Whipsnade Zoo in World War Two by Janie Hampton

Whipsnade Zoo Keeper ploughing paddocks with Dixie the elephant,  1940.  Source: Zoo and Animal Magazine, 1939/40. 

Lucy Pendar’s father, Albert, was the Resident Engineer of Whipsnade Zoo, a 500-acre park in the Chilterns, Bedfordshire. They lived in a little pointed red-brick house set against pine trees. ‘Like a picture in a pop-up nursery rhyme book,’ she remembered. But growing up surrounded by exotic animals, zoo-keepers and thousands of visitors, was a lonely life for a child.
However, the outbreak of the war in September 1939 changed everything for 11-year-old Lucy. London Zoo in Regent’s Park evacuated many of their animals to Whipsnade, including two Giant Pandas who joined ‘Ming’, the first Giant Panda ever seen in Europe; and five elephants who joined Dixie, the retired circus elephant. 

The London Zoo chimpanzees were evacuated onto an island surrounded by a moat and a barrier. One day Lucy was surprised. ‘Tiny Tim, the youngest chimp, was executing a beautiful crawl stroke, swam smartly across the moat, and with equal aplomb, climbed over the barrier and made off in the direction of the Giraffe House.’ Nobody realised that chimps could swim; and no-one had noticed that Tiny Tim had grown up, until a female chimp produced an unexpected baby.
When the Black bear from London Zoo escaped for the third time, Lucy’s father laid a trail of treacle into the ladies’ lavatories and waited in bushes nearby. ‘At long last the bear appeared and started licking the step,’ said Lucy. Her father followed the bear into the lavatories. ‘Father triumphantly slammed the door on it.'

 Best of all for Lucy, was the arrival of the families of London Zoo staff who moved into the wooden huts normally occupied by summer waitresses. The evacuee girls asked Mrs Beale, the wife of the Zoo Superintendent, to start the 1st Whipsnade Girl Guide company, and while Captain Beale tended to his stamp collection, they met in the Beale’s front room. Among the Guides were Mary Billet, daughter of the Keeper of the Bird Sanctuary; Beryl Rogers, the daughter of Bert the Giraffe Keeper; and Austrians Elizabeth, Esther, Lilly and Gertrtude, who had recently arrived in England with Kindertransport.

The 1st Whipsnade Guide Company , run by Mrs Beal. Credit Lucy Pendar.

‘Captain Beale had been chief veterinary officer of East Africa, so he taught us how to stalk and track both animals and humans.’ When Mrs Beale invited a handsome, young, Cambridge undergraduate to teach Morse Code, meetings were always well attended. The 1st Whipsnade Guides taught the local Home Guard Morse code, tracking and stalking. ‘We showed them how to wriggle through a wheat field on your tummy, so slowly that the wheat made no noise,’ recalled Lucy.  

After Guide meetings, Lucy walked home through the zoo in the dark, with her black-out torch shining a pin-hole onto the ground. ‘I could hear the elephants putting themselves to bed. There was also the roar of lions, the tigers slinking through their jungle, polar bears splashing in their pond and the barking of sea-lions. I wasn’t frightened, I knew them all well.’ She hand-fed the rare Chinese Pere David deer fawns with bottles; and even tried to resuscitate a frozen baby alligator with warm water.

Keeper Billett, father of Girl Guide Mary, of Whipsnade Zoo , November 1939. 

Lucy’s father started a rifle club in the café for the Air-Raid Wardens and Guides. ‘The walls were protected with sand bags, filled by us Guides. In the summer the rifle club moved to a chalk pit near the bison’s paddock. Father used to arrange competitions against the Home Guard, and us Guides always won. When the RAF camped nearby, he suggested a shooting competition. We beat them too.’

The first Christmas of the war was miserable, especially after the death of the Black rhinoceros, an evacuee from London. ‘Disposing of a dead rhinoceros is not an easy task, weighing nearly four tonnes.’ Lucy and the Guides helped collect firewood to make a huge funeral pyre. Then an African elephant died, and its body was added. ‘The new year was greeted with the acrid smell of burning flesh and the belching forth of black smoke, which lasted for almost a week, until a smouldering pile of ash was all that remained of the great beasts.’ That was the last time so much meat was cremated and not fed to other animals. When the German-Italian-Japanese alliance was named the ‘Axis’ in 1940, the dainty Axis deer from India were renamed ‘Spotted’ deer.

The ‘Whipsnade Lion’, carved on a chalky Chiltern hill, made a perfect landmark for enemy planes to navigate to the armament factories in nearby Luton, so the Guides helped to camouflaged it with brushwood and manure.

The war was tough on the animals. When snow engulfed the park, one of the Giant Pandas and a litter of tiger cubs had convulsions. Once petrol rationing began there were fewer visitors, so less money to pay for the food. ‘One February day in 1940 the takings amounted to six pence [2p], which meant the solitary visitor was a soldier as they got in half price. At first, visitors were encouraged to bring lettuce, cabbage and carrots, but soon no one had even those to spare.’ The zoo bred their own mealworms to feed to birds, and fish-eaters were given meat coated in cod-liver oil. ‘The zoologist Julian Huxley appealed to the public to bring buns for the bears, which of course was not what bears needed at all.’
A colony of bright green, noisy Quaker parakeets, originally from South America, lived in a huge communal nest overhanging the zoo’s main gate. ‘When they ventured down the hill and stripped Mrs Hain’s orchard, she was furious. The following year they were kept in a cage until the apples had been harvested. ‘By the next spring they had flown, their fate a mystery.’
Whipsnade Park had originally been a farm, and now even the parkland and cricket pitch were ploughed up. With no combine harvesters, and most of the keepers called- up, the Guides helped gather in the harvest. ‘With British Double Summer Time we could work even longer hours than normal,’ said Lucy. ‘June saw hay-making. The sheep were sheared, then dipped in July. Grass was scythed again in August. And then the wheat harvest. My back was aching, and my arms sore from scratches, as we gathered up the sheaves and stacked them in stooks.’ Filling sacks of grain for hours was rewarded with a ride on the truck to the barn. ‘The joy,’ she remembered, ‘standing like Boadicea, leaning on the cab as we sped down Bison Hill with the wind in my face. We brought back rough loaves of oaten bread, which had normally been fed to animals.’

The Girl Guides’ war work included mucking out and riding the Shetland and rare Iceland ponies. Lucy Pendar was one of the first people to experience their unusual tölt, a running walk, and the flugskeid - a flying pace.

The five o’clock Closing Time hooter, high on the side of the water tower, served as the air-raid siren. ‘The wind carried its sound for some distance and the howling of the wolves, which always accompanied it, added both to its effectiveness and its eeriness.’ During 1940, over forty bombs were dropped around the zoo. Most fell in the paddocks, making large holes which were later turned into ponds. The only reported casualties were a spur-winged goose - – the oldest inhabitant –- and a baby giraffe which panicked. 

One night Lucy was on duty with the Home Guard. ‘We stood in a field all night in thick fog. As the dawn began, we saw these figures approaching, very quietly, through the fog.’ They stood quaking, convinced they were German parachutists. ‘Suddenly the cloud thinned and they were revealed – as Farmer Bates’ cows!

The Giant Pandas returned to London in 1942. 

The Whipsnade Guides practiced first aid on themselves and were also practiced on by the WRVS, Air-Raid Wardens, and Home Guard. ‘I often had to pretend I had a broken arm, or an epileptic fit,’ said Lucy. In the blacksmith’s forge at the zoo, the Guides put out incendiary bombs with a stirrup pump.

WP Beale, the first superintendent at Whipsnade 1930-47, Captain of the Home Guard. Credit Lucy Pendar.

After Lucy’s 16th birthday, she didn’t want to confess the reason for not becoming a Ranger Guide: the uniform required a long-sleeved jersey and she was hopeless at knitting. So she helped to run the Whipsnade Cub Scouts instead. Later she became a Girl Guide District Commissioner in West Yorkshire, and then a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society.

Lucy Pendar, Whipsnade - my Africa, Book Castle Dunstable, 1991.
Janie Hampton, How the Girl Guides won the war, Harper Press, 2010.
Interview with Lucy Pendar, 12 November, 2008

www.janiehampton.co.uk

Whipsnade Zoo

Every Picture Tells a Story

Every picture tells a story is an old cliché but it is true. When it comes to illustrating non-fiction, well-used and thoughtfully captioned images can enhance understanding of a story. However all too often books contain pictures that are either poor quality reproductions or badly explained: pictures have to earn their place in books and that the author then has a duty to ensure that they are appropriately captioned.

One of the most extraordinary photographs is of The Endurance. On the face of it this picture is of Shackleton’s ship sinking into the ice of the Weddell Sea in November 1915.

What is significant about the photograph, taken by Frank Hurley was that Shackleton carried it with him in his pocket when he sailed from Elephant Island to South Georgia to raise the rescue mission for the men left behind. Now here’s the critical thing as far as I am concerned: Frank Hurley took a photograph of a sinking ship. Fine. He developed the glass plate (approximately 12" x 8”). Where? On the ice. In a tent. Then he made a little print for Shackleton. Not a big one. Shackleton could not have fitted a big one into his pocket. Where? Also in a tent on the ice. Moving ice at that. In fact we know that Hurley kept a selection of the photographs he had taken on the voyage, prior to The Endurance sinking, because it is recorded that he and Shackleton had to make the terrible decision to jettison the majority of the glass slides as they were so heavy. Shackleton succeeded in making his extraordinary journey in a lifeboat, the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia, some 800 miles across some of the heaviest seas in the world. He carried this photograph with him in order to prove who he was and what had happened to his ship. It is only slightly more remarkable that the actual photograph still exists.

When my editor was looking for a photograph for the front cover of my book about evacuees she chanced up a famous image of three little children sitting on suitcases with luggage labels round their necks. The picture says everything about the mass evacuation of unaccompanied school children from Britain’s cities to the countryside in the Second World War. Except that this picture is not quite what it seems. It was taken not in 1939 but in 1941 when the children were about to leave from King’s Cross Station for Northampton. They had in fact been evacuated with their parents to Chislehurst Caves in Kent at the beginning of the war but returned to Greenwich before Christmas 1939. It was only when their father got a job as a driver in the RAF that their mother decided the children needed to be evacuated. Barbara, the oldest of the children, seated in the middle, had no recollection of the photograph being taken. Her memories of that day are of being left by their mother and ending up in a beautifully clean house smelling of lavender polish. She and her sister, Rosie, spent eighteen very happy months with Mr and Mrs Rice. 

Their brother John was sent to another family for the duration. They returned to Greenwich after the war and Barbara’s strongest recollection from that period was her determination to be as clean and tidy as her foster parents. Fast-forward sixty years and imagine Barbara’s surprise when her daughter phoned to tell her that the photograph had appeared in the Daily Mirror in 2005. The Royal Mail used it on a stamp for their Britain at War series and the memory of wartime evacuation returned to the forefront of Barbara’s mind. When I interviewed her in 2009 she said: ‘Although I was happy in Northamptonshire and well looked after I never quite lost that nagging sensation of sadness that I would so very much rather have been with my mum, despite all the difficulties of life at home.’

Brigadier Sir Philip Toosey DSO, CBE, 1974. His role as senior
British officer at the Bridge camp in Thailand was immortalised
by Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai

A third image (below) is one of my all-time favourites and it helped me better to understand a family story that I wrote about in The Colonel of Tamarkan. Sergeant Major Saito was a Japanese guard in the prison camp on the Thailand-Burma railway where my grandfather and 3,500 men built the bridge over the River Kwai. My grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel (later Brigadier) Philip Toosey, was in charge of the camp and had difficult dealings with the Japanese and Korean guards. On one occasion two officers and six other ranks escaped from the camp into the jungle. This caused a terrible scene and Saito, second-in-command at the camp knew that the deeply-feared Kempei Tai (the equivalent of the Gestapo) would be called in to investigate. Toosey realised the implications of this so took responsibility for the men’s escape. He told Saito he and he alone had known of their intentions to run away (they were later all caught by the Japanese and executed). Saito beat him severely and ordered him to stand to attention for 24 hours in the full heat of the sun, badly knocked about. It was a public punishment intended to humiliate him in front of his own men but it was also for the benefit of the Kempi Tai who would not feel the need to investigate further, thus sparing the camp a much worse fate. Through this and various other contretemps, Saito and Toosey developed a mutual respect and understanding. At the end of the war Toosey was called to screen camp commanders for war crimes. It was here that he came face to face with Saito for the last time. To the guard’s intense surprise Toosey shook him by the hand and told him he was free to go. In his opinion, Saito had treated the POWs firmly but fairly. Thirty years later Saito wrote to him: ‘I especially remember in 1945 when the war ended and when our situations were completely reversed. I was gravely shocked and delighted when you came to shake me by the hand as only the day before you were prisoner. You exchanged friendly words with me and I discovered what a great man you were. You are the type of man who is a real bridge over the battlefield.’

Saito at Toosey's grave 12 August 1984, on what would have been my grandfather's 80th birthday

Saito had wanted to visit Toosey in Britain but the old man was too sick. In 1984 he finally managed to get to Landican cemetery on the Wirral where he visited Toosey’s grave on what would have been his 80^th birthday. This is the photograph taken that day by Toosey’s son, Patrick. Saito wrote to him the next day: ‘I feel very fine because I finish my own strong duty. One thing I regret, I could not visit Mr Philip Toosey when he was alive. He showed me what a human being should be. He changed the philosophy of my life.’

A Comic Strip War, by Clare Mulley

Can war be seriously examined through art inspired by American comic strips? As a biographer I am fascinated by the different ways in which human stories from the past can be effectively examined and presented, particularly when this touches on my own current area of interest, the Second World War. So I was captivated when a friend and neighbour, Brian Sanders, published a stunningly beautiful and evocative picture book memoir, Evacuee. Sandy, as I know him, is now working on the sequel, about his life in post-war London, and invited me over to have a look. 

If you are as stunned as I was by the cover of Evacuee, I should perhaps mention that Sandy has had a wonderful fifty-year career as a professional artist with commissions ranging from magazine illustration, Penguin book covers and postage stamps to being the official artist portraying the making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey during 1964-65, and designing the advertising poster for last year’s acclaimed television series, Mad Men. However, it is Sandy’s work portraying war, and the impact of war on lives, that fascinates me most.

As a young man, Sandy served in 45 Commando Royal Marines during the Suez Invasion and later in Cyprus. His irrepressible talent for capturing the scenes around him was soon noticed by the intelligence officer, and he was recruited into the Intelligence Section to record events, the movement of people and so on, as well as producing occasional private portraits. When he returned to Britain all his drawings were in his sea-kit bag, and had been stolen before he arrived. The only piece he has from this time is the one published in Soldier magazine, below, showing how far from reality the public image of life in the Libyan desert was at the time:

Tripoli 1957 

Sandy never sought a career as a war artist but commissions for various publications, and several series of stamps including those commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Second World War, naturally followed his experience and the trust placed in him as an artist who, as he put it, ‘had been there, and understood what war was’.

Some of Sandy's stamps commissioned to commemorate
the 50th anniversary of the Second World War

Now a pacifist, Sandy has always aimed to report historically rather than comment through his art, letting events speak for themselves. ‘I wouldn’t glorify war’, he told me, but ‘in fact I have advertised war, I have done pieces for Officers Magazine and so on’. It was only when he came out of the Royal Marines that he gained a new perspective on Britain’s involvement in Suez, and his attitude started to shift.

After a rich career in what is called ‘lifestyle illustration of the 1960s', Sandy is now taking a very different look at the Second World War, focusing on his own childhood as a London evacuee in Saffron Walden, a market town in Essex. Free from the constraints of commission or briefs, this is a very personal project, the impact of which comes from both its clear sincerity and its wonderful evocation of time and place.   

Sandy told me that his great blessing is that he has always known he had to draw. The Evacuee project began with loose sheets of pictures drawn from memories, and collected in a small black folder until he suddenly realized there was a book there. He found no problem remembering what he saw, and felt, as a child; ‘my problem is eliminating pictures, not finding them’, he told me. Soon he realized that the book was naturally going to be told from the perspective of his younger self in the form of the American comics that he had collected during the war, and long afterwards. In this way the book speaks directly to ‘children of all ages’, from three or four, up to 65 or 70; ‘the people who were there’. As a result Evacuee is great fun, with hundreds of wonderfully evocative visual details, and the echoing refrain that rang in his ears as a boy; ‘because there’s a war on’. And yet although Sandy’s own father survived the war, he makes a point of recording without unnecessary elaboration that those of two of his friends did not. 

Evacuee is an honest book and this, combined with the stunning art-work, is where its power lies. ‘It’s about the people that I love, that I loved at the time’ Sandy says simply. Although increasingly conscious from readers’ reactions that the book is seen as a much-loved contribution to social history, his intentions were always just to record and let the pictures speak for themselves. This is a world beautifully observed by a child and reproduced by his adult self, which is at once deeply personal and yet also gloriously familiar. ‘It is deliberately for everyone’ Sandy told me, but because it is his own story it is also compellingly authentic. Surely this is social history at its best.

Sadly Evacuee is currently sold out, but the good news is that as I left Sandy this afternoon he was heading to his studio to work on the sequel about his life in post-war London and Saffron Walden holidays. I will let you know when it is out, but here is a sneak preview of a page in progress: