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| ISBN-13: | 9780752497211 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 12 Years |
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The Story of Colchester Zoo
By S.C. Kershaw
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 S.C. KershawAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9721-1
CHAPTER 1
PART ONE
OUT OF AFRICA
Then something even odder happened: he accidentally grasped a warm, thick mane of hair as a roar swelled before him – a soft, slow, lion's roar.
– Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
1
THE KINGS AND QUEENS OF BIRKDALE
MOST ESTATE AGENTS worry about rats. Frank Norman Farrar was different. He had a young adult lioness living in the house which he also shared with his second wife at No. 36 Westbourne Road in Birkdale, one of the most desirable areas in the attractive and wealthy northern seaside resort of Southport in Lancashire.
Frank was no stranger to risk and excitement. Born in 1911 near Leeds, he had spent his teenage years working in the short-lived but substantial zoo his father had opened in 1924 near Scarisbrick New Road in Southport. Frank had later volunteered for the RAF in 1940, three days after Prime Minister Winston Churchill's declaration that the Battle of Britain was about to begin, when the British air force was the last remaining obstacle which blocked Hitler's dream of global demolition.
Thanks to the bravery of young men such as Frank in the summer of 1940, the RAF provided Hitler's first military defeat. As the Second World War moved on and began to develop into a truly intercontinental war, Sergeant Farrar found himself stationed variously all over Europe, Africa and Asia as part of the RAF's Air Sea Rescue Service, mainly picking up Allied pilots whose planes had ditched into the English Channel, the Mediterranean Sea or the Gulf of Aden. The end of the war found him stationed in India. He was demobbed on 22 December 1945.
Early in 1946, Frank returned home to his wife and his six-year-old daughter, Daphne. He soon found work helping to restore buildings that had been damaged by German bombs. This quickly led to more specialised work in restoring churches, and he even developed a nice little side-line in stained-glass artistry, replacing broken church windows in towns all over Lancashire.
Housing was a flourishing industry after the ravages of wartime. Many families were homeless and looking for somewhere to live, and other families, free at last to get on with their own lives once again, were selling up and moving around the country, creating much business for estate agents. Frank knew an opportunity when he saw one, and soon found a position as the manager of the Southport branch of an estate agency called Knights National, which had offices dotted all down Britain's north-west coastline.
By 1950, Frank was divorced from his first wife and was almost into his forties. He was doing excellent business at Knights and he personally owned a number of properties around Southport that brought him a steady income. The end of the war meant that, slowly, more fine foods had become available to the public than had been for years. Frank, as usual, dived right in, and opened several profitable little businesses in the town, including a tidy basement confectionery shop on Lord Street called The Biscuit Box, and a delicatessen on Eastbank Street, which sold items that had not been seen on British shelves for a decade.
Surely by this point his taste for adventure and enterprise had been sated? Southport was a pleasant town to live in; Frank had many friends and the paradisiacal life of a bachelor beckoned. He had not, however, counted on a woman called Helena who swept into his office at Knights National one morning in 1950.
Like Frank, Helena had recently divorced and urgently needed a place for herself, her son and her daughter to live. Frank took her to see a flat which he had available to let in the town. He liked her immediately and as they got talking he invited her to lunch at the Grand National, which was running later that day at Aintree, just down the road. Helena clearly liked Frank straightaway too, for she accepted.
Helena was a powerful woman in build, thought and speech. She was, perhaps, getting on a little in years, but still had the looks of a minor Hollywood starlet, with her high cheekbones and a pile of immaculately sculpted blonde hair. She intrigued Frank with her peculiar Dutch-Australian accent; she was well-travelled, knowledgeable and held firm opinions on all matters, and she appealed strongly to Frank, who had been deeply frustrated by the boredom of life with his ex-wife.
Helena had been born around the same time as Frank (though she always lied about her age) and, like Frank, had been through a few adventures in her time. She had been one of several children born to a family of Dutch immigrants living just outside Sydney in Australia. Sydney had then been a town of a mere quarter of a million people and very different to the huge metropolis of nearly five million souls that it is today. Growing up on an orange farm on the outskirts of this tiny centre in the early years of the twentieth century, Helena was exposed to just about as rural a life as any other Australian and spent much of her time playing in the outback.
Helena was a girl born completely without fear and she grew up a little wild. Spending much time in the Australian bush, she learned to befriend and tame wild animals. Although she was the youngest in the family, her older siblings would not go near the outhouse until Helena had gone in and removed the snakes, spiders and scorpions from behind the lavatory and under the seat.
But Helena soon left the bush behind. Her grandmother in the Netherlands had often complained to Helena's mother that she had never seen her grandchildren. All the family (but for the father) therefore decided to take a pleasant holiday to Europe, but the ship on which they travelled foundered and Helena, along with all the passengers and crew, had to be rescued from the ocean waves. Helena's grandmother read of the disaster in the newspapers and feared that her family had been lost at sea. When at last they turned up on her doorstep in the town of Nijmegen (on the German border with the Netherlands) her relief was such that she never let them return to Sydney. Helena's mother often wrote letters to her father, but the grandmother hid every single reply forthcoming from Australia and Helena never saw her father again.
Helena had effectively become a resident of the Netherlands and was having to adjust quickly to urban European life. She was now eleven years old and was being bullied mercilessly at school for she did not know the language. This, coupled with the perceived indifference of her father to the family, no doubt helped to turn Helena from a brave little girl into a tough young woman.
The Olympics in the 1920s were very different to the Games today with their police escorts and surface-to-air anti-terror missiles. They were open affairs in which people were much freer to mix with competitors and officials at the events, and when the Games came to Amsterdam in 1928, young Helena was among those who attended. While mingling in the crowds, she made a good friend of one of the British athletes. So good, in fact, that they married not long afterwards and Helena moved to England with him.
By 1950, Helena had been with this man for over twenty years and had borne him two children. Unfortunately the marriage had turned sour and she and the children were subjected to physical violence. She left her husband and his home without any clear idea of where she might go. Her options were somewhat limited for there were not many people to whom she could immediately turn: her father was lost to her; one of her brothers had died in a concentration camp during the war; and her mother had also met an untimely end – during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands she had refused to step out of the way of a group of German soldiers, had been butted with the end of a rifle for her insolence, and had died of abdominal injuries.
However, after the many losses and struggles of Helena's early life, things seemed to be looking up as she unexpectedly found herself sitting opposite this affluent and charmingly flamboyant estate agent named Frank over luncheon at Aintree. The Grand National of 1950 was as sensational a day out as any Britain then had to offer. It was the first Royal National since before the Second World War, with King George VI and his Queen in attendance along with their young princess, Elizabeth, and Marina, Duchess of Kent. Though the Grand National comes in the cruellest month of April, in that year it was a glorious summery day for which almost half a million people turned out.
Helena was a life-long gambler but unrepentant: problem gamblers are only those who lose and she never lost. She won on Freebooter, the favourite at 10/1 (the first favourite to win at the National for twenty-three years), launched home by jockey Jimmy Power with fifteen lengths to spare. All the horses were safely returned, unlike the bookies, who were rinsed for everything they were worth by the crowds. In short, it was a good day all round, especially for Frank and Helena whose future fate together was sealed by this happy day. Helena's insistence on paying for the meal would probably have embarrassed other men of the time, but those who knew Frank would have said it probably endeared her to him all the more.
They were married within weeks and complemented each other brilliantly. Helena was a determined and practical woman, but tended to rub people's fur the wrong way, which often caused what might otherwise have been perfectly avoidable problems. Frank, on the other hand, was a silver-tongued joker who could never take anything seriously and whom everyone absolutely loved. He had grand ambitions and a good head for finance but often lacked focus in his work. Helena brought to the marriage a no-nonsense sense of purpose that countered Frank's dreaminess, and Frank, for his part, became Helena's public relations counsel, always able to smooth the waters which she habitually stirred up.
If either of these two middle-aged newly-weds had thought that they were due a quietly contented life, having travelled the globe and found the right partners at last, this was thrown out of the window in early 1952, when they were driving one day through Manchester. They saw a large group of people clustered around a shop window, shouting and banging on the glass. Helena noticed it was a pet shop and ordered Frank to pull over to see what the commotion was about. Inside the shop window was a trapped and terrified young lion from which the jeering crowd was trying to elicit a response. Helena took pity on the creature: she marched straight into the shop and bought him on the spot. On their way home to Southport in the car she christened him Samson.
The Farrars were quite used to living with animals. Helena had, for instance, tamed a wild koala back in her orange farm days. Frank had grown up with his father's elephants at the little zoo on Scarisbrick New Road and had kept a great number of his own rabbits, bantam chickens, dogs and cats. Neither of them appear to have had animals when they met, but shortly after they were married they set up a small riding school together, and it was not long before a retired racehorse came to live with them – the first of countless animals that came to live with the pair over the years.
Starting with the racehorse, the Farrars slowly began to acquire a reputation for taking in unwanted creatures, and their animal family at Westbourne Road grew. To begin with, the animals were small and comparatively easy for the Farrars to keep; a few parrots arrived, then they took in an armadillo rescued from cruel treatment, and before long they had a dexter bull in the garden and a cobra in the greenhouse.
But a lion was another matter. It would be almost a decade before Joy Adamson would amaze readers with her book Born Free, about domestic life with a lioness on a game reserve in Kenya. Yet here was an estate agent and his wife raising a cub in exactly the same way, in the fashionable part of a densely populated British coastal tourist resort.
Samson was still small, however. So small, in fact, that it was some time before Frank and Helena realised that Samson lacked the necessary equipment to qualify for such a name and renamed her Sammy (though 'Samson' remained in use as well). For the moment, Sammy was simply a playful smudge of golden fur. However, lions have a tendency to grow and her appetite seemed to be growing in accordance. Sammy was, however, perfectly tame and Helena was often seen walking her around Birkdale on a leash as this lioness began to grow up. Many stories are told of the horror expressed by Southport locals when they saw these two ladies coming. People who did not know about Helena would laugh when they saw her at the end of the street with a 'dog' so large they said it looked almost like a lion, only to scatter, wild-eyed, when she approached closer. There is no doubt that Helena enjoyed giving people a fright and watching the streets empty at her advance. A story is told of the surprise the local vicar had when he dropped in for tea one afternoon and casually ran his hand over what he too thought was a big dog lying against the end of the sofa.
It was not long before Sammy was really starting to fill out into a fine huntress and it became clear that things could not continue in this way. One afternoon, while sitting in his office at Knights National, Frank Farrar asked himself, 'What the hell am I going to do about this damned lion in the house?' He was having trouble getting his mail delivered after the postman had been terrified almost out of his mind at coming face-to-face with Sammy in the garden one day. Many tradesmen would no longer come near the house, and the various members of the Farrar household, including Helena's son and daughter from her first marriage, were also struggling with Sammy – they found, for instance, that they were often being made late for work and school; she would make it impossible for them to go out until they had played with her for a while. Sammy had also recently jumped the garden fence and wandered Birkdale on her own, terrifying the local children. The police had not been terribly impressed by that at all. The neighbours had been patient but had grown more anxious as the months had passed and Sammy had grown up, and they eventually set up a petition to have poor Sammy removed. What was Frank to do? He could not sell Sammy or give her away: Helena would divorce him on the spot. Helena and Sammy now came as a package, and the choice was either to return to his bachelor life, which seemed extremely dull in contrast to life with Helena, or keep Sammy in the house until he ended up before the magistrate. What if Sammy should wander off alone again and get hold of a child? What would then happen to Sammy once the authorities got hold of her?
Gabrielle Hutchinson (known to everyone as Gaye) was Frank's secretary at Knights National. She recalls as if it were yesterday that unusually quiet afternoon at the office when Frank was thinking these things over. Frank was also reminiscing that day about his childhood, and ended up talking about his father's zoo, back in the years before the war. It had been a lot of fun and he missed it: the hustle and bustle; the excitement; the gangs of local children skipping behind him and old keeper Winrow as they walked the elephants down to Southport beach to bathe the animals in the Irish Sea.
There was one other desk-worker in the room with Gaye that day and she distinctly remembers catching this man's eye. They looked at each other and then back at Frank and then at each other again, as their boss started to hatch the idea of starting up his own zoo. Within mere minutes Frank had built an entire animal park in his head and was imagining all the possibilities and enjoyment there might be had from such a project. Frank had his solution and it appealed to him in every way – Helena could keep Sammy and the neighbours would be satisfied. A zoo would probably do very good business too, since there was no serious, direct competition for that sort of thing in Southport at the time. It even solved the problem of the huge appetite Sammy had for meat (which was still rationed in the early 1950s and horribly expensive on the black market). One of the reasons people went to a zoo was to feed the animals, and Frank saw straightaway that this had a great financial angle: not only would he save the money on 10lb of meat a day, but people would actually pay him to bring their scraps to Sammy!
And so started a remarkable thirty-year career in zoology for Frank and Helena Farrar. All the pieces of the puzzle had been there, waiting to be put in the right places. The two of them were natural animal handlers; Frank had considerable experience in starting and maintaining small businesses; and his work in estates allowed him to work smoothly through the process of acquiring land and planning permission. His life in the RAF had won him many contacts around the world and even a smattering of knowledge of a number of local dialects from far-off places – ideal for a person intending to collect exotic creatures.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Story of Colchester Zoo by S.C. Kershaw. Copyright © 2013 S.C. Kershaw. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Abbreviations,Acknowledgements,
Prologue,
PART ONE OUT OF AFRICA,
1 The Kings and Queens of Birkdale,
2 Days at the Beach,
3 Rajah Going South,
4 Jackets Off,
5 From Caroline to Callas,
6 The Zoo of the Future,
7 Hybrids,
8 Breeze Blocks and Chicken Wire,
9 The Zoo of the Past,
10 Arrivals,
PART TWO ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW,
1 The To-and-Fro Conflicting Wind and Rain,
2 New Zoo Order,
3 Resurfacing,
4 Orange Squash and Popcorn,
5 Behold Now Behemoth,
6 A Pale Horse,
7 Hauled from the Wallow,
8 Imago,
9 The Owl and the Pussycat,
10 The Lateness of the Hour,
Epilogue,
Further Reading,
References,
Plate Section,
Copyright,