The Lost Gardeners of Kew in World War Two

RBG Kew’s war memorial, Temple of Arethusa, Kew
(Image copyright : Kew website)

Kew Gardens war memorial (from the Kew Gardens website)

Kew Gardens lost 14  serving and former staff in World War Two, commemorated alongside the Great War losses at the Kew Gardens war memorial in the Temple of Arethusa. A wreath is laid there each November on behalf of past and present Kew staff, a copy of one laid at the Cenotaph made by Kew staff for the Foreign Office on behalf of British Overseas Territories.

Kew Gardens staff and Old Kewites served all over the world in both World Wars and sadly this is where some of them lie buried, as far afield as the hills of Italy, the deserts of Libya, the jungles of Singapore and the battlefields of Normandy.  Kew Gardens staff or Kew trained gardeners in both world wars also helped with the design and planting of war cemeteries, which are beautifully and respectfully maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission gardeners.

One of RBG Kew Gardens’ WW2 staff casualties rests in this beautifully planted war cemetery, Assisi, Italy. (Image copyright CWGC website http://www.cwgc.org)

Looking through the 1940s issues of the Kew Guild Journal recently published online, there are short obituary tributes to the lives of these Kew Gardens and Old Kewite staff. I have added details from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website. A recent discussion thread on the Rootschat forum listed brief details of the names of First World War casualties from Kew Gardens, which I will develop in a future blog post. There was however no list of easily accessible names for the 14 casulaties from World War Two. A little detective work reveals the following (nearly complete) list.  I hope this is of use to family historians, as well as a tribute to these brave men.

G.H.Larsen 13 September 1944
Born November 25 1914 in France, Georges Henri Larsen came to Kew on exchange from the Luxemburg Gardens, Paris 1935-36. Serving with Corps Franc d’Afrique and Free French forces in Normandy, Larsen was killed in the fighting at Epinal.

C.G. Last, 22 June 1944 MM, Military Medal
Died aged 36, Corporal 9900V, Cecil George Last served with the South African Medical Corps, attached First City / Cape Town Highlanders, South African Forces, buried at Assisi War Cemetery, Italy. This is mostly burials from June – July 1944 from battles with the Germans who were trying to stop the Allied advance north of Rome. Born October 12, 1910 he was the son of William G and Beatrice Last of Letchworth, Hertfordshire.
His Kew Guild obituary notes that he was killed at Chiusi in Italy whilst attempting “under heavy shell fire … to bring to safety one of his native stretcher bearers who was wounded and exposed to heavy fire.” He was previously noted for gallantry and awarded the Military Medal whilst wounded in the Desert campaign. He served as a medic with the South African Highlanders until after El Alamein.

C.G.Lasts’s burial place lies amongst the graves of Assisi War cemetery, Italy (image CWGC copyright http://www.cwgc.org)

J.G. Mayne, 16 May 1944
Lieutenant, 48th Highlanders of Canada, Royal Canadian Infantry Corps.
Buried at the Cassino War Cemetery, Rome. Monte Cassino was finally taken two days after Mayne’s death.
Born on January 1st 1914, ‘Jack’ was the son of Robert Furlong Mayne and Kathleen Mayne. He attended Kew from 1938 to 1939 before leaving for an exchange post at the Ontario Agricultural College. He married Mary Mayne, Frimley, Surrey in England in 1943 and his only daughter was born after his death.

J.G. Mayne’s burial place, Cassino War Cemetery, Monte Cassino, Italy
(image copyright: CWGC http://www.cwcg.org)

W.S.H. Menzies, 2 July 1943
Sergeant William Sydney Hugh Menzies, Sergeant Wireless Operator, RAF (Volunteer Reserve) buried Sleaford Cemetery, Lincolnshire. Garden boy at Kew 1936-38. Son of William Duncan Graham Menzies

R. F. Miles, 11 May 1942
Reginald Frederick Miles 1375370, RAF (Volunteer Reserve), aged 26. He is one of 47 air force burials in Dunure Cemetery, Ayrshire. Born July 21st 1915, Miles was a student gardener at Kew from 1932-34 and returned to work in the Tropical department in 1938 until call up on September 23 1940. He crashed off the West Coast of Scotland during a training flight and was listed as missing for four months until identified and buried. “A wreath from the Kew Guild was among the floral tributes”, his Kew Guild Journal obituary noted. He was the son of Frederick William and Ethel Miles, Clench Common, Wiltshire.

J.C.Nauen, October 1943
Assistant Curator, Botanic Gardens Singapore from 1935. Served with G.H. Spare as a sergeant volunteer in the 3rd Penang, SSVF Straits Settlement Volunteer Force. His botanic skills were of help gardening and collecting plants from the local area to help keep fellow prisoners alive. Nauen died as a Japanese POW prisoner of war working on the Burma-Siam railway in October 1943 of blood poisoning

T.W. Rayment, 14 June 1942
Flight Sergeant Thomas Watkins Rayment, Air Gunner, 7 Squadron, RAF (Volunteer Reserve) aged 28. Buried at Avesnes-sur-Helpe Communal Cemetery, France.
‘Tommy’ Rayment is buried alongside several of his crew after being shot down during a bombing raid over Essen and the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial areas. Son of Herbert John Rayment and Louise Rayment, Beecroft, NSW, Australia. Born to English parents working in the seed business in NSW, Australia, Tommy was at Kew from 1938-1940 in he Tropical & Decorative Departments. He volunteered for the RAF from July 23,1940 and survived many bombing missions. He was shot down once at sea, the sole survivor of his crew, picked up by a trawler after five hours in a rubber dinghy.

E.H. Robson, 23 October 1944
Born in 1912, Edward Herbert Robson entered Kew in 1935 after working in private estate gardens and became foreman in the Temperate House until 1938 when he moved to work in the parks of Coventry. He had already joined the Royal Berkshire Regiment in October 1940 by the time Coventry was bombed in late 1940 and 1941. His brother Major John Elliott Robson of the same regiment was also killed in Italy on 7th October 1944 and a third brother was injured and taken prisoner at Arnhem. His Kew Guild Journal 1946 obituary notes him as collecting and sending back plants and seeds throughout his service in Palestine, Egypt and Italy. His grave is in Florence War Cemetery in Italy.

F.G.Selby, 4 December 1943
Born August 4 1913, Frederick George Selby entered Kew from 1937 – 1942 serving as student gardener and then Foreman in the Decorative department after several years working in private gardens in Cornwall and Surrey. He joined the RAF on October 16, 1942 as aircrew becoming a Sergeant Air Gunner.
Selby was killed during a bombing raid on Leipzig on December 3-4, 1943. He is recorded as visiting Kew two days before his final flight. Air Gunner F.G. Selby is buried At Becklingen War Cemetery in Germany. He was the son of William Frank and Alice Selby, and husband of Rita May Selby.

Eric Egerton Smith, 23 November 1941
Trooper 7910903,11th Hussars, Royal Armoured Corps. Joined Born June 19 1914, Smith was at Kew as a student gardener from February 1939 to June 12 1940 when he enlisted in the 11th Hussars, after previous service with the Parks Department, Hounslow. Buried in Knightsbridge War Cemetery, Acroma, Libya. Smith died during the Libyan Desert campaign driving an armoured car on patrol towards Italian and German enemy lines at Sidi Rezegh. Son of George Egerton Smith & Lilian Nelly Smith, Heston, Middlesex.

Eric Smith’s desert burial ground Knightsbridge War Cemetery, Acroma, Libya (Image copyright: CWGC website http://www.cwgc.org)

G.H. Spare, 7 February 1945
Gordon Henry Spare, Private 6070 SSVF Straits Settlements Volunteer Force / 3rd Battalion (Penang and Province Wellesley Volunteer Corps), Singapore Volunteers, died at Labuan, Borneo as a Japanese POW. Remembered on column 396 Singapore Memorial. Son of Harry and Grace Spare, Wallington, Surrey, and husband of Rose Ellen Spare, Worthing, Sussex. His wife, young son and daughter were evacuated clear  of danger before the Japanese invasion.

Singapore Memorial (image copyright CWGC website http://www.cwgc.org)

J.W. Sutch, 8 August 1944
Royal Armoured Corps, Trooper, 1st Northants Yeomanry. John Wilfred Sutch was born on November 8 1923 and served at Kew as a “Gardens boy” from 1939-1942. He is buried in the Banneville La Campagne war cemetery, Calvados, France. Sutch was a tank driver and died during the battle for the Falaise Gap in the Normandy campaign after D-Day.

Beautifully kept garden setting of Banneville La Campagne War Cemetery , Calvados, France where Kew’s J.W.Sutch lies buried. (Image copyright: CWGC http://www.cwgc.org)

P.E.Thyer, 17 June 1944
Lance Corporal 589614V, Royal Natal Carabineers, South African Forces, Berbena War Cemetery, Italy. Born July 5 1911, he was the son of William H. and Kate Thyer, Glastonbury, Somerset. He was at Kew between 1936 and 1937. He transferred to South Africa as an Exchange student at Government House Gardens, Pretoria in 1937 until he enlisted in 1943 after part-time service whilst still employed as a gardener. Thyer died aged 32, in action at Belvedere Farm, Citta d’Pieve, Italy. Many of the burials in this cemetery are related to a tank battle between the 6th South African Battalion and the Hermann Goering Panzer Division in Italy.

So that (as of April 2013)  is brief information on  13 of the Kew casualties named on the bronze memorial plaque on the Kew Gardens memorial.

Who the 14th name belongs to will have to wait until I next visit Kew or somebody checks and leaves a comment on the blog here.

Several other Kew related wartime casualties are mentioned in the Kew Guild Journal tributes.

Norman Laurence Harding, July 23 1941  RAF Sergeant Wireless Operator and Air Gunner, 18th Squadron, reported missing (later presumed killed in action) after an attack by Blenheim bombers on shipping off the coast of France on July 23 1941. Bought up at Kew, the son of Laurence Harding, Norman as a 19-year-old had worked in Kew’s Herbarium Library from 1933-34.

Percy Henry Patmore MBE, MM, 26 February 1944
‘Pat’ was a Ministry of Agriculture ARP Officer and a District Warden in Westminster during the war, well-known to many Kew staff. He earned his Military Medal in the First World War. He was killed by injuries from a bomb on his home at 80 Cat Hill in East Barnet in the little blitz of February 20 1944. Passed away from injuries in Wellhouse Hospital, 26 February 1944.

Posted on behalf of the World War Zoo Gardens Project at Newquay Zoo, researching what happened in zoos and botanic gardens in wartime. Find out  more about the project on the Botanic Gardens Conservation International BGCI website article from the BGCI Roots journal by Mark Norris

Dig for Victory 1917 (World War 1 style), the lost gardeners of Kew and the fortunate Herbert Cowley (1885 – 1967)

“There is still a great deal of labour employed for example, in pleasure grounds and bedding out which in the present circumstances should be put to better account“

(The Garden, editorial No. 2359, 3/2/17)

Herbert Cowley (1885-1967) from his Kew Guild journal obituary 1968

Corporal Herbert Cowley returned from the trenches in 1915 to his editing desk at The Garden magazine, walking with a stick from a shrapnel wound to his knee cap. In this he was somewhat lucky as 37 of his former Kew Gardens colleagues were killed (see forthcoming blog post on the Lost Gardeners of Kew).

This was a generation of gardeners for whom ‘digging trenches’  had a deadly double meaning. Active in the Kew Guild for Old Kewite staff as its secretary, he also edited the Kew Guild Journal, recently placed online. After four years as journal editor from 1909 to 1914 and time off for military service, he became editor of The Garden in 1915/16 and carried on as a gardening writer until the late 1930s.

Unlike his fallen Kew colleagues, Herbert Cowley lived to the grand age of 82, dying in Newton Abbott in Devon in November 1967. There is a lovely description of him at Dartington as:

“that eighty-year-old gentleman with the vivid blue eyes, who retired from the world of horticultural journalism in 1936, yet who still remembered everyone and everything from those days”

recalled a researcher who had tracked him down to talk about his friendship with Gertrude Jekyll (quoted on pg. 79, Beatrix Jones (1872-1959):Fifty Years of Landscape by Diane K. McGuire)

The Garden 1917, edited by Herbert Cowley.

In my collection of wartime gardening books at Newquay Zoo as part of the World War Zoo Gardens project,  I have a slightly musty bound year’s copy of The Garden magazine from 1917, an edition  that Cowley edited. This is one of the wartime volumes I’ve bought whilst researching  the wartime history of zoos and associated botanic gardens.  Leafing through its yellowing pages, it is sometimes hard to believe at first that there is a war on. Only when you begin to read between the lines or look at the adverts do you begin to pick up glimpses of the upheavals caused by war on an Empire of pioneer plant hunters, foresters, farmers and botanists called back from around the world to defend their mother country. I will feature more in detail from this random 1917 edition in a future blog post.

Herbert Cowley as Editor at The Garden magazine was no desk gardener. As a career gardener he had risen through the ranks. His father Henry was a ‘domestic gardener’. Herbert studied at Swanley College for two years, one of the last eight men students before it became a female horticultural college around 1902. Swanley then trained many lady gardeners who dug for victory in both world wars. He worked at Lockinge Gardens in Berkshire before studying at Swanley, at some point for the royal garden at Frogmore and after Swanley for the famous nursery family of Veitch’s at Feltham. One of that same family, Major John Leonard Veitch MC (Military Cross) of the Devon Regiment would be killed on 21 May 1918, one of Cowley’s Old Kewite & Veitch’s nursery family.

Cowley joined Kew Gardens and appears always to have been a popular colleague. The Kew Guild Journal describes him in 1915/16 as having been much sought after by different departments, eventually settling in the Orchid department in 1905, probably from his experience with Orchids at one of the Veitch’s nurseries’ specialities. Veitch’s employed several famous plant hunters to collect exotic plants from around the world for the conservatories and gardens of Victorian and Edwardian Britain in one of the ‘golden ages’ of British estates, big houses and impressive gardening schemes. It was the Downton Abbey age. All this would go into decline after the war as it poignantly did at Heligan Gardens in Cornwall and many places elsewhere as a result of rising costs, loss of labour, fortunes or heirs. By the time of Herbert Cowley’s death in 1967, many of these country houses, their gardens  and their gardeners would have vanished into memories and yellowing  pages of his gardening magazines and Country Life in bound volumes in archives.  

From early on Herbert Cowley was active in learning, sharing and passing on information, a quality that any good gardening writer needs, through Kew’s Mutual Improvement Lectures in 1906/7 season. Sadly the prewar lecture lists contain the names of some of the Kew staff who would soon be killed on active service. Cowley left Kew around 1907 to join The Gardener magazine as a subeditor (later called Popular Gardening). He then became Assistant Editor at a different title, The Garden in 1910. This was the magazine he was to return to as Editor in 1915/6 until 1926; this is the magazine that I have the 1917 edition in my collection. Cowley then edited Gardening Illustrated from 1923-26, another success in a long career as a gardening journalist and writer.  At some point he worked for Wallace & Co of Tunbridge Wells, nursery-men and landscape architects. He wrote his final (?)  book The Garden Year from Tunbridge Wells in 1936;  March & April excerpts of his advice are included at the end of this blog post:

“In my capacity as editor of gardening journals I have many times been asked for a practical book containing reminders for garden work all the year round. This book is specially written to supply that want – it is in fact a modern gardening calendar in book form … 

Reminders for each department – utilitarian as well as ornamental – from the kitchen garden to the orchid house – will be found in these pages.  

It is hoped that this book will be given a place in the front row of the gardener’s bookshelf and that it will prove useful all the year round.

The information given is based on generally accepted practice and the season for doing things in any well-ordered garden” (Preface, The Garden Year, 1936)

Frontispiece to The Garden Year 1936, written by Herbert Cowley.

“Well-ordered”,  ”practical”, “each department” of the garden, this is the voice of the Kew-trained gardener from the Edwardian age . Cowley writes in a clear, no-nonsense advice style about gardening. At first sight there is very little personal material, so it is hard to glimpse from his writing what he made of his wartime experiences as a temporary warrior. Like many of his generation, he got on with life after the war and probably didn’t talk or write about it much.

His army records (available on genealogy sites like ancestry.co.uk) reveal that he enlisted early in the war on 7th September 1914 as No. 2477 in the 12th County of London Regiment (the London Rangers). He very quickly embarked for France by 25 December 1914, just after the famous Christmas Truce and football matches in No Man’s Land. He may well have been a Territorial Army soldier to have enlisted and embarked so swiftly. His brother Charles Cowley  (b. 1890, Wantage, Berks – d. 1973, New Zealand) served in the same regiment from 1915 and became a Sergeant, invalided out with trench foot to become a musketry instructor in devon.  

In one of Herbert Cowley’s  postwar letters in his  National Archives British Army Service records, he complains to the Army authorities in 1920 from his residence at Curley Croft, Lightwater, near Bagshot :

“I have received so far no medals whatsover for services rendered at the Front in 1914/15. I was in the 12th London Regiment and went to Belgium with the 1st Battalion on Christmas Eve.”

He would eventually be awarded the ‘Pip, Squeak and Wilfred’ trio of medals for soldiers who served so early in the war. He was also awarded the War Badge by 1916, a useful public symbol which showed others that he had been injured and demobilised, protecting him from the comments and white feathers of the ignorant or unknowing. Cowley had got what was known as a ‘Blighty’ wound, serious enough to get him invalided out of the army but one that allowed him to live an active life. He was to suffer other family tragedies though.

Cowley is recorded in the 1916 Kew  Guild Journal as being “wounded twice” in the spring battles of Ypres in 1915. Looking through his army and pension records, he was wounded on May 4 1915, as GSW Right Knee (either Gun Shot Wound or shrapnel wound?). The entry is hard to read on the ‘burnt documents’ as these Blitz damaged records are known. Over the next few days of fighting on the Frezenberg Ridge in the Second Battle Of Ypres, it is recorded at 1914-18.invisionzone.com website entries about the 1st Battalion, that the fighting “brought about the end of the original battalion.” The battalion had also been involved in the first German poison gas attack on 22 April 1915.

Cowley was lucky to be alive, if injured; only 53 of his original battalion comrades survived unscathed  after this action at Ypres, an area soon to become as sadly well known as the Somme. The Kew Guild Journal 1916 notes his absence from the 1915 Kew Guild dinner speeches as “Our Secretary Rifleman H. Cowley (cheers) in hospital at Oxford, wounded at the knee.” Obviously a popular man as the ‘cheers’ shows. In an uncanny or eerie coincidence, the 1911 census lists his sister Annie (b. 1887) as being a nurse in domestic service to the Prentice family of the oddly named Ypres House, Rye in Sussex.

By the end of the 1915,  Herbert Cowley would be invalided out of the Army, be recovering from wounds and married to Elsie Mabel Hurst on 8th December 1915 in Kingston. By the end of this same year, several more of his Kewite gardening colleagues would be dead. Herbert Cowley went on to have at least one son. Many of his Kew colleagues who died in the First World War left many children fatherless.

A walk in the trench cemeteries in my early twenties past rows of teenage soldiers’ graves  made me feel both prematurely old and also fortunate to have a life ahead of me. Searching through book auction websites reveals Cowley to have made good use of his extra lease of life, a life  denied to so many of his generation.  Cowley very quickly returned his gardening and writing talents  to produce many books of practical, no-nonsense advice for the gardening enthusiast, in his own way helping the war effort in the First World War’s version of Dig for Victory.

In the 1917 journal,  his own book Vegetable Growing in Wartime is reviewed. His  article on this topic appears soon after, amidst many articles on vegetable allotments for the novice gardener, some written by women. Cowley’s book quickly went into a second edition as the First World War Home Front food situation in Britain appeared more and more worrying.  Bad  harvests and the increasing German submarine attacks on merchant shipping was causing shortages, price rises  and uncertainty over future supply. Rationing was introduced in Britain in the last years of the First World War. In Germany the Allied blockade was to have even greater effects on the wartime population and eventually its fighting ability.

Herbert Cowley continued to practical small pamphlets on Storing Vegetables and Fruit (1918), Cultivation with Movable Frames (1920) and a short book on The Modern Rock Garden (a book still available as print on demand online). His largest book The Garden Year appeared in 1936, when some sources suggest his garden journalism career came to an end.

