Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography

Though Gerald was officially described as a ‘student keeper’, his real role was that of ‘odd-beast boy’, at the very bottom of the heap in terms of status. But by dint of his personality he defied all conventional classification among his friends and colleagues at the zoo. The odd-beast boy was at everyone’s disposal, and could be assigned to any task with any creature, big or little, docile or lethal. In terms of learning the ropes at a premier zoo – the hands-on care of large and dangerous animals (including lions and tigers, bears and buffalo), daily routine and standard zoo practice – the job was exactly what Gerald wanted. But he wanted to learn more than that.

Gerald continued his voracious reading, but now he focused his interest much more on zoo business. Almost without exception, he realised, most of the world’s zoos since Victorian times had served merely as peep-shows, places of public entertainment, where people went to be amused in much the same spirit that their ancestors used to visit lunatic asylums. Scientific research at most zoos was virtually nil, and if an animal died it was simply replaced from what was taken to be Nature’s unending bounty. Before long, it dawned on Gerald that this bounty was in fact being rapidly exhausted:

As I pursued my reading, I began to learn with horror of man’s rapacious encroachment upon the world and the terrible devastation that he was producing among animal life. I read of the dodo, flightless and harmless, discovered and exterminated in almost the same breath. I read of the passenger pigeon in North America, whose vast numbers darkened the sky, who were so numerous that their nesting colonies measured several hundred square miles. They were good to eat; the last one died in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The quagga, that strange half horse, half zebra once so common in South Africa, was harried to extinction by the Boer farmers; the last one died in London Zoo in 1909. It seemed incredible, almost impossible, that people in charge of zoos should have been so ignorant that they did not realise that these animals were tottering on the border of extinction and that they did not do something about it. Surely this was one of the true functions of a zoological garden, to help animals that were being pushed towards extinction?

Jill Johnson remembered Gerald saying, ‘A lot of animals are going to become extinct. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one could breed these animals and put them back where they came from?’ But then he would have doubts, and remark: ‘Perhaps they’re becoming extinct because they’re meant to, because the world is changing. Perhaps they’re becoming extinct like the sabre-toothed tiger became extinct, because it’s in the order of things, because they’re meant to be replaced by something else.’ But was it in the order of things for one species to commit biocide against all the others? For man to take it into his own hands to speed half the animal kingdom to extinction? Sixty million buffalo once trampled the Great Plains of America – the greatest animal congregation that ever existed on earth. Then the white man came and began to kill them off at the rate of a million a year, so that by the 1880s there were just twenty left in the whole USA. A man could ride a thousand miles across the plains and never be out of sight of a dead buffalo and never in sight of a living one. Was that in the order of things? Nothing in Gerald’s life so far gave him greater insight into the acuteness of this problem, and its potential solution, than his encounter with Père David’s deer.

Père David’s deer had provided the world with a classic case of near-extinction and captive breeding undertaken by default. A distant relative of the red deer, it was once widespread in China, but by the end of the nineteenth century it had been hunted almost to extinction, and during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 the few that remained were killed in the emperor’s garden in Peking. Or so it seemed. As it happened, before their total extinction in their natural homeland a few specimens had been sent to Woburn Park, not far from Whipsnade, by an English aristocrat, the Duke of Bedford. From this small group the numbers of the almost vanished species were increased by haphazard natural breeding in captivity to a point where Père David’s deer can now be found all over the world. Gerald was well aware of this extraordinary story, and he was fascinated when four newborn specimens of the famous deer – still rare at that time – were sent to Whipsnade to be hand-reared:

They were delightful little things with long gangling limbs over which they had no control, and strange slanted eyes that gave them a distinctly oriental appearance … They had to be fed once during the night, at midnight, and again at dawn … I must say I rather enjoyed the night duties. To pick one’s way through the moonlit park towards the stable where the baby deer were kept, you had to pass several of the cages and paddocks, and the occupants were always on the move. The bears, looking twice as big in the half light, would be snorting to each other as they shambled heavily through the riot of brambles in their cage. At one point the path led through the wolf wood, with the moonlight silvering the trunks and laying dark shadows along the ground through which the wolf pack danced on swift, silent feet, like a strange black tide, swirling and twisting among the trunks.

Then you’d reach the stable and light the lantern. The baby deer would start moving restlessly in their straw beds, bleating tremulously. As you opened the door they’d rush forward, wobbling on their unsteady legs, sucking frantically at your fingers or the edge of your coat, and butting you suddenly in the legs with their heads, so that you were almost knocked down. Then came the exquisite moment when the teat was pushed into their mouths and they sucked frantically at the warm milk, their eyes staring, bubbles gathering like a moustache at the corners of their mouths. In the flickering light of the lantern, while the deer sucked and slobbered over the bottles, I was very conscious of the fact that they were the last of their kind, animal refugees living a precarious existence on the edge of extermination, dependent for their existence on the charity of a handful of human beings.

Jill Johnson was Gerald’s partner in this operation. She recalled:

I used to milk the goats, and Gerry used to take the bottle of goat milk to feed the deer. But it was a bit of a nuisance doing it this way, because the deer kept swallowing the teats. So one day we decided to take the nanny goat in to the deer so that they could suck from her direct. This worked pretty well when the deer were small, but eventually they grew bigger than the nanny and would butt under her and lift her up in the air, legs sprawling, and feed from her like that …

After that venture we moved on to looking after sick and orphaned animals, and were even allowed to help with operations by the vet. But the Père David’s deer may well have given Gerry his first glimpse into the possibilities of captive breeding. We used to talk about them perhaps breeding in the Park and then being reintroduced into China. It was just a dream then, but later it did happen.

At Whipsnade Gerald continued to compile his own list of animals in danger of extinction. He was moved, he later confided to a friend, by a mixture of horror, despair, determination and love, quoting Cecil Rhodes’ alleged dying words, ‘So much to do, so little done.’

Jill Johnson thought Gerald must have been rather a lonely soul at Whipsnade, his class and intelligence distancing him from his fellow keepers. His family never visited him, as far as she could tell. Eventually he moved out of the Baileys’ house and into a room in a bleak and chilly place called the Bothy – he referred to it as the Brothel – a huddle of four or five keepers’ cottages opposite a pub called Chequers at the bottom of the zoo. Sometimes he was invited for a curry (West African style with lots of chilli peppers) at the home of Captain and Mrs Beal – ‘So hot,’ he told Jill, ‘it makes me sweat like a fever.’

Among Gerald’s friends at Whipsnade was Guinea Pig Gus. ‘As a romantic figure,’ he recalled, ‘Gus had little to commend him.’ His skull sloped back from his nose like a Neanderthal’s. His nose looked like some fungus squashed on his face. He suffered acutely from acne, had adenoids and bit his nails. ‘He was quite the most unattractive human being I had ever encountered,’ Gerald wrote in his autobiographical jottings years later, ‘yet he had the kindest of hearts.’ It was Gus who walked all the way to Dunstable and back to get patches and glue when Gerald punctured his bicycle tyres. It was Gus who brought him half a bottle of whisky – ‘God knows from where, for at that time a bottle of whisky was as valuable as the Koh-i-noor diamond’ – when he had pleurisy and thought he was going to die. It was Gus who took Gerald’s shoes to be soled and heeled so that he didn’t have to do it on his day off.

Gus’s heart belonged to the guinea pig, and all his spare cash went towards materials for the palace he was planning to build for these favoured creatures. When it became clear to Gerald that Gus would never have enough money to finish it, he decided it was time to repay him for all his past kindness, and to break his vow to live on his meagre salary by hook or by crook and never to write home for funds. ‘I wrote to my mother,’ he recorded, ‘explaining about Gus and his guinea pigs. By return came a letter containing ten crisp pound notes. In her letter, my mother said: “Don’t hurt his feelings, dear. Tell him an uncle who liked guinea pigs died and left it to you.”’

So the Guinea Pig Palace was completed, and the grand opening day arrived. ‘It was a splendid occasion,’ Gerald recalled, ‘attended by no lesser personages than Gus’s mother and father, his dog, his cat, me, his goldfish, his frog, and the girl from next door, as exciting as a dumpling. The Guinea Pigs took the move from their old home with great aplomb and dignity. Three jugs of beer from the pub and some elderberry wine and the party got so convivial that Gus’s mother fell into the goldfish pond and Gus at last succeeded in kissing the girl next door.’

The Guinea Pig Palace, which also contained other species of rodents, became the place where Gerald took his girlfriends. It was, he reckoned, the most romantic spot available. Not all the girls agreed. Gerald recalled:

The first one, a town girl, suddenly said:‘’Ere, you’re paying more attention to them rats than wot you are to me. I can tell, your eyes get all unfocused like.’ I felt this was unfair, since most of her clothing was scattered about the hazel grove, but I must admit the dormice were enchanting, and enchanted by us.

At last I met an adorable girl with a Devonshire accent like cream out of a jug and dark blue-grey eyes fringed with eyelashes as long as hollyhocks. She loved dormice, but this was the trouble.

‘No, don’t, not now,’ she would say. ‘You’ll disturb them, dear wee mites. And anyway – you never know – they might be watching.’

Gerald finally struck lucky with a policeman’s daughter – ‘buxom, blonde and willing’ – who ran Pets’ Corner. Her office was in a wooden hut which was often locked from the inside at lunchtime. ‘We were poking the living daylights out of each other at every opportunity,’ Gerald later confided to a friend. ‘I thought I would marry her in the end.’ Gerald took her home to Bournemouth to meet the family once or twice. ‘Really she was quite hefty and rotund,’ his sister Margaret recalled. ‘Gerry was very keen on her at the time. But then, what young man isn’t very keen at the time?’ It was not to last, though, as the policeman’s daughter turned out to have another boyfriend hovering in the wings.

How Gerald Durrell saw himself in his leisure hours at Whipsnade – a Lothario among the paddocks – was not quite how others saw him. Jill Johnson recalled:

The waitresses in the cafeteria said he looked like a Greek god, but really he was not the most handsome, though he had a nice face. He wasn’t particularly macho, either, but nor was he the opposite. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember him having any close girlfriends at all. If anyone went out with him it was me, but I was only a friend who happened to be a girl. We were close, but we never had a romance. Neither of us was interested in boyfriends and girlfriends, we were interested in learning as much as we could about the animals. There wasn’t much to do in the evenings, nowhere much to go, no TV in those days. We used to go out for bike rides in the evening, and sometimes he’d take me up into the hay barn. You’d think we were up to something, but we weren’t. He’d say: ‘Sshh … be quiet … they won’t know where we are. I’m going to read some Housman; see if you like him.’ And he’d read out loud to me, in his beautiful voice:

Oh, when I was in love with you,

Then I was clean and brave,

And miles around the wonder grew

How well did I behave …

Gerry would provide much more intelligent conversation than any of the keepers who used to go down to the pub in the evening. He was quite a deep thinker, but he was fun too. Sometimes, sitting up in the dark, watching over a sick animal, he’d tell the most wonderful stories – some of them really quite rude. He did have a special way of treating women – rather cosmopolitan, a bit Latin perhaps. One day I was with another girl in the office and he came rushing in, and he got down on one knee in front of this other girl and made a most elaborate and passionate speech to her. ‘There is a question I have got to ask you,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know how to put it.’ We both thought he was going to ask her to marry him. Then he burst out: ‘Can you tell me where the gentlemen’s lavatory is?’ So he was great fun, very lively, very bright, very special, a nice, kind, unusual person to know.

Lucy Pendar, the teenage daughter of the resident engineer at Whipsnade, remembered Gerald less as a ladykiller than as a generous and supportive young man with a highly developed, rather bawdy sense of humour:

Gerry’s stay at Whipsnade brought a new dimension to our lives. A slim young man with unusual blue eyes, his long fair hair fell over his eyes and he wore suede shoes. To me, he looked more like a poet than a keeper! His burning ambition was to be a wild animal collector. We’d heard of Wilfred Frost and Cecil Webb, the Great White Hunters, but this was our first encounter with anyone aspiring to such a dangerous and thrilling occupation! What a captivated audience we were as this new person in our midst told us about his early life. He related splendid stories as we sat, spellbound, on the oatsacks or on the grass. He expounded, at length, his pet theories on the care of animals in captivity, many of which he subsequently put into practice. The slim, aesthetic young man was a great deal tougher than he looked. None of us had any doubts that he would ultimately achieve anything he set his sights on.

Gerry was enormous fun, Lucy Pendar remembered. He was always bursting into lusty renderings of ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ or ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, or piping up with ribald verses like ‘Little Mary’.

Little Mary, in the glen,

Poked herself with a fountain pen.

The top came off, the ink ran wild

And she gave birth to a blue black child.

And they called the bastard Stephen …

They called the bastard Stephen …

They called the bastard Stephen …

’Cos that was the name of the ink.

When Lucy fell ill, it was Gerry who read to her. When she had doubts, it was he who encouraged her to stick at it. When she tripped him up during a romp at a VJ-Day party, so that he sprawled headfirst into a cow pat – ‘I always lay claim to fertilising that brain,’ she joked later – he took it in good part. ‘It is unbelievable the influence one person can have upon another in so short a time,’ Lucy Pendar was to reflect, ‘but he was ever after indelibly imprinted on my memory. A wonderful man. We had the faith in him the adults did not, and we were right.’

