The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  On Safari now seems every much a bygone as Hopalong and the Lone Ranger, a faintly embarrassing relic of a colonial age in which African people could be captioned on-screen as ‘the Natives’. But there were two other popular shows which, on one young mind at least, would have a deeper and much more lasting impact. One of these was presented by a gawkily handsome, toothy young man whose cheerful disposition reminded me of my favourite schoolmasters – engaging, brimming with enthusiasm but not didactic. The other was (misleadingly, as it would turn out) a more headmasterly figure – bald, somewhat older than the first, and stuffed with knowledge. The handsome young man was twenty-eight-year-old David Attenborough, just hitting his stride with Zoo Quest. The other was Peter Scott, with Look.

  As Attenborough recalled in a filmed interview in 2007, animal programmes hitherto had been of two contrasting types. In the first type – a kind of prototype Blue Peter – live animals would be brought to the studio from the zoo. ‘You stuffed them in a sack,’ said Attenborough, ‘and brought them in the middle of the night in a taxi up to Alexandra Palace, and then hoiked the poor things out on to a table covered with a doormat.’ The programmes went out live, and the thrill for the audience was the sheer unpredictability of a bewildered animal with fully functioning bladder and bowels, and a yen for freedom. The risk to the presenter’s dignity made it ‘great television’, but it revealed almost nothing about the animal’s nature.

  The other strand was the Armand-and-Michaela-type film of creatures in the wild, shot usually in Africa. This was more informative, but it lacked the immediacy of live animals in the studio. Attenborough’s brainwave was to combine both strands into a single format. The idea was to travel to remote parts of the world to hunt, film and catch rare species never before seen by the public, and – with a modest echo of Frank Buck – to bring them back alive to London Zoo. Hence the title, Zoo Quest. The animals then could be brought to the table to entertain the live audience. The plan was for Attenborough to produce the series, and for his friend Jack Lester, the zoo’s curator of reptiles, to appear on screen.

  For some reason they elected to start on the west coast of Africa, in Sierra Leone, 1,700 miles north and west of the point where Hanno the Navigator had turned for home 2,500 years earlier. In the days before intercontinental jets, it still took them three days to fly there from London (the first leg in a Dakota) via Casablanca and Dakar. ‘Sierra Leone’ translates invitingly as ‘Mountains of the Lion’, but the quarry necessarily had to be a bit less daunting than the fabled king of the jungle. London Zoo in any case had had a lion house since 1876, so Panthera leo wouldn’t fit the criteria of rare and unseen. But neither, it seemed, was there much else in Sierra Leone that could satisfy Attenborough’s desire for ‘the ultimate rarity’. The best candidate, it turned out, was a bird. To modern ears, the white-necked rockfowl, Picathartes gymnocephalus, doesn’t sound too much like the stuff of compulsive viewing, or the springboard for one of the greatest careers in broadcasting history. But so it proved, though it was a triumph that grew out of tragedy. In Africa Jack Lester caught a tropical disease from which he was never to recover, and which eventually killed him. He was able to present only the first episode, after which the producer had to step out from behind the camera and fill the gap. As I write, he’s still there.

  Peter Scott’s Look series was of the more traditional studio-based kind, though it also made use of film. The very first programme featured a live fox and launched a series that would make Scott, like Attenborough, a household name. Scott might have been remembered for many different things. He was a distinguished wartime naval commander, an Olympic sailor, British gliding champion and a popular artist whose prints – typically of flighting wildfowl – were the only art that many families hung on their walls. He was also an expert ornithologist. For a full account of his extraordinary life, Elspeth Huxley’s biography (foreword by David Attenborough) does a rather better job than his autobiography, The Eye of the Wind. Better than Scott himself, Huxley describes how his feeling for nature developed through his passion for wildfowling, and how by the early 1950s his shocking proficiency with the gun had turned him away from killing. His decisive conversion to the preservation of life is one of the reasons why, today, I receive yet another invitation from the WWF to support a species under threat – this time the jaguar, Panthera onca, largest cat of the Americas. If I prefer, I could choose instead a giant panda, a polar bear, orang-utan, bottlenose dolphin, Bengal tiger, Asian elephant, black rhinoceros, hawksbill turtle or Adélie penguin, and I could receive a ‘gorgeous soft toy’ of my favourite species. The populism and ubiquity of wildlife conservation now would astonish the far-sighted few who got it moving.

  Throughout recent history, the name Huxley has been one of the most prominent in contemporary thought. Scott’s biographer Elspeth Huxley was married to a cousin of the writer Aldous and of the evolutionary biologist Julian, grandsons of ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ Thomas Henry Huxley (a younger contemporary of George Perkins Marsh). It was Thomas Henry, inventor of the word ‘agnostic’, who objected to Richard Owen’s Creationist vision of the Natural History Museum, and who opposed Owen and ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, in the famous debate at Oxford in 1860. Soapy Sam made the mistake of trying to demolish Darwin by scorn. Was it through his mother’s or his father’s side, he wondered, that Huxley had descended from a monkey? In modern political debate, Huxley’s riposte would be called a zinger. He would ‘not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor’, he told the unfortunate bishop, ‘but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth’. No smirk has ever disappeared more swiftly from episcopal lips, and literal-minded biblical fundamentalism has seldom taken a longer step backwards.

  Thomas’s grandson Julian would grow up to share the old man’s taste for controversy. He was, for example, an outspoken advocate of eugenics, a far from easy thing to be in the years after the Second World War. He was president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962, and dispensed from a great intellectual height opinions on the reproductive excesses of society’s ‘lowest strata’. Although he was no racist, the liberal consensus now would find these opinions difficult to swallow or even to forgive. As a scientist he could see no reason why selective breeding should not be as improving to Homo sapiens as it had been to pigs, sheep and cattle. Population statistics continue to be controversial. Generations of scientists and conservationists have seen, and still do see, overcrowding as the most serious threat to life on the planet. (This was the theme of David Attenborough’s 2011 President’s Lecture to the Royal Society of Arts, when he quoted Malthus’s doomy Essay on the Principle of Population, which first sounded the tocsin in 1798.)

  But it was not any of this that fixed Julian Huxley in the public mind. From January 1941 he was a panellist on BBC radio’s hugely popular Brains Trust, and in 1946 he became the first director-general of UNESCO. Crucially, though, above all else he was a biologist. From 1935 until 1942 he was secretary of the Zoological Society of London, where his progressive ideas put him in almost perpetual conflict with the Fellows. Echoing his grandfather’s vision for the Natural History Museum, he wanted the zoo to give more emphasis to research and education. He added more informative labelling to the cages, and – in the face of opposition from the Fellows – established the world’s first Children’s Zoo (officially opened by Robert and Edward Kennedy, the two younger sons of the then US Ambassador to Britain). Always he was driven by a mission to inform and enlighten. He wrote popular books about the zoo and its animals, and launched a monthly Zoo Magazine. The Fellows, however, rejected his scheme for a natural history cinema, and blocked his attempt to save money by cutting senior staff. His plan to buy Eric Gill’s nude female statue Mankind for the society’s rural outpost at Whipsnade, on the Dunstable Downs in Bedfordshire, also came to grief. Chimpanzees were one thing, but a kneeling, headless human female au naturel was, in the Fellows’ view, not somethin
g to be set before visitors to a zoo. (The statue subsequently was acquired by the Tate Gallery, and at the time of writing is on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum.) The Council was also outraged by Huxley’s freelance activities as a broadcaster, writer and lecturer. After three months’ unpaid leave lecturing in the United States, he resigned in 1942.

  By 1960, at least seventy modern mammals, described and known to science, including species of gazelle, deer, moose, bat, wolf, rodent and marsupial, had become extinct. Domestic cattle had long lost their wild progenitor, the aurochs. Tasmania had lost its talismanic thylacine, and South Africa had said goodbye to the quagga. While television might reassure the viewing public that woods, forests, plains and seas were throbbing with life, men like Julian Huxley and Peter Scott were thinking differently. No child of my generation had any idea about species-loss. It did not dawn on me even as a young adult until I read Silent Spring and the world was sensitised by Greenpeace’s campaign to Save the Whale. Working as an editor on The Sunday Times’s environment pages in the 1970s, I was impressed by the work of colleagues like Brian Jackman, who combined a lifelong, unconditional love of nature with an inextinguishable fury at what was being done to it. Week after week in the space we were generously allowed to fill, we excoriated those who saw dying or displaced animals only as unmourned sacrifices to economic growth. Economics was a one-eyed ghoul without soul or vision. Milton Friedman, the most influential economist of the late twentieth century, seemed to have given moral authority to the despoilers by declaring that the social responsibility of business was ‘to increase its profits’. Simply that. To us, no philosophy had ever sounded more amoral; no full-stop more like a muffled drum. As the forests fell, and as fresh water was either poisoned or drained entirely away, so the casualties mounted and the anger grew. In those days it was unusual for newspapers to reserve space for environmental issues. The visionary editor Harold Evans made The Sunday Times an exception, and this allowed us to think of ourselves as pioneers. Speaking for myself, I must confess, nearly forty years on, to the sin of hubris.

  Quagga, photographed at London Zoo in 1864. It has been extinct for more than a hundred years

  *

  In fact, the ‘conservation movement’ was not as new as I thought it was. For its earliest beginnings we have to go all the way back to the generation of my grandfathers. Even at the turn of the twentieth century it was obvious that George Perkins Marsh had not been crying wolf and that a philosophical divide was opening up. Until then, the idea that nature had a value in its own right was not something that had lodged in the minds of more than a few idealists, aka crackpots. It was one thing for a saint like Francis of Assisi to bind himself in brotherhood to birds and wolves, but for an ordinary mortal it looked like infirmity of mind. Man had dominion over all the beasts of the field. The Bible said so, and not even a saint could interfere with that. Thus began an ideological schism – still evident in almost any collision between man and nature – dividing those who believed wild places should remain pristine and inviolable (we may call them preservationists), and those who thought natural resources should be harvested sustainably (conservationists). The preservationist wing scored an early victory in 1872 with the world’s first legally designated national park at Yellowstone, in the American states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Even earlier, in 1867, the East Riding Association for the Protection of Sea Birds, whose purpose was to oppose the culling of birds off Flamborough Head in Yorkshire, had set itself up as the first-ever wildlife protection body. It was notably led by women campaigning against the harvesting of plumage for the hat trade.

