Last Updated: 11:43AM BST 10 Apr 2009In a small art gallery in central London, an incongruous and eminent collection of people have gathered for an unusual event: the display and auction of fabric pictures and ceramic art by the artist and actress Lalla Ward. The occasion is the 50th anniversary of the opening of Gerald Durrell's wildlife trust in Jersey, and the mixed bag of attendees – who include Sir David Attenborough, Brian Eno, Edward Fox, Sir Peter Hall and Redmond O'Hanlon – are invited to bid for the work anonymously.
All proceeds go to Durrell's work in Galapagos, and a particular aim is to save the Floreana mockingbird, the bird that inspired Darwin's epiphany, and now one of the world's most endangered species. It is a silent auction, and Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, author and husband of Lalla Ward, exhorts us to place a secret bid in a cardboard box. Stephen Fry, on location in Borneo, has already placed bids on seven items. Don't let the Floreana mockingbird go the same way as the dodo, Dawkins says.
I have been invited here by Dr Lee Durrell, Gerald's widow, to observe what she calls 'something really Durrelly'. As well as being an author – he wrote 37 books – and animal collector, Gerald Durrell was a pioneer in captive breeding. 'Our objectives are firstly to provide a safe sanctuary for species and then to build up a colony of them,' he declared. 'Once you have created your colony surplus, animals can be sent to organisations all over the world until the creatures are safely established under controlled conditions. Then you can start on the final problem: taking your surplus animals and returning them to the wild, reintroducing the species to areas where it has become extinct.'
Among the guests are 34-year-old Nick Breeze, Durrell's great-nephew and one of the very few remaining direct descendants of the family. His grandmother was Margaret – or Margo as she was known in Durrell's most famous book, My Family and Other Animals, the flighty older sister – and Nick grew up with her in her house in Bournemouth. It was his father, Gerry Breeze (named after Gerald), who helped build the cages and worked at the zoo in its early days, where he was in charge of the reptile house. Before the Jersey zoo was acquired, Durrell kept his animals in Margo's garden. It was Gerry's job to feed and clean the animals every day while 'Uncle Gerald' was off trying to find them a permanent home.
In a telling comment 30 years ago, Durrell informed the trust's former secretary, Simon Hicks, that it wouldn't be necessary to have a zoo if there weren't any endangered species, and furthermore that he wouldn't admit the public at all were it not essential.
These days the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, as it is now known (commonly called Durrell; before, it was the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust, commonly called 'the Zoo'), is a model of its kind. Set in 32 acres of the Trinity area of Jersey, it is a beautiful, verdant oasis and the island's main tourist attraction.
Apart from 130 species of animals, birds and reptiles, there is an education and training centre and all kinds of research going on behind the scenes: for example, to combat the fungus that is attacking amphibians and causing a global crisis, they have created a bio-secure environment to breed a clean population.
This is also the HQ that coordinates Durrell's international conservation work – more than 40 projects in 17 countries. The captive breeding has been an unqualified success: since the zoo opened, more than 13,000 animals have been born here. Durrell has saved several species from extinction, and they have also reintroduced species into their original habitats and other habitats, and worked towards protecting those habitats.
This is one zoo where you don't feel guilty looking at the animals, because the animals don't look out of place. There is no repetitive behaviour born of stress, no pacing around. They all look busy, they have stuff to do: the orang-utans have worked out that if they poke twigs into certain logs, they can get honey out; the aye-ayes, looking like furry leprechauns, fiddle with bamboo sticks, ferreting out mealworms with their long fingers. There are black macaques with their lovely hairstyles and long, wise faces; there are enclosures for lemurs and tamarins; there are aviaries and a fruit bat tunnel.
In the gorilla enclosure, the patriarch Ya Kwanza lounges around with his favourite wife, Bahasha; unfortunately Bahasha has developed a thing for another female, and there are no babies forthcoming at the moment. When Jon Stark, the gorilla keeper, tells us about the death of Ya Pili, a charismatic little female, and how it damaged the dynamic of the whole group, it sounds as if he is talking about a member of his own family. (In 1968 a five-year-old boy called Levan Merritt fell into the gorilla enclosure where he lay unconscious with Jambo, the original patriarch of the Jersey gorillas, standing over him, guarding him from the others until the keepers could get him out. It changed people's attitudes to gorillas and made world headlines.)
The primates are endlessly fascinating, but this is not a people-pleasing zoo. Durrell used to say he felt 'sympathy for the small and ugly; since I'm big and ugly I try to preserve the little ones.' He tended to select animals that were close to extinction, or those that could best be helped.
Charlotte Bernard, a volunteer who has been at the zoo for more than 15 years (they have a devoted army of about 100 volunteers), takes my daughter and me on a tour. And so we see the wrinkled hornbill, the agile frog and the hottentot teals (little brown jobs) and the ferruginous duck; we learn how the flamingoes, born white, turn pinker as they age, and about the two who escaped and lived on the beach; about the round island boa and the abnormal breeding habits of the mountain chicken, which is actually a frog from Montserrat, and how a surgeon came in from the local hospital to perform a caesarean on Gina the orang-utan because their anatomy so closely resembles that of a human.
It wasn't always like this. In the early days it was more conventionally zoo-like: there was Leo the lion and Peter the cheetah; there was Cholmondeley the chimp and Delilah the porcupine and Trumpy, the grey-winged trumpeter, whose chief job was to settle in new animals. 'He looks, to be frank, like a badly made chicken,' wrote Durrell in Menagerie Manor. 'As soon as
we got a new creature, Trumpy managed to hear of it, and would come bouncing along, cackling to himself, to settle it in. He would then spend 24 hours standing by the cage (or preferably in it if he could) until he thought the new arrival was firmly established, whereupon he would bounce back to his special beat in the mammal house.'
'We tend not to use the word "zoo" because of its negative connotations,' says Lee Durrell, an elegant woman with a faint trace of a Tennessee accent. She lives in the flat in the manor house. A zoologist who specialises in animal communication, she is executor of the Durrell estate and honorary director of the trust; her role now is chiefly as ambassador, chairman of the governance committee and fundraiser for the cause, for the trust needs millions of pounds to make some major improvements and continue its work. In 1989 tourism in Jersey was at its peak, before low-cost flights made it as cheap to go to Italy or Corsica. Then, Durrell had 340,000 members, now it is less than half that.
Gerald Durrell died 14 years ago, but his wife thinks he would be very pleased to see how his zoo has turned out. 'In the early days it was pretty much hand to mouth, chickenwire and old crates, so it looked like a menagerie,' she says. 'We've really tried to keep an energy about it. When you fly over the island you look down and see a big patch of green, because all our trees are so mature now.'
Walking around the aviary, Lee's favourite place, we come across the pink pigeon, a classic Durrell success story. It is a distant relation of the dodo, the symbol of the trust, which was extinct by 1681, its Mauritian habitat eaten by goats, its eggs eaten by pigs, its number killed by dogs and cats. On a trip to Mauritius to save the pink pigeon in 1976, Durrell reflected, 'I was filled with great sadness that this was one of 33 individuals that survived; the shipwrecked remains of their species, eking out a precarious existence on their cryptomeria raft. So, at one time, must a tiny group of Dodos, the last of their harmless, waddling kind, have faced the final onslaught of pigs, dogs, cats, monkeys and man, and disappeared for ever, since there was no one to care and no one to offer them a breeding sanctuary, safe from their enemies.'
Gerald Durrell barely went to school and never passed any sort of exam, but he won nine international awards for leadership in conservation. Sir David Attenborough has referred to him as having the zoological equivalent of green fingers. 'He certainly was very good at handling animals and divining ways in which to make them happy,' Attenborough says. 'He had an intuition about animals. It's difficult to define what green fingers mean but some people instinctively know whether a plant wants a little more water or a little less water, or more shade or wind – and it comes from an absorption in looking at things and never tiring of looking at them, and therefore noticing things which people who are only paying more cursory attention don't see. That applies to animals even more than plants. There are some people in the zoological world who can't keep animals, and it isn't a lack of love, it's just that they don't have the perception or understanding to find out what that animal may require to make it happier.'
Attenborough was a great fan of Durrell's very early books – The Overloaded Ark and The Bafut Beagles – but notes that 'he tended to humanise things, his descriptions were anthropomorphic very often.' I think this is where Durrell's charm lay, this anthropomorphism – he writes of a long black and yellow striped snake 'like an animated school tie'; of hippos in Zambia 'running off on tiptoe like a fat woman in a tight skirt running for a bus'; of a herd of European bison 'like woolly express trains'.
What has made Durrell most famous, of course, is his 1956 book, My Family and Other Animals, which has to date sold five million copies worldwide. Never out of print, the book tells the story of his idyllic childhood in Corfu, where the family moved in 1935, when he was 10. 'Our arrival was like being born for the first time,' he said years later. His tales of growing up in paradise – with his dog Roger, his tutor and mentor Theo Stephanides, his friends the rose beetle man and Yani the shepherd, and his menagerie: Achilles the tortoise, Quasimodo the pigeon, who liked to march to waltzes, the puppies Widdle and Puke, Old Plop the ancient terrapin – and of the snow-white villa and the strawberry-pink villa and the daffodil-yellow villa, of parties that began at lunchtime and ended after a midnight bathe at three in the morning, are probably his most vivid legacy.
Durrell's book appeals to all ages and virtually all markets; it can be read any number of times and still feels sprightly and funny and new. 'His style is like fresh, crisp lettuce,' said his brother Lawrence, who went on to become a celebrated author himself. Durrell wrote the book 20 years after they left Corfu, aided by an extraordinary memory; he had the gift of total recall. 'It's almost vulgar,' he told the writer David Hughes, 'the way I remember photographically in the colours of a glossy magazine.'
Gerald Durrell had wanted his own zoo since the age of six. Zoo was his first word, which he uttered in Bihar province, India, where he was born in 1925. His father, Lawrence, was a civil engineer who died of a suspected cerebral haemorrhage when Gerald was three. His mother, Louisa, who was left the equivalent of £500,000 in Lawrence's will, brought Gerald and his sister Margo, five years older, back to England to be educated (his older brothers, Larry, 16, and Leslie, 11, were already at school there), and the family moved to Bournemouth. Gerald went briefly to school, which he absolutely hated, and his mother took him out, aged nine, and he never went back.
Louisa was eccentric and independent and ran a slightly chaotic household. 'I just loved the whole craziness of it,' said Nancy (Larry's first wife), in Douglas Botting's gripping biography of Durrell. 'Mother used to drink a lot of gin at that time, and she used to retire to bed when Gerry went to bed – Gerry wouldn't go to bed without her, he was afraid of being on his own, I think – and she'd take her gin bottle up with her. So then we all used to retire up there… she had a large double bed, and an enormous silver tea tray and we'd carry on the evening sitting on the bed, drinking gin and tea and chatting, while Gerry was asleep in his own bed in the same room. It was all very cosy.' 'It's curious,' Gerald related later, 'something one didn't realise at the time – but my mother allowed us to be.'
The family moved to Corfu at the urging of Lawrence, who thought of England as 'that mean, shabby little island'. When Gerald arrived he found 'creatures I had never seen or imagined before,' he told David Hughes. 'I'd never thought of such fecundity: this garden overloaded with plants, every stone I turned over had 20 different creatures under it, and there were huge blue furry bumblebees flying round my head and praying mantises staring at me even more astonished than I was, and for me it was like being pushed off the Bournemouth cliffs into heaven. From then onwards, just like that, I was home.'
Under the guidance of Theo Stephanides, his life's path was set. When the family reluctantly left the island four years later, with war threatening, they took with them three dogs, two toads, two tortoises, six canaries, four goldfinches, two greenfinches, a linnet, two magpies, a seagull, a pigeon and an owl. As Gerald was to relate in My Family and Other Animals, the Swiss official glanced at their passports and wrote on a form, 'One travelling circus and staff'. 'What a thing to write,' his mother said. 'Really, some people are peculiar.'
