I was particularly impressed by the personal interest that Gerald Durrell took in such projects. I found him to be very open and receptive to the opinions of others. I was impressed by his approachability, his naturalness, despite his fame, and by his physical presence and sense of humour. He was a person at ease with himself, and unfazed by the antipathy he had attracted from the London Zoo, which in those days (but not later) was anti-Durrell and anti-Jersey Zoo and totally dismissive of the viability of captive breeding as a way of saving endangered animals.
When he was eventually invited to join the JWPT Council, Bob Martin became more impressed still. The Trust, he felt, never stood still, never drifted into complacency. Jersey Zoo was always one jump ahead in the field of captive breeding. It was far more productive per working unit than anywhere comparable in the world. However much it achieved, it was always firmly concentrated on the next stage in the process. Not only did it invite assessments from outsiders, for example in the fields of scientific research and education, but it actually put the advice it received from such sources into practice. This continuous readiness for change and openness to inputs from others was a hallmark of Gerald Durrell’s deep concern for endangered species, and was consistently reflected by all members of the JWPT team.
It was Gerald’s personality that drew the whole thing together. ‘I owe a personal debt to Gerald Durrell for his inspiration and friendship,’ Bob Martin was to recall. ‘It is no exaggeration to say that his example and philosophy exerted a major and comprehensive influence on my own interests, teaching and research activities. He was never a theorist. Rather he was a communicator; and the idea he articulated throughout his life was of mankind’s communion with all animals. He was ultimately trying to save life, in all of its forms, and to export the message. You could say he was the Florence Nightingale of the animal world. He gave a broad brush-stroke to the movement, and his life, his books, his zoo have had a universal and unique impact on both animal and man.’
The growing stature of the organisation was further enhanced later in May when Princess Anne paid a visit to the zoo. This had not been easy to arrange. The zoo had not been on the itinerary for the Princess’s official tour of Jersey, and when Gerald rang up the powers-that-be who organise these things they were very dismissive. Show the Princess a zoo? Never! She had more important things to do, like visiting the island’s new sewerage works. Gerald was down at the Mazet when the phone rang. There had been a change of plan, he was told: the Princess had asked to see the zoo. She was a fan of his books, it seems – the first one she had read had caused her acute embarrassment, she was to confess later, because she was on a train and couldn’t help guffawing out loud.
Gerald had never been involved in a visit of this kind before, and he was unprepared for the swarm of detectives who fanned out over the premises in a hunt for bombs and undesirables, the men with stopwatches who calculated ways of squeezing a tour of seven hundred animals spread over twenty-odd acres into twenty-five minutes, the posse of pressmen ‘clicking like a field of mentally defective crickets’.
‘The imminent approach of royalty has an odd effect on one,’ he noted. ‘What was I going to say to her? All of a sudden our achievements and our aspirations seemed as interesting as a vicar’s sermon. The whole thing seemed a great mistake. I wished I was back in France.’ But the moment the royal car drew up and the Princess stepped out all his fears vanished. ‘I was taking round a beautiful, elegant, highly intelligent woman,’ he was to recall, ‘who asked unexpected questions, who was interested.’ The only way Gerald and Jacquie could escort the Princess round the zoo in the allotted time was to show her only the more spectacular or interesting animals – and none was more spectacular than Frisky, the male mandrill. At that moment, as it happened, Frisky was at the multicoloured climax of his sexual display. Gerald was to record the encounter:
He was in full bloom. The bridge of his nose, the nose itself and the lips were scarlet as any anointment by lipstick. On either side of his nose were bright, cornflower blue welts. His face, framed in gingery-green fur and a white beard, looked like some fierce juju mask from an ancient tribe, whose culinary activities included gently turning their neighbours into pot roasts. However, if Frisky’s front was impressive, when he swung round he displayed a posterior which almost defied description. Thinly haired in greenish and white hair, he looked as though he had sat down on a newly painted and violently patriotic lavatory seat. The outer rim of his posterior was cornflower blue (as were his genitals) and the inner rim was a virulent sunset scarlet. As we approached the cage, Frisky grunted and then swung round to display his sunset rear.
‘Wonderful animal, ma’am,’ I said to the Princess. ‘Wouldn’t you like to have a behind like that?’
Gerald heard a deep insuck of breath from the entourage behind him and realised – ‘with deep gloom’ – that he had said the wrong thing.
The Princess examined Frisky’s anatomy closely. ‘No,’ she said, decisively. ‘I don’t think I would.’
They walked on.
After Princess Anne had left, Gerald had several large drinks to steady his nerves. He had made a sow’s ear out of a silk purse, he reckoned. He had meant to ask her if she would become the Patron of the Trust. It was too late now, he thought. But some weeks later, after relentless prodding by Jacquie, he wrote to her and put the question. ‘To my incredulity and delight,’ he recalled, ‘she replied that she would. I am not sure how much he had to do with it, but I took Frisky a packet of Smarties – whose virulent colours so closely resembled his own – as a thank-you gift.’ Since August 1972. Princess Anne has carried out her duties as Patron of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust seriously, supportively and with great enthusiasm.
At this high point in the zoo and the Trust’s history, some of the leading trustees decided the time had come to take a fresh look at where the organisation stood and how it might capitalise most effectively on its opportunities, rather along the lines of Lord Jersey’s preliminary memo a year previously. On 1 September 1972., while Gerald was away in the South of France, the Zoo Management Committee recommended that a special committee of the council should look into the organisation, administration and running of the Trust and the zoo.
This was eminently sensible. No organisation can stand still, and it was obvious that improvements could be made across a whole range of matters. There was no question that the main mission of the organisation was sacrosanct, but it was felt that the time had come for it to be administered more like a well-run commercial company than the vaguely ad hoc creation of a philanthropic enthusiast, and that the overall direction of the zoo and Trust should be placed in more professional and experienced hands.
Implicit in the committee’s proposals was the understanding that those hands did not belong to Gerald. He was the founding father, creator, visionary; but he had no head for sums, or time for committees, or reverence for reputations, or room for corporate mind-sets and the rule of accountants, or any bent for administering anything or anybody in the sense the trustees implied. He was a dreamer of extraordinary dreams, and his job was to try to make those dreams come true. When rumours of what was afoot reached him in distant Languedoc, Gerald grew restless and resentful. He returned to Jersey post-haste, and when he read the minutes of the management committee’s meeting he grew more restless and resentful still. ‘I think that both Lord Jersey and Sir Giles Guthrie were genuinely concerned that Gerry was being overwhelmed by the affairs of the Trust,’ Jacquie was to reflect a long time later, ‘and were seeking ways to alleviate the problem. It was just unfortunate that neither of them approached either Jeremy Mallinson or myself before springing it on Gerry.’
In a memorandum in early September, Lord Jersey recommended a recourse to that typically English organisational stratagem, the committee system, as a cure for all ills. Gerald bridled. ‘The apparent cure for lack of funds and its attendant difficulties,’ he noted with scorn in a memo to the management committee, �
�is to proliferate committees and subcommittees like mushrooms. I cannot stress too strongly that I myself would not be prepared to work for any more committees than we have at the moment.’ Then he came to the real nub of his resentment. ‘Arising out of this,’ he stormed, ‘comes the criticism that everything “comes to a standstill” when I am away. This is a criticism, not only to myself, but to my staff, which I do not feel to be justified and which I would like to take this opportunity of refuting.’