  Ornithologists have been the single most important group in the conservation movement ever since. I confess I am not one of them. Though I enjoy looking at birds in the garden and keep a pair of binoculars handy for the purpose, my occasional attempts at serious birdwatching have always failed through impatience, observational incompetence and intolerance of damp and cold. The failure is especially gross since the part of Norfolk in which I live – a waterscape of creeks, mudflats, sandbars and coastal marshes – is a fabled birdwatching hot spot. I’m not entirely hopeless. I can distinguish common-or-garden tits, finches and corvids, the commoner species of wild geese and some of the ducks, gulls and waders. My garden seethes with woodpigeons, collared doves and pheasants, and I am in thrall to the barn owl – Titus alba, titular parent and historic regurgitator of the Somali golden mole – which hunts across the neighbouring hayfield. But that’s about it. I’m useless with anything small and brown, and (this time really to my chagrin) with almost all birds of prey save the hovering kestrel. My naturalist friends necessarily treat me like some kind of imbecile.

  We pay attention to the birdmen now, but at the turn of the twentieth century they had the whole world to wake up. More than anyone, they understood the meaning of ‘ecology’ – a word then newly minted – and of the critical importance of habitat. George Perkins Marsh had given full and prescient warning of the consequences of deforestation, but it was the effect of hunting on African mammals that had begun to focus political minds and had united the birdmen in their cause. It is important to understand how different the world now is. During the game season, Norfolk sounds like a re-enactment of the Boer War (which in the early 1900s would have been an all-too-recent memory in southern Africa). But for all their sound and fury, the pheasant shoots are more social gatherings of like-trousered friends than serious assaults on nature or any pretence of backwoodsmanship. As the great Australian zoologist Tim Flannery has said, most of us now live in a state of civilised imbecility, less able to fend for ourselves than any man, woman or child in any society before our own. To catch, kill, paunch, skin, joint and cook an animal is as far beyond the scope of most adult males as online banking would have been to Billy the Kid. At a time when we need more than ever to mend our relationship with the world, we continue to breed generations of what Flannery calls ‘poxed, inadequate weaklings’, for whom a shift to self-sufficiency would be a sentence of death. Modern man can skin a client, but not a rabbit. Back in the 1890s it was different. No gentleman would have been unfamiliar with sporting guns or squeamish in their use. It was indeed English gentlemen – and English gentlemen of the highest sort – who gave impetus to the world’s very first international environmental organisation, the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire (SPWFE), in 1903.

  By then the damage was obvious. Erosion caused by deforestation and burning of the veldt was setting off alarms in the minds of a prescient few, but it was the staggering loss of shootable game that worried the gents. Then as now there was scepticism at the hunters’ self-justifying claims that they were conservationists committed to the well-being of the very species they liked to take aim at. Nevertheless, just as we are obliged to admit that wildfowlers and game shooters in modern Britain have protected acres of habitat that would have been lost without them, so it was that the sportsmen of the early nineteenth century did rather more than just safeguard their private interests. The ivory trade had already played havoc with elephants. In the Eastern Cape, none had been seen for seventy years. In Natal, exports of ivory had collapsed from 19 tons (950 elephants’ worth) in 1877 to 66 pounds in 1895. After 1880 so few elephants remained that ivory-hunters south of the Zambezi had to look for new employment. My figures are third-hand (from John McCormick’s The Global Environmental Movement, quoting John Pringle’s The Conservationists and the Killers), but they are easy to believe. In 1866 a single company in Orange Free State exported the skins of 152,000 blesbok and wildebeest. In 1873 it shipped out 62,000 wildebeest and zebra. With the added impacts of big-game and specimen hunting, fears of extinction – local, if not global – had begun to seem somewhat less than fanciful. The blaubuck had long gone, and so by now had the quagga. It was events in the Sudan that finally prodded the English gentlemen into action. When he learned that a well-stocked nature reserve north of the Sobat River was to be abandoned in favour of poorer territory to the
south, the Verderer of Epping Forest, Edward North Buxton, gathered signatures for a letter to Sudan’s Governor-General, Lord Cromer.

  This was no ordinary public petition. Signatories included the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, the future foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, Philip Lutley Sclater (for forty-two years Secretary of the Zoological Society of London), the explorer Sir Harry Johnston and his recent antagonist Professor Ray Lankester, director of the Natural History Museum, who had mocked him for believing in the okapi. Also lending his name, perhaps more significantly, was the Natural History Museum’s favourite marksman, Frederick Courteney Selous. This was the group that would form the SPWFE and would develop rapidly into one of the most exclusive institutions in the English-speaking world. Its vice presidents included Lord Cromer; Lord Milner, Governor of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner for Southern Africa; Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India; and Lord Minto, Governor-General of Canada. President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a keen big-game hunter, was among the honorary members, as were Lord Kitchener and Alfred Lyttelton, Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies.