My old friend, Clinton Keeling (1932-2007), after a series of misfortunes, some of which it has to be said, were of his own making, reinvented himself as a historian of British zoos*. Beginning in 1984 he produced a series of booklets over the next 19 years with particular attention to a number to zoos that had long been closed. There were two problems why these booklets remain relatively unknown. The first was that they were self-published as typewritten cyclostyled sheets and so never reached conventional publishing and retailing channels. The second was that their content was not obvious from the title (e.g. Where the Leopard Lazed, Where the Macaw Preened, Where the Penguin Plunged). The booklets were known to very few people and the numbers sold must have been very small. Those surviving in circulation must also have dwindled. I suspect the few that I had in the 1980s got bundled with similarly-bound reports and ended in that open-ended receptacle in my office that was sooner or (rarely) later the final resting place of A4-sized documents received from government departments.
The Bartlett Society, which Clin founded in 1984 for zoo history enthusiasts, has made the brave decision to republish the first of Clin’s books, Where the Lion Trod, but this time as hardback. Brave because the information it contains is dated, not surprisingly since sources of information were far harder to access in the 1980s, and brave because it is difficult to predict whether such a venture would be other than a financial drain.
Zoo histories come as two sorts. The first sort which look outwards are produced by social historians and tell you all about the milieu in which the zoo operated, its supposed social significance and why everything is all down to colonialism. The second tell you a lot about the animals kept, the people who set them up and something about the layout and architecture. Clin’s books fall firmly into the latter category; the first sort would have had him foaming at the mouth. His prejudices, both about how animals were kept and should be kept, and about the world in general, shine through so that those who never spent time in his company will get some idea of his diatribes against those who ran zoos in Britain, his loathing of popular culture and his hatred of ‘The Great British Public”.
Clin’s research and musings covered twenty extinct collections/zoos dating from the 13th century (the menagerie in the Tower of London) until 1959 (the date of closure of Maidstone Zoo). Various chapters consider, for example, the long-gone zoos in Liverpool, Manchester before Belle Vue, Edinburgh before the present Edinburgh Zoo, Hull (where a pub still recalls the zoo that closed in 1862), Southport, Cardiff, Halifax, Oxford, Sheringham and Southend.
The original format has been followed so that this hardback reprint bears a striking resemblance to the original typed version. I feel that was an error since I had the feeling of reading a dissertation for a degree rather than a published book. The editor has also added a few notes of explanation or correction as well as a list of known species kept at each establishment; the latter I finds adds little.
I must end with this paragraph on Maidstone Zoo (1934-1959) and its owner, the brewer Sir Garrard Tyrwhitt-Drake (1881-1964):
Sir Garrard was nothing if not a character. When I met him I almost did a double-take in amazement, so astonishing was his likeness to Charlie Chaplin. He invited me into the manor, gave me a glass of beer and after talking to me for a time said ”Hmmm, you know a bit about animals”, which I took to be praised indeed. Then suddenly he said “Well I must ask you to go now Mr Keeling—I want my lunch!” And that was that.
You can buy the book from the Bartlett Society here.
*Those who knew Clin Keeling will realise I risk his posthumous wrath. He never called a zoo a zoo, always a ‘zoological gardens’. I also visit the bot in Hong Kong and also, on occasion, the bot in Edinburgh and the bot at Kew.