But the trustees did not let up. They appointed an investigation committee which swiftly focused on the same main bones of contention. Gerald was not in a position to continue as supremo at the Trust, they reiterated, because he was so seldom there. What the Trust needed, they implied, was a full-time administrator-in-chief. Thus the axe was aimed at the tallest tree. Gerald could now be in no doubt that the main thrust of the Trust’s agenda was to remove its founder from his position. In a memo to the investigation committee on 3 October he again defended his absences. When he was away, he said, nothing was left undone that should have been done at the zoo and the Trust. When he was away he was working – both on his own behalf and that of the Trust. It was then that he wrote his books. ‘I would like to point out,’ he continued, ‘that the writing of these books fulfils two functions of great importance to the Trust: (1) It provides me with a livelihood, thus obviating the necessity of the Trust paying me a salary commensurate with my worth – a sum the organisation could not possibly afford; (2) It increases Trust membership, one of our most important sources of money. It is true to say that without the books there would be no Trust membership and therefore no Trust.’ To write his books he had to get away: ‘If Trustees and Council lived with their staff, were on the job 24 hours a day, and with a cafe practically in their drawing room, they too would find their powers of concentration impaired.’
If the present structure of management was changed, Gerald contended, and all Trust matters were vested in one person, as was proposed, such a person could not possibly cope with all the multifarious complexities of the organisation. The only structure by which the Trust could function, he argued with desperate illogic, was with himself in overall control, Jeremy Mallinson in charge of the scientific and animal side and Catha Weller in charge of finance and Trust business. ‘To try and do it in any other way is to treat the Trust as if it were a bank or some similar inhuman organisation. If this is attempted this place will fail: if this is what the Trustees want then I want no part in it.’
The trustees were not to be deflected. Again Sir Giles Guthrie led the charge. He believed that what was being proposed was sensible, rational, necessary, above all helpful. As the saviour of BOAC and creator of British Airways he was used to getting his own way. The Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust was on a much smaller scale, but as an intricate piece of problem-solving the challenge appealed to him. It is also probable that he greatly misunderstood and underestimated Gerald Durrell, who now emerged as not only the main problem, but as his main opponent. Like many people in Jersey and on the Trust, Sir Giles saw Gerald as an amiable, eccentric, bearded best-selling author with a passion for animals, a taste for champagne and a creative bent – but not as a practical administrator. He did not imagine that such a charming chap could re-emerge in a totally different guise, swinging a mailed fist, breathing brimstone and uttering oaths.
At a series of informal meetings mostly held at Lord Jersey’s home, Radier Manor, the council members eventually agreed to go ahead as planned, in spite of Gerald’s objections, and at a meeting of the Trust Council at Les Augrès Manor on 23 September 1972 it was resolved that a subcommittee of the council should examine the organisation and running of the zoo and the Trust. There was to be a long-term plan for the expansion of the zoo; finance would be under tight control; the structure of management would be changed; and responsibility for the administration of the organisation would be put ‘where it rightly should be’, on the shoulders of those in day-to-day control. Then came the coup de grâce, as Gerald was to see it, delivered with exquisite sleight of hand: ‘We feel these recommendations, if adopted, would give G.M.D. his rightful place in the hierarchy of the Trust as its Founder and as originator of the Zoo. They also recognise that it is wrong to tie him down in the routine of the Zoo Administration and Finance.’ The council would always be happy to receive the benefit of Gerald’s ideas and advice, they said, but in the meantime he would be free to get on with his writing.
Gerald saw the council’s recommendations for what they were – or so he thought. The territorial imperative took over. They wanted to dispossess him of the edifice he had created, disengage him from running his own show. They wanted to sideline him as a celebrity fund-raiser who could extract rich pickings from American audiences. Though much of what the council recommended was sensible and constructive, to Gerald it looked like a coup d’état, a palace revolution. He tossed all the documents in a paper file and scrawled across it the words ‘Judas File’. ‘I felt deeply hurt, bewildered and angry,’ he told Sir William Haley, the former Director-General of the BBC and editor of The Times, who lived on Jersey, not long afterwards. ‘The rules governing my actions in the future I found totally unacceptable.’
