‘I’m tired of human beings,’ he told David Hughes when they met in Jersey towards the end of 1961. ‘They’ve made such a mess of it. It’s odd how human beings in a crowd become the most stupid of animals. It’s usually the other way round. A herd of buffaloes is more intelligent than a single buffalo.’ It was unbelievable how some of the public behaved when they came to the zoo, Gerald told a couple of French reporters. One oaf had slipped a packet of aspirins into the chinchilla cage, and one of the animals had died. Other morons had given razor blades, lipstick, even lighted cigarettes, to the monkeys. ‘If only people had the intelligence of gorillas,’ he sighed.
‘It’s a complex business, how to treat an animal,’ he said. ‘Any human being who has a rapport with an animal will gain something. It makes you aware of other spheres. Just watch a dog sniffing like a connoisseur and imagine the whole field of art that lies unexplored in that.’ His attitude to animals, he went on, was not anthropomorphic, as some people believed. He didn’t look on animals as little furry humans, and he would have no compunction in shooting one and eating it, if need be.
Gerald was well aware of the emotive views of those who held that it was cruel to keep wild animals penned up in zoos. Zoos went down in the public’s estimation in the 1960s, when the young were proclaiming freedom and love and conservationists were revealing the extent of the biological catastrophe that was overwhelming much of the planet. Some maintained that there was no such thing as a good zoo. Gerald understood that view, and where the zoos were bad, he sympathised with it. ‘The average zoo is pretty bloody,’ he declared. ‘It might pose under the wonderful banner of a scientific society, but it’s nothing more or less than a three-ring circus, run either by businessmen or illiterate showmen.’ However, he shared the position of Florence Nightingale, of whose achievements he was a great admirer. The fact that she criticised bad hospitals did not mean that she was opposed to all hospitals. For while even a good zoo – like Jersey Zoo – did indeed keep animals in confinement, it also gave them significant freedoms that greatly enhanced their quality of life: freedom from fear (especially of predators); freedom from hunger and disease; freedom to live and bring up their offspring in shelter and security and even (with luck) freedom from extinction. The majority of human beings would be happy to live out their lives on such terms. In any case, animals in their wild state defined their own limits, which amounted to cages of their own making. A mouse throughout its entire life might seldom move out of an area of twelve square feet. A lion needed a much bigger territory, but even he marked out his own natural cage. In Gerald’s view no zoo could be considered good if it did not breed the animals it housed. Not only did this reduce the need to draw stock from the wild, but it raised the possibility of returning species to it. And where this was not feasible, at least a good zoo provided a sanctuary in which species on the brink of extinction might continue to draw breath.
‘I have the same interest in politics as a gamekeeper has in stoats,’ Gerald once said. ‘The only view I hold strongly, which I suppose is political in a far-flung way, is that human beings should stop reproducing themselves. The pronouncements of Kennedy and Macmillan are just not important. Our problems are biological: overpopulation.’ In 1961 – prior to such seminal dates in the history of the modern environmental movement as the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962.) and the politicisation of green protest with the foundation of Friends of the Earth (1971) – such views put Gerald Durrell well ahead of his time.
So far as his own role was concerned in practising what he preached, Gerald was disarmingly selfless and frankly self-willed by turns. ‘I am a charlatan,’ he told David Hughes. ‘I am lazy and stupid, vain and greedy and selfish. But I’m terribly broad-minded when it comes to me. I’ve got, you see, all the normal human virtues.’ On the other hand, he was pursuing a cause, to which he was prepared to sacrifice even himself. ‘If you’re an intelligent mammal, apart from giving your body to the earth and thus creating new life, I think you should leave something behind. If you go through life taking and not giving, then it’s detrimental to you.’
Early in February 1962 Gerald and Jacquie set sail from wintry Rotterdam bound for the southern hemisphere, at the start of another grand adventure. First dreamed up by Jacquie, then taken up by their friend Chris Parsons at the BBC Natural History Unit, the plan was to make a series of television documentaries about the conservation work being done in New Zealand, Australia and Malaya – new ground for both the Durrells. On 4 April they stepped ashore in Auckland. Chris Parsons, who would direct the series, and Jim Saunders, the cameraman, were making their own way there, and would meet up with them shortly.
Gerald wrote a long letter to his mother (the last he was ever to write her, though he never quite finished it or even posted it) giving an account of the New Zealand section of the expedition:
In Auckland, to our astonishment, we found ourselves greeted like royalty. The red carpet was unrolled in no uncertain fashion. We were interviewed, photographed from seventy different angles, recorded, televised, and generally exhausted. We found the Wildlife Department had – to use a New Zealand expression – jacked up our whole tour for us, and had detailed one Brian Bell from the Department to be our guide throughout our stay.
From Auckland they proceeded, via the black swans of Lake Fongapay and the mud geysers of Rotorua, to another red-carpet welcome in Wellington, followed by lunch with the entire New Zealand Cabinet. ‘Can you picture me sitting there surrounded by the Minister for this and the Minister for that?’ Gerald wrote to his mother. The lunch was not without its moments. Gerald expressed concern at the environmental damage inflicted by sheep grazing. Some members of the Cabinet were themselves guilty of this, and when they protested that a little bit of erosion did nobody any harm, he replied: ‘It’s a bit like having a Rembrandt. Once it’s destroyed, you can’t replace it. If you had a Rembrandt, would you destroy it?’ ‘Really,’ he said to Jacquie when he emerged from the encounter, ‘they’re just a bunch of hick farmers like the rest.’
A mile off the coast lay the island bird sanctuary of Kapiti.
Though the birds are wild they are incredibly tame. The first we saw were the Wekas, dumpy brown birds the size of a chicken with very worried expressions. They prowled around our feet, examining us and the equipment with great care, and consulting each other with a most curious noise, like someone beating softly on a tom-tom. Then George Fox, who looks after the island, said he would call the Kakas; these are large parrots clad in rather sombre shot silk feathering, and with very large, strongly hooked beaks. Fox shouted out for a bit and then, suddenly the birds appeared out of the forest, screeching excitedly. They flew down and perched all over us to eat the dates Fox had provided. One of them decided that my head was the ideal perch, and as their claws are long and sharp I was nearly scalped.
Their next venture was to a pair of rocks called The Brothers, where they had to be hauled ashore by crane. The Brothers were home to the rare Tuatara lizard, and much else beside.
There were Giant Geckos all over the rocks, and I collected a number of these which I sent off by air and which I hope are now settled in happily at Jersey. All five of us had to sleep in a tiny hut that night, and our slumbers were not of the sweetest as two pairs of Fairy Penguins had their nest burrows under the floor, and spent the whole night braying at each other like four donkeys; even banging on the floor with a boot did not have the slightest effect on their singing …
After this came the highlight of our trip: we had been granted permits to go into Notornis Valley. The Notornis [commonly known as the takahe] is that bird that they thought was extinct until they rediscovered it in this remote valley in the mountains. They think there might be about four hundred pairs. The valley is, of course, strictly protected, and no one is allowed to go in without permission.
But the visit to the remote valley where the strange, flightless takahe had been rediscovered was a disappointment. ‘We made our
way down the whole length of the lake without seeing anything,’ Gerald wrote in his film commentary. ‘It was one of the most unpleasant bits of country I had ever been in.’ A few days later he did succeed in setting his eyes on a number of takahe in captivity at Mount Cook, where the New Zealand Wild Life Service was attempting to breed them. ‘But it was another rarity being kept there that raised Gerry into almost a quivering state of excitement,’ Chris Parsons was to recall. ‘This was the one and only kakapo [nocturnal owl parrot] in captivity. Since then more kakapos have been discovered in the wild and translocated to safety, but the possibility of breeding such endangered species in captivity and reintroducing them to the wild was already prominent in Gerry’s mind.’