He ha not given up plants though in 1936. For a well-known gardener  with a dodgy knee in his fifties, a new element to his career was beginning, away from the deadlines of editing  and publishing. In Theo A. Stephen’s My Garden magazine, a 1936 volume lists Cowley as leading:

“Garden Tours – starting from London on the evening of Saturday 20th, Mr. Herbert Cowley will conduct a party to the Swiss Alps. The tour will take fifteen days,returning on Sunday July 5th to London …”

So Cowley was still energetically going abroad in his fifties, despite his shrapnel wounds. Alpine plants were to remain a passion of Herbert Cowley to the end of his life in 1968. He was an honorary life  member of the British Alpine Society and his Modern Rock Garden remains in print to this day. His Kew Guild Journal obituary in 1968 mentions other plant hunting trips to the Dolomites and a notable visit to Bulgaria as a guest of King Ferdinand in the company of Kew contemporary C.F.Ball of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin in Dublin. (Ball was killed as a Private in the Royal Dublin Fusilers on 13 September 1915 as part of the Gallipoli campaign).

In a future blog post, I will look at the gardening and writing career of Theo Stephens in war and peace. Owned and edited by Stephens from 1934 to 1951, My Garden  was an unusual survivor amongst small magazines throughout the paper shortages of World War 2.

Cowley had a long  working relationship with Gertrude Jekyll, to whom she records her thanks in A Gardening Companion:

“and lastly to her devoted friend and colleague, Mr. Herbert Cowley, editor of The Gardening Illustrated during the period of her contribution to it, for many of the photographs which materially enhance such value as this book may possess.”

The Fate of The South Border, Gertrude Jekyll, January 20, 1917, The Garden magazine

An entry in the 1917 The Garden  magazine describes how Miss Jekyll dug up the South Border, one of her flower beds at Munstead to plant potatoes (photograph by Cowley?). Many of the famous postwar photographs of Jekyll’s Munstead Wood and Miss Jekyll are attributed to Cowley. Judith Tankard in a recent beautifully illustrated Country Life article launching her Gertrude Jekyll book (27 April  2011 pdf reprinted at judithtankard.com):

“in her articles published before the First World War she supplied most of the pictures herself, but after that, she relied on photographs taken by Herbert Cowley, who became Country Life‘s Gardens Editor after the departure of E.T. Cook in 1911“.

Many of Cowley’s early booklets were published by the Country Life magazine publishers / George Newnes. They produced small and useful booklets throughout the Great War well into the Second World War as part of  the ‘dig for Victory’ efforts.

Cowley, according to Tankard, “was a frequent guest at Munstead Wood [and] snapped the famous picture of Jekyll strolling in her Spring Garden in 1918.” He is remembered as a prolific photographer in his Kew Guild Journal 1968 obituary by A.G.L Hellyer, a noted editor of Amateur Gardening and garden writer (1902-1993) in the Second World War period:

“throughout the 1920s he was always a prominent figure at shows – with close-cropped hair and always a large wooden camera and stand. He seemed to do all his own photography as well as being editor.”

By Spring 1918 when he had snapped these famous photographs, Cowley would have undertaken a more unpleasant task.  As oldest surviving Cowley brother, he was busy of sorting out the probate or estate on 12 March 1918  of his older brother Henry William Cowley. Brother Henry had died whilst training on military service on 14 September 1917. Lance Corporal Henry W. Cowley TR9/76191 (his trainee / regimental number) 26th Reserve Training Battalion died in a comatose state of a cerebral haemorrhage at Napsbury Hospital St Albans. Cowley’s brother is buried near Heathrow airport at Heston (St. Leonard) Churchyard as the family lived in Isleworth, Middlesex.
Brother Henry’s service and pension records still contain the urgent  telegrams from medical staff to his wife that Henry was dangerously ill in hospital. Among other records are a list of his surviving possessions to be returned, poignant personal items such as pipes, tobacco, whistle, cigars. A schoolteacher, Henry W. Cowley attested on 22 November 1915 and was mobilised for training on 16 July 1917, called up in the 34/35 year old age range. His wife Olive was awarded a pension of 26/3 a week for herself and her three children Henry F G Cowley (born 23/08/1906, d. 1986 Newton Abbott, Devon), Ivy Cowley (b. 6/01/1908)  and Eric Jack Cowley (b. 24/2/1911, . 1984), all born at Heston, Middlesex. Later Herbert Cowley would again be listed professionally as ‘editor’ when he sorted his father Henry’s will or probate after his father died on 3 April 1930 at Easton, Portland, Dorsetshire.

Richard van Emden’s recent 2011 book The Quick and The Dead gives a much fuller account of how the burials, search for the missing and impact on the surviving families affected the now passing generation of surviving children and their own families right up to the present day. Some of the long-serving Kew staff such as C.P. Raffill, A.B. Melles and others worked in the Graves Registration Unit and for the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission; in this way Kew was involved in planning the planting of these cemeteries with suitable plants for the climate.  

Herbert Cowley’s side of the family was not the only one to lose a relative. Two years earlier on the first day of Battle of the Somme, his wife Elsie Mabel (nee Hurst) lost her 30 year old brother Percy, a clerk. Rifleman 4278 Percy Haslewood (or Hazlewood) Hurst of the 1st /16th Battalion, London Regiment (Queen’s Westminster Rifles) was
killed on the 1st July 1916, during his battalion’s diversionary attack on Gommecourt. Percy left a wife Geraldine of 18 Teddington Park, Middlesex. His widowed clerk / accountant father Samuel and typist sister Elsie Mabel was left grieving for his loss. Like Herbert’s Kewite colleagues Rifleman John Divers and Corporal Herbert Martin Woolley, Percy H. Hurst is listed on the Thiepval memorial to the Missing of The Somme (Pier / face 13C). Several other Kew Gardens staff are listed in the Kew Guild magazine ‘Roll of Honour’ section as serving in Percy Hurst’s local London Regiment but thankfully survived.

The Kew Guild journal obituary ends with an unusual coda to Herbert Cowley’s gardening career. According to an (obituary?) article it quotes from the Western Guardian on November 9th 1967, Cowley left journalism to move to Withypool on Exmoor to run a riding school for 20 years throughout what must have been the wartime period 1940s up to the late 1950s. I wonder what this old soldier, who had seen the widespread call up and loss of horses, their grooms and riders  in the Great War, made of Exmoor’s famous mounted Home Guard patrols in a very different
war, a war that would cause him more family grief.

Cowley and his wife made a final move to the Brixham area in the early 1960s, growing camellias, nerines and alpine plants. (His Western Guardian obituary notes him as an honorary life member of the Alpine Garden Society). This is where he was encountered at Dartington in his eightieth year, with his “vivid blue eyes” and excellent recall.

Herbert’s unexpected move to the West Country and retirement from journalism may be explained by a sad wartime event in 1940. His Kew Guild Journal 1968 obituary concludes that he is survived by his wife Elsie (b. 1893?  d. 1969) and a son (name as yet undiscovered). However it seems one possible son is likely to have been killed in World War Two.  RAF Sergeant Observer Robert Hurst Cowley, 580643, died aged only 22 on the 2nd September 1940. His 57 Squadron was flying Blenheim bombers on anti-shipping patrols over the North Sea from its base in Elgin in Scotland at the time before converting to Wellington bombers in November 1940. Robert is listed on the CWGC site as the son of Herbert & Elsie Mabel Cowley of East Grinstead, Sussex. Like many of his father’s Kew Gardens colleagues from the previous war, Robert Hurst Cowley has no known grave and is commemorated on panel 13 of the Runnymede Memorial to missing aircrew, one amongst 20327 names. Robert is also listed on the St. Thomas a Becket church, Framfield on the War Memorial as ‘of this parish’. Kew Gardens itself would lose several of its 1940s staff as aircrew during the Second World War (see future blog post), recorded on their war memorial.

I will end with some of Herbert Cowley’s March vegetable gardening advice from The  Garden Year (1936). The advice in some areas would soon be out of fashion or obsolete as rationing and Dig For Victory took hold again in Cowley’s lifetime. No doubt his 1917 Vegetable Gardening in Wartime booklet would be found on the shelves or second hand bookstall, dusted off and referred to many times again.

We’ve just started planting some 1930s / 1940s varieties of veg that Cowley would be familiar with in the World War Zoo Gardens project allotment at Newquay Zoo, despite the rain, frost and soggy ground. Heritage varieties such as The Sutton broad bean  seedlings, Early Onward peas and Ailsa Craig onions are all in, planted on the odd dry warm March  day.  By late summer they will be ready as fresh unsprayed  food for our zoo animals, especially our monkeys.

GARDEN OPERATIONS FOR MARCH (1936)

from The Garden Year 1936 by Herbert Cowley

Fruit & Vegetables

Wall fruit will require protection from frost.

Gooseberries are best pruned now and sprayed to keep birds at bay.*

Fruit tree planting must be completed.

Gaps in the Strawberry beds should be filled and Strawberry plants in pots for forcing should be taken inside.  

Autumn-fruiting Raspberries need cutting down

Black Currants infected with ‘big bud’ require spraying.*

Grape Vines, Peaches, Nectarines and Figs require attention.

Main crop potatoes should be planted, also Jerusalem Artichokes, Shallots and Asparagus.

The main sowings of all vegetable crops are necessary this month.

Tomatoes will require potting on.

Celery must be sown in gentle heat.

Herbs can be planted.

A seed bed can be sown for the cabbage tribe.   

GARDEN OPERATIONS FOR APRIL (1936)

from The Garden Year 1936 by Herbert Cowley

Fruit & Vegetables

Apples and Pears should be sprayed with lime-sulphur and lead arsenate*,  and bark ringed if necessary.*

Gooseberries should be sprayed with  derris.*

Raspberries and Loganberries need mulching.

Melon beds should be made and seed sown.

Peaches and Nectarines should be disbudded.

Grape Vine flowers should be pollinated.

Onions should be planted out.

Carrot and Beet   main crops should be sown.

Celery trenches should be prepared.

Mushroom beds can be made this month.

Vegetable Marrows and Ridge Cucumbers should be sown in the greenhouse.   

Peas, Beans, Spinach, Lettuce should be sown.

* Many of these sprays are now wisely banned (2013).

