We Bought a Zoo. Benjamin Mee

But it mostly seemed like a standard rewiring, re-plumbing and plastering job would make it good. The other half of the house, with a grand galleried staircase and stone-flagged kitchen was marred by decades of clashing wallpapers, patchwork surface rewiring which snaked wildly like the tendrils of an aggressive giant creeper gradually taking over the house. And of course the all-pervading smell coming from the front kitchen.

      The stone-flagged kitchen had not been used for this purpose for decades, and in the fireplace, behind a ragged dusty sheet hanging on a string nailed to the high mantel above it, lay a rusted hulk of an ancient range, a door hanging off, clogged inside with what appeared to be bird droppings from the chimney above. ‘My grandma used to cook on that,’ said Ellis. ‘Bit of work would get it going again. Worth a few bob, that.’ I wasn’t so sure. But this room looked out over an old cobbled courtyard, now overgrown with weeds, which looked across to the cottage opposite, above the ‘stables’/junk depository. Melissa, who is good at spotting potential and visualizing a finished house, lit up. ‘This is the best bit of the house,’ she said. Really? ‘I can imagine doing the breakfast in here, looking across the courtyard, waving to Katherine or mum in their kitchen in the cottage.’ At that time Melissa was still seriously considering selling up and moving in too, five kids and Jim included. It sounded good. But in the time allowed, and with enough clutter to fill a hundred jumble sales strewn about, it was hard to gauge what it might be like to live in this house. Except that it, like the park, would require a lot of (expensive) work.

      We came back out of the house and met Nick in the restaurant again, thanked our hosts, and strolled down the drive. By now our objective and impartial advisor had become a little partisan. ‘I think it’s a great place,’ enthused Nick. ‘Much better than I thought it would be from all the stories. You’ll need proper site survey to be sure, but as far as I can see this could be a working zoo again without too much trouble.’ As an advisor on zoo design, Nick also had a few ideas to throw in at this stage. ‘Get the customers off the drive [which runs up the centre of the lower half of the park for a fifth of a mile] and into the paddock next to it. You could put a wooden walkway through it, meandering so that they don’t notice the climb, and get something striking in there like zebras, and maybe some interesting antelopes, so that as soon as they pass through the kiosk they enter a different world.’ Could we get zebras, I asked? ‘Oh, I can get you zebras,’ said Nick casually, as if they were something he might pick up for us at Tesco. This I liked. Spoken almost like a wholesome Arthur Daley: video recorders, leather jackets, zebras, roll up, roll up. But there was more to this glimpse into the workings of the zoo world which appealed. Nick was painting with the animals, as well as designing a serious commercial layout in his head. ‘You need more flamingos,’ he said. ‘Flamingos look good against the trees. The lake up there with the island has trees behind it, so if you put a few more in it they’ll look marvellous when the punters reach the top of the path. Then, having climbed that hill, they’ll be hot. So that’s where you sell them their first ice cream.’ Wow. Unfortunately, flamingos are one of the few animals which don’t usually come free from other zoos, costing anything from £800 to £1,500 each. Which is a lot of ice creams. And with the prospect of bird flu migrating over the horizon there was the possibility of a mass culling order from DEFRA shortly after we took delivery of these beautiful, expensive birds. Our flamingo archipelago might have to wait.

      I went back to France, Melissa to her children in Gloucester, and Nick went back to Whipsnade, where he prepared the report that was to dictate the direction of our lives. If it was negative, it would be definitively so, and there would be no point chasing this dream any further. In many ways, as before, I was half hoping that this would be the case and I could finally lay the idea to rest knowing categorically that it would be a mistake to proceed. If it was positive, however, we knew we had to continue, and the report itself would become instrumental in finding the backing to make it happen.

      Meanwhile I was learning more about the zoo every day. Ellis had once been seen as a visionary, designing innovative enclosures, putting in disabled access on a difficult sloping site long before legislation required him to do so, and developing an aggressive Outreach education programme, one of the first of its kind in the country and now copied by almost every other zoo. But he had absolute, total control. There was no one to tell him when to stop. And with over-investment in expensive infrastructure like the enormous restaurant (against advice which he overruled), an expensive divorce, and other zoos learning, copying and developing his techniques and continually changing their game while he began to grind to a halt, visitor numbers declined.

      My life became a series of long phone calls to lawyers, estate agents, bankers, family members and Ellis. Every time I spoke to Ellis, I noticed, he inexorably steered the conversation towards conflict. We were frank with him. We didn’t have the money to buy it yet, but we had assets of equal value, which we could borrow against or sell, if he could only hold on. ‘You’d think when someone offered to buy a place they’d at least have the money to do it,’ he said once, the type of observation which gave me an indication of why so many other sales had fallen through. Apart from anything else, Ellis was in the terrible position of having to sell his much-loved park, built largely with his own hands, the expression of his life’s vision over the last 40 years, so it was no wonder he was irascible. The only bidder left was a developer wanting to turn it into a nursing home, and Ellis didn’t want that. So, to his enormous credit, he agreed to wait for us.

      In this tense situation, I was genuinely concerned for Peter Wearden, who had become the focus of Ellis’s vexation, crystallized as the deliberate, Machiavellian architect of his downfall. It had all started with a routine inspection several years ago which had concluded that the hand-painted signs on the animal enclosures were now illegible and needed replacing. Ellis escorted the inspector from the park (some say at the end of a shotgun), and refused to carry out the directive. This activated a one-way process of head-on confrontation with the authorities, which escalated into many other areas over the years, and ultimately led to him handing in his zoo licence in April 2006. When we’d visited that last time, after so many years of gradual decline, it felt like we’d been to the Heart of Darkness, to a place where a charismatic visionary had created an empire once teeming with life and promise, but where human frailties had ultimately been exposed by the environment, with terrible consequences. I telephoned Peter and told him of my concerns. Ellis was, in my opinion, a man with his back to the wall, and I was genuinely worried about his safety. ‘Oh, I’m not bothered about that,’ laughed Peter, with a bravery I doubt I would have shown in his position. ‘He does seem very difficult to deal with’, I said. ‘Is there anyone else it might be possible to talk to there? His lawyer? Rob?’ ‘Try Maureen, his sister,’ advised Peter. ‘She talks sense.’

      And so another vital piece fell into place for the acquisition of the park. Maureen was devoted to her brother, and on both tours of the house we had been shown a picture of her as a teenager falling out of the back of a stock car during a jump Ellis was performing (among other things he had been a stunt-car driver). But she had worked outside the park in a hotel all her life, and understood the pressures of the outside world perhaps better than he did. I spoke to Maureen two or three times a day as we tried to piece together a plan which would save the park.

      Another key person, without whom we would never have succeeded, was Mike Thomas. To get backing we needed a site survey, which would cost about three thousand pounds. But I knew that several (nine, in fact) such surveys had been commissioned recently, and was reluctant to pay for another. I asked Maureen if she knew of anyone of the recent potential buyers who may be prepared to sell us their survey. ‘Try Mike Thomas,’ she said. So I ended up pitching down the phone to a complete stranger that we were trying to buy the park and had heard he had commissioned a full site survey recently. ‘Go on,’ said a gravelly voice. I told him everything about our inexperience and lack of funds, surprised as I continued that he didn’t put the phone down. ‘You can have the survey,’ he said at the end. ‘Where shall I send it?’ This was the first of many generosities from Mike, whose reassuring voice often saw me through difficult times in the months ahead.

      Mike was the former owner of Newquay Zoo, which he had turned from a run-down operation with 40,000 visitors a year, to a thriving centre of excellence with about 250,000 visitors, in the space of nine years. He knew what he was doing.