The family moved to a flat off Kensington High Street, London, and 14-year-old Gerald got a job as a junior assistant in a pet shop, where he looked after the reptiles and the aquarium. When they then moved to the Bournemouth suburb of Charminster, Gerald was past the age of compulsory education, and went to work on a farm until the end of the war. (In 1942 he was called up but failed the medical due to sinus trouble.) Thanks to a hopeful letter and an enterprising official, he was offered the
job of student keeper at Whipsnade zoo, where he was to remain for more than a year. At this point Durrell realised he wanted to see the animals in the wild, but having no experience, failed to join any collecting trips. At 21 he came into his inheritance and decided to use it to finance his own collecting trip – to the Cameroons.
It was trial by fire but he adored it. He contracted malaria and everything else going ('He had had jiggers in his toes, ants in his pants, lice in his hair, bugs in his bed and rats in his tent,' Botting wrote) but arrived home after seven months abroad with nearly 200 creatures. His sister, Margo, wrote in The Daily Telegraph about Gerald's arrival at her house, rather ominously carrying a sack and a large wooden box: ' "Just a few monkeys," Gerry called out airily. "I hope there's nothing dangerous in that sack, dear?" Mother inquired, kissing her youngest tenderly. "It's a 6ft python, but harmless," Gerald replied." ' The trip was a big success, Gerald sold the animals to English zoos and set off on a second expedition to the Cameroons the following year, where he encountered the Fon of Bafut, and nearly died after being bitten by a burrowing viper.
On his return to England he visited Manchester zoo and met Jacquie Wolfenden, the 19-year-old daughter of a hotelier; they were married two years later and moved into the upstairs flat in Margo's house. Broke and under pressure from Jacquie, Durrell wrote The Overloaded Ark about his trip to the Cameroons on his brother-in-law's portable typewriter, lying on the floor, smoking. He found that he hated writing but that he had an incredible memory.
Faber bought the book for £25 but Durrell then acquired an agent, Spencer Curtis Brown, who sold the rights to America for £500, and in July 1953 the book was published to extremely good reviews. 'My younger brother has scored tremendous success with his first book,' Lawrence wrote to his friend Henry Miller, 'and he is making a deal of money. How marvellous to have one's career fixed at 25 or so and to be able to pay one's way.'
In autumn 1954 The Bafut Beagles came out, and the book became a Christmas bestseller. The following summer Gerald started writing My Family and Other Animals, and found that it poured out of him. He wrote it in just six weeks, sitting up in bed in his sister's house, with a constant stream of visitors. 'He has successfully re-created the family with the devastatingly faithful eye of a 13-year-old,' Larry remarked.
By 1955 Gerald had written six books and a pattern had been established – he would go off on trips, collecting animals to sell to zoos, and then write about them, which would pretty much provide his income for the rest of his life. He started looking for a zoo of his own – 'for breeding of those forms of animal life which are on the borders of extinction and which without help of this sort cannot survive' – and planned to write about its birth.
In July 1957 he returned from his fifth collecting trip with 200 reptiles, 50 birds and a nine-month-old chimp called Cholmondeley St John. They were all installed in cages in Margo's garden; her son, Gerry, was detailed to look after them, and Cholmondeley was handed over to Mother, who dressed him in hand knits and treated him like a toddler. Durrell started looking for potential sites in Bournemouth, then Jacquie suggested the Channel Islands, and Durrell's publisher introduced them to Major Hugh Fraser, who took them to his family home, Les Augres Manor, which they promptly leased and turned into what would become the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust.
The zoo opened at Easter in 1959, and by the fourth day they were up to 6,000 visitors a day. Jeremy Mallinson came to work there at the age of 22, when the zoo had been open for two days.
'A job became available when someone broke their ankle chasing a crane, and I joined in the bird section,' says Mallinson, who worked six and a half days a week for £8.50 ('I had Thursday afternoons off to play hockey'). 'Gerald pointed out that
when I joined I didn't know the difference between a hippo and a hearth-rug, but I was there for 42 years.'
