The zoo's game
Neville Braybrooke The Ark in the Park Wilfrid Blunt (Hamish Hamilton £7.50) London's Zoo compiled by Gwynne VeVers (Bodley Head £4.95)
Wilfrid Blunt has written a history of The Ark in the Park which is both anecdotal and °ssiPy. 1850 was a record year for the
and over 360,000 people visited it. The Gardens had been open for nearly a quarter of a century and the star attraction, Mr Blunt recalls, was a few-months old hippoDotatnus—the first to be seen in England for half a million years, and the first in Europe since Roman times. No other 'first' secured by the Zoological Society of London created more public excitement in the last century. A 'hippo craze' (not unlike the current 'shark craze' brought about by Jaws) swept the country. Silver models of the -Young calf were sold by the hundred in the Strand; an officer in the Guards was Observed sporting a hippo breast-pin; and the 'HiPpopotamus Polka' became the rage in every drawing-room. The beast himself Was called Obaysch in memory of the island in the Nile on which he had been captured, and in the popular news-sheets his name was prefixed by an HRH. It stood for His Rolling Hulk.
Queen Victoria and her daughters made a special pilgrimage to the Hippopotamus House in Regent's Park, and in her diary she described him as 'a truly extraordinary animal'; she remarked on his 'very intelligent eyes' and his ability to roll about in the water 'like a porpoise'. Lord Macaulay, on the other hand, was not impressed. He confided to his friends: 'I have seen the Hippo both asleep and awake, and I can assure you that, asleep or awake, he is the ugliest of the works of God.' Twenty-eight years later the Times reported Obaysch's death 'with regret', adding that although a mate had been acquired by whom he had sired several infant hippos, only one had survived to reach maturity. This was Guy Fawkes—whose name was retained, even after it was discovered by the authorities that he was a female.
The publication of The Ark in the Park has been timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the Zoological Society of London, which fell this week. In the early days the Society was known as the Noah's Ark Society—and Mr Blunt's account of its foundation with its policy to import 'new birds, beasts and fishes . . . from foreign parts', is entertaining. Sadly though, it remains a truncated work. Two chapters— one about keeping animals in captivity, the other about recent events at the Zoo—have been omitted at the suggestion of the Society. Yet the loss of these chapters has been lessened to some extent by the simultaneous publication of an anthology entitled London's Zoo. The editor is Gwynne Vevers, the Curator of the Aquarium, and he has drawn heavily upon the Society's Annual Repo'rts, Occurrences Book and Council Minutes for the last 150 sears. I le selects wittily—especially from the mail-bag. 'NIy cockatoo escaped last night.' complained a distraught bird-lover two ■ ears ago. 'Could you tell me in which direction he vill 11.■ T
If Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of the Zoo, were to return today, I doubt if he would recognise his Gardens. Gone are the three wooden shacks that served as an entrance, and gone are the pagoda-shaped cages, which, in bad Weather, were wheeled down to Camden Town for shelter with the animals aboard. Annual attendance figures now run at over the two million mark, and the new Sobel' Pavilions for Apes and Monkeys, which were completed in 1972, have been designed to give protection in the bad weather and open-air freedom in the good. In the late 1820s, when the Gardens opened, the only building of permanence was the brick bear-pit. A number of engravings of it are provided by Mr Blunt and Dr Vevers, and in their respective texts they both tell the story of the young man in 1867 who dropped his best hat over the edge and jumped in to retrieve it. Had it not been for the intervention of one of the keepers, he would have been hugged to death. Yet so great was the cheek of the young man that the next day he sent the Society a bill for a new hat.
From time to time, it appears, the authorities were quite without humour. Certainly the Society has had its share of petty disputes and intrigues. In 1829 there was a long protracted and heated argument amongst the Committee as to whether 'Bye-laws' should be spelt with an e.
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