The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London. Christopher Skaife

and the Ravenmaster is a keeper of one of the world’s few single-species open-air zoos.

      The term menagerie – which I like to use to refer to all of us who live and work together in the Tower – derives from the French, and refers to an aristocratic or royal collection of captive animals. As every schoolchild knows, when William the Conqueror invaded in 1066 he ordered that a series of fortresses be built around England to protect his barons from the threat of invading armies and civil dissent – among which fortresses the Tower is only the most famous and the most long-standing. According to the Domesday Book, the Normans founded nearly fifty castles in the twenty years after landing at Hastings, a building programme unprecedented in English history, and which makes even the current property boom in London seem not so much a bang as a whimper. What’s perhaps less well-known is that William’s son Henry established England’s first menagerie at his manor house in Oxford, building a big wall to contain his collection of lions, camels and porcupines. This small royal zoo was eventually moved to the Tower around 1204, during the reign of King John, and formed the beginning of the Royal Menagerie.

      There have always been famous animals who have called London home. When I was growing up it was the giant pandas Chi Chi and Ching-Ching and Guy the gorilla at London Zoo. Earlier in the twentieth century there was Winnie, the female Canadian black bear who would give her name to young Christopher Robin Milne’s teddy bear, the inspiration for Winnie-the-Pooh. And back in the nineteenth century there was the mighty Obaysch, the first hippo in Europe since the days of the Roman Empire, who caused a sensation: Queen Victoria came to watch him swimming in Regent’s Park, and compared him to a porpoise. But before all of them there were the animals of the Tower, the bigger and stranger the better.

      There was a ‘white bear’ – a polar bear – for example, who was a gift from King Haakon IV of Norway to King Henry III in 1252, and who was kept tethered at the riverside with a huge collar and a long rope, allowing him to fish for food in the Thames. I like to imagine the look on the faces of anyone who happened to be sailing up or down the river when they saw a big white bear swimming past. In addition, in 1255 Louis IX of France gave Henry III an African elephant. Just getting it to London must have been a logistical nightmare. According to one eyewitness, ‘the people flocked to see the novel sight … The beast is about ten years old, possessing a rough hide rather than fur, has small eyes at the top of its head, and eats and drinks with a trunk.’ Again, what a sight, to have seen an elephant at the Tower back then – I would compare it today to seeing a Tyrannosaurus rex suddenly poking its head over the battlements.

      Like any great collection, the Royal Menagerie just grew and grew. By the time Edward I came to the throne, an official position had been created known as Keeper of the Lions and Leopards, later renamed the Master of the King’s Bears and Apes. By the 1300s all the animals in the Tower had to be moved outside to the main western entrance, which was later named the Lion Tower, for obvious reasons.

      An ‘Extraordinary and Fatal Combat’ that took place at the Royal Menagerie at the Tower in December 1830. The lion died of its injuries. (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)