'He treats animals as if he had given birth to them,' Durrell was to say, and he made Mallinson his deputy in 1963; he became director of the trust after Durrell died. Mallinson looked after the cheetahs. Durrell's mother moved into the manor and nurtured some of the more delicate specimens. A tiny woolly monkey called Topsy, which Gerald had rescued half-dead from a dealer's shop, was entrusted into her care. Topsy needed to cling but was nervous of humans so was given a teddy bear. 'Soon she was too big for the teddy bear and was transferred to an amiable guinea pig with a vacuous expression. At night she slept on top of the unfortunate animal looking like an outsize jockey perched on a Shetland pony.'
Chimps escaped; Claudius the tapir laid waste a field of gladioli; Pedro, one of the spectacled bears, ran off; and one day Gerald and a new recruit, John Hartley, got trapped in the coils of a reticulated python called Pythagoras. Hartley, who left school on a Friday and started work at the zoo the following Monday, aged 18, remembers meeting Durrell as, 'the best thing that ever happened to me'.
In the early days Durrell wasn't around that much. 'We used to see him in short spells, then he'd be off, filming or writing at his house in France,' Hartley says. 'He had to earn a living somehow, he had no income from the zoo. Then one day he appeared when I was scrubbing out a pond and invited me to come to west Africa with him to make a television series for the BBC. It was a proper old-fashioned expedition.' Hartley went on more than 40 expeditions, and has now retired.
Although shy, Durrell was a very funny man, and a great raconteur. 'He was full of jokes, all the time, and terrific fun to be with,' Attenborough says. He inspired devotion in everyone who met him. Doreen Evans, who became his assistant and went on several collecting trips with him, remembers her job interview, in which he suggested with a completely straight face, 'Would you be prepared, if need be, to breastfeed a baby hedgehog?'
'He was a volatile character but he was an absolute genius,' Lee says. He was also an alcoholic, and prone to depression, railing against what mankind was doing to the world. His mother had also suffered depressive bouts where alcohol became her refuge, and Lawrence too had this gene, getting to the point where he couldn't function without alcohol. In the late 1960s Gerald had a breakdown, exacerbated by the death of his mother. He received treatment at the Priory in early 1969. Peter Grose, his agent, remembers getting up at eight one morning to find him drinking a vast brandy mixed with a pint of milk for breakfast, and then opening the first bottle of claret at around 11.
In May 1972 Gerald addressed a conference on breeding endangered species in captivity at which he spoke passionately about the need for captive breeding, and also voiced his wish that one day the trust could provide a training basis for zoological students and staff from around the world. This was to materialise seven years later, when the neighbouring property was bought by the trust and turned into an international college of specialist education. The first trainee went on to become the first director of the first national park in Mauritius, and 2,000 students from 125 countries have now attended the centre, which was officially opened by the Princess Royal, an enthusiastic patron of the trust, in 1984. Its graduates have become known as Gerald Durrell's Army.
In March 1976 Durrell flew to Mauritius with John Hartley to catch some specimens of the highly endangered Mauritian kestrel and pink pigeon. In 1984 he signed an accord with the Mauritian government to begin a breeding programme for a number of critically endangered species, including the pink pigeon, which became one of his first successful reintroductions. The pink pigeon is now officially no longer critically endangered (nor is the kestrel, once the world's most endangered bird).
Returning to Jersey from his 1976 trip, Durrell found his wife, Jacquie, packing to leave; their relationship had been rocky for a while, exacerbated by alcohol and Durrell's obsession with his zoo, which Jacquie resented. The following year he met Lee McGeorge, then a 27-year-old zoology graduate from Memphis, who had recently spent two years in Madagascar studying ecology and the social behaviour of lemurs. They were married in 1979, once Durrell's divorce was through, and Jeremy Mallinson was their best man. 'I am one of Lee's disciples,' he says. 'She was a little bit of heaven coming into his life. I'm sure she gave him at least another 10 years of life.'
For her part, Lee had taken a while to be convinced. 'She married me for my zoo,' Durrell was fond of saying, but he took great delight in showing her his world, and she was swiftly caught up in his life and work. With Lee he went on to write several books, including The Amateur Naturalist, which outsold everything he had ever written, and together they made five television series, including Durrell in Russia, where they visited 20 conservation reserves, which were flourishing before the collapse of the USSR. Durrell found this inspiring but he was becoming increasingly desperate about life. 'The world is being destroyed at the speed of an Exocet missile, and we are riding a bicycle,' he said of his work at the trust. 'I feel despair 24 hours a day.' In those days it cost £2 million a year to keep the trust going, and they were constantly plagued by financial worries (they still are).
By the early 1990s Durrell's health was in swift decline. He had suffered several grand mal seizures, probably alcohol-related, and had developed a pain in his abdomen that wouldn't go away. In January 1994 he was diagnosed with liver cancer and given a few months to live unless he had a transplant.
In March a liver became available. He was flown from Jersey to King's College Hospital in south London, sipping whisky on his way to fortify his spirits. The operation was deemed a success, but his pancreas was in a mess and he was plagued by infections, and by November 1994 he had been in hospital for eight months without a break.
At this point, Lee made a breakthrough. 'I so profoundly wanted to be part of Gerry's dream and take it forward,' she told Botting, 'that I married without romantic love. I was not worthy of Gerry's enormous love because I did not return it – not at first – though at least I was honest with him from the beginning. But when Gerry really became ill, I began to feel strongly protective towards him, and then, when I realised what I could lose, I began to realise what I had, and I finally fell in love with my husband.'
In January 1995, shortly after Durrell's 70th birthday, Mallinson went to see him in hospital. 'He was sitting up in bed, quite twinkly, and asked, "How long have you worked for me, Jeremy?" "Thirty-five years," I replied. "I'm so pleased I only took you on a temporary basis," he said.' Three days later Durrell died of septicaemia. Lee and Jeremy Mallinson were with him. 'He was my mentor,' Mallinson says simply.
The following June Sir David Attenborough addressed Durrell's memorial celebration at the Natural History Museum. In an address entitled 'The Renegade who was Right', Attenborough said, 'The extraordinary thing (which is perhaps the mark of genius) was that everything he said – and then typically did – seems now to be so obvious, so logical and so much part of everyday conservation language, that we easily forget how radical, revolutionary and downright opinionated his statements seemed at the time.'
Lalla Ward's auction raised £24,000 for Durrell's work in Galapagos. Back in Jersey, the trust had its own way of celebrating 50 years. On March 26 Lee hosted a small party for the 'old boys' – Mallinson, Hartley, Quentin Bloxham, Shep Mallet – and the staff. Attenborough was the guest of honour at a special fundraising dinner. Everyone in Jersey helped out, even the local Co-op, for Durrell is part of their heritage, they are proud of it. And 200 children – members of the Dodo Club, the junior membership – arranged themselves in the grounds to spell out the campaign slogan, which was then photographed from the air, written in children: it's time.
It is indeed time. As Gerald Durrell pointed out, 'You can't build a tortoise. You can't build a bird. That's what we've got to remember – if we destroy it, we can't recreate it.'
In March 2010 Lee Durrell will accompany a wildlife adventure ‘To Aldabra and Beyond’, on board the MS Island Sky. The expedition begins in the remote eponymous Indian Ocean archipelago and en route for Mozambique and Tanzania, the ship will visit Madagascar for a behind the scenes look at the foundation’s invaluable work on the world’s fourth largest island. Arranged by The Ultimate Travel Company, this unique two week voyage aims to raise £20,000 for the Durrell Foundation.
The Ultimate Travel Company is offering Telegraph readers an exclusive opportunity to join this extraordinary journey at a saving of £500 per person.
For more information telephone 020 7386 4646 or visit www.theultimatetravelcompany.co.uk
For more information about the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, visit durrell.org.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/conservation/5130889/Gerald-Durrells-Jersey-wildlife-conservation-trust-celebrates-50th-anniversary.html
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