Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  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 Ame
rican 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.