At Whipsnade Gerald learned that zoo keeping, like many jobs, was not quite as romantic as it sounded. Most of a keeper’s time was spent on routine work such as feeding and cleaning. Gerald worked in a number of sections, each of which took its name from its principal animals. The lion section, for example, where he started, also included wombats, Arctic foxes, tigers and polar bears, which could be very dangerous if sufficiently annoyed. From ‘lions’ he moved on to ‘bears’, where there were also wolves, warthogs, zebras and gnus. But though Gerald enjoyed his work at Whipsnade, and was able to find time to learn more about the animals in his charge, it sometimes seemed to him that the only knowledge he had acquired was how to muck out and how to avoid a goring. The most dangerous animals, he discovered, were not necessarily the ones with the most fearsome reputations. Even a velvet-eyed zebra could be transformed into a raging demon that would treat one’s behind like a kettle drum given half a chance, while the much-feared wolf did not deserve its terrible notoriety at all.

Gerald was acquiring a priceless grounding in the daily running of a first-class, up-to-date zoo. But there were some minuses. He was disappointed at the lack of scientific expertise at Whipsnade, and at the reluctance of his fellow keepers, fearful for their jobs, to impart their knowhow to him. He was also alarmed by certain aspects of the animal management procedures, and convinced that some of the keepers were putting his life in danger. Gerald had a wonderful way with animals, but he was no fool. Most of the animals at Whipsnade were half wild. Some of the keepers thought they knew the ways of the creatures in their charge, but they didn’t, and one day, Gerald was sure, there would be an accident. Often the keepers asked him to do things which he was reluctant to do because he knew he could be injured. One day he was asked to fetch a baby water buffalo from its mother, a nearly suicidal undertaking. He managed to get hold of the baby and make a run for it, but the enraged mother caught up with him and rammed him with her horns, smashing his hand against the metal bars of the paddock and breaking several bones.

One exception among the keepers was a new man, recently discharged from the RAF, by the name of Ken Smith. Early on Gerald had struck up a rapport with Smith, who was then in charge of the Père David’s deer, and this friendship was to continue for many years, with great significance for the careers of both men.

On 7 January 1946 Gerald celebrated his twenty-first birthday and came into his inheritance – a sum of £3000 (worth over £60,000 in today’s money) which had been set aside for him in his father’s will. Suddenly Gerald – who until now could barely afford the price of half a pint of watery bitter or a packet of Woodbines – was a man of means. He had already decided to leave Whipsnade some months before. His ambition was still to go animal collecting and start his own zoo one day, and he knew he was not going to further either ambition if he stayed where he was.

Every evening he would sit in his little cell-like room in the cold, echoing Bothy, writing painstaking letters to any animal collectors who were still in business asking if they would take him on one of their expeditions if he paid his own expenses. These fearless, resourceful frontiersmen were a legendary breed of men. But their replies all said the same thing – as he had no collecting experience, they could not take him with them. If he ever managed to acquire some experience, then he should by all means write again.

‘It was at this point in my life, depressed and frustrated, that I had a brilliant idea,’ Gerald recalled. ‘If I used some of my inheritance to finance an expedition of my own, then I could honestly claim to have had experience and then one of these great men might not only take me on an expedition but actually pay me a salary. The prospects were mouthwatering.’

This, he decided, was what he would do. He would try his hand as a freelance animal-catcher, paying his way on his own expedition collecting animals for zoos. He now had capital, and this was how he proposed to invest it. Though the war had largely put an end to the animal-catchers’ unusual way of earning a living, with the coming of peace many zoos needed to restock their dwindling collections, and for the rarer and more exotic animals the demand was considerable and prices high.

At Gerald’s farewell curry dinner at Whipsnade, however, Captain Beal was less than enthusiastic. ‘No money in it,’ he warned in doleful tones. ‘You’ll be chuckin’ money away, mark my words.’

‘And watch out,’ warned a keeper called Jesse. ‘It’s one thing to have a lion in a cage and another to have the bugger creeping up behind you, see?’

The next morning, Gerald went the rounds saying goodbye to the animals. ‘I was sad,’ he recalled, ‘for I had been happy working at Whipsnade but, as I went round, each animal represented a place I wanted to see, each was a sort of geographical signpost encouraging me on my way. Everywhere the animals beckoned me and strengthened my decision.’

On 17 May 1946 Gerald Durrell left Whipsnade in pursuit of his dream. His time there had taught him many valuable and practical things about the profession upon which he was now embarked. No less importantly, his experience at Whipsnade had crystallised his thinking about zoos in general, and the ideal zoo in particular. He later wrote: