Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  At night he slept in a huge laundry basket with a paper bag containing a dormitory feast – a couple of tomatoes, an apple, a handful of grapes, a slice of brown bread, four cream cracker biscuits and a packet of potato crisps. ‘This fragment of food,’ noted Gerald, ‘kept him going during the dark hours and prevented night starvation.’ Then it would be morning, and tea again, or better still, four large mugs of cocoa and raw egg.

  Cholmondeley became a well-known local character, dressed in football shorts and a sweater. Sometimes he would venture forth around town with Gerry on his motorbike. Once he took part in a BBC radio programme involving an intelligence test, in which he performed extremely well, emerging with the mental age of a human child of seven, though he was a good bit younger than that. If he was sick Gerald would ring up Alan Ogden, who would arrive complaining that this was vet’s work, but would stay to inject penicillin for whatever Cholmondeley’s ailment turned out to be. On one occasion the long-suffering Ogden was obliged to administer a suppository to an ailing pigmy mongoose which had eaten some of its coir bedding.

  Gerald, meanwhile, had begun his search for a place in which to house his animals permanently. His aim had been to persuade Bournemouth Council to rent or sell him a suitable site in the area, using the fait accompli of the menagerie in Margaret’s garden as both a stick and a carrot. The town should be glad, he felt, to have a new amenity that would cost it nothing. The council was amenable at first, and even came up with two sites, both of which proved to be totally unsuitable. But gradually they went off the idea. The animals were likely to be dangerous and smelly, they claimed, and even if they weren’t, they had no land anyway.

  Gerald’s next move was to launch a press campaign, and soon a stream of reporters from the local and national press were coming to Margaret’s house, where they were first softened up by Cholmondeley and then charmed by Gerald and Jacquie. ‘Have You a Site for a Zoo? Mr Durrell’s Problem’, read the headline in the Bournemouth Echo. ‘If you know of such accommodation,’ ran the story, ‘Mr Durrell will be pleased to hear from you.’

  Gerald received only one letter – from the borough council in neighbouring Poole. They had a place that might be suitable for a zoo, they said – a large but neglected Georgian mansion called Upton House, the former residence of the Llewellin family, situated in fifty-four acres of ground at a beautiful site on the shores of Poole Harbour.

  Gerald was greatly excited by this development. An initial inspection confirmed that the house and its grounds were perfect for a zoo, and on 6 August 1957 he sent Poole Council a lengthy letter outlining his preliminary plans for a zoological garden, and an estimate of the likely income and expenditure involved during the first two years of operation:

  I have estimated that the property would cost £10,000 to develop and £6000 to stock. I myself can stock it, and would like you to put up the £10,000 for development. I should like to stress that my motives for wanting this zoo are not entirely mercenary. It has always been my ambition to have a place of my own, to run on my own lines and incorporating many new ideas that I have. Therefore, you can rest assured that I would put my maximum effort into making the project not just a financial success but something of scientific value recognised throughout the world. In nine years I could make it the foremost zoo in England.

  By early October Gerald had finalised a working proposal. Only the land immediately surrounding the house and its walled garden would be developed to start with. The entrance fee would be two shillings, extra for special exhibits. There would be a minimum of seventy-eight aviaries, some with ponds; eleven paddocks, including one each for lions and bears; four pits with ponds for small mammals; a small mammal house with forty cages; a monkey house with six cages; a reptile house; an aquarium and a pets’ corner. Money could be saved by converting the squash court into the aquarium, the tennis courts into the pets’ corner, the coach house into the store room and animal feed centre, and Upton House itself into a cafeteria, offices and keepers’ quarters. Additionally – a nice touch – the shoreline along Poole Harbour could be developed into a complex of channels and islands where various species could be kept and viewed from boats. Some 875 mammals, birds, reptiles and fish would have to be purchased, at a cost of over £2600, but Gerald could provide nearly two hundred animals of his own – ‘all young animals in magnificent condition’. A bear enclosure could be got for £400, a station for the model railway for £100, and a shorthand typist for £312.

  Though it was obvious that Upton House was currently in no fit condition to house a zoo, it would not have made much difference if it was. With winter approaching, and Margaret’s back garden looking, as Gerald put it, ‘like a scene out of one of the more flamboyant Tarzan pictures’, he was dismayed to learn that the council’s decision about Upton House would not be forthcoming until the New Year. The animals could not be expected to last out the winter in an unheated marquee. What to do?

  At this critical juncture, Jacquie had a brilliant idea. ‘Why not let’s offer them to one of the big stores in town,’ she suggested, ‘as a Christmas show?’

  Only one store in town, the huge emporium J.J. Allen, had room for such an improbable Christmas attraction. So ‘Durrell’s Menagerie’ was born. A basement was set aside, roomy cages were constructed to Gerald’s design, murals depicting a tropical paradise were painted on the walls, and the ceremonial robes with which Gerald had been presented in his capacity as deputy Fon of Bafut were put on public display. Those animals that were suitable for housing in a shop basement were moved in during the run-up to Christmas, the others being offered winter quarters at Paignton Zoo. ‘Durrell’s Menagerie’ proved such a success that it was kept open for several weeks more after Christmas, but there was always potential for trouble with monkeys in a department store, and one peaceful Sunday morning trouble came. It began with a phone call.

  ‘This is the police ’ere, sir,’ came a lugubrious voice. ‘One of them monkeys of yours ’as got out, and I thought I’d better let you know.’

  The escapee proved to be Georgina the baboon. Gerald grabbed a taxi and rushed down to the store. A large crowd had gathered outside one of the big display windows, which had been carefully arranged to exhibit a wide variety of bedroom furniture. ‘It looked as if a tornado had hit it,’ Gerald was to recount. ‘The bedclothes had been stripped off the bed and the pillows and sheets were covered with a tasteful pattern of paw marks. On the bed itself sat Georgina, bouncing up and down happily, and making ferocious faces at a crowd of scandalised church-goers. I went into the store and found two enormous constables lying in ambush behind a barricade of turkish towelling.’

  With Margaret, Jacquie and the two constables guarding the main exits and the approaches to the china department, Gerald approached the errant baboon.

  ‘Georgina,’ he said in a quiet, reassuring voice, ‘come along then, come to Dad.’

  The hullabaloo of the ensuing chase lasted half an hour. Georgina rushed hither and thither, swinging from the Christmas decorations, rampaging through the stationery department, chewing lace doilies and hiding in linoleum rolls before grabbing one of the policemen round the legs in a tackle worthy of a rugby forward. It was then that Gerald leapt out, seized her by her hairy legs and dragged her away.

  ‘Cor!’ said the policeman. ‘I thought I’d ’ad me chips that time. It makes a change from teenagers, I must say.’

  The demands made by the animals – especially the primates – were endless. On 9 December 1957 Lawrence Durrell received the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for his book Bitter Lemons from the Queen Mother in London. He invited Mother to come along, but she declined – she hadn’t anything decent to wear, she explained, and besides, she had to look after the chimp.

  Christmas was spent en famille in St Alban’s Avenue. It was not a peaceful time, for Cholmondeley had ideas of his own about how the festivities should be celebrated, and spent much of his time demolishing the Christmas tree, eating the candles, swinging from th
e paper chains, stuffing a cracker into the gravy boat, burning his fingers on the flaming brandy, running off with the Christmas cake and throwing the duck into the fire.

  Gerald was too preoccupied with his efforts to start up his zoo to be able to settle to anything, least of all to writing his book about the latest expedition. His thinking had evolved considerably in recent months, and he had received valuable advice from Peter Scott on ways and means to establish a conservation Trust, based on Scott’s experience when starting up his Severn Wildfowl Trust in 1946. Though Gerald was never entirely at ease in Scott’s company he came to admire him enormously as a founding father of the conservation movement, and was always to be grateful to him for the encouragement and advice he had given him. ‘In those days,’ he recalled, ‘captive breeding was considered anathema to most conservationists. But Peter was one of that small band of conservationists who realised that captive breeding could be a useful and powerful tool in the preservation of endangered species. Therefore he thought my idea was a splendid one.’

  Reflecting what he now saw as the main thrust of the project, Gerald proposed setting up a Trust – a non-profit-making charitable organisation, to be known as the Wild Animal Preservation Trust – to run the zoo, which he now called a sanctuary, where he aimed to do for wild animals what Peter Scott had done for birds at his Wildfowl Trust.

  ‘The objects of the Trust,’ Gerald wrote in a preliminary report which in effect spelled out his life’s mission, ‘are to save animals in danger of extinction, to conduct collecting expeditions to obtain these rare creatures, and to promote the preservation of wild life all over the world.’ The establishment of such a sanctuary had never before been attempted, he pointed out, and it would therefore be unique.

  The negotiations with Poole Council dragged on endlessly, and Gerald began to complain of the ‘constipated mentality of local government’ and the ‘apparently endless rules and regulations under which every free man in Great Britain has to suffer’. The country, he fumed later, was ‘enmeshed in such a Kafka-like miasma of bureaucracy that the average citizen was bound immobile by red tape and it was impossible to get quite simple things agreed to, let alone something as bizarre as a zoo’.

  Eventually the basis for a forty-nine-year lease on the Upton House property was agreed. This required that Gerald put up £10,000 towards the costs – the equivalent of about £125,000 in today’s money. At this delicate moment his publisher, Rupert Hart-Davis, came forward with an extraordinary offer. His firm was prepared to act as guarantor for a £10,000 loan, he told Gerald, on the understanding that the zoo would provide material for a virtually endless series of books, for which they would have exclusive rights.

  On the strength of this bold and generous offer – a huge vote of confidence in Gerald’s present and future status as a best-selling author – Gerald wrote to his bank asking for £10,000 to finance the Wild Animal Preservation Trust. He had a guarantor in place, he said, and expected enough profits from the zoo to pay the money back within six years. ‘I regret that I cannot personally deposit any security,’ he added, ‘but I would mention that my estimated income for the next financial year will be not less than £10,000.’ In case his bank manager was still dangling on the ropes, Gerald decided to knock him out of the ring once and for all. ‘My activities have put me in touch with a variety of well known people in different walks of life,’ he wrote, ‘all of whom could be useful, including Julian Huxley, Peter Scott, James Fisher, Somerset Maugham, Freya Stark and Lord Kinross.’

  However, when the terms of the lease from the Poole Council were finally made known, they proved quite impossible. Most of Gerald’s £10,000 would be swallowed up by specified repairs to the house and outbuildings, which were in a shocking state of repair, leaving next to nothing for the construction of the enclosures, lighting, heating and other necessary services. ‘Durrell was bitterly disappointed,’ Jacquie recalled, ‘and we reluctantly came to the conclusion that we would have to abandon the whole idea of starting a zoo in Poole.’

  Gerald was in a bind. Most of his animals were in Paignton Zoo, and would remain there for ever if he failed to reclaim them by a certain date. He had an agreement with his publishers to write a book a year, but he still hadn’t written last year’s book, and now he had to write another one, for which he would have to make another foray overseas while he was trying to found a zoo back home. Now his immediate zoo plans had collapsed. His instinct was to forget England altogether, since all the local authorities in the land would be bound by the same red tape and tunnel vision. But if not England, where on earth …?

  Gerald turned his back on Poole and set his sights on another expedition to Argentina, departing in the autumn of 1958 and returning in the summer of the following year. This time it was not to be simply a collecting expedition, for he was keen to establish himself in wildlife television, as Peter Scott, David Attenborough and the ornithologist James Fisher had already done, and hoped to come back with material for a series rather like Attenborough’s Zoo Quest, which had been attracting large audiences on BBC.

  By now Gerald was quite an experienced broadcaster, mainly on radio, a medium he felt relatively (though never entirely) relaxed in. He was a natural on radio, as Tom Salmon, then a young reporter for BBC West Region, found when he went to St Alban’s Avenue to interview him shortly after his return from the Cameroons.

  Gerry and I did a little four- or five-minute piece in a modest little house in the suburbs, sitting on a sofa and scampered over by a chimp called Cholmondeley, who was dressed in a sort of 1890 bathing costume and plastic pants and seemed to have the run of the house and absolutely terrified me. When I got back to Bristol I sent a copy of the tape to the Natural History Unit together with a note saying I had just interviewed one of the best off-the-cuff broadcasters I had ever come across and I thought he could well help them in their programme-making. Thereafter Gerry reckoned I had marked his path into broadcasting and we became the firmest of friends. The relaxed skill of his broadcasting never failed him, and never once, though he was such a ‘name’ by then, did he think regional broadcasting was beneath him.

  The previous spring, while he was in Africa, the BBC had broadcast Gerald’s brilliantly written six-part radio series Encounters with Animals, an engaging account of a miscellany of creatures who had impinged on his life in one way or another. It had been produced by Eileen Moloney, Gerald’s mentor in the world of radio broadcasting, to whose encouragement and professionalism he owed much. Encounters with Animals was repeated three times, and was such a hit that Eileen Molony commissioned Gerald to write a sequel, to be broadcast early in 1958. This was another six-part series, called Animal Attitudes, a behavioural study of animals which treated the animal kingdom as an organisational and technological world comparable to the human one, encompassing animal inventors, animal architects, animal warriors, animal lovers, animal parents and animal minorities, the species in danger of going under, or already gone.

  It was Jacquie who came up with the idea of amassing all twelve talks from the two series in the form of a book, to be entitled Encounters with Animals. This was a relatively easy task, and at a stroke solved the problem of delivering a new book to his publishers for 1958, as required by Gerald’s contract. The typescript duly landed on the desk of a copy editor at Rupert Hart-Davis by the name of David Hughes, five years younger than Gerald and an aspiring author in his own right.

  One morning Hughes was informed that the famous author of My Family and Other Animals was coming into the office at noon to discuss editorial matters concerning his new book. Durrell was one of the money-making stars of the firm, and though Rupert Hart-Davis normally chose not to sully his hands with authors of a popular kind, and was often impatient with people who were likely to make money, he had a rapport with Gerald Durrell which he didn’t have with other best-selling non-fiction writers like ‘Elephant Bill’ Williams and Heinrich Harrer. Durrell, the secretaries in the office decided, was also a ladykiller.
He was also, so the office mythology had it, a rewrite job. According to Hughes’ predecessor, Gerald was one of those illiterate adventurers whose ungrammatical scribbles required maximum input from his editor in order to turn them into a publishable book. Eventually, went the story, Durrell would be sent the proofs of the book, but not a copy of the original text. ‘Thus, legend had it,’ recalled Hughes, ‘he would never guess that an anonymous wage-slave had guaranteed him yet another best-seller.’

  The reality, Hughes found, was rather different. The typescript of Encounters with Animals was immaculate – totally literate, perfectly grammatical, punctiliously spelt. ‘There wasn’t a howler in sight,’ David Hughes remembered. ‘A flip through the script told me that Durrell seemed to enjoy places, animals, landscapes, jokes, wine, weather and people, in roughly any order. I thought that Durrell might be the kind of wild-eyed enthusiast who would at once intimidate me by his brilliance.’ But when Gerald entered David Hughes’ office, unannounced, he did no such thing. Hughes’ account of his first encounter with a Gerald Durrell still only in his early thirties, and at the very beginning of big things, is illuminating.

  He looked young, blond, handsome, excited and nice, all to excess. After a few words, minding his every comma, he gave me a hard blue stare of amusement and said: ‘We’re all going to Bertorelli’s, if you’d care to join us …’ All? That ‘all’ was crucial. I had learned in two seconds that this man was uniquely inclusive. I had discovered Durrell’s gift of drawing others irresistibly into his private orbit. His prompt intimacy had found me a friend for life.

  Over plates of pasta he assumed me too to be an adventurer, if not a ladykiller, as well as a very literary fellow well above the sort of tripe he wrote. He had only just had success with My Family and was regarding it as a fluke. Meanwhile, as he wolfed his veal, Gerry was working me up with visions of Greece, regretting that by some oversight I had missed that country and therefore most of civilisation, but convinced I would very soon be ordering pints of ouzo with my arm round a willing nymph. Every word was infectious. He had the gift of being as interested in my life as in his own, and as keen to enrich it. As of this lunch I began to see that life of mine in a jollier perspective, riddled with possibilities, ambushed by the unpredictable. It was clear that Durrell had no vanity (and certainly no conceit), only exuberance, a pleasure in the feel of this piece of bread or that plate, the taste of the second bottle of wine, the look of the decorations in this old favourite among dining rooms, the sound of the waitresses making a fuss of him, the mood of the moment. The last thing he wanted or needed to talk about, or impose on anyone, was himself, because he so distinctly was himself without trying. That defined charisma.