Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  1984 marked a double celebration – the twenty-first birthday of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the zoo, a combined Coming of Age and Silver Jubilee. There was much to celebrate, for the Trust had made enormous progress in the last few years, and had attained many objectives which Gerald had never thought to see in his lifetime. For a start, it had proved that a zoo can and should be a vital cog in the conservation machine, especially through captive breeding. As well as its work in Jersey, the Trust was now establishing captive breeding units in many countries, training foreign nationals and conducting field studies at every stage. By the end of 1984 they hoped to have released Jersey-bred Mauritian pink pigeons back into the wild – their first reintroduction, and an event of great significance.

  To mark these anniversaries and achievements there would have to be a great celebration, beginning with Princess Anne opening the Trust’s International Training Centre at Les Noyers, and culminating in a dazzling tribute to the animal kingdom on whose behalf they all laboured – a Festival of Animals. On the great day there would be an official opening in the morning, an anniversary lunch, a reception and supper for the Trust’s patron, Princess Anne, and finally, the pièce de résistance, the Festival itself. During the preceding days there would be special events at the zoo and across the island. There would be a pets’ day at the zoo, a mothers’ (and grannies’) day, an art exhibition, a special programme on Channel TV and an anniversary thanksgiving. A commemorative postage stamp would be issued, as would a wildlife lager from a local brewery. There would be a fund-raising appeal, and anniversary merchandise would include granite dodos, pink pigeon trays and table mats, and wildlife decanter and tumbler sets.

  Nobody at the Trust or the zoo had ever planned anything quite so ambitious before, and the bulk of the complex and intricate planning fell on the shoulders of Simon Hicks, the Trust Secretary. Gerald was deeply involved in working out the original concept and persuading the Princess Royal to take part. All the details had to be planned many months ahead. This caused a few problems, as Gerald reported to Hal and Harriet McGeorge:

  When we shipped the bare bones of this plan across to the Palace, we had a slightly worried secretary on the phone immediately, saying that no members of the Royal Family ever planned anything further than six months ahead, and she was not at all sure that Princess Anne would want to stay the night, but she thought that probably the sensible thing to do was for us to come across and discuss it with HRH. So we polished our shoes and washed our hair and trotted along dutifully to Buck House. Her secretary ushered us into a room which was arranged as a drawing room but with a big and – I was glad to see – very untidy desk in one corner. HRH greeted us, whisked us over to the chairs and sofa and sat us down. There was nobody else present. We spent over an hour with her and although, having met her before, I had formed a very good opinion of her, I was doubly enchanted this time because she displayed such a nice sense of humour and also a mind as sharp as a razor. She not only agreed to everything that we proposed but actually made some suggestions of her own. For example, she pointed out that on the great day we would want her bright and early, so she thought she ought to come the evening of the day before.

  Of the great day itself, 5 October, Gerald reported:

  Princess Anne arrived looking very good and officially opened Les Noyers, our New Training Centre, and then met various members of the staff, various members of the American board (many of whom had put up money for the development of the Training Centre), and a selection of students. The Princess then drove round from Les Noyers to the big main gates of the zoo and down into the courtyard, where there was a whole mass of people clapping like mad things. Lee and I had to rush out of Les Noyers as soon as she had left, leap into Jeremy’s car and be whisked down the back way, so that we could be standing at the Manor front door when the Rolls arrived.

  The first stop on the patron’s tour of the zoo was the gorilla complex. Gerald and the Princess were blissfully unaware of the turmoil that was going on inside this haven of primate well-being as they strode purposefully towards it. Four minutes before the royal visitor was due to arrive, a young gorilla called Motaba chose, with split-second timing, to get his head stuck in the bars at the top of his cage, and commenced to wail and scream. Observing their youngster’s plight, his devoted parents Jambo and Nandi began to wail and scream as well. Jambo’s first idea was to release the distraught Motaba by pulling downward on his legs; then, realising that this solution would speedily result in a headless young gorilla, he wisely decided to support him by his bottom instead. The gorillas’ keeper Richard Johnstone-Scott could see the umbrellas of the royal party bobbing their way towards the complex, the floor of which had now been turned into a manure heap, as the gorillas, in their agitation, voided an immense quantity of excrement and urine on to the floor. When Gerald learned of this dire crisis later, he wondered how he would have explained it to the Princess.

  ‘“Oh, yes,” I would have said, “we always keep our gorillas knee-deep in excrement, they seem to prefer it. And that little chap in there dangling from the bars like a hanged man on a gibbet? Well, gorillas frequently do this. It’s a sort of … sort of habit they have. Yes, very curious indeed.”’

  Suddenly, however, the young gorilla managed to find a point in the cage roof where the bars were wide enough for him to extract his head, and he was thus able to descend just as Gerald and the Princess arrived. But there was nothing that could be done about the manure heap.

  ‘All went well and the tour was a great success,’ Gerald was to report. ‘We kept it as absolutely informal as possible and it was obvious that Anne appreciated this. She then zoomed off in the Royal car and we had about twenty-five minutes to change clothes, brush our hair, wash our hands and rush down to the anniversary luncheon that was put on at the Hotel de France in St. Helier. This was a luncheon for over 600 people (Trust members from all over the world, local dignitaries, etc.). Again, cutting formality to the absolute minimum, I got up at the end of the lunch and made a short, incoherent speech. Then our Patron rose to her feet and proceeded, in spite of my blushes, to heap praise upon my head.’

  Today was the celebration of a unique man and a unique institution, the Princess said. He had pursued his dream, in Jersey and around the world, with determination, charm and, above all, humour. She wanted to congratulate everyone involved in their efforts to fulfil that dream – ‘a dream that can now be said to have been wholly realised and established as a vital part of the preservation of wildlife everywhere.’ In particular she wished to congratulate the man who had made the zoo and the Trust admired and respected worldwide. ‘As a token of that gratitude,’ she concluded, ‘I would very much like to present him with a little gift from his zoo staff.’

  The Princess handed Gerald a little velvet bag. Inside the bag was a silver matchbox, and inside the matchbox was a gilt mother scorpion and a lot of little gilt baby scorpions – a reminder of a famous incident in My Family and Other Animals. ‘I was so amazed and touched by this gesture from my illiterate, unworthy and flint-hearted staff,’ Gerald reported, ‘that when I sat down I leant across Princess Anne and said to our Chairman, who was sitting next to her, “What silly bugger thought this up?” I then realised that she was regarding me slightly wall-eyed and had assumed that the remark had been addressed to her. “I do apologise, Your Royal Highness,” I said. “That’s quite all right,” she said, “I don’t understand French.” But later on she apparently said to the Governor, “Do you know what? The bloody man swore at me.”’

  That evening the Festival of Animals was enacted in the great auditorium of Fort Regent in St Helier. All afternoon the performers – the famed, the professional, the amateur, the infantile – had been rehearsing their parts. Now they were ready. Gerald came on stage to open the proceedings, accompanied by Simon Hicks’s twin daughters, aged four and a half, dressed as dodos. ‘Your Royal Highness, ladies and gentlemen,’
he began:

  Welcome to the Festival of Animals. As you will see, I am accompanied by two fledgling dodos; alas, not a breeding pair. But it is an interesting thought that when the dodo, the symbol of our organisation, was discovered on the island of Mauritius, birds were taken to both India and Europe, and had there been an organisation like the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust in existence in those days, we would still have the dodo with us. What we are going to do tonight is show you how the other animals that share our planet with us have influenced us in an enormous number of different ways. We want to celebrate the fact that we are sharing the world with such marvellous and fascinating creatures.

  The show was meant to last for two hours, but went on for three. Nobody noticed – they were entranced throughout, spectators and performers alike. Children from the island’s primary schools opened the programme with a jolly rendering of a song dedicated to Jersey Zoo entitled ‘Don’t Let them do what they did to the Dodo’. The Royal Ballet School followed with the ‘Chicken Dance’, The Jersey Children’s Music Theatre and Jersey Musicians performed a jazz oratorio based on a story by A.A. Milne, Johnny Morris, Isla St Clair, Michael Hordern, Dinah Sheridan, wildlife artist David Shepherd, David Bellamy and David Atten-borough did their bit by depicting animals in art, music, literature, film, humour and nature, the Moving Picture Mime Show did a rendering of ‘Creatures from the Swamp’, and Yehudi Menuhin performed with the Jersey Youth Orchestra.

  The show was brought to a fragile and pensive end with Elizabeth Perry’s rendering of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, the violin birdsong hovering tremulously on the edge of sight and sound, leaving only a silence in the hushed auditorium. As the applause faded, the sound of a skylark echoed round the vast concert hall.

  Dreamed up by Gerald and set up by Simon Hicks, the Trust had put on a show in their small island town that was worthy of London’s West End or South Bank. ‘Princess Anne reiterated several times to me that she had enjoyed the whole thing enormously,’ Gerald related proudly to his in-laws. Many of the hundreds of guests at these events sent Gerald their heartfelt thanks. ‘The warmth and love that came over last night was unforgettable,’ wrote David Shepherd. ‘Just wonderful, wonderful and totally deserved. God help wildlife without people like you, you old bugger. Bless you.’ Gerald’s old friend Alan Thomas wrote: ‘Apart from your brother and sister, I don’t think there is anyone who has watched your career so warmly and for so long as I have. I was in a perfect position to watch you and Princess Anne at lunch. I saw you both at perfect ease, she laughing at your jokes. At one moment you caught my eye and half raised your glass in an expression of friendship which I returned. Does it sound ham when I tell you that over these two days I often had a lump in my throat and a tear or two in my eyes, rejoicing in your triumph. What happiness it has been to watch your continued achievement. Long may it continue.’

  The great celebration ended on 11 October with a Wildlife Thanksgiving Service given by the Dean of Jersey. This was a more solemn and reflective occasion. In spite of the jollification of the past days, all were aware that the natural kingdom had been celebrated in the midst of an animal holocaust. Gerald read an extract from the powerful and prophetic 1854 address attributed to the native American Chief Seattle, about to lose his people’s land to the white man. Dear to Gerald’s heart and desperately relevant to his mission, the long-dead chief’s words, a last cry of pain and admonition from the desert, almost burned in the air. Now, 130 years later, their truth was even more demonstrable, even more a battle hymn for all those who were fighting in the same cause around the world. Chief Seattle had seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, he said, left by the white man who had casually shot them from a passing train:

  Perhaps it is because I am a savage that I do not understand.

  What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to man. All things are connected.

  Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

  This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.

  Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.

  When the last red man has vanished from this earth, and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, these shores and forests will still hold the spirits of my people. For they love this earth as the newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat.

  So if we sell you our land, love it as we’ve loved it. Care for it as we’ve cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you take it. And with all your strength, with all your mind, with all your heart, preserve it for your children, and love it … as God loves us all.

  One thing we know. Our God is the same God. This earth is precious to Him. Even the white man cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see.

  Gerald’s voice, slow, soft, measured, vibrant with emotion, died away. He turned, sombre-faced, and left the podium.

  Three days later he was heading east towards a vast land that covered a sixth of the surface of the planet. How precious was the earth to the widely scattered peoples of the USSR? he wondered. And would they turn out to be brothers after all?

  THIRTY

  To Russia with Lee

  1984–1985

  The Soviet Union was terra incognita for Gerald Durrell. Within its plethora of natural regions lived a host of wild creatures that were little known and little seen in the outside world, and the rarer forms of the nation’s wildlife were the subject of dedicated and often spectacularly successful conservation programmes, some of them dating from as far back as the Revolution.

  Besides its sheer physical scale, the USSR in 1984 presented formidable challenges to travellers from the West, particularly travellers who proposed to nose around the country’s remoter and obscurer parts. The Soviet Union was still a rival (and mostly hostile) superpower, a monolithic totalitarian police state. Yet, as Gerald was to find out, behind the country’s paper-thin Communist mask there lived a mass of humanity that was warm, welcoming, yearning, curiously innocent and reassuringly perverse – a people who by and large took after Gerald’s own heart, and whose instinctive camaraderie was underpinned by an alcohol culture as ancient as Mother Russia herself.

  On 22 October 1984 Gerald and Lee set off for Moscow, accompanied by John Hartley and a film crew of six. The plan was a complex one. Though both the television series and the book based upon it would give the impression of a single epic journey during which the party would clock up a total of 150,000 miles, in fact they planned to make three separate expeditions over a period of a little under six months, following a complicated itinerary dictated by the complicated illogic of a shooting schedule that was in turn at the mercy of the seasons and of Soviet bureaucracy. Throughout this long perambulation their purpose remained constant – to observe at first hand the work being done to protect and breed species in danger of extinction.

  The first stop was the Soviet capital. ‘Moscow was damp, dreary, drizzly and dismal,’ Gerald reported to the McGeorges in Memphis, ‘and did nothing to raise our spirits. One of the things I discovered in Russia to my astonishment, was that I am a sort of cult figure, and everybody appears to have read my books.’ This became more apparent when he went to visit the Kremlin. When the policeman on duty discovered who Gerald was, he danced with delight and insisted on shaking his hand, excitedly declaring what a great fan he was. Improbably, he was also the favourite author of Russia’s future military supremo General Lebed.

  Gerald and Lee’s first task was to take a look at one of the m
ost successful captive breeding programmes ever carried out in the Soviet Union. For Gerald the story of the European bison (or wisent) was a benchmark example of how a species can be rescued from extinction by captive breeding. At one time this magnificent animal could be found throughout the forests of Europe and Russia, but hunting and habitat destruction gradually caused its numbers to dwindle, until by the beginning of the twentieth century the only wild bison left were in the Bialowieza forest in eastern Poland and in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains in Georgia. During the havoc of the First World War and the hunger years that followed the survivors were hunted out, until the only European bison in existence were a few individuals kept in zoos. In the 1920s a Frankfurt-based society was formed for their protection and breeding, and by the 1950s their numbers had been built up sufficiently for a small herd to be released into the Bialowieza forest. By 1984 a breeding centre had been established outside Moscow with the aim of reintroducing the bison into the southern parts of its former range.