by Benjamin Mee
In fact, the animals would not have to be dispersed by then, as they would be held under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act (DWA) as a private collection. It just meant that visitors were not allowed, so the park’s already seriously faltering finances would reach a crunch point. But not absolutely necessarily an eleven-day crunch point, it seemed. If we could mount a credible bid, there was every chance that we could carry on negotiating for a few weeks after the park closed. Already, there was reason to hope that this apparently hopeless task was not necessarily impossible.
“Is it viable?” I asked Peter. This time he took longer to respond. “Erm, I’m sure it is,” he said. “With the right management, a lot of money invested in the infrastructure, and a hell of a lot—and I mean a hell of a lot—of hard work, it should be viable, yes. For a long time it was one of the area’s most popular attractions. It’s declined over the last few years due to lack of investment and not keeping up with the times. But until quite recently it was a thriving business.”
I was deeply suspicious that there must be more to it than this, and that there was some sort of black hole in the whole fabric of the place that meant that it couldn’t work. Why had the other sales fallen through? So many industry professionals had cruised up to this project and somehow not taken the bait. Were we going to be the suckers who bought it and then discovered the truth?
Clearly, I needed professional help, which came in the form of a text message from a friend whose sister-in-law Suzy happened to be a fairly senior zoo professional, easily equivalent in fact to the rank of curator, currently working in Australia. I had met Suzy once at a wedding a long time ago and liked her instantly. I was impressed with the way that even in a cocktail dress, with her wild mane of blonde hair, she managed to give the impression that she was wearing work boots, leggings, and a heavy fleece. Her job at the time had involved educating Queensland cattle farmers about the need for conservation of local wildlife, a tough-enough sounding proposition for a bare-knuckle prize-fighter, I would have thought. But not for Suzy, who was now working as head of animal procurement for the three zoos in the State of Victoria, including the flagship Melbourne Zoo where she was based. Suzy offered any help she could give, and said she would even consider taking a sabbatical for year in order to act as curator. “I can’t guarantee it,” she said. “But you can put me down as a candidate until we see how things develop. In the meantime, before you go any further, you need to get a survey done by a zoo professional who can tell you whether it works or not.” Suzy shared my concerns about the possibility of a black hole, having read about Dartmoor’s decline through the zoo community literature. Did she have anyone in mind for this inspection? “There’s someone I used to work with at Jersey who could give you a pretty definitive opinion,” said Suzy. “He’s a bit too senior to do that sort of thing now I think, but I’ll see what he thinks.”
And that’s how we came to meet Nick Lindsay, head of International Zoo Programs for the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), in the car park of Dartmoor Wildlife Park a few days later. This tall, slightly avuncular man shook hands with me and Melissa, who was now about eight months pregnant, and agreed that we should walk up the drive along the normal visitor access route to get a feel for how the park works. We had commissioned a report from ZSL and Nick kindly agreed to carry out the inspection himself, as he too had been following the plight of the zoo, and as a local boy had an interest in it. He even stayed with his mum down the road so that we didn’t have to pay a hotel bill.
On the way up the drive we were as candid as we could be. “We know nothing about zoos, but if this really is a viable zoo, do you think it’s possible for us to do it?”
“Oh, there’s no reason for you to know about zoos in order to buy one.” said Nick, laughing. “You’d have to be a bit mad, but I assume you’ve got that part covered. Let’s just see if it really is a viable zoo first.”
Our first stop was Ronnie the tapir, whose enclosure ran parallel to the drive. Nick bent down and called him over, and to my surprise he came. I had never seen a tapir this close before, and was impressed that this large, strange-looking animal was so biddable and friendly. Resembling a large pig with a hump on its back and a miniature elephant’s trunk for a nose, the tapir was made, the Indonesians say, from the parts left over when God had finished making all the other animals.
Nick held his fingers through the mesh, and Ronnie wibbled his extended proboscis onto it, and then onto our hands, happy to make our acquaintance. With this charming encounter, however, came the first of the things that would need addressing. “This fence should have a stand-off barrier,” said Nick. “We have to be sure his house is heated in the winter, and it looks a bit muddy in there for him. He’s an ungulate, so his feet are quite delicate.” I’d been determined to take notes all day to keep track of the kind of expenditure we would be looking at, but already I’d run into an unforeseen problem: tapir snot, all over my hand and notepad. “Don’t worry,” said Nick. “I’ll put everything in the report.”
The day went well, and we were halfway around the park when we were intercepted by Robin, a strained-looking man with a long gray ponytail, who introduced himself as a member of the staff, clearly prepared to undergo the unpleasantness of seeing us around the park, though not relishing it. Though we had made an appointment to view, we should be escorted at all times, for legal and security reasons, he told us. He was our guide for the rest of the outside tour. It soon became clear that there was no question about the park that Robin could not answer. History, attendance figures, animal diets, names of plants—he knew it all. And then something happened that gave him a tricky one. A huge shot boomed out, echoing across the valley. It could only have been a gunshot, and from something big, the kind of sound you generally only hear in films. We stopped in our tracks. “Er, bit of trouble with the tigers?” I asked. Robin paused, looked a bit more strained but now tinged with sadness, and said. “No, it’s one of the lionesses, actually. She had lung cancer.” He turned to lead us on and I looked at Nick, utterly agog. I had never been anywhere where they had shot a lion within fifty meters of where I was standing. Was this okay? Are they allowed to do that? Does it sound justified? Is this somehow connected with the black hole? Nick looked slightly taken aback, but seemed to take it in his stride. “If she had lung cancer and the vet says it’s time, it’s completely justified,” he said. And the use of a gun rather than an injection was also quite normal, if the animal was difficult or dangerous to dart. So it was all okay, everything normal, just that a lion had been shot. If the head of the International Zoo Program at ZSL said it was all right, it must be, but I confess I found it slightly unsettling.
So did Rob, the man who had pulled the trigger. We met him later in the Jaguar Restaurant, along with Ellis, and Ellis’s sister Maureen. Ellis was also unsettled, by a toothache, he said, which was why he was holding a glass of whiskey. There was a difficult, tense atmosphere as the edifice of a once successful family business lay in ruins, creditors circled, and emotions were near the surface. But there were questions we and Nick needed to ask Ellis, and he also had questions for us. Rob seemed almost close to tears after his ordeal of shooting the lioness, Peggy, an animal he had known for thirteen years, and was reluctant to come to the table at first, but Maureen persuaded him that it might be necessary, as he now held the license to keep the collection on site under the DWA. Ellis paced the room, cursing, not quite under his breath.
Eventually we all sat down and Nick said hello to Ellis as a teacher might greet a former student, expelled but at the reunion, as was only right. They knew each other from various Zoo Federation meetings over the years, and Ellis nodded, acknowledging that here was a man with whom he needed to cooperate. Nick began his line of questions for his report, and everything went well until he mentioned the name of Peter Wearden, the South Hams environmental health officer. “Peter Wearden? Peter Wearden? I’ll kill him, I will. I’ll cut his head off with a sword and stick it on a spike at t
he top of the drive. That’ll show them what I think of him.” He went on for a while, explaining how he had killed men before, in the war—”I’m good at killing men”—as well as every kind of animal on the planet. He wouldn’t make a fuss about shooting a lion, like Rob.
At this point I interjected, and said I personally didn’t think it was unreasonable for Rob to be upset, but we needed to talk about Peter Wearden. “I’d kill him without a thought, just like the lion,” he said, looking me in the eye. Not sure what to say, I thought I’d try to claw back toward some references to reality. “Well, that would at least sort out your accommodation problems for the next few years,” I said. He weighed this remark, looked at me again and said, “I’ve got his coffin ready for him up here before.” And it was true. A coffin with a picture of Peter Wearden in it had been in the restaurant for a period of about six months, even while the park was open to the public. “Now then, Ellis,” said Nick, moving seamlessly on, “what about those stand-off barriers?”
Ellis was polite but perceptibly preoccupied as he took us on the tour of the house again, even more briskly than last time, and I was surprised to see that it seemed in significantly worse condition than I remembered it. Whether this was cosmetic, due to an increase in mess, or me misremembering the fabric of the place was hard to tell, but the impression was strong enough to cause a new entry in my mental spreadsheet of expenditures.
The first warning was the increase in the strength of the odor in the kitchen, at the front of the house. This was Ellis’s entry point, and obviously one of the key rooms he used, but it stank. Last time it stank badly, but this time the stench was like a fog that you felt was clinging to your clothes. Women in Melissa’s condition are particularly sensitive to smells, and she nearly gagged as she passed through, pressing her hand to her mouth in case she had to forcibly suppress some vomit—it is impolite after all, when someone is proudly showing you around their home, to throw up in it.
The main source of the smell seemed to be a bucket in the corner containing raw mackerel and dead day-old chicks to be fed in the mornings to the heron and jackdaw population. It was an ancient, yellowed plastic vessel, and there had to be some doubt about its structural integrity, as a large, ancient, multicolored stain rippled outward from its base like a sulphur bog, but more virulent. Even Ellis was moved to comment, “Bit whiffy in here. But you don’t have to keep that there,” he added, gesturing toward the bucket. “You’ll be moving things around, I suppose.” Somehow I didn’t think that simply repositioning the bucket would expunge this odor. I vowed on that threshold that, if we got the park, no food would ever be prepared in this room again.
The rest of the house seemed more dishevelled than we remembered, and we still didn’t have time to get a full picture of how the floor plan worked. Half the house had been used for students, and this section was coated in plastic signs declaring, NO SMOKING, TURN OFF THE LIGHTS, and oddly, BEING SICK ON THE STAIRS IS FORBIDDEN. But it mostly seemed like a standard rewiring, replumbing, and plastering job would make it good. The other half of the house, with a grand galleried staircase and stone-flagged kitchen, was marred by decades of clashing wallpapers and patchwork surface rewiring that snaked wildly like the tendrils of an aggressive giant creeper gradually taking over the house. And of course the all-pervading smell coming from the front kitchen.
The stone-flagged kitchen had not been used as such for decades, and in the fireplace, behind a ragged, dusty sheet hanging on a string nailed to the high mantel above it, lay a rusted hulk of an ancient range, a door hanging off, clogged inside with what appeared to be bird droppings from the chimney above. “My grandma used to cook on that,” said Ellis. “Bit of work would get it going again. Worth a few bob, that.” I wasn’t so sure. But this room looked out over an old cobbled courtyard, now overgrown with weeds, which looked across to the cottage opposite, above the stables (read “junk depository”). Melissa, who is good at spotting potential and visualizing a finished house, lit up. “This is the best bit of the house,” she said. Really? “I can imagine doing the breakfast in here, looking across the courtyard, waving to Katherine or Mum in their kitchen in the cottage.” At that time Melissa was still seriously considering selling up and moving in too, five kids and Jim included. It sounded good. But in the time allowed, and with enough clutter to fill a hundred rummage sales strewn about, it was hard to gauge what it might be like to live in this house. Except that it, like the park, would require a lot of (expensive) work.
We came back out of the house and met Nick in the restaurant again, thanked our hosts, and strolled down the drive. By now our objective and impartial advisor had become a little partisan. “I think it’s a great place,” enthused Nick. “Much better than I thought it would be from all the stories. You’ll need a proper site survey, to be sure, but as far as I can see, this could be a working zoo again without too much trouble.” As an advisor on zoo design, Nick also had a few ideas to throw in at this stage. “Get the customers off the drive”—which ran up the center of the lower half of the park for a fifth of a mile—“and into the paddock next to it. You could put a wooden walkway through it—meandering, so that they don’t notice the climb—and get something striking in there, like zebras, and maybe some interesting antelopes, so that as soon as they pass through the kiosk they enter a different world.” Could we get zebras? I asked. “Oh, I can get you zebras,” said Nick casually, as if they were something he might pick up for us at Tesco. This I liked. Spoken almost like a wheeler-dealer: video recorders, leather jackets, zebras, roll up, roll up. But there was more about this glimpse into the workings of the zoo world that appealed. Nick was painting with the animals, as well as designing a serious commercial layout in his head. “You need more flamingos,” he said. “Flamingos look good against the trees. The lake up there with the island has trees behind it, so if you put a few more in it they’ll look marvelous when the punters reach the top of the path. Then, having climbed that hill, they’ll be hot. So that’s where you sell them their first ice cream.” Wow. Unfortunately, flamingos are one of the few animals that don’t usually come free from other zoos, costing anything from £800 to £1,500 each. Which is a lot of ice cream. And with the prospect of bird flu migrating over the horizon there was the possibility of a mass culling order from DEFRA (Department for Environments, Food, and Rural Affairs) shortly after we took delivery of these beautiful, expensive birds. Our flamingo archipelago might have to wait.
