human population control must have sounded even more shocking in 1948, when the world was still counting its dead, than they do now. ‘Even after his wars, too many are left alive,’ he said.

He echoed Marsh in condemning deforestation and overexploitation of land, measuring the cost in dried-up watercourses, silted rivers, erosion and vanishing wildlife – ‘as deadly ultimately as any delayed-action bomb’. In the USA, he complained, timber was being felled twice as fast as it grew. ‘The story of this nation in the last century as regards the use of forests, grasslands, wildlife and water sources is the most violent and the most destructive of any written in the long history of civilisation.’ Fifty-seven years before the post-Katrina storm surge that would devastate New Orleans, he saw all too plainly what must come: ‘How about the valley of the greatest river of them all, the Mississippi, its bed so lifted, its waters so choked, so blocked with the wash of productive lands, that the river at flood crests runs high above the streets of New Orleans? As in historical times, the power of nature in revolt will one day overwhelm the bonds that even the most ingenious modern engineer can prepare.’ Fourteen years before Silent Spring, he even recognised the danger of DDT.

As to mismanagement of wildlife, Osborn could find no worse an example than America’s own treatment of the bison. The white man had arrived on the continent to find fifty million of them north of the Rio Grande. By 1905 only 500 remained – a loss of 99.999 per cent. Osborn’s verdict on humankind is correspondingly bleak: ‘The uncomfortable truth is that man during innumerable past ages has been a predator – a hunter, a meat eater and a killer.’ Comparisons with other species worked only to man’s disadvantage. ‘His nearest relatives in the animal world most similar to him physiologically remained vegetarians. And at no time, even to the present day, have depended upon the lives of other living creatures for their own survival.’

As he saw it, the result was a mounting catalogue of devastation in which the old world fared no better than the new. A traveller in Greece told him that ‘during all his travels through the mountain section of the country he saw only two pair of partridges and one rabbit – all the natural wild life having been killed off’. In North Africa, ‘wandering tribes of herdsmen move from oasis to oasis, their herds stripping such grass as there is from the gullied slopes, leaving nothing but the raw unstable soil’. In southern Africa, animal life continued to be spent as if it were both a limitless resource and an offence to the sovereignty of man. ‘Alarming reports have come from southern Rhodesia to the effect that more than 300,000 native wild animals have been deliberately destroyed in recent years on the grounds that they were carriers of the tsetse fly pest. This move on the part of the Rhodesian authorities, unfortunately being imitated in neighbouring territories, may well prove to be a misguided and futile butchering of the superb wild life of those regions . . . [This is] typical of man’s lack of understanding of the place that wild living things occupy in the economy of nature.’

Gratifyingly to this latter-day seeker of moles, Osborn celebrated the work of burrowing animals in maintaining the health of the soil. But he had little confidence that his vision would be shared. ‘It is amazing how far one has to travel to find a person, even among those most widely informed, who is aware of the processes of mounting destruction that we are inflicting upon our life sources.’

One place he might usefully have visited was the cricket-loving English county of Gloucestershire. It was here, two years earlier at Slimbridge in 1946, that Peter Scott established the Severn Wildlife Trust – the small but potent beginnings of what would grow to become the Wildlife and Wetland Trust, now one of the most effective guardians of wetland habitat, with nine reserves strung across Britain. It was indeed Britain that would become the control centre of international efforts to conserve animals and their habitats. The crucial last shove came from the recently knighted Julian Huxley in a series of three articles for the British Sunday newspaper the Observer, published in November 1960. Huxley had just returned from what he described as ‘the most interesting assignment I have ever had’ – a three-month journey through ten African countries to prepare a report for UNESCO on ‘The Conservation of Wild Life and Natural Resources in Central and East Africa’. The result was a powerful mix of excitement and foreboding. His unconcealed sense of awe leapfrogs back in time over the sombre gloom of Osborn and Marsh to reawaken the ghost of Alfred Russel Wallace.

The variety of Eastern African mammals is astonishing and so are their numbers. There is still an abundance of relatively easily visible creatures – elephants, hippos, warthogs, rhinos, giraffes, lions, leopards, servals, cheetahs, hyenas, zebras, buffaloes and baboons, monkeys and mongooses, hyraxes and hares, and a unique array of antelopes large and small – eland, hartebeest, topi, oryx, sable, roan, gnu (wildebeest), kudu, waterbuck and gerenuk, to lechwe, gazelles, bushbuck, reedbuck, impala, steinbuck and klipspringer to the little duikers and tiny dikdik.

And the sight of great herds of topi or gnu or zebra galloping across the open plains, of a troop of elephants coming down to drink and play, of a pride of lions on a kill, of sausage-like hippos in and out of the water, of a herd of impala leaping in all directions, of prehistory incarnate in a rhinoceros, of a family of giraffes cantering along like elongated rocking horses – any of these is unforgettable, a unique contribution to the riches of our experience.

Besides these, there are many less frequently seen but wonderfully interesting mammals – chimpanzees and gorillas, bongo and situtunga, bushpigs and giant forest hogs, wild dogs and bat-eared foxes, otters and wildcats, civets and genets, polecats and honey badgers, furred mole rats and naked sand rats, elephant shrews and bush babies, porcupines and pangolins, springhares, squirrels and the strange nocturnal aardvarks and aardwolves.

Unlike Wallace he made no mention of golden moles, but one feels they were there in spirit. This was indeed the picture of Africa I had grown up with, implanted in my mind by Attenborough, Scott, and Armand and Michaela Denis. Huxley, however, was not deceived. Though there were still ‘a great many’ wild animals left, he noted that they were patchily distributed over a very wide area, and that their numbers were ‘grievously reduced’.

A century ago South Africa harboured tens of millions of large mammals: to-day they survive in any density only in a few National Parks and Reserves. Many parts of Kenya and Tanganyika and the Rhodesias which fifty years ago were swarming with game are now bare of all large wildlife. Throughout the area, cultivation is extending, native cattle are multiplying at the expense of wild animals, poaching is becoming heavier and more organised, forests are being cut down or destroyed, means are being found to prevent cattle suffering from tsetse-borne diseases, large areas are being over-grazed and degenerating into semi-desert, and above and behind all this, the human population is inexorably mounting, to press ever harder on a limited land space.

Poaching in particular dismays him. It would have dismayed him even more if he could have imagined a time sixty years hence when park rangers – some of the bravest men on the planet – would be required to face guerrilla bands armed with rocket-launchers, AK-47s and NATO-standard Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifles. But then, as now, game departments and national park authorities had too few men to stop the poachers. Then, as now, the criminals’ incentive was not just an appetite for meat.

It is also Asian superstition and European taste for ‘curios’. Indians and Chinese believe (on the basis of purely magical reasoning akin to that which led medieval herbalists to the doctrine of signatures) that rhinoceros horn is a potent aphrodisiac: they believe it so firmly that it now fetches an extremely high price per pound – much more than the best ivory; in consequence rhinos are being poached out of existence, except where well protected.

Many giraffes are slaughtered by poachers merely to sell their tails for fly whisks; many Colobus monkeys to make rugs out of their lovely black and white fur; many elephants to satisfy the demands of white men for ivory ornaments, usually of low aesthetic value.

He was not entirely a pessimist, but his faith in reason would turn out to have little more foundation than the ‘god hypothesis’ he rejected (he was, after all, a Huxley). The route to salvation, he believed, lay in licensed game-cropping schemes that would ‘go far to satisfy the Africans’ legitimate meat-hunger’ and so reduce the poachers’ incentive to hunt illegally. It would also ‘help them to realise that African wildlife is a major resource’. Somewhere at a theoretical level this truism has always been recognised. On the plains, however, the ‘major resource’ would be viewed in a rather narrower sense than Huxley had intended. Inside government as well as out, private gain and common good are locked in eternal enmity. During a visit to a southern African village not long ago, protocol required my hosts to introduce me to a local official of the national government, responsible for protecting wildlife. He turned out to be a cocky, tough-looking young man accompanied by muscular sidekicks, who saw no need during our brief interview to remove his reflective sunglasses. It was like meeting the Tonton Macoute. He took little trouble to conceal the fact that he combined his official duties as nature’s protector with a profitable sideline as the local Mr Big in the illegal bushmeat trade. But it is not false optimism for which Huxley’s articles should be remembered. Fifty years on, it is hard to believe that a short series of pieces in a Sunday newspaper could have a lasting effect on public opinion, let alone on the care and governance of the natural world. But that is exactly what they did.

Through his director-generalship of UNESCO, Huxley had already got the International Union for the Conservation of Nature up and running. This was a huge testament to his diplomatic skill and powers of persuasion. The worldwide fellowship of naturalists and conservationists was far from the bonded coterie of like-minded fur-freaks that people tend to imagine. The international rivalries, jealousies, theological hair-splitting and clashes of personality would have done credit to any faction competing for the legacy of Marx and Lenin, or for control of the Vatican. A nest of vipers by comparison would have looked like a model of friendship. For a while it had seemed that the global centre of conservationism would drift to the USA, but the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt – a president committed to the conservationist cause – somewhat stalled the American impetus. In any case, with the focus on what was still called ‘big game’ in Africa, Eurocentrism had a certain political logic. At the end of the Second World War, most of Africa was still governed by European colonial powers. After a long, frustrating and often unedifying tussle for supremacy, which revolved mostly around the Swiss, Huxley used his political clout to convene an international conference to establish what at first would be the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN), and what in 1956 would become, as it remains today, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). The conference at Fontainebleau, from 30 September to 7 October 1948, involved twenty-three governments, 126 national institutions and eight international organisations. They resolved that the new body would ‘collect, analyse, interpret and disseminate information about “the protection of nature”’. The mission statement has evolved with its burgeoning ambition – it now pledges to ‘help the world find pragmatic solutions to our most pressing environment and development challenges’ – but the dissemination of information remains at its core. Much of the information is unwelcome – the Red List of Threatened Species makes hard reading for anyone excited by the visions of Alfred Russel Wallace or the films of Armand and Michaela Denis. But without it the zoos, learned societies and conservation charities dedicated to the survival of wildlife would be like the blind watchmaker, struggling to put together complex life-systems in the dark.

Information was just the starting point. On its own it might help conservationists define their objectives but it didn’t provide the means of carrying them out. If saving the giant panda or black rhinoceros was to be more than just a pious hope, then some means of raising money would have to be found. Once again all eyes were on Huxley. Having been instrumental in driving forward the information network, he was now the catalyst for effective action. It is a long story to which my brief account will do scant justice, but the response to Huxley’s Observer articles was electrifying. Many others would be centrally involved – most importantly the director-general of Britain’s Nature Conservancy, Max Nicholson – but it was Huxley who inspired the foundation of what is now the world’s biggest non-governmental conservation organisation, WWF (originally the World Wildlife Fund, and since 1986 the Worldwide Fund for Nature). Its official launch was at the Royal Society of Arts in London on 28 September 1961, when the speakers included Peter Scott and Huxley himself. Scott became WWF’s energetic first vice-president, and recruited Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and the Duke of Edinburgh as its international and UK presidents. He also designed the WWF’s famous panda logo.

Progress was rarely smooth. Conflicts with other conservation bodies, especially those in America, were par for the political course. Fairfield Osborn, who by now had founded America’s Conservation Foundation, was initially a board member of WWF-US, but resigned and refused to be a trustee. (The Conservation Foundation would not merge with WWF until the 1980s, and even then WWF-US, along with Canada, would not accept the name change adopted by every other country.) Elsewhere, the royal figureheads’ penchant for hunting would cause controversy reminiscent of the ‘penitent butchers’. So, later, would sponsorship from oil and agro-chemical companies. There were spats with the IUCN (with which for many years it shared an office) and with the Fauna Preservation Society (over who should take the credit for saving the Arabian oryx). But gradually, over the years, like magnetised particles the forces of conservation would turn and point in the same direction.

It is a coincidence that my own idealised and wildly optimistic notion of African wildlife should have developed during that early, critical post-war period. Coincidence, too, of a happier sort, that a couple of decades later I should find myself sitting alongside my boyhood heroes, Attenborough and Scott, on the judging panel of an environmental essay competition run by The Sunday Times in memory of the nature writer and broadcaster Kenneth Allsop. I knew little of Julian Huxley then (and had certainly never read his Observer articles, which were published while I was still at school), and would never see or hear him speak – he died, aged eighty-seven, in 1975 – but his voice and philosophy, however unconsciously, were fundamental to every entry we received. It is only now that I realise the centrality of his thinking to everything I believe about wildlife. How else, I wonder, would I see any point in searching for the world’s most improbable mole?