‘When Sir Giles Guthrie suggested that Gerald should become a kind of figurehead Director-General of the Zoo Trust,’ Jacquie recalled years later, ‘and withdraw himself from the daily hands-on running of the zoo, that’s what I wanted as well. Let Jeremy take over, so we could have some life of our own. But they set about it the wrong way – more like a takeover or palace revolution. Giles went at it like a bull at a gate and caught Gerry on the raw. Gerry, of course, just hit the ceiling – there was no possibility of his leaving now. He was all for doing a bulldozer job and all we could do was lock him up in the flat and tell him not to answer the phone while Brian Le Feuvre, a local journalist and friend of the Trust, handled the press. It was a pity Rhona Guthrie was away at the time because she and I could have sorted it out between us.’
To Lord Jersey, the Trust’s President, Gerald fired off an intemperate riposte on 13 November 1972: ‘As a piece of insulting, mischievous fatuity,’ he exploded, ‘I have never seen it equalled. It is really a waste of my time to even comment on it, but since you apparently want my views I will.’ And he did. Some of the report he found ‘exceedingly offensive’, some ‘laughable’, some ‘distasteful’, some even ‘immoral’. He went on: ‘Curious though it may sound to the limited minds of the committee the day to day running of the zoo interests me enormously. They may be surprised to learn that I created the place because it does interest me enormously. I am tempted to say that I know more about the day to day running of the zoo than the Trustees and Council and I have never at any time suggested that I want relief from the day to day running of the zoo in order to get on with my writing and television appearances. What does not interest me is having to waste my time constantly as a fund-raiser owing to the complete inertia of the Trustees and Council.’ If they thought he was going to relinquish control – ‘after nine years of steady growth from tiny beginnings into an organisation known throughout the world’ – they had another think coming. ‘If the committee seriously imagines that I intend to have my authority undermined in this way,’ he finished off, ‘their collective intelligence is less than I had always supposed it to be. I am stating here and now – and for the last time – that I would not dream of accepting any of these proposals. I do not intend to implement any of them. Should the Trustees and Council wish to implement anything like this then I am afraid they will have to ask for my resignation.’
Gerald’s reaction caused some confusion in the enemy ranks, but they quickly regrouped and returned to the fray. Lord Jersey asked for an apology. A meeting was convened for 8 December at Les Augrès Manor. Gerald was fired up, fighting mad, taking no prisoners. He was battling for his dream, for his baby, for the cause. He spared no one. He did not hide his contempt. He did not mind his language. He spat fire and four-letter words in an
attack such as the staid and distinguished gathering round the council table had never heard – or at any rate had never heard directed at themselves.
The council’s ultimate weapon, as they thought, was mass resignation, which would leave Gerald without a remit, without a mandate to continue. At a meeting at Lord Jersey’s home, letters of resignation were circulated among the trustees, and all but one – Brian Park – signed.
To Gerald the crisis looked terminal. He instinctively took evading action, telephoning his literary agent, Peter Grose, in London. Grose recalled:
He rang me up in a pretty agitated state and said, ‘The whole Trust has quit on me.’ I said, ‘I’m on the plane,’ and I went straight over to Jersey. When I got there Gerry was in a great state of fury and mouthing many expressions of disgust in pretty fruity language. ‘This is appalling. I’ve written a letter to the local paper.’ He gave me the letter to read. It was a defence against what he called ‘charges’. ‘Barmy!’ I said. ‘You can tear that one up straight away.’ The public didn’t give a damn about the directors, I told him, what they wanted to know was what was happening to the animals. What we had to do was take the initiative, issue a press statement, get the TV people up here, tell the world – a bit like Harold Macmillan at the time of the Profumo scandal – that there had been ‘a little local difficulty’ but that now it was ‘business as usual at the zoo’. So I drafted the press statement and got the TV cameras in, and that night, when Jeremy Mallinson and his wife, and John Hartley and Sam and Catha Weller came up to the flat to have a rallying dinner with Gerry and Jacquie and me, we watched it all on the TV news, all the animals as happy as lambs and the public pouring in as if nothing had happened. So we had won the day – so far. But the idea you could run the Trust without Gerry was preposterous and grotesque. You had to have Gerry, warts and all.
Gerald Durrell Page 51