March 1936 tasks
The Garden Year

April 1936 tasks, The Garden Year

 

Last wartime letters of Peter Falwasser, Chester Zoo aquarist 1916 -1942

Arriving at the office in Oakfield House in Chester Zoo  70 years ago this week, the first week of February 1943, the wartime postman (or more likely postwoman) carried  some sad news.  One letter was  postmarked Manchester 31 Jan 1943 (about the time and date that I draft this blog 70 years on) and stamped with an attractive orange  2d and green 1/2d stamp bearing the portrait of the Queen’s father George VIth. Within was a short handwritten letter on one piece of paper:

“I feel sure that you will be sorry to hear of the death of my brother, Peter Felix Falwasser, whilst on active service in the Middle East. He died in hospital on December 23rd as the result, no  doubt of  the serious injuries he had received at Tobruk a long time ago. Subsequently he had operation but he seemed to have made a good recovery. He had for some time been on base duties at GHQ, so that his death, when seeming to be comparatively safe, comes as a severe blow…” (letter by John F Falwasser to the Mottershead, 30/1/43, Chester Zoo Archive).

Selection from letter 27 March 1941 reprinted in Chester Zoo Archive Zoo News, 1942/3

This letter is filed away in  the archive of Chester Zoo  amongst hundreds  of letters to and from its enterprising founder George  Mottershead, saved  by the zoo and his daughter June over many decades.

Among this archive has recently come to light a small batch of four poignant letters written by or about  the zoo’s early aquarist in the 1940s, Peter Falwasser.

 ”Possibly you had heard from him”", John Falwasser’s letter continues, “but in any event you will like to know that his interests in wildlife and nature were most helpful to him while on Active Service & during a recent leave to Palestine.”

Peter was a 26 year old ‘bomb casualty’ of the desert war, buried in a trench during an attack by a German dive bomberat Tobruk. He lost two of his mates who died from their injuries, lost the hearing in his right ear and received back and chest injuries which put him in the 63rd General Hospital hospital in Egypt for four months. In the same letter (opposite), he describes the wildlife he’d seen. He went back on active service to his regiment in 1942. Gunner P.F. Falwasser, 952126, (Rocket Troop, B/O Battery) 1st Regiment Royal Artillery, Middle East Forces  is buried in a Commonwealth War Graves Commission hospital-linked cemetery at Heliopolis, near Cairo in Egypt.  A photograph taken by the Rogers family of Peter’s grave in Egypt can be seen online at the excellent website of the  The War Graves Photographic Project.  

Peter had written three other surviving letters, one of which was already part published in the Chester Zoo News, all about the wonderful range of fish, birds and other wildlife he hoped to bring back to Chester Zoo after the war. Peter’s last letter to the zoo arrived in the same post as the one from his brother, announcing his death. These letters are a gift to a zoo historian studying wartime conditions in zoos, full of his questions home which prompt other questions 70 years later:

“I often wonder how the zoo is jogging along and whether attendances are keeping up. Rationing of foods must be making things very difficult for you. Since I have been abroad I have twice visited the Cairo Zoo …” (Undated letter to George Mottershead by Peter Falwasser, 1941? 1942? Chester Zoo Archive)

” I often wonder how things have been going on at the Zoo especially through a wartime winter? The only news I have of your activities was a small newspaper cutting sent by my sister concerning the removal of certain animals from Bristol Zoo to Chester Zoo for the war’s duration. This I took as a good sign that the Zoo was still flourishing & I hope it continues to do so … Raids on Liverpool have given me some qualms as to the safety of the zoo  … .” (Letter to George Mottershead by Peter Falwasser, 27 May 1941 , Chester Zoo Archive)

Chester Zoo and its ‘new’ aquarium continues to flourish, 70 years on, in its own way a fitting testament and memorial to the memory and hard work of ‘Mr Mott’, his daughter June and keepers like ‘gentle Peter’ Falwasser (as June describes him in her memoir Reared in Chester Zoo)

“I was very pleased indeed to hear that you have had a record season and really wonder how you have managed it. I’m afraid that any other man would have given in long ago … I should be interested to know what staff you have now and what you have lost in the way of the parrots … as seed became scarcer and more expensive …  I am sorry that Chester Zoo’s aquarium had had to be neglected owing to lack of interest  on the part of the staff. What have you got left and are you still using all the tanks?” (Letter to George Mottershead by Peter Falwasser, 10/11/42, Chester Zoo Archive).

This letter is likely to be his last letter, the one mentioned in Chester Zoo News (all of which newsletters are scanned an available on Cd disk from Chester Zoo’s library). With this last letter is Peter’s photograph of a lion from Tel Aviv Zoo, Palestine, dated 19th Oct 1942.

Peter knew the  Chester Zoo aquarium that he and the young schoolgirl June Mottershead created in the basement of Oakfield House was not faring well. This happened to many wartime aquariums, big and small. Oakfield House is still open for dining and conferences,  part of the attractive gardens of Chester Zoo. As a result  I have spent  several convivial meals and evenings during zoo conferences  below the ground floor there, little knowing what hopes of a fine wartime fish collection and of a zoo career after the war were frustrated by Peter’s  death. His letters were full of plans for the new aquarium after the war, and notes on species to stock:

“If things come out OK after the War, you must build a good reptile house in place of the old greenhouse and as time goes on a Sea Lion Pool as I feel that both would be good attractions; they only have a couple of Sea Lions at Cairo but there is usually as big a crowd there as anywhere. They charge each person 1 pt (two and a half old pence) to throw one fish into the pool, quite a good money maker.”  (Letter to George Mottershead by Peter Falwasser, 10/11/42, Chester Zoo Archive).

At my home zoo at Newquay, where the World  War Zoo Gardens project is run from, we fundraise in the main season in much the same way by selling sprat fish to visitors to feed our Humboldt’s Penguins during keeper talks.  The two and a half pence in 1942 has now gone up to 50p a fish today! Peter Falwasser would be pleased to see how Chester Zoo has grown to become an active breeding centre of endangered species, including fish. A Sea Lion pool was built after the war and there are several impressive reptile areas, including Komodo dragon lizards. “Lizards abound everywhere in the desert …” , he wrote in his May 1941 letter. Few could have foreseen in 1942 the need for  Chester Zoo’s new Act Now! conservation projects for endangered wildlife.

Is there a photograph of Peter Falwasser anywhere in a family album? I am currently researching a little more about Barnsley born Peter Falwasser’s family history.You can see my growing Falwasser family tree based  on research in several other family trees on ancestry.co.uk. His solicitor father John Felix Falwasser of Cawthorne Lane, Kexborough nr. Barnsley in Yorkshire (1870-1940) and mother Mary Annie (nee Cousins, 1870-1932) appear to be dead by the time Peter joined the Army.

Peter was the youngest of eight children, two of whom died very young (Ione, 1900-1915 and daphne 1909-1912). John Frederick Falwasser, his older brother (b. 1902) had the sad task of dealing with Probate and Peter’s Will, along with help from his unmarried older sister Christine (b.1905). Peter  mentions wartime letters from his sister(s) as he had several other siblings Theodore (1903-1979), Angela (1907-1999) and Katherine (b. 1912) who would long outlive him.

I will update the blog as I find out more about Peter and other zoo keepers and botanic garden staff  who served in wartime.

All the Falwasser letters are quoted from with the permission / copyright of the Chester Zoo Archive.

Not just zoo animals get adopted, even wartime allotments get Christmas presents …

Christmas is often a struggle to find the right gift, which is why we do lots of Christmas animal adoptions at Newquay Zoo and Paignton Zoo. Many zoos do this gift scheme – you can find your local BIAZA zoo in Britian and Ireland on the BIAZA website. 

Animal adoptions were one innovative wartime solution to shortage of funding to feed the animals especially when zoos closed at the outbreak of war for weeks or sometimes months in 1939. Both Chester Zoo and London Zoo claim to have first set this up in 1939/40, a scheme which was picked up by other zoos and has never stopped.   

Our wartime allotment has just received its first Christmas card of the year – by email! It was a lively Oxfam Unwrapped allotment gift e-card with a little Christmas message: “This Xmas gift of an allotment is one way of linking the allotment and project work of the World War Zoo Gardens project at Newquay Zoo with what is happening in troubled parts of the world today.” Maybe this new allotment in Afghanistan is its first informal twin …

It is very appropraite twinning as Oxfam itself was born out of a humanitarian response to wartime famine in Greece in the 1940s. You can find out more about the allotment gifts at Oxfam’s  website http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shop/oxfam-unwrapped/gardeners/plant-an-allotment-ou7026ag

As the Oxfam e-card went on to say - ”More budding UK gardeners are discovering the joys of growing their own. But for many poor women and men an allotment isn’t just a way of saving on the weekly shop, it’s how they feed their families and earn a bit extra to buy other essentials. And this gift will supply the tools, seeds and training to create working allotments that will produce a lot more.”

I was really pleased to hear that “As part of this project in Badakhshan, Afghanistan, Oxfam is helping women to establish kitchen gardens on their land to supplement their income and their family’s diet. Oxfam provides the training and distributes the seeds for the women to grow a variety of vegetables and crops. The extra produce that the family cannot eat is sold at local markets.

Shirin Gul is one gardener who has been reaping the benefits after Oxfam distributed seeds in her village: “It’s very expensive to buy vegetables here in the mountains. I am lucky as I have a plot of land. Our family has always grown vegetables on this plot – but the Oxfam seeds mean the amount and variety of vegetables that I grow has increased. It used to just be potatoes, onions and egg-plants but now I have tomatoes, beans, squash, lettuce, cucumber – oh, everything.”

Zeinab, from the nearby village of Sah Dasht, is also a lady with green fingers. Her garden is full of produce. There are beans, potatoes, okra and tomatoes all ready to be picked. “I had never really done much farming before though I did grow potatoes but Oxfam gave me some training to help me grow the maximum amount of vegetables.”

I’m very pleased that one  Oxfam project area is Afghanistan. Each year at Newquay Zoo’s Christmas carol service,  the retiring collection is usually for our conservation projects at the zoo and overseas, some of them in former war-afflicted areas like Vietnam. Ten years or more ago in the aftermath of 9/11 in 2001/2, I can remember asking visitors for contributions to the global zoo effort to support the recovery of  Kabul Zoo in Afghanistan which had suffered under the Taliban. There also can’t be many of us who don’t know a service family with relatives who have served there in the last ten years or are spending a wartime christmas away from home on active service.

As mentioned in our November poppy day blog post 2012, it is the 70th anniversary on Sunday of the death of Chester Zoo’s aquarist Peter Felix Falwasser who died of wounds from the desert war in North Africa on active service on  22nd December 1942.

It will soon be time to plan the spring planting to provide a small amount of fresh food for our zoo animals as they did in wartime. I’ve turned over some ground in a one-armed digging style to lazily let the frost do its work on weeds, pests and soil quality. I hope to be fully fit for planting in the Spring season when the ground warms up, but at the moment it’s time to flick through plant catalogues and plan planting schemes. I’m also reading Lizzie Colliingham’s The Taste Of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food  (Penguin 2012, now in paperback and Kindle), by turns both entertaining and sobering account of how food and famine became a global issue in wartime.  I’ve found this has changed my view of the Second World War as much as Kenneth Helphand’s Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime.

I’ve enjoyed reading and watching the BBC Wartime Farm series Look out for the BBC Wartime Farm Christmas Special tonight at 9pm on BBC2 on the 18th December 2012 if the OU site and Wartime Housewife’s blog etc. are correct on transmission times! The main Wartime Farm series is due out on DVD, but when oh when will the old 1980s BBC Wartime Kitchen and Garden series be issued on DVD?  All that is accessible at the moment are scraps on You Tube. Harry Dodson remains one of my gardening heroes. Sadly now Ruth Mott has also passed away in July 2012 earlier this year with some affectionate obituaries.  

After the difficult and painful year I’ve had, I wish all the more a peaceful, happy and healthy Christmas and New Year 2013  to our blog readers, zoo visitors, zoo staff, their animals and gardeners everywhere.

2012 – a whole growing season missed in the World War Zoo wartime garden …

Hello again – at long last! It’s been over 6 months since my last blog post and a whole growing season in 2012 has come and gone in the wartime garden at Newquay Zoo. And I missed it all …

Mr Bloom visits the World War Zoo Dig For Victory wartime garden at Newquay Zoo, 2 April 2012 with project manager Mark Norris.

April 2012 started really well with a visit to Newquay Zoo from popular Children’s TV gardener Mr. Bloom. After an exhausting day signing autographs and singing songs from his show, he popped over to see our award-winning World War Zoo wartime garden plot.

Somewhere in the midst of the RHS National Gardening week in April I downed tools mid planting and didn’t come back.  I have a good excuse (and an impressive scar to prove it) as I have been offline and away from my daily work and wartime garden at Newquay Zoo since mid April with ill-health requiring an operation.

So whilst I recovered offline and at home, my zoo colleagues got the 2012 harvest in for the zoo animals  - a small harvest, for the weather this growing season was generally poor.

Convalescence and nursing a still aching wound or operation scar have taught me a few things. Patience, for one. I also realise how physically difficult and slow their recovery and return to work would be for zoo keepers  injured during the war.

It’s poppy time again and time to spare a thought for keepers and animals affected by war over the last century. Below the list of keepers killed in action on the Belle Vue Zoo gardens staff memorial in Gorton Cemetery Manchester  is a postscript,  keepers who died after 1918 from the effects of war service.  My lungs are now healthy again but keepers and zoo staff at Belle Vue Zoo such as Bernard Hastain were passing away years later from the after-effects of being gassed in the First World War. You can read more about these men in last November’s blog posts, 2011.

I had hoped whilst convalescing off work to catch up on researching wartime zoos and botanic gardens  for our forthcoming book but morphine (an age-old pain-killer familiar to injured troops) doesn’t do much to help you concentrate on reading.  I did come across some interesting sections in books I was lent by kind friends on country houses in wartime. Some of those estates with animal collections had an important wartime role, as did those  later to be opened postwar as stately homes  and safari parks. Some such as Harewood House (still with a popular bird collection) were convalescent homes like the one you might have seen in Downton Abbey series 2.

Others such as Woburn housed London Zoo’s priceless library collection safe from the London Blitz and later housed a secret Wrennery of WRNS (navy women) working as part of the Bletchley Park codebreaking network.  Knowsley Safari Park at Prescot in Merseyside still bears the scars on its rough ground of tank and artillery training.

It was the loss of wartime heirs, shortage of staff, crippling death duties, lack of wartime maintenance and the destructive effects   of troops stationed in these houses that saw many estates broken up and sold off, houses demolished. Others opened to the public and developed leisure attractions to pay their way, such as Longleat  and its famous safari park. Maybe Downton Abbey series 47 or some such will see the grounds full of roaming lions or elephants …

So whilst wartime was a difficult time for zoos, and often fatal for their staff and animals, it had the surprising effect in postwar Britain of creating more zoos and wildlife parks when old estates were sold or opened to the public with animals as part of the attraction, alongside the house. Marwell Zoo is one such surviving example, created in the 1960s by John Knowles and once home to a secret wartime airfield. 

It’s Poppy month and also the 7oth anniversary of El Alamein in 1942.  Church bells silent since 1939 were rung in Britain to celebrate El Alamein,  featured in the wartime film Desert Victory.  Fighting between the Desert Rats and the Afrika Korps in the Western desert of North Africa claimed the life of one zoo keeper or aquarist, Peter Felix Falwasser of Chester Zoo, Yorkshire born despite his foreign-sounding name. A Gunner in the 1st Royal Horse Artillery, he died of wounds from the  Tobruk battles aged 26 on 22 December 1942. He’s buried in Heliopolis War cemetery, Cairo in Egypt, a wartime hospital cemetery beautifully maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.  

Chester Zoo Archive Zoo News, 1942/3

We hope to gain more such glimpses of wartime life from his letters home to his zoo colleagues from recent donations to the Chester Zoo archive by founder’s daughter June Mottershead, herself a wartime zoo keeper as set out in her story, Reared in Chester Zoo.

Whilst I was convalescing, I saw the Wartime Farm series on BBC TV and spotted on a leaflet for  improvised toys for Christmas a handmade wooden toy engine just like one in our World War Zoo Gardens  wartime collection.

So whilst zoo gift shops are full of lovely present ideas and expereinces,  this Christmas we hope to informally twin our wartime allotment   with a sustainable modern one through the gift of an allotment somewhere in the developing world through the Oxfam Unwrapped gifts scheme. There’s some great ideas for gifts and well worth a look at www.oxfamunwrapped.com

Signing off until the next post , hopefully only for a few weeks this time … Mark Norris, World War Zoo Gardens project, Newquay Zoo.

Over Here – 70th anniversary of first US troops arriving in Britain

Over Here, then off to D-Day beaches 1944: wreath at Trebah Gardens war memorial, Cornwall

Today 26th January 2012 marks the 70th anniversary of the first GI American servicemen arriving in Britain, the first  in blitzed Belfast then others through Clydeside and Bristol. By 1944, over a million US servicemen had arrived in every part of Britain from here in Cornwall, our zoo cousins at Paignton and Slapton in Devon.

 

Previous blog posts have told the story of Operation Tiger the tragic loss of life on training at Slapton Sands (our nature reserve run by FSC) and the GIs camped at Paignton Zoo’s Clennon Gorge. Many troops from the Torbay area embarked next to The Marine Spa which became in 2003 the peaceful location of Living Coasts, our sister zoo.

 

 In a rationed and blitzed Britain, Digging for Victory to feed itself, these young GIs and airmen changed not only our eating habits with gum, chocolate and unfamiliar plants like sweetcorn. They also changed our landscape and left many things behind.They left hard stuff like runways, beach ramps but also softer things – memories,  broken hearts but more positively,  many a GI bride.   

 

Many an American zoo employee was called up and served overseas, some never to return. American zoos and gardens went into a s alavge and Dig for Victory garden footing. Our World War Zoo Gardens at Newquay Zoo with its American plants like Sweetcorn / maize is a quiet memorial to zoo keepers of all nations from America to Japan, Germany to Russia, worldwide who served and suffered on the home front and the battlefield.

 

Previous blog posts (see the month by month selection) also mentioned the 1943 US Liberator crash, whose engine relics were displayed here at one of our World War Zoo garden events. Down at the bustling beaches of Watergate Bay near Newquay Zoo, home to the famous Fifteen and the Extreme Academy, look out for a simple plaque  marking the crash of a Liberator and the loss of its American crew in 1943, remembered each year by Douglas Knight , Newquay ‘boy’ now in his 80s.

Not forgotten. ‘Over here, over paid, and over sexed’ was one popular summary of the GIs in Britain, something Juliet Gardiner discusses critically in her wartime history books. The recently republished pocket advice manuals to US servicemen on life in wartime Britain  make fascinating reading about our strange British habits, cultural differences and hard wartime experiences. But we have much to remember and be thankful for … 

War Horse, War Elephant, War Ferret? The wartime role of zoo and other animals from Tommy’s Ark and the World War Zoo gardens?

 With all the publicity surrounding the film of War Horse this week, I was interested over Christmas to be given and read Richard Van Emden’s book on soldiers and their animals in the Great war, called Tommy’s Ark (Paperback, Bloomsbury), the animal equivalent of Kenneth Helphand’s Defiant Gardens book.

 Last week at Cornwall College Newquay, I delivered one of their varied programme of  research seminars by outside speakers, talking  about my research  into the role of zoos, zoologists, (botanic) gardens and nature in wartime.

Throughout the talk and questions, the value of nature and the natural world in extreme times kept cropping up. Peter McGregor the Professor who organises the seminars mentioned he had been surprised when he traced the famous research into Blue tits pecking cream through  tops milk bottles was published in and dates back to 1940, when he thought minds would be more  focussed on the Battle of Britain and threat of invasion.

The respect for and value (or lack of value) of wildlife in the midst of the strange life and death world of the trenches and wartime came up in conversation after the seminar too.  I was busy answering questions and  chatting whilst students looked through a small display afterwards of wartime memorabilia, wartime gardening and wildlife books and magazines from our collection. During this and other sessions, I’m often asked by students what they ‘could or should be reading and so I mentioned this new book by Richard van Emden to several students, alongside the older, more wide ranging books Jilly Cooper’s Animals in War (recently reprinted in paperback) and Juliet Gardiner’s The Animal’s War (IWM). Jilly’s book helped fundraise for a memorail to these animals in London.

Whipsnade elephants ploughing for victory (Animal and Zoo magazine Sept.1940) . In WW1, German zoo elephants did similar farming and forestry work. 

We had talked in the seminar about the known cases of keepers killed from London and Belle Vue Zoo (Manchester), many of them serving in the artillery either as hardy physical labour or more probably for their large animal handling skills of the horses and mules with the guns.

Alongside the War Horse type material of the suffering of horses and mules, Tommy’s Ark is full of unusual details about the mascots, pets and wildlife spotting, even the occasional spot of hunting and angling that officers and soldiers in the trenches recorded in diaries, letters home and in the oral history archive that Richard Van Emden and the Imperial War Museum have collected. Lieutenant Philip Gosse, RAMC, the son of a famous naturalist family, toured the trenches on the lookout for local small mammal specimens to be sent (stuffed) to the Natural History Museum in London. There is a roll of honour / war memorial of their staff killed in action near the NHM entrance.  Newquay’s doctor / director of health (or his relative?) Major AGP Hardwick RAMC crops up in the book, from an account in the IWM archives, of his smuggling ferrets back to the trenches for ratting duties. 

Tommy’s Ark  is a rich, rewarding, sometimes unsettling and well organised book by Richard Van Emden, http://www.richardvanemden.co.uk/ one to match his oral history The Last Fighting Tommy about Harry Patch  whose medals can be seen on display not far from our base in Newquay Zoo at Bodmin’s DCLI Museum   http://cornwalls-regimentalmuseum.org/specialfeatures.html

Why do the troops on both sides  notice animals, befriend them, make mascots of them? Several of these more unlikely or unruly mascots ended up in zoos, including the role model for Winnipeg the bear at London Zoo, better known as Winnie the Pooh in AA Milne’s books. The answer is probably the same as why the students I was talking to had staked their time and money (especially when tuition fees increase next year) in a course and career that will likely not make them rich. Probably not famous  either, except for some  budding wildlife film makers, photographers, potential presenters and journalists on the Wildlife Education and Media course.

It’s perhaps something in the blood, a vocation, a passion, a different view or value of the world that makes a professional or  amateur naturalist,  zookeeper, or aquarist  of one person, but seem a strange career choice to another. E.O. Wilson calls it biophilia, a love of living things. Richard Mabey has written very movingly about this, especially in his darkest days battling depression. Kenneth Helphand’s recent book Defiant Gardens, much mentioned in our wartime zoo gardens blog, covers much the same from a planting and gardening angle.  

The wartime pages of Animal and Zoo Magazine (1936-41) are full of articles that would not be out-of-place in today’s peacetime BBC Wildlife magazine – nature notes, photographs, zoo news – with the occasional snippet about how the war was affecting wildlife. There was an obvious  tension in the magazine letters page between those who would like to see no mention of the war at all (Dublin Zoo’s description as ‘a place of peaceful resort’ in war and peace comes into mind from Catherine De Courcy’s excellent recent history of that zoo) alongside those readers and naturalists who observed how the role, value  and lives of wild and domestic animals are changed by war.

The same generation that observed wildlife in the trenches went on to run zoos and observe wildlife in the Second World War where a whole new generation of naturalists were called up.  In this later war, the death of Chester Zoo’s aquarist Peter Fallwasser from wounds from the 1942 North Africa fighting (below) is made more poignant through his excitement about wildlife spotting in letters home from Egypt and the Nile, reproduced (below) in Chester Zoo News newsletters at the time. Copies of these newsletters 1930s – 1980s are available scanned on a CD Rom from Chester Zoo Archive.

 

Looking around the room at Cornwall College Newquay, many of the young men and women there were of an age where two or three generations before, they would have been called up on active service and war work and extraordinary things required of them. In an age where looming environmental problems and challenges are the modern equivalent of Churchill’s ‘gathering storm‘ in the 1930s, extraordinary things may well be required of this generation coming through.  

 

More from The World War Zoo Gardens project blog next month … until then, enjoy a peaceful few moments in the garden.

 

Chester Zoo Archive Zoo News, 1942/3

1942 ‘the end of the beginning’ 70 years on in the World War Zoo Gardens at Newquay Zoo

Thursday 1st January 1942      Very dark morning. Saw the New Year in with a drop of Don’s special port …

Friday 2nd January 1942            Not so bad a day. On Fire Watch in evening. Got permission and went down the Palais for a couple of hours. Had quite a nice time. (from Eileen’s Diary, 1942 – see below)

Happy New Year? 1941 was reckoned the ‘grimmest year of the war’ for Britain and the Allies by some historians (see our January 2011 blog post). 1942 didn’t start much better with the collapse of Empire outposts like Hong King, Singapore, Burma and Malaya and American bases like the Philippines before the unstoppable Bamboo Blitzkreig of the Japanese Imperial Army, Air Force and Navy.

Clays Fertiliser advert from 1940s Britain

By the end of 1941, despite the Enigma codebreaking successes at Bletchley Park http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/  (where several zoo staff and future conservationists were working, no doubt their ‘Zoo German’ being useful),  the war at sea against the U-boats was going badly for the convoys of Merchant ships supplying Britain, along with several large Royal Navy ships sunk in December 1941 by  the Japanese.   1942 would see large naval battles at Midway and Coral Sea.

Limited successes against the Italians in the Desert War of North Africa in late 1941 and early 1942 might have brought a ready crop of Italian prisoners into POW camps in Britain, soon to be working in the market gardens and fields of Britain. However January 1942 saw the arrival of a new German general for the Afrika Korps Rommel the Desert Fox who would soon see his troops besieging Tobruk (falling 21 June) and threatening Egypt. Only the victory by Montgomery on 4 November 1942 at El Alamein would reverse this long retreat and uncertainty.

The German advance at Stalingrad was stifled by another harsh winter and stubborn Russian resistance; German forces would collapse early in 1943. The church bells (a warning of invasion) were rung in Britain in celebration of North African victories for the first time since 1939. It was as Churchill observed, at a low point in his wartime leadership, the ‘end of the beginning’.  

From a World War Zoo Gardens perspective, one wonders how many keepers and staff from zoos and botanic gardens across Britain, the Empire, Europe, Germany, Russia and now America and Japan were now pitched on opposing sides into this now worldwide conflict.

Already by 1942 the shortages of ‘manpower’ in zoos were being plugged on a  by female staff and old veterans of the Great War.  By 1942, many Japanese zoo keepers and vets had been drafted into the army. The Japanese mainland was raided by Jimmy Doolittle’s US bomber squadron on April 18 1942. The official response to this raid on Tokyo was quite devastating, with many large zoo animals being euthanased on order of  the Japanese authorities and army, a sorry and unpleasant tale told in Mayumi Itoh’s book Japanese Wartime Zoo Policy.   

Percy Murray Adams ZSL Whipsnade Keeper

Already one of the unwilling guests of the Japanese Army, ZSL Whipsnade Keeper Percy Murray Adams was likely to have become  a Japanese POW during early 1942, dying on 28th July  1943  (see our November 2011 armistice blog post). One of his ZSL staff colleagues at London Zoo , ZSL Clerk Lieutenat Henry Peris Davies  RA was already dead ‘Killed in Action’ against the Japanese on 21 December 1941 aged 27 (listed on the CWGC Singapore Memorial, having no known grave). London Zoo staff, many of whom served and suffered through the Great War and the loss of 12 colleagues, were seeing it happen all over again. Almost exactly a year earlier on 18th December 1940 another ZSL Clerk Leonard Peachey had been killed in flying training with the RAF. 

By the end of 1942, quiet and gentle Peter Fallwasser the aquarist from Chester Zoo had died of wounds in North Africa on 22 December 1942, aged only 26, recorded in the Chester Zoo Our Zoo News and June Mottershead and Janice Batten’s book, Reared in Chester Zoo. By 1942, the war was taking its toll on zoo keepers and botanic gardens staff across the world.

Oh, and the American GIs arrived … in increasingly large numbers, in Britain on 26 January 1942, and on 8 November 1942 in North Africa an Allied landing  Operation Torch. Quickly, America, still reeling from the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 went onto a war footing. Rationing of food, sugar and later coffee began in 1941 in the USA.

Victory Gardens sprang up across America again. (Again? They had briefly flourished in America as in Britain in the First World War). See Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden for many great links and the PBS US TV gardening series http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/victorygarden/watch/video_3301_wm.html 

So 1942. It’s all dates and history book stuff – but what did it feel like to people there? Sadly December  2011 saw the passing of Fred Thornhill, aged 92, one of Newquay  Zoo’s oldest volunteers well into his eighties. Fred had been a medic and stretcher bearer in the British Army in the 1941/2 Western Desert Campaign and didn’t talk about it often, but from the rare comments, his experiences dealing with the human debris of the desert war had left a strong impression on this big man. He occasionally produced the odd tiny photo snapshot of his family or army travels. Once for a display of horns, antlers and other ‘animal weapons’ , Fred brought in his bayonet for us to borrow and mount on the wall. He’d somehow acquired or swapped it with a Free French  Foreign Legionnaire, he said, as I weighed it in my hands. Despite its current polish, it had been used in action, he added quietly. I handed it quietly back for him to keep with a slight shudder thinking where it had been.  Strange how objects can be ‘haunted’ or suddenly change in your estimation – another grisly candidate object for the BBC’s excellent series History of The World In 100 Objects?

Another personal touch or view of 1942 has been in the pocket diaries of Eileen K. and of Peggy Skinner that I have been editing for publication, the first hopefully in 2012.  Eileen,  a young Post Office clerk in London is passing a more peaceful year on Fire Watch several times a week after the Blitz of 1940/41 (recorded in her 1941 diary). Recently engaged, her fiance is a war worker also on regular exercises with The Home Guard.  

10 Monday August 1942      Wynne came round first thing. Joins the WAAF on Wednesday week. Cold morning. On Fire Watch tonight. Warning during night but did not have to get up.

Her friends steadily leave for work as nurses, WAAFs. There’s regular cinema trips, dancing at the Palais and getting a trousseau and bottom drawer ready for a wartime marriage against a backdrop of rationing of food, scarce household items  and clothes. The clothes rationing she records as introduced in June 1941 (Utility, Civilian Clothing  1941 or CC41 label ) soon extends to furniture and further restrictions in summer 1942 on clothing and the amount of material used.  It’s obviously a struggle to stay presentable and well fed with all the shortages.

With fuel restrictions. Eileen also ‘Holidayed at Home’ with nearby country relatives in Surrey, an anticipation of the Staycation holidays of our New Austerity since 2007. Allegedly zoos near cities have had a better year 2011 than ones like ourselves at the seaside. (In wartime, seaside was often too far, hotels requisitioned for the forces or evacuees, the beaches of which in wartime were in many cases off-limits or on ‘Invasion coasts’). 

The music that Eileen would have listened to included Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and Vera Lynn’s White Cliffs of Dover. Films released in 1942 included classics such as Casablanca, In Which We Serve and Mrs. Miniver.

Thurs 8   October 1942   “Not seeing Don as he’s on Home Guard all night. Went to the  Chelsea Place with Mum. Max Miller up there. Did not think much of the show.”

Fri 9  October 1942       “Met Don outside the Forum. Our film quite good. Humphrey Bogart gone good.”  [Is this film Casablanca?]

Peggy Skinner an 18 year old  London born student at Glasgow University saw these films in 1943  and records in her diary on  Saturday 9^th  January 1943:      “Very uninteresting day for my last Saturday of holiday.  I would have liked to have gone with mum and dad to see Noel Coward In Which We Serve but I did not like to ask and anyway I’d made up my mind that next term I must work harder (what a hope but I must try) and must try also to enjoy myself more, but how I could do that without going to dances which is impossible, I don’t know.”

When she saw it later, she liked the film, more so than Mrs Miniver:

Wednesday 7^th  April 1943    I went to pictures by myself this evening to Paisley to see “Mrs Miniver” with Greer Garson  and Walter Pidgeon. As I rather expected I would be I was rather disappointed with it. I’d heard such a lot about it  that I’m doubtful if any picture could come up to standards which were to be expected of a film  of which I’d heard such glowing stories. The little boy in it was awfully good, also the clergyman and Walter Pidgeon and the Young Mrs Miniver but Greer Garson seemed to have an awful fixed grin on her face.

We’ll feature a little more about Peggy Skinner’s diaries 1940, 43 and 46-49 later in 2012 closer to publication, and she will be added to the Glasgow University Story website and  blog  http://www.universitystory.gla.ac.uk/ww2-background/

Like Churchill with his view that the end of 1942 was the ‘end of the beginning’, Peggy’s  1943 diary entries start on a more optimnistic note than her (missing) 1942 diary would have done:

Tuesday 2^nd     February 1943:                I’m going to bed very late again as I had a bath and once I get in I can never be bothered getting out. The war news has been good now for a month or two, it is the best spell we have had since war began, the only trouble seems to be inTunisia and it’s not too serious there – yet. It must do the occupied countries a lot of good to hear good news for a change.

Eileen  or Peggy mention little by 1942/3 in the way of actual bombing (though still many air raid warnings) but the Baedeker raids of 1942 saw several historic and largely undefended British cathedral cities such as  nearby Exeter (23 and 24 April; 3 May 1942), Bath , York and Canterbury badly damaged in surprise air raids.

This was no doubt retaliation for the steady increase of bombing raids on Germany by Bomber Harris’ RAF Bomber Command  , including Lubeck and the first RAF 1000 bomber raid on Cologne in May 1942 followed by other German cities. These raids accidentally took a heavy toll on the German city zoos, many of which historically had been built in cities partly as green parks and gardens.

2012 sees the 70th anniversary of the daring commando raid Operation Chariot at St Nazaire  (commemorated nearby our Newquay Zoo  in the departure port of Falmouth 28 March 1942 ) and the disastrous Dieppe Raid  on August 19th. This was a forerunner of the 1944 D-Day landings which saw the Southwest countryside and towns around ourselves in Cornwall and our sister Whitley Wildlife Conservation Trust sites at Paignton Zoo and Slapton Ley occupied by huge numbers of Americans arriving for the Second Front which was being discussed throughout 1942.

So many anniversaries throughout 2012 which we shall document from the unusual perspective of how they affected zoos and botanic gardens and their staff.

We’re also widening our World War Zoo Gardens research to include the Great War and how this affected zoos and their staff, as well as mnay animals as the 100th anniversary of the Great War is not far off in 2014. This will be much in the news with the relaese of the film of Micheal Morpurgo’s book War Horse in mid January. (Morpurgo has also written about the German zoo animals of the Second World War in An Elephant in the Garden).  The lessons learnt from the First World War was of some use to a generation of zoo keepers, often veterans themselves,  preparing to survive another potentially very different war.   What can we learn from them for our own future?

It’s now raining in Newquay, great start to 2012! 2011 was on the whole a good year for the World War Zoo Gardens, with reasonbly good crops (some almost sweetcorn!) and the BIAZA Zoo award for planting in November 2011. Off to go through the wartime advice books and today’s seed catalogues to plan the next year’s planting in the wartime zoo garden … then there’s the website due soon … some time needed to wade through a few more gardening and history books that friends and family have kindly given at Christmas. Busy few months ahead. I’ll share the pick of these books in future posts …

Panda Tourism and Pearl Harbor – a wartime perspective from World War Zoo Gardens

LR Brightwell's wartime panda poster for London Zoo 1942

What colour are Giant pandas? Black, white … and in wartime, grey, blue or possibly green.

Pandas were amongst some of the larger and famous London Zoo animals which were evacuated to or kept safe at rural Whipsnade as war loomed in 1939, with bamboo shipped regularly by the train load from the West country at several points in the 1940s (and 1960s) to feed them (according to many local stories).

After the 1940/1 Blitz,  the surviving panda(s) returned to the comparative safety and quiet of London Zoo in 1942 alongside the Off The Rations exhibition as witnessed in the morale boosting wartime publicity poster by L.R. Brightwell. (It is reproduced in his 1952 London Zoo history book). It’s a beautifully detailed cartoon, reminiscent of the First World War troops off to the trenches where Brightwell and other London Zoo staff served,   but with  the modern 1940s touches of  bamboo food ration book, identity card, keeper’s ARP steel helmet and gas mask box. Some animals may have had gas masks, but generally animals had no ration books, hence the victory gardens dug in many British  zoos to feed animals, which our award-winning World War Zoo Gardens project recreates at Newquay Zoo.

Britain’s wartime Pandas helped to draw the crowds back to London Zoo and so glimpse the “Off The Rations” exhibition and ‘dig for victory’ model allotment gardens.  

Pandas are on the move and in the news again, from China to Edinburgh Zoo – and best of luck to all involved http://www.rzsspanda.org.uk Whatever the arguments for and against ‘Panda tourism’ that will be rehearsed as a ‘conservation con-troversy’ in the media,  hopefully these iconic animals will draw many people through the gates to visit RZSS Edinburgh Zoo and find out about all the other endangered animals, both native (at the RZSS Highland Wildlife Park) and exotic species at the zoo and its many conservation projects, including overseas projects such as the Falkland Islands.

Red panda conservation poster, Newquay Zoo, 2011 (designed by Cornwall College students)

Bill Conway, a major American zoo figure, argued that good zoos are ‘a place to turn recreation dollars into conservation dollars’. Here at Newquay Zoo we don’t have Giant pandas, but we do have their rare cousin the Red or Lesser panda, with its own conservation problems of habitat loss and hunting for its vivid red fur. In the same tradition as Brightwell’s cartoon panda poster, a contemporary student banner from our partner college CornwallCollege sums up one problem that zoos can highlight for action to its visitors: “Conservation not deforestation”.

Panda ‘Peace Ambassadors’  Tian Tian and Yang Guang, the Giant Pandas from China arrived at  Edinburgh Zoo today on 4th December 2011. They will be on show to the public from 16th December 2011. For details of how to get Panda Viewing tickets, visit http://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk .

It’s been almost twenty years since Pandas have been seen in British zoos. I’m told I saw them as a 1970s child but have no memory of this.  I was lucky enough to see several pairs of pandas in American Zoos, including a pair at San Diego Zoo in California about ten years ago. These were part of a long-running relationship between American zoos and China stretching back to the 1930s.

The Roosevelt family played an important role in making  Pandas – dead or alive -  more well known in the West.

Two pandas were caught in transit when the events of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place, on 7^th  December 1941,  a “date which will live in infamy”, according to President Roosevelt. 

Another strangely comic wartime story about pandas cropped up recently on the email network of the Bartlett Society www.zoohistory.co.uk. Richard Reynolds recalls ” Before there was any national TV in USA, there was a national Sunday radio broadcast from the Bronx Zoo. I recall hearing several episodes on our radio here inAtlantain the fall of 1942. One of them dealt with the struggles to get the two giant pandas to the zoo just as war was breaking out in the Pacific. The animals had to be  flown over Japanese occupied China to the Philippines. They were on the high seas  en route to California from the Philippines when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor …”

“While at sea (after War broke out) the ship had to be painted in camouflage. The pandas were on deck for exercise and one of them got into the paint.  I can recall that as vividly as though it were it were yesterday though 68 years have elapsed” (with thanks to  Richard Reynolds, Atlanta, GA, 2009 for his memories).

So pandas are indeed black, white and  grey (or  blue and green) whatever disruptive coloration was in emergency use on US naval ships in 1941. Camouflage is one useful contribution of zoologists in wartime, and HMS Belfast still bears the colour scheme invented by Sir Peter Scott, founder of the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust but then a well known wildlife artist and young naval commander. Peter Scott helped set up the international World Wildlife Fund in the 1960s (Patron: another young wartime Naval commander, the Duke of Edinburgh). WWF has of course  as its logo the  iconic Giant panda.

Gas masks for Japanese zoo elephants on the cover of Mayumi Itoh Japanese zoo wartime book

The sad anniversary of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war by the Japanese on Allied countries 70 years ago will be marked  with many events this Wednesday. Within a month, many British, American and Allied outposts were captured by a triumphant Japanese Army and Navy. As we pointed out in our January 2011 blogpost, 1941 was seen by some as the “grimmest year of the war” forBritain and the Allies.

The rubber plantations, zoos and botanic gardens of Singapore and other colonies of the British Empire were quickly overrun. Rubber became a scarce and salvageable commodity. Zoo keeper’s wellington boots and rubber hoses became difficult to replace. In Britain the ladies of the WVS and WI dragged village ponds for scrap rubber tyres. In America, zoo animals patriotically gave up their rubber tyre swings for the war effort in publicity salvage drives.

Eleanor Roosevelt the President’s wife ordered a Dig for Victory garden to be dug in the White House lawns as an example to her nation to save , make do and mend and give their all for the war effort. (A modern organic version of the victory garden has been recreated by President  Obama’s family). 

American zoos, especially on the coast, would have gone rapidly onto a war footing as British zoos had done in 1939; some closed, never to reopen.  One sad consequence of the declaration of war and very real fear of an invasion of Americaby the Japanese was the internment of ‘enemy aliens’ including Japanese-American families in harsh and remote places. Several generations of Issei, Nissei, Sansei and Yonsei responded by transforming their prisons and barrack blocks with beautiful stone gardens, a story told in Kenneth Helphand’s book Defiant Gardens.

Some of the ‘ghost marks’ of these ephemeral gardens at Manzanar CA are now national memorials, whilst many Japanese gardens erected after the war became peace gardens of reconciliation after the horrors of war ended at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I sometimes take Kenneth Helphand’s book down to our quiet Oriental gardens here at Newquay Zoo to read on quiet or difficult days.  Defiant Gardens is at times a difficult but ultimately inspiring book to read about this little known chapter of the war– a real argument for the peaceful urge to garden and plant, create rather than destroy. It would make a good present for the Christmas stocking for the quiet indoor months for your gardening friends.  http://defiantgardens.com/ Defiant  Gardens  flourished in the most unlikely places including ghettoes and POW camps.

Percy Murray Adams ZSL Whipsnade Keeper (from pre-war Animal and Zoo Magazine)

Three  of London Zoo and Whipsnade’s keepers, Henry Peris Davies (d. 21.12.1941, listed Singapore memorial)  and Albert Henry Wells (d. 25.01.1945, Burma)   perished through the long and bloody years of fighting in the Far East or in Japanese POW camps Percy Murray Adams (died in Japanese POW camp, 28.07.1943)  – Many of these keepers would have known or worked with the Giant pandas at London Zoo and Whipsnade. Read our November 2010 and 2011 blog post about ZSL London Zoo’s staff war memorial for more details.  I used to meet many old sweats of the the Burma Star Association and POWs on their visits to Newquay Zoo on their West Country reunions, a peaceful place  they said, despite the unnnerving  and evocative jungle scent in our Tropical House.

A Bamboo memorial garden to Far East POWs has been created through http://www.captivememories.org.uk/ with local schools at Ness Botanic Gardens near Liverpool http://www.bgen.org.uk/index.php/who/22/345-ness

 No doubt many US, Indian and Australian zoo staff also died, were wounded or served in the Far East, as did members of my own family who held the Burma Star. Part of our World War Zoo Gardens research involves tracking down the effects of wartime on zoos, their staff and animals so any details of memorials or casualties are very helpful.

 Mayumi Itoh’s recently published book Japanese Wartime Zoo Policy puts the other side of the story, describing the difficulties experienced by Japanese zoo animals and staff in wartime. Many Japanese zoo vets were called up to serve in the veterinary corps, keeping healthy that vital machine of war, the mule.

Not far from where Percy Murray Adams is buried, Sasanuma Tadashi, Ueno Zoo Tokyo keeper was killed.

Despite the language differences, I’m sure these two keepers, like the two soldiers in Wilfred Owen’s First World War poem Strange Meeting,  would have had much common ground.

Mayumi Itoh comes out strongly to the conclusion that zoos need peace to flourish, whether in wartime, during the 1960s Panda and chess games of Cold War diplomacy or in today’s recessionary and uncertain world where zoos and wildlife are engulfed or sidelined by conflict in places likeLibya, Africa and the Middle East.

The sheltered woods and quarries of Paignton Zoo (our sister zoo in Devon), our nature reserve at Slapton Ley and much of the area of Cornwall around Newquay Zoo (where the World War Zoo Gardens is based) were once temporary home and training ground to thousands of young GIs from all over America who shipped out to D-Day from our now peaceful West Country beaches. Some of them returned home to America, with many a Cornish orDevon ‘GI bride’ on their arm. Others never returned as they perished on the beaches of Slapton in Devon (remembered by Ken Small’s Sherman tank memorial), Normandy or the Pacific.  Our own World War Zoo Gardens at Newquay Zoo is a peaceful and productive memorial garden to the men, women, children and animals of all nationalities who have been affected by war around the world.   

So maybe we should celebrate the peace, ‘sweetness’ and ‘sunshine’ that Tian Tian and Yang Guang (in translation) the Giant Pandas will hopefully bring (despite the crowds) to Edinburgh Zoo and the world. If you can’t make it toEdinburgh, you could visit your local zoo or spend a few quiet hours in the garden.

We’ll be busy getting ready for our Christmas weekend on 10 and 11th December 2011, and carol service on the 11th – see http://www.paigntonzoo.org.uk - and closed only on Christmas Day. We’ll be busy fundraising for the conservation of rare South-east Asian birds from those Far-East jungles in our Gems of The Jungle aviary project throughout next year.

So finally, a peaceful Happy Christmas and (Chinese) New Year (or Happy Panda Hogmanay) to all our blog readers over the next few weeks! 

Stuck for presents or stressed by Christmas, you can read our  last December 2010 blog post (much pingbacked)  where we reflected on ‘make do and mend’ wartime Christmas presents and a few modern ideas for presents. Panda adoptions for Christmas presents maybe?

World War Zoo Gardens at Newquay Zoo wins a ‘zoo Oscar’ national BIAZA 2011 gardening award

Staff at Newquay Zoo are celebrating after World War Zoo, a unique wartime garden project, has won a prestigious award in the zoo world.

The BIAZA award for best use of plants in a landscape feature went to Newquay Zoo for the World War Zoo gardens project.

Newquay Zoo's wartime gardener and blogger Mark Norris with the BIAZA award for best plants in a landscape feature and design.

The British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums (BIAZA) annual awards ceremony are dubbed the ‘zoo oscars’ as they recognise outstanding contributions and achievements made by member zoos in the fields of conservation, animal welfare advances, animal husbandry, enclosure design, marketing, PR, education and research.

The 2011 BIAZA awards were presented by TV vet Steve Leonard at an award dinner and zoo conference at in the impressive new Himalaya conference space and visitor centre at Twycross Zoo on 16th November.  Snow leopards strolled down off their roacky outcrop to come and watch through the large floor to ceiling windows.  Steve’s own blog can be found at http://web.me.com/steveleonard/Homepage/Blog/Blog.html 

As this blog formed part of our BIAZA award submission, I’d like to  thank  all our readers for your comments, feedback and interest (over 25,000 hits) which has supported us since 2009. 

As  leader of the wartime garden project, I am thrilled that this project has received this award.

It was two years ago that I asked Newquay Zoo Director Stewart Muir if we could dig up lawns and flower beds to recreate a ‘Dig for Victory’ garden. Since then the project has gone from strength to strength – providing food for the animals, a talking point for visitors and a living memorial to many men, women and children involved in the war effort, reflecting the gardens that sprung up in unlikely places all over the country during World War Two, including zoos.

To be recognised by peers in the zoo world for the wartime garden project is extremely rewarding, especially because the standard of nominations is usually very high.

I was very pleased to be asked to do a presentation during the conference about the project to zoo educators and other zoo staff, taking part of our travelling display and artefacts with me. I’m looking forward to doing the same to our zoology students at Cornwall College Newquay as part of the rresearch seminar programme in January 2012.

The history and garden project has proved a great talking point with visitors, and Mark has picked up some useful gardening tips ‘over the fence’. ‘I have learnt a lot from talking to visitors of all ages and look forward to talking to more garden societies. I have really enjoyed listening to visitors’ stories and views about food, rationing, animals, green issues, zoos and family history.

Our sister zoo Paignton Zoo, which alongside Newquay Zoo and Living Coasts in Torquay is part of the Whitley Wildlife Conservation Trust, was highly commended by BIAZA for a research project on howler monkeys.

Dr Miranda Stevenson, Director of BIAZA said: “The BIAZA awards highlight the significant achievements within the zoo world and once again this year’s award-winning projects show the exceptional contributions our members make to conservation and education each year. Equally, they are standard bearers for excellence in animal husbandry and welfare. We congratulate all the winners.”

What next for 2012 ?

November and December is quite quiet in the garden at the moment, so apart from planning next year’s plantings, we’re harvesting the last of the Autumn crops to tidy our plot up. Monkeys love our Green Globe Artichokes, especially when thrown by Junior Keepers onto the top mesh of enclosures (like weird vegtable hand-grenades) to make them difficult to reach.  Excellent enrichment for monkeys and very entertaining for visitors to watch. Future note: wartime steel helmets will be  useful when artichokes bounce off the mesh at the first few throws  …

The World War Zoo Gardens project forms part of the Zoo’s education programme, which runs successful curriculum linked workshops from Early Years Foundation Stage through to Higher Education. We’re currently working on our new (2012) primary history workshops, resource packs and talks for schools about the Home Front (Primary History Unit 9, Years 3 to 6) on how zoos, their staff, animals and vsistors survived the dangers and challenges of wartime – keep watching our website http://www.newquayzoo.org.uk/education/world-war-zoo-1.htm

We’re also working on a dedicated new World War Zoo Gardens website within the next month to support the project – watch this space! 

As well as  blogging, I am currently  doing research for a book on zoos and botanic gardens in wartime, which will highlight how zoos survived during World War Two and how we can learn from this for the future.  Whilst at Twycross Zoo, I spent a day in their zoo library, which also holds the library and archives of the Bartlett Society (www.zoohistory.co.uk), looking at the range of books and memoirs on zoos worldwide and looking for scattered snippets about their wartime survival strategies. I was also following up references for some of the civilian wartime diaries I’m editing for publication in 2012. These diaries will be sold through Newquay Zoo’s online shop online being set up later in 2012 with profits going back to running the zoo and its many education and overseas conservation projects. A Christmas present for the list, but for December 2012 …

Enjoy your gardening … and a peaceful December.