Wartime Zoo Keeper’s Garden survives frost, Santa’s offerings … and Happy New Year to you all.

More items for a wartime or evacuee Christmas. Boys' comics, a beautifully simple handmade wooden plane (probably a Spitfire), handmade wooden slider puzzle, a selection of toy catalogues and evacuee memoirs (including Alf Townsend's Newquay evacuee experiences) from the Newquay Zoo wartime life collection. Wartime garden launch weekend display, August 2009.

What Santa might have bought a lucky wartime child! (Wearing Santa’s tin hat in wartime, naturally). Chocolate, comics, colouring books, tiddlywinks, a bear …

Ice and frost kept many people including zoo staff at home in the run up to Christmas. I hope you spent some quality family time and resorted to the blackout family favourites of “making your own entertainment” helped by card games, books, puzzles, battered board games and listening to the Queen’s speech on the radio.  

Gardeners would have had a few days grounded, as there’s  not much to do in ice or  frosty conditions once you’ve put up what protection you can. Time to get out the gardening books, new or old. Mr C.H. Middleton, the wartime radio gardener, in his excellent books (recently reprinted)  suggest that the ice and frosts will kill off garden pests and break down the recently dug soil on new garden plots. Maybe Santa left you some of these excellent and still very useful reprinted wartime gardening guides!

Winter garden work - in the library or armchair, planning your coming year's crop plans and trying new plants using handy wartime advice even in cartoon / strip form from the papers. Items from part of the Newquay Zoo wartime life collection, garden launch weekend, August 2009

To my surprise,  because of where it is placed in a sheltered spot near the Lion House, which receives the first and almost last winter sunshine of the day, the wartime zoo keeper’s garden at Newquay Zoo survived the recent ice and frost pretty much intact. Only the Nasturtiums have frosted and died. Carrots, leeks, leaf salad, lettuce, rocket and cabbage are all still in good shape although frosts of 10 below zero are predicted for some parts of the West Country over the next few days. The first year of the wartime zoo garden is seeing what survives and what can be grown here as animal food.  A similar approach to climate change adaptation will be needed by farmers and gardeners in the future.

Keeping frost at bay was  particular problem for wartime gardeners, wrestling with cloches or  unheated greenhouses (in days of fuel rationing). Old tricks of lighting fires in orchards etc at night to drive off frost were impossible during the blackout.   The same ‘orchard’ trick was used at nearby wartime airfield of RAF St. Mawgan (created at the start of the war and recently mothballed, being  turned into mostly  a civilian airport at Newquay. Large fires of oil pipes were lit along the clifftop airfield to drive off the mist and fog, requiring massive fuel tanks and a rail depot near the zoo at Quintrell Downs (where there is still a railway halt and fuel depot today).

Look around the Newquay area and Cornwall, like much of the country, and the scars or relics of wartime are still very visible – from pillboxes above beaches to wartime airfields, flattening whole lost hamlets and villages. There are plenty more stories like this in the highly readable book Cornwall At War.

Stephen McKeown at Chester Zoo told me that you can still see the traces of wartime life at Chester Zoo (built in the 1920s) in the form of pillboxes and concrete tank traps. They form part of a former early 1950s Polar Baer enclosure (now Europe on the Edge exhibit and aviary),  bought after the war  by the resourceful Mr. Mottershead, Chester Zoo owner being useful concretewhen building materials were in short supply.

Happy New Year!

The World war Zoo project team.

Lend a hand with the sand(bags) …

Not a bomb site but redeveloping the old parrot aviary, coati house and tortoise summer enclosure ; old sand for a new use, Richard the Newquay zoo gardener and Robyn from the zoo education team filling sandbags for the zoo keeper's wartime garden. Rubble from the old enclosures forms the base of the new ones in some neat wartime recycling.

Newquay Zoo Director Stewart Muir, being a respected wildlife artist, has an eye for things around the zoo. Sandbags, he declared! Sandbags are what we need to add atmosphere to the wartime garden especially in its winter plumage. 

So at risk of being mistaken for a flood prevention scheme, sandbags were bought and are now being filled using the sand from the surrounds of old parrot, tortoise and coati enclosures being taken down for rebuilding into a larger aviary and home to some rare Madagascan mongoose. So this corner of the zoo might appropriately look like a bomb site but it’s all in a good cause of conservation at www.newquayzoo.org.uk. 

Also in a good cause: waylaying passing members of staff from all walks of zoo life from gardeners to admin staff, education staff and keepers, even the operations manager being asked to lend a hand with the sand(bags) re-enacting on a dark wet afternoon what happened in zoos, gardens and aquaria  all over Britain and elsewhere as vital sections of the zoo such as glasshouses and shelter tunnels were sandbagged for safety. 

A fine album of photographs of zoo staff digging in (or filling sandbags) can be found on the wartime garden’s own Facebook page worldwarzoo worldwarzoogardener, established last week http://http://www.facebook.com/#/profile.php?ref=name&id=100000564684596. Join up (enlist today!) to see more of our developments. We will also establish a Flickr site for photos of the wartime garden in the next few weeks.   

It’s the perfect sort of gardening job for when the weather is frosty or wet at this time of the year. Our salad crops are still hanging on. The leeks have not needed ‘heeling in’ (laying down slightly with a covering of earth) yet to avoid frost damage. Thankfully no snow or frost has further damaged any more trial plantings in the wartime zoo garden, although it might also help kill off a few more slugs! 

A stock of sandbags still features in many zoo storerooms to prevent flooding, this zoo being built around a stream valley. Zoos still have crisis or disaster plans for fire, flood etc. but thankfully not as worrying as those for wartime zoos on what to do in an air raid! 

Our colleagues in botanic gardens often had the same problems, sandbags and sticky paper to protect their delicate glasshouses. James Wheeler the director of Birmingham Botanic Gardens sent me some pages from Oasis of Delight, the biography of the gardens by Phyllida Barnard. The same preparations had to be made in gardens as in zoos.  Just as many zoos still maintain a botanic garden function, Birmingham Botanic Gardens was not alone in having an animal collection. Both young keepers and gardeners were called up for military service. Dangerous snakes which could not be rehomed were euthanased and the bear enclosures reinforced to avoid animal escapes during air raids. (Ballard, P. (1983) An Oasis of Delight: The History of the Birmingham Botanical Gardens).   

'Sandbags and sticky paper', sign from the wartime garden launch weekend trail in August 2009, Newquay Zoo

 An original November 1939 copy of Animal and Zoo Magazine produced by Julian Huxley at London Zoo shows the preparations there. 

Not just managers and keepers, London Zoo had real team work for their sandbagging; both human and non-human primates doing ARP duties, September 1939

Further research for the World War Zoo project should reveal more about wartime life in zoos, aquaria and botanic gardens, not just in Britain but across Europe and further afield.

Keep following the blog for more stories and news of this garden.

Any comments, relevant links or historical snippets that you know of please send us these via the comments feed.

 

Feel free to post a link to our site to your own networks – even leeks and salad crops like having friends and getting emails.

 

Have a happy and peaceful sandbag free Christmas – see our previous Christmas blog for wartime Christmas ideas!

The World War Zoo project team at Newquay Zoo