June Mottershead zips ahead on her mobility scooter as we enter the zoo by the old gatehouse. A member of staff plays an imaginary trumpet to welcome her, June laughs and exclaims at the neat shrubbery that has supplanted some overgrown conifers. A trip to the zoo may bring back early memories for many of us, but for June, 88, a stroll around Chester zoo is a journey into her childhood universe.
June was four when her father, George, bought a small mansion going cheap in the Great Depression and turned it – with a large amount of help from his family – into Chester zoological gardens. Chimps, tapirs and lions were childhood friends and June also fell in love and raised her own family at the zoo. Her life has inspired the BBC drama Our Zoo, and now a memoir in which, with characteristic self-effacement, she puts the escapades of charismatic animals ahead of her own feelings.
“It was an unusual childhood. I took it all very much for granted until this bloomin’ drama series started,” she says over sandwiches in Chester zoo’s boardroom, once part of her family home. “I was shocked when the publicity blurb said I come from an eccentric family – I thought, I’m not eccentric.”
Most zoos were started by zoological societies or grew out of rich men’s private menageries. Chester is an exception, forged by the vision and entrepreneurial cunning of June’s father, George. A body-builder who was paralysed in the first world war, George taught himself how to walk and opened a shop selling home-bred exotic birds and vegetables grown by his father. When recession struck, he converted his father’s allotment into a miniature zoo. Despite fearful locals fighting his plan to create a “zoo without bars”, he borrowed money from his farmer father-in-law to buy a bankrupt cotton millionaire’s mansion with 3.6 hectares (nine acress) of land for a knock-down £3,500 (about £250,000 in today’s money) and Chester zoological gardens opened in 1931.
In the early days, the zoo had few visitors and George couldn’t afford to employ anyone. So the family ran the zoo. June’s mother, Lizzie, ran the cafe; June’s older sister, Muriel, became a keeper; their granny took admissions; and their grandfather, then 78, maintained the gardens and grew the food for the cafe. June worked too: her mother cut holes in a potato sack for June’s head and arms and in these overalls the four-year-old painted the wire of the bear enclosure.
Another job was being a zoo guide. “It’s like this book – it’s fun to begin with and then it becomes a chore and you’re repeating yourself all the time,” she says cheerily.
June was shy as a girl and her parents were too busy to show her much affection. “They were more of their era,” says June, “but we did get on well. We all spoke the same language.”
Growing up in the zoo was rather like being raised on a traditional farm. “Animals had to be fed, cleaned out, kept warm and dry. You’d go round them every day and look at them, like a farmer inspecting his flock of sheep.”
The animals always came first. June remembers her sister feeding pineapple to their tropical birds but she wouldn’t let June taste this exotic fruit for the first time – it was only for the birds. Then there was a traumatic trip through bomb-blasted Liverpool docks to collect a monkey: after June carried it home, getting soaked in monkey urine when the box broke, her dad was too busy to listen to her saga. “The zoo always came first.”“ If anything needed doing you dropped everything and went and did it,” she says. Did she feel neglected? “Never. We were all pulling together. If we had failed we would have been out of a house – we were all relying on the zoo for a livelihood.” Her father’s scrimping and ingenuity is impressive, but June thinks hardship “blighted our childhood really. Money counts an awful lot, doesn’t it? If you haven’t got any, you can’t do much.”
It is simplistic to suggest that zoo animals were a substitute for human companionship, but June couldn’t help but form intimate bonds with some animals.She does not have a favourite species but sees creatures as individuals, just like people. “Look at how many millions of us there are and we’re all individuals. Some you get on with like a house on fire and others you avoid.”
Virtually before she could talk, she chatted to Mary, their first chimpanzee, and watched her play and use tools long before the primatologist Jane Goodall theorised about chimps’ tool-making capabilities. “Mary was a friend,” says June. “She had a beautiful temperament and was very, very intelligent. I was lucky enough to grow up with her.” June’s sister Muriel had taught Mary how to write letters and June remembers Mary writing with a pen and paper before she could.
As a child, June was repeatedly photographed with the zoo’s latest acquisitions for the local papers. “A pretty girl and an animal got you into the papers – he was a good publicist,” says June of her father. George did not let truth get in the way of a good story. “When he got up to something and I thought, oh no – here he goes again, he’d give me a wink and I’d give him a grin. He used to like telling tales. I underplayed everything and he overplayed everything. Sometimes I’d get embarrassed and think, ‘oh, Dad, that didn’t happen that way’, but I’d never say anything.”
Although George turned the zoo into a charity in 1934, the finances were precarious and the family constantly feared they would be shut down, especially during the second world war. Much of Liverpool was flattened but shrapnel only killed one coypu in the zoo. The war enabled George to entice charismatic new evacuees to the zoo including a lion called Judy from Butlins and two elephants and their Indian trainer. June once drove with her dad to Dorset in their Hillman Minx, which they filled with African grey parrots, crowned cranes, a box of reptiles and a vervet monkey. It was not a childhood for the squeamish. June’s beloved terrier was fatally savaged by Punch, the polar bear, whose sullen disposition was transformed when he was fed a horse that had died in a steeplechase. During the war, horse flesh became a crucial food for the zoo animals. “You got used to it,” says June. “We had to breed mealworms and rats and mice as well.”
For all her robustness, June still had her heart broken as a teenager. When a mother lion and five cubs died, leaving just one tiny orphan called Christy, June kept the cub alive and the pair became inseparable. She would sneak Christy out of her cage to walk around the zoo but the young lion became so used to human company that she was attacked when placed in an enclosure with other lions. Rescued and put in a separate cage, Christy refused to bound over to June, who clung to the mesh and wept. June knew she must cut all ties if Christy were to live a more normal life. “I would just lie on my bed and cry, listening to her yowling and yowling,” she writes in her memoir.
Her dad never mentioned Christy again and, a few years later, the lion was dispatched to a foreign zoo. June has agonised for years over whether she ruined the young lion’s life. “I still do feel I’ve let her down because she was part of the family,” she says. “I would never now allow myself to get attached to an animal that I didn’t own.”
In 1945, the zoo’s fortunes were transformed: the war ended and it also received a bequest of £18,000. For the first time, says June, her father didn’t have to worry about getting through the winter. She had left school at 16 (“I hated school because there was always something going on here. I still can’t spell”) and spent the postwar years painstakingly rebuilding the aquarium, which had been turned into an air-raid shelter. Seeking new fish, she went looking for sticklebacks in the ponds created by bomb craters with a new keeper, Fred Williams. They fell in love and married in 1949. “My husband and my father were very alike,” says June. “They would improvise and not let things grow under their feet, and were very clever at planning things.”
Here, her memoir ends, but June’s relationship with Chester zoo has continued for another six-and-a-half decades. She and Fred went to Australia for three years (“We only worked 40 hours a week – it was like one long holiday,” she says) but returned to work for George at the zoo, living in a bungalow inside the grounds where they raised their three children, Joy, Linda and George. For years, the three generations ate together in the old mansion every evening.
In her memoir and in person, June appears to be exceptionally easygoing, untroubled by a need for attention. Did she ever resent the animals who stole the show every day? “No,” she says firmly. “But I did get to a stage when I was about 12 where I’d refuse to have my photo taken with any more animals.”
Her father, June says, would be very proud of Chester zoo today: it had a record number of visitors through the gates in September, a £30m expansion is under way on its 200 hectares and undertakes pioneering breeding and conservation work. People assume that June is wealthy but the zoo is a charity and she lives simply in an ordinary three-bed semi nearby.
As we stroll through the zoo, I ask June if it has changed much, expecting a nostalgic answer. “Oh yes,” she says. “Thank goodness. It would be very old-fashioned now if it hadn’t.”
With our time running out, June insists that I stop talking to her and admire the elephants. “The elephants are more important, aren’t they?”
I disagree but June is remarkably accepting about the animals coming first: it is a fact of her life.
• Our Zoo by June Mottershead is published by Headline, £20. Buy it for £17 with free UK p&p at bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846
