But these plans came badly unstuck. The first casualty was the lovely but luckless Saranne Calthorpe, with whom Gerald and Jacquie had enjoyed a long and intense friendship. Indeed, some who were close to the three of them considered the friendship to be obsessive, and even unhealthy. Without a trace of a grin, Gerald had proposed the appointment of Lady Calthorpe as the Trust’s special fund-raiser on Jersey at a solemn committee meeting because, he said, ‘as everybody knows she’s the sexiest bitch on the island’.
Saranne’s post was conditional on her remaining single, Gerald informed her, since he did not consider it a suitable job for a married woman. A married woman would have too many other distracting commitments, he claimed – not admitting even to himself the jealousy and possessiveness he felt on Saranne’s account. He was therefore greatly dismayed to learn that following her divorce from Lord Calthorpe she proposed to marry again, this time to Tony Lort-Philips, who had worked at the zoo in the early days. Gerald’s reaction was demonic. From the Mazet he wrote to Saranne in terms that suggested he regarded her decision as a personal betrayal.
‘From the very outset of this affair,’ he raged, ‘you have behaved with a crass stupidity which I had hoped was only a temporary manifestation due to your private life. This latest effort, however, leaves me no alternative but to believe you imagine this job to be a sort of plaything, a hobby … As you say, happiness tends to make one incoherent – so does imbecility. I would be glad if you send your letter of resignation direct to Lord Jersey.’
Gerald never saw Saranne again. Her second marriage broke up like her first, she drifted about the island, helpless and forlorn, then took to the bottle in a systematic, suicidal way, and after crashing her car a few times in Jersey’s narrow, stone-walled lanes, died prematurely of drink in a Jersey nursing home.
In Saranne’s place Gerald proposed John Hartley, a highly diplomatic but determined young man. ‘He is genuinely devoted to the Trust,’ Gerald advised Lord Jersey, ‘loves being loved by people, and is really quite ruthless.’
The second casualty was Gerald himself. He was back in Jersey in the autumn, but his doctor doubted if he was yet well enough for such a strenuous undertaking as a fund-raising tour of the United States. On 19 November Gerald wrote to Lawrence that the doctors had vetoed the proposed visit next year as well, ‘because they think the pressure of a whistle-stop tour would unravel my psyche again’. He wrote again later: ‘I have broken the drug cycle [medication] but still get enormously tired very easily, with occasional great dollops of depression which only last for about five or six minutes but are rather terrifying in their intensity.’
In a way Gerald was relieved not to have tackle the States so soon. ‘I do not share some Council Members’ opinion,’ he told Sir Giles Guthrie, ‘that all I have to do is walk down the gangplank in New York to be immediately handed a cheque for a million pounds.’ In any case, he was fed up with having to wrestle with money matters year in year out. ‘It has, among other things, affected my health, so that I really feel now is the time to make an all-out effort to get ourselves into a financial position where I can concentrate on intelligent conservation work and not be constantly harried by the world of accountants and bank managers, about which I know nothing and care less.’
TWENTY-TWO
The Palace Revolution
1971–1973
For some time a move had been afoot among the senior members of the Trust Council to push through a radical review of the organisation and direction of the Trust and zoo. This was to mark the second great crisis in the organisation’s history. The first had been the battle for survival. The second would be the battle for power.
In September 1971 Lord Jersey had drafted a preliminary memorandum, the main thrust of which was that the organisation had to adapt to keep up with change. There was the faintest hint that the biggest obstacle to that adaptation was Gerald Durrell himself:
A complete review of the organisation is urgent. Les Augrès Manor is fast becoming a very important specialist zoo, and is no longer merely a collection of animals. The animals are, and must continue to be, pets; that is the charm of the zoo. But the collection now has a wider, vastly more important function, and we must be ready for it. We must not forget that the zoo centres on Gerald Durrell, the author, and his books, and the TV personality and his films and appearances, and the zoo is linked to him in the public eye and in the minds of the Trust members … As the Trust and Zoo grow bigger and increase in scope, one might think it more efficient to decentralise, but this would only be possible up to a certain limit. We must do nothing to break the impression that this is Gerry Durrell’s private zoo, and that the animals are all his pets.
Gerald’s value to the zoo, in other words, was as the star turn in an elaborate fiction. But the days had long passed when he knew most of the animals in the zoo by sight, if not by name, and when some of them, companions from the earliest weeks of their lives, had been an integral part of his own past. It was impossible for a scientific institution run on the most rigorous lines, with new animals constantly coming in from all over the world as part of a systematic conservation programme, to continue to be run as a personal fiefdom of private pets, and had Gerald never intended that it should, though most of the public still believed it was.
Gerald did not at first pick up any scent of danger in the radical rethink now afoot. He did object to certain things in Lord Jersey’s memo, however – the idea that the Trust was in danger of becoming moribund, for example, or that a way of improving the organisation’s efficiency was to increase the number of committees, to the point where, as he. put it, it was ‘all balls and no brain’. But he did not yet perceive that his own role was under threat.
Christmas 1971, therefore, was to pass in relative peace and contentment, after a rather good year for the Trust and not a bad one for Gerald. His newly published collection of stories, Fillets of Plaice, was ‘going a bomb,’ he told brother Lawrence, and the reviews were good. The book was a miscellaneous collection of short pieces based on fact – a bizarre dinner party in Africa, an ocean picnic in Corfu, a nose-bleed in a London taxi, a sojourn in an eccentric nursing home in the Home Counties – with a title that was an affectionate spoof on his brother’s recent literary paean to the deus loci, Spirit of Place. ‘Dotty, painful and amusing,’ declared the Evening Standard. ‘An element of what can only be called “niceness” invades everything which Gerald Durrell writes,’ Ronald Blythe wrote in the Listener. ‘His books accept life in a generous, unshadowy way and are a testament to getting on with it. They remind human beings that the earth is not exclusively theirs to rape and ruin but also belongs to a vast population of other creatures which looks at it with observant eyes, breathes its air and listens to its sounds.’
There was a frisson of excitement when a film option on My Family and Other Animals was taken up, and it looked as if it might go into production the following year, with Christopher Miles as director, Gerald as ‘technical adviser’ and Ingrid Bergman as Mother. This choice did not please everybody. ‘She might be a beautiful and very talented actress,’ complained Jacquie, ‘but she doesn’t possess an atom of comedy in her bones.’ Alternative names put forward for the part included Maggie Smith, Glynis Johns, Joan Greenwood and Audrey Hepburn. But though Christopher Miles visited Corfu to check locations, the production came to nothing when the British unions slapped a ban on filming in Greece because it was still under military rule.
As for the rest of the family, Lawrence was stuck fast in Provence, and Margaret was working as a hostess aboard a Greek cruise ship. ‘No word, fortunately, from the Bovril-drinking brother,’ Gerald wrote to Lawrence about Leslie, ‘but I still scan the Police Gazette nervously over my morning coffee.’
As the New Year of 1972 dawned, Gerald was preoccupied with the publication of his book Catch me a Colobus, a potpourri of animal encounters and travel adventures, including a belated account of his expedition to Sierra Leone seven years previously and his
foray to Mexico to catch volcano rabbits four years ago, with a colourful résumé of the last ten years or so at Jersey Zoo thrown in. The book received mixed reviews: some found it a lacklustre and pedestrian effort compared to the dazzling and infectious virtuosity of his earlier works. But it sold well enough, and raised more public interest in the work of the Trust than any other of Gerald’s books. Shortly afterwards the Royal Society of Literature invited Gerald to become a Fellow, in recognition of his contribution to the world of books. ‘FRLS’ became the second set of letters he could put after his name, and many more were to follow, including (not long afterwards), FIB, or Fellow of the Institute of Biology. Gerald was at the Mazet when he heard the news, working hard on a new book, an account of his year at Whipsnade more than a quarter of a century ago, to be called Beasts in my Belfry.
At the zoo the future of the two half-grown female gorillas, N’pongo and Nandi, was giving some concern, first because they were growing out of their accommodation, and second because, without a mate, they had begun to lavish their affections on each other. The first problem was solved when Brian Park, a Jersey resident (and a future Chairman of the Trust Council), happened to see Gerald on local television bemoaning the lack of funds for development at the zoo, and donated £10,000 towards the new Brian Park Gorilla Breeding Complex. The second was solved when Ernst Lang of Basle Zoo, the first man to breed a gorilla in captivity and then persuade the mother to rear the baby herself, presented Jersey Zoo with a young adult male gorilla called Jambo, the first mother-reared gorilla in captivity and a proven breeder.
On 30 April 1972 the new Gorilla Breeding Complex was officially opened by the film star David Niven. The Durrells’ connection with Niven had come in a roundabout way. Gerald had bought his first volume of autobiography, The Moon’s a Balloon, as a present for Jacquie. She had loved it and thought Gerald would get on well with Niven, so when they were searching for a celebrity to open the complex and act as best man at a gorilla wedding she suggested they ask him. Fortunately Dick Odgers, their television agent at Curtis Brown, knew Niven’s son Jamie, and so it came about that Niven agreed to come to Jersey.
‘He did it wonderfully,’ Jacquie recalled. ‘He and Gerry took to each other like soul mates and in fact Niven said it was like meeting his twin. Throughout his association with the Trust he was marvellous and did all we asked of him.’ The opening ceremony was not without its moments. Niven – armed with an appropriate bouquet of celery, leeks, cabbage, cauliflower and curly kale, and dressed in an extremely elegant dove-grey tailcoat – had no sooner declared the complex open, and ‘married’ its two newly introduced occupants in a speech of immense charm and humour, than the newly-wed Nandi and Jambo began to copulate in full view of the assembled dignitaries and the deeply gratified zoo staff. Niven turned to Gerald and declared in a loud stage-whisper: ‘Wherever I go this sort of thing happens. I have this effect on primates.’
On 1 May 1972, the day following the opening of the Gorilla Breeding Complex, more than three hundred conservationists, zoo keepers and field scientists from around the world gathered in Jersey for the First World Conference on Breeding Endangered Species in Captivity, organised jointly by the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust and the Fauna Preservation Society of Great Britain. The theme of the three-day conference, the first of its kind, was the captive breeding of endangered species.
An outline of the scope and aims of the conference was given by Gerald as Director of the Trust and Sir Peter Scott as Chairman of the Fauna Preservation Society. Later Gerald was to give a clear and trenchant account of where captive breeding came from and where it was heading. Saving endangered species was a matter of the most urgent concern, he declared. Over a thousand species were under threat at that very moment. The only practical way of saving them was by protecting their habitats and, as a safeguard, creating ‘zoo banks’ in which viable breeding groups could find sanctuary in which to live and breed in security until their numbers were sufficient for them to be reintroduced, if possible, back into the areas from which they had vanished.
The concept was not new, he said, but it had been an uphill struggle to persuade some conservationists that it was a respectable, let alone a viable, one. ‘Even now,’ he told the conference, ‘if you mention it at some august body of conservationists they tend to regard you as if you had advocated war as an ideal form of population control.’ There were even those who thought it was better a species became extinct in the freedom of the wilds than ‘languish’ within the confines of a zoo. Many (and Gerald was one of them) acknowledged that most zoos were thoroughly bad places, with high mortality rates and near-zero breeding records, that did more to deplete animal populations than conserve them. But a few world-class institutions were doing a first-rate job, including Jersey (where they had successfully bred the West African colobus monkey and the Chinese white eared pheasant), Basle (lowland gorilla and Indian rhino), Antwerp (the extremely rare Congo peacock), Phoenix (Arabian oryx), and Prague (Przewalski’s wild horse). Gerald went on:
First, and perhaps the most important thing to stress, is that this Trust has never claimed – nor would it be foolish enough to claim – that captive breeding of an endangered species should take the place of conservation of that species in its natural habitat. We have always maintained that controlled breeding should be used as well as, not instead of, conservation in the wild.
Second, we have never claimed to be able to help all species currently in danger of extinction. Out of this long and melancholy list we can only aid a few – generally the smaller and more obscure ones which tend to be ignored by zoological gardens and conservation schemes generally – but we feel that even this is a worthwhile undertaking.
The Jersey Trust, a model of its kind, did not run a zoo in the usual sense: it was a dedicated breeding centre, not merely a showplace. As such, it had many advantages over the conventional zoo. For example, it could concentrate all its energies and funding on conservation. It could design its cages and enclosures for the needs of the animals, and not the public. ‘With luck,’ Gerald declared, ‘we may be groping our way towards a goal all zoos in the future should aspire to.’
‘I am afraid that we must face up to the fact,’ Gerald continued, ‘that a vast number of species in our lifetime are going to become extinct in the wild state and will – with luck – exist only under controlled conditions, provided we set up programmes now. Let us strive wherever possible to save habitat, and the creatures that live in it, but as a precautionary measure let us also set up breeding centres now.’
There were, he acknowledged, possible problems inherent in prolonged breeding programmes, about which they were still largely ignorant. For example, would animals bred for many years in controlled conditions undergo genetic change? Gerald contended that a certain amount of hope was to be gained from the fact that the golden hamster, lost to science for a hundred years, now had a world population probably numbering millions, all originating from one gravid female found in Syria in 1930. Or again, what sort of reproduction programme would have to be evolved to train creatures of say, the seventh or eighth generation born under controlled conditions, so that they could be reintroduced into a wild that they had never known, full of dangers from which they had no protection? ‘The future of controlled breeding bristles with questions of this sort,’ Gerald warned the conference, ‘but it is precisely these challenges which make the task worthwhile.’ Already a few species had been released back into the wild, among them the white rhino, the Hawaiian goose and the eagle owl.
Gerald ended with a rallying cry. ‘We realise,’ he said, talking of the Jersey Trust, ‘that at the moment our work is only a small part of the whole complex machinery of conservation, but we feel it is important for three reasons. Firstly, no one is doing it on the scale that we are; secondly, it is practical; thirdly, judged as a rescue operation, it is something that can – funds permitting – be done today, and with luck bears fruit almost immediately.’ As the Trust grew, h
e explained, he hoped that one day it could function as a training base where staff from around the world could be trained to establish similar breeding centres in the places where they ought to be set up – in the natural habitats of the creatures concerned. There were many who were to think that inherent in this thought was the germ of Gerald’s greatest achievement.
The conference was a huge success, and was widely reported in the press and broadcast extensively around the world. It established the validity of captive breeding as an important conservation tool and finally confirmed the stature of both the Trust and its founder in the eyes of the world’s scientific community. Three of the world’s most influential conservation organisations – the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the World Wildlife Fund and the Fauna Preservation Society – had thrown their weight behind the work of the Trust, and some of the world’s leading scientists had commended the superlative quality of its ground-breaking endeavours. The Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. wrote to Gerald: ‘Having visited Les Augrés I can personally attest that you possess personnel so completely imbued with your own dedication to the cause of wildlife conservation that any venture you undertake will most assuredly have the very best chances of success. For many of our lesser known species, your facility and goals represent their only hope of survival. You can already look back on an enviable record.’
One of the contributors to the conference was Dr Robert D. Martin, a young and highly able primatologist, who also edited the proceedings for publication. Not long afterwards he became Senior Research Fellow at the Wellcome Laboratories of the Zoological Society of London, and this appointment led on to a number of projects on endangered species which required samples from numerous zoos. It soon became apparent to him that the Jersey Trust was rather special. Not only was it the best and most reliable source of samples, he reckoned, but it showed the greatest interest in the projects’ results and potential applications:
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