Unlike the Durrells’ previous expeditions in Africa and South America, the one in New Zealand had all the characteristics of a tightly organised, official guided tour. By contrast, in Australia the itinerary was less structured. This was perhaps one of the reasons Gerald and Jacquie adored Australia from the moment they landed there. ‘We all fell in love with Australia, completely and instantly,’ Gerald was to write. ‘If ever I was compelled to settle down in one spot – which God forbid – Australia is one of the few countries I have visited that I would choose.’
The animals and birds they went in quest of – wombat, bandicoot, platypus, cassowary, lyre bird, kookaburra and many more – were primordial and extraordinary. But none gave Gerald so much pause for reflection as Leadbeater’s opossum, which, like the takahe, had once been considered extinct. The film crew visited the animal’s secret location at night, and the narration Gerald wrote for this sequence is of particular significance:
As far as has been discovered, they’re only found in a piece of forest about a mile square. Such a small area could only support very few pairs of these little creatures. Should a bushfire ever break out and sweep through this area, the Leadbeater’s Opossum would be doomed for ever. Probably the only safeguard for their survival would be to establish some in captivity, to breed them and then introduce them into other suitable areas so that at least if this forest was burned, they would still survive elsewhere.
The travellers were growing weary by now, but they still had Malaya to go. ‘Dreadful voyage on Italian liner,’ Jacquie wrote to Mother in early July. ‘Got to Singapore July 1st, two days there, then Kuala Lumpur by road. Fascinating country and people but dreadful climate – sticky heat all the time. How long I’ll be able to put up with it – being sopping wet all the time – I don’t know. Filming situation difficult – not laid on as in Australia and New Zealand.’ Their itinerary in Malaya took them first to the Terman Negara, the country’s largest national park, a gigantic slab of untouched forest which was home to the Sumatra rhino, tiger, leopard, gibbon and king cobra; and then to Dungun, on the east coast, an area rich in reptiles.
At last they came to the end of a journey which had taken them some forty-five thousand miles through three countries, during which they had encountered dozens of fascinating species. Gerald later summed up what he had learned from this conservational grand tour:
The picture of conservation that I found in New Zealand, Australia and Malaya was distressingly familiar. Small bands of dedicated, underpaid and overworked individuals are fighting a battle against public apathy and political and big business chicanery. By and large people are apathetic because they do not realise what is going on, but the most dangerous part of the problem is political apathy, because it is only at top level that you can get things done. Most politicians would not risk their careers for the sake of conservation, because firstly they do not think it is important, and secondly they treat conservationists with the disregard they would display towards an elderly spinster’s ravings over her pet peke. But unlike us, animals have no control over their future. They cannot ask for home rule, they cannot worry their MPs with their grievances, they cannot even get their unions to agree to a strike for better conditions. Their future and their very existence depends on us.
Gerald and Jacquie had planned to carry on to East Africa when they finished shooting in Malaya, but the news from home was not good. The state of things at the zoo had deteriorated to a point of crisis. So had Mother’s morale. Her loneliness had become acute over the months that Gerald and Jacquie had been away, and her friend Betty Norton and Eileen Moloney, who was staying in the manor in the Durrells’ absence, urged Gerald to forgo the last stage of the expedition and to come home as speedily as possible. The travellers changed plans and ships. By the last week of August they were in Aden on board the Glen Line cargo boat Glenorchy, and in the second week of September they docked in London.
Gerald and Jacquie were given a warm welcome when they finally returned to Jersey in the late summer of 1962, but they were dismayed by the lacklustre look of the zoo. Although it had enjoyed a record season at the turnstiles, it presented, Jacquie recalled, a ‘shabby’ and ‘uncared-for’ appearance. Underfunded, understaffed, dilapidated and down-at-heel, the zoo was evidently near to financial ruin. Jacquie blamed Ken Smith, who had been given carte blanche in Gerald’s absence, and she was outspoken in her criticism. ‘He not only ignored Gerry’s plans for the zoo,’ she was to claim, ‘but imposed his own ideas.’ He was really a zoo man of the old school, she felt: ‘He didn’t have a clue what Gerry was about. I tried to persuade Gerry to get rid of him and put somebody else in charge. But this revealed the weakness in Gerry’s character. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.’ Instead, Gerald staunchly defended his old friend and colleague. Jacquie was furious: ‘Things got to a point when, after I’d had a couple of barneys with a member of the staff who was incompetent, Smith came storming into our flat and told Gerry that if he didn’t keep his wife’s bloody nose out of it, he’d leave. And Gerry supported him and not me!’
Smith’s wife Trudy saw things differently. ‘Ken and I had got on pretty well with both Gerry and Jacquie,’ she recalled. ‘But in the winter of 1962 ill-feeling began to develop – I don’t know why. We all felt it was a parting of the ways. Probably Gerry wanted to take over the reins, change things, bring the Trust into being. Probably he thought Ken had run his course and done his bit.’
The writing was on the wall, and the senior staff of the zoo were under immense pressure. By the time Gerald got back from the Far East he had run up debts of £17,000. Drastic action was required to halt the three-year-old zoo’s slide into insolvency. Gerald’s accountant Eddie Ray, from the London firm of Spicer & Pegler, was invited to Jersey to audit the books and produce a financial survey of the administration and its day-to-day running costs. His report confirmed their worst fears. The books were in a mess, money had leaked away, and the establishment was getting nowhere. The zoo was on the verge of folding.
EIGHTEEN
Durrell’s Ark
1962–1965
The crisis was total. Gerald’s dream was on the brink of dissolution, and instant action was required. Neither he nor Jacquie was in a position to run the financial side of the zoo. There was nothing for it – they would have to bring in a professional, an administrator and troubleshooter who could sort out the mess. They advertised in the local paper, and the response was overwhelming. Among those who applied was Catha Weller, who had previously worked in advertising in London, and had recently come to Jersey when her husband Sam was posted there. She was summoned to an interview at the manor on a Sunday morning in December 1962.
‘Only Gerry could interview somebody on a Sunday morning,’ Catha recalled. ‘I walked into the room and I could hardly speak. I am a clairvoyant, and years before I had described to Sam in detail a room I had seen as a sort of vision in my head. And when I walked into the room in the manor I realised straight away that this was the room I had seen, precise in every detail. It was uncanny. So I said to myself: “Well, of course, this is where I am destined to work.”’
Gerald and Jacquie had already interviewed some twenty no-hopers that morning, and were beginning to despair. But Catha was clearly something special.
‘She waltzed into my office for her interview,’ Gerald recalled, ‘diminutive, round, with sparkling green eyes and a comforting smile. Yes, she knew how to do book-keeping, shorthand and typing – the lot. I looked at Jacquie and Jacquie looked at me. We both knew instinctively that a miracle had happened.’
Three days later, on 12 December 1962, Catha started her life-saving job at the zoo, though when she turned up for her first day’s work she formed the impression that she had been brought in simply to wind the place up: ‘I thought the job would last about six months. They were in dire straits: there was no money, nothing at all, and I had never done any fund-raising in my life. I thought, well, in six months I can get this all sorted out for the Receiver.’
Catha ruled the zoo’s finances with a heart of gold and a hand of iron. Not even the smallest transaction could be entered into without her approval. If a zoo worker asked her for a new broom with which to sweep out the cages, he was required to bring the old one for inspection, and if it retained a single bristle his request was denied. If a keeper indented for twenty bananas, his order was cut to eighteen. If a member of staff was caught eating an apple, he or she was reproached with the words: ‘You are taking food from an animal’s mouth.’ If the month’s budget was spent in three weeks, it would be short commons all round for the remaining week. Payments of bills were deferred with a polite note. Though such penny-pinching alone would not save the zoo, it was symptomatic of a state of mind that might. ‘What we would have done without this ally who sorted out our administration,’ Jacquie was to record, ‘leaving us free to deal with animals, I cannot bear to think; we shall for ever be in her debt. Slowly but surely she introduced routine and order, and with the help of our many friends, things began to settle down.’
Gerald Durrell Page 41