I went back to France, Melissa went to her children in Gloucester, and Nick went back to Whipsnade, where he prepared the report that was to dictate the direction of our lives. If it was negative, it would be definitively so, and there would be no point chasing this dream any further. In many ways, as before, I was half hoping that this would be the case and I could finally lay the idea to rest knowing categorically that it would be a mistake to proceed. If it was positive, however, we knew we had to continue, and the report itself would become instrumental in finding the backing to make it happen.
Meanwhile, I was learning more about the zoo every day. Ellis had once been seen as a visionary, designing innovative enclosures, putting in disabled access on a difficult sloping site long before legislation required him to do so, and developing an aggressive outreach education program, one of the first of its kind in the country and now copied by almost every other zoo. But he had absolute, total control. There was no one to tell him when to stop. And with overinvestment in expensive infrastructure like the enormous restaurant (against advice, which he overruled), an expensive divorce, and other zoos learning, copying, and developing his techniques and continually changing their game while he began to grind to a halt, visitor numbers declined.
My life became a series of long phone calls to lawyers, real estate agents, bankers, family members, and Ellis. Every time I spoke to Ellis, I noticed, he inexorably steered the conversation toward conflict. We were frank with him. We didn’t have the money to buy it yet, but we had assets of equal value, which w
e could borrow against or sell, if he could only hold on. “You’d think when someone offered to buy a place they’d at least have the money to do it,” he said once, the type of observation that gave me an indication of why so many other sales had fallen through. Apart from anything else, Ellis was in the terrible position of having to sell his much-loved park, built largely with his own hands, the expression of his life’s vision over the last forty years, so it was no wonder he was irascible. The only other bidder left was a developer wanting to turn it into a nursing home, and Ellis didn’t want that. So, to his enormous credit, he agreed to wait for us.
In this tense situation, I was genuinely concerned for Peter Wearden, who had become the focus of Ellis’s vexation, crystallized as the deliberate, Machiavellian architect of his downfall. It had all started with a routine inspection several years ago, which had concluded that the hand-painted signs on the animal enclosures were illegible and needed replacing. Ellis escorted the inspector from the park (some say at the end of a shotgun), and refused to carry out the directive. This activated a one-way process of head-on confrontation with the authorities, which escalated into many other areas over the years, and ultimately led to him handing in his zoo license in April 2006. When we’d visited that last time, after so many years of gradual decline, it felt like we’d been to the Heart of Darkness, to a place where a charismatic visionary had created an empire once teeming with life and promise, but where human frailties had ultimately been exposed by the environment, with terrible consequences. I telephoned Peter and told him of my concerns. It was not uncommon for council officials to be attacked in the course of their work, even occasionally killed, and Ellis was, in my opinion, a man with his back to the wall. The word amok, in Malay, describes a syndrome whereby someone feels they have received an intolerable insult that has ruined their life, and that the only way to redeem their status is to kill the perpetrator, or perpetrators. The amok syndrome is a universal phenomenon, just as likely to present itself in South Hams as in Malaysia or Southern California. And Ellis owned an elephant gun with a range of about three miles. “Oh, I’m not bothered about that.” Peter laughed, with a bravery I doubt I would have shown in his position.
