The bear who liked a beer!
Not forgetting a constipated llama, the giraffes who took a stroll through London and other astonishing tales from the world’s most famous zoo
TBOOK OF THE WEEK THE ZOO by Isobel Charman (Viking £16.99) MARK MASON
RICKY things, zoos. even as I was reading this book, a 29st gorilla called Kumbuka escaped from its enclosure at London Zoo. The beast was soon recaptured, but as David Attenborough pointed out, it was ‘hardly surprising’ Kumbuka had become restless. The eminent naturalist wasn’t calling for zoos to be banned, but did remind us that gorillas in the wild are very private creatures — life on display in an artificial environment is bound to upset them.
It’s a contradiction that runs through Isobel Charman’s account of how London Zoo was founded in the 19th century. The tale is a very personal one, told through the eyes of seven of the people involved.
First up is sir stamford raffles, who, in 1824, returns to Britain from his role with the east India Company a broken man: four of his five children have died. The one thing keeping him going is the dream of founding a menagerie in London.
His wife, sophia, encourages this, knowing the pleasure raffles got from their collection of animals in the east.
The couple share ‘joyful memories of their children playing with the young tigers in the nursery...how they had all traipsed through the aviary, dodging flapping wings and bullets of excrement’.
raffles is determined his animals will be ‘objects of scientific research, not of vulgar admiration’. He loathes Mr Cross’s menagerie in the strand, where Chuny the caged elephant has been trained to take sixpences from visitors with his trunk and then return them.
Chuny isn’t much happier about the arrangement — he eventually tries to escape and has to be killed to prevent carnage. ‘Not until the one hundred and fiftieth bullet had entered Chuny’s great frame, this one just behind the ear, did the beast seem affected at all.’
NexT we meet Decimus Burton (so-called because he was the tenth child in his family), the architect commissioned to design the zoo’s premises in regent’s Park. He includes some nice touches — the columns in the aviary are decorated as palm trees — but until the buildings are finished, some of the animals reside at 33 Bruton street, the society’s townhouse in Mayfair. On one visit there, Burton has his hat stolen by a monkey.
Larger animals are soon housed in the park: a leopard, some llamas, kangaroos and emus. The russian bear, Toby, has ‘a particular taste for ale, acquired under its previous owner, the Marquess of Hertford’.
The place isn’t exactly living up to the noble intentions of its founder — fathers ‘buy buns and apples from the sweet-seller to stick on their umbrellas and walking sticks and so lure the bears up their pole for their children’s amusement’. What’s more, Charles spooner, the zoo’s medical attendant, is struggling. Previously familiar with cattle, horses and dogs, he now has to care for lions and sables, ostriches and reindeer, pumas and buffalo.
The tigers have caught coughs, a zebra’s got catarrh and a llama is constipated. The kangaroos keep throwing themselves at their fence. Whether it’s an escape attempt or an act of self-harm, serious injuries result.
Many of the animals fail to make it through the english winter, and a keeper is killed by the Arctic bear.
slowly, however, the institution establishes itself. A monkey called Tommy arrives and steals everyone’s heart. He goes everywhere in his favourite frock and a sailor’s hat. One day, facing away from someone and with his hands pressed against a wall, he is mistaken for a plasterer.
For some reason he sleeps in a seated position, leaning forward with his arms folded. Head keeper Devereux Fuller loves
to watch Tommy sleeping, just as he does his own children. Tommy ‘was becoming part of all of their lives’.
And Raffles’s aim of ‘scientific research’ is fulfilled. In the autumn of 1831, the Society helps a promising young naturalist prepare for an expedition to South America.
They train him in the preservation of animals’ bodies so he can bring them back for analysis (John Gould, the Society’s taxidermist, works in a space at Bruton Street known as the Stuffing Room).
On the naturalist’s return, Gould inspects the finches obtained in the Galapagos Islands and discovers that those from different islands have evolved in subtly different ways. This provides evidence for the revolutionary new theories of the naturalist: his name is Charles Darwin.
Visitor numbers are boosted by the arrival of four giraffes. The only way to transport them to the zoo from the London docks is by walking them through the streets.
The giraffes are so horrified by the sight of a cow near the Commercial Road that they refuse to continue until it is hidden from view.
WHEN Tommy the monkey finally succumbs to illness, there is much sadness, though ‘the end, when it came, was calm: he took off the blanket he lay under and put his arms around his beloved keeper’s neck, held his face close to his and died without a struggle’.
The final player in the drama is Lord Derby, son of the man who gave his name to the horse race.
A keen animal collector himself, Derby donates several creatures, including two antelopes, 24 Senegal pigeons and a jungle cock.
Under his presidency, the zoo acquires Obaysch, a hippopotamus, whose journey from Egypt requires P&O to fit a 400-gallon iron tank to its ship for the animal to bathe in.
Obaysch drinks ten gallons of milk a day and is the first live hippo in Europe since Roman times. The crowds flock to see him.
Lord Derby, pushed around the zoo in his bath chair, is delighted they’re here, ‘not at the taverns and gin palaces he has seen in the stinking city to the south of him. They are here for the love of natural history’.
One of the zoo’s most enduring legacies, meanwhile, is the word ‘zoo’. For its first few decades, the institution was known as the Zoological Gardens.
It was only in 1868 that the shorter word first appeared, in a music hall song called Walking In The Zoo.