‘MY WELSH ZOO RUINED MY MARRIAGE’
TV STAR Anna Ryder Richardson said running her wildlife park in Wales has taken its toll on her marriage and she is now preparing to start a new life in France.
Anna will leave Manor House Wildlife Park in Pembrokeshire for good and is reportedly moving into a dilapidated farmhouse in France.
It follows the announcement that she is divorcing her husband Colin MacDougall, the father of her daughters Bibi and Dixie, after 16 years.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, the 53-year-old said: “The stresses and strains and expense of running our wildlife park have destroyed our marriage.
“I’m moving lock, stock and barrel to France, and I’m getting divorced.
“I still well up thinking about all the beautiful Welsh countryside and the nature. I had the best of times there, but they became the hardest of times.
“We had so much work to do we never saw each other.
“I’m having to start all over again with nothing and it’s scary. I’m older and wiser, but I’ve lost a bit of confidence. I’m wrinkled and I’ve lost a lot of weight.
“I woke up one morning and thought, ‘Here I am, broke, middle-aged, sad and now single.’ We were a privileged couple who had it all, but somehow it all got lost.”
It’s been almost a decade since Anna started renovating the zoo.
Giving up her 30-room Georgian mansion – once the headquarters of the Scottish Football Association – she plumped for the rundown 52-acre zoo in the wilds of Pembrokeshire.
That was in 2008 and since then Anna and Colin have transformed the tired, neglected zoo into a hub of conservation activity, at one time having their own ITV show. They built up a collection of animals including a tapir, wallabies, white rhinos and Sumatran tigers.
But now Anna – who presented the hit BBC series Changing Rooms with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen – has admitted it was a naive decision to buy the wildlife park – and one they took against Colin’s better judgment.
“In the early days, I was blissfully happy, with our children growing up among the African animals I always dreamed of as a girl,” she said.
Reality soon hit, however, when the couple learned just how much work was needed to make the £600,000 a year they needed to stay in business.
She said: “We were like ships in the night, trying to get everything done, and we started rowing. Inevitably it took its toll.
“I began to realise I was useless with money, business plans and things like that. All the technical things went over my head. Eventually Colin banned me from all the meetings.”
They found themselves making uncomfortable choices, including a four-year stint living in a flat-pack wooden cabin in the zoo’s grounds, while the park’s Edwardian manor house was turned into a visitor centre.
“It cost us more than £300,000 to build a state-of-the-art rhino house, yet we were freezing to death in a log cabin 50ft long by 20ft wide,” Anna recalls.
“The animals had a warmer, better home than us. Even I, the passionate interior designer, can see the irony.
“But our arguments weren’t about our basic living conditions. We argued about whether our rhinos and gibbons were warm enough and even turned our heating off to save money.
“Our discussions were not what we were having for dinner but what food they were having.”
She also said the family felt they “became like one of the specimens in the zoo, with everybody coming to peer at us”.
“Colin didn’t like it. I didn’t like it either, really, because we were on show all the time. One day I was sitting in my little garden and I heard some picnickers on the other side of the fence talking about Anna Ryder Richardson.
“It was really beginning to affect me mentally.”
Then came the terrible day in August 2010, in which an apparently healthy tree in the park suddenly fell, causing serious injuries to a three-year-old visitor and his mother.
Anna and Colin faced more than £100,000 in fines and costs.
“To this day I can’t talk about what happened, it’s too painful,” said Anna.
“What happened to those poor people will never leave me.”
The case against Anna was thrown out after Colin took the blame and pleaded guilty.
The zoo recovered eventually in terms of takings, but Anna said she now wonders if it was the beginning of the end of their marriage, saying: “I don’t think things were really ever the same between us after it.”
With her remaining money, Anna has bought what she describes as “an absolute ruin” in six acres near Bordeaux.
She said she is learning French and intends to live in the farmhouse with her daughters.
She said she still loves the zoo, which Colin will continue to manage, and will leave it with a heavy heart.