These days nobody would dream of keeping a wild animal as a pet, but there was a time, not so long ago, when a gentleman could stroll into Harrods and buy an elephant or an alligator. Jonathan Self explores the era of the exotic menagerie.
Gerard de Nerval, the romantic poet, had a pet lobster called Thibault, which he took for walks on a blue silken lead.
Crassus, the Roman orator, dressed his pet eel with jewellery ‘just like it was some lovely maiden’.
Lord Byron, forbidden by Trinity College, Cambridge, to bring his dog into college, brought in a tame bear instead and took it to lectures.
The Marquis de Lafayette was devoted to a pet alligator; Noël Coward also had one, given to him as a present in 1951.
Edmund Kean, the greatest actor of the early 19th century, shared his house in London’s Clarges Street with a lion.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s house in Cheyne Walk, SW3, was home to dozens of animals (‘who were disruptive, noisy and sometimes escaped causing havoc in the neighbourhood’), but his favourite was a wombat called Top.
The grand eunuch Zheng He of China had several pet giraffes.
And former US President Ronald Reagan had a baby elephant which, legend has it, he bought in 1967 from Harrods’ infamous Pet Kingdom, famous for procuring any animal. The story goes that the sales assistant answered Reagan’s call, listened politely to the request, then without skipping a beat enquired, ‘And would that be African or Indian, sir?’
Margaret Rutherford and Donald Sinden in the 1955 comedy An Alligator Called Daisy. The plot seems far-fetched today, but four years before it was made Noël Coward had been given an alligator as a pet. Picture: Alamy
I could go on, but as you can see it’s clear that ever since the dog was domesticated, perhaps 35,000 years ago, gentlemen have kept a huge variety of animals. The first documented menagerie, however, was owned by Gilgamesh, King of Uruk (Sumer), who, in about 2750BC, created vast garden-orchards in which were to be found apes, singing birds, falcons, bulls, gazelles and other beasts. Some were eaten, some were used for hunting and some were pets.
Slightly later, bas-reliefs from Assyrian palaces show monkeys, antelopes, camels, elephants and other species in cages. By 700BC, the Assyrians had begun to re-create entire habitats — marshes, lakes and miniature mountains — to better accommodate their rare animal collections.
Throughout the ancient world, from Greece to Egypt and from India to Rome, the ownership of exotic, wild animals was considered a sign of wealth and power.
Gilgamesh depicted with bulls and birds in a carved vase thought to be over 4,000 years old.
What of our own ancestors? They produced nothing quite as sophisticated as the Roman vivarium (a structure for keeping animals under semi-natural conditions), but the skeleton of a monkey was discovered during excavation of the pre-Roman Navan Fort in Co Armagh and Julius Caesar did write in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico: ‘The Britons consider it contrary to divine law to eat the hare, the chicken or the goose. They raise these for their own amusement or pleasure.’
William the Conqueror is credited as being the first English king to collect animals on a serious basis, stocking his estate with exotic species. His son, Henry I, expanded the collection to include ‘lions, leopards, lynxes, camels, owls and a porcupine’. James I, incidentally, received ‘a lioness, five camels and an elephant’ as a gift from the King of Spain. When the lioness died, James I invented a nippled bottle with which to feed her cubs; the camels were sent to live in the Tower; and the elephant joined his majesty at St James’s Palace, receiving a daily allowance of wine.
Where British royalty led, the Church and aristocracy followed. Imported animals, birds and fish were to be found in monasteries, abbeys and the larger estates from medieval times onwards. Yet it wasn’t until the 18th century that menagerie fever can really be said to have gripped the nation. The expansion of the Empire and subsequent flow of wealth brought a flood of exotic creatures to our shores. Soldiers, sailors and merchants came home with parrots, Tasmanian devils, platypuses, cheetahs, crocodiles, tortoises, lynxes, camels, kangaroos, salamanders, snakes, goldfish, sloths and thousands of other species. By the 1770s, every major city in Britain had at least one pet shop and some had dozens.
The Royal Menagerie at Exeter Change, The Strand, London, pictured around 1820. Edward Cross kept animals here in the cages including an elephant, lion, tiger, apes/monkeys and parrots. Picture: Aquatint after Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827).
The golden age of the British menagerie began, then, in the early 1700s and lasted for about 200 years. It was fuelled by a variety of factors: the desire to display one’s taste and wealth, a genuine fascination and affection for the animals, as well as scientific interest. Some of the finest menageries were to be found in London. Dr Joshua Brookes, for example, built a vivarium in the garden of his Blenheim Street home using stones from the Rock of Gibraltar and filled it with ‘rare and interesting animals including a wolf dog, a savage Devil from New South Wales, monkeys, bisons and racoons’.
Rural menageries were, of course, constructed on a considerably larger scale — often by somewhat eccentric owners. Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild trained a team of zebras to pull his carriage and rode bareback on his giant tortoise. Thomas Barrett-Lennard insisted that all the animals on his estate (including the rats) were given a full Christian burial when they died. Charles Waterton, who conceived the world’s first wildlife sanctuary, would pretend to be some of the different species he was protecting, dropping down on all fours and nipping at visitors’ ankles (he also kept a vampire bat in his bedroom in the hope that it would bite him, as he wanted to write up the symptoms).
Zoo owner John Aspinall plays with his tigers in 1971. (Photo by George Greenwell/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
The First World War and the advent of public zoos put paid to most menageries, although there were exceptions. In the 1950s, John Aspinall began to breed gorilla and big-cat families on his two estates in Kent. In 1970, the Duke of Bedford opened Woburn as a safari park.
Quite rightly, the practice of keeping wild animals as pets was ended by the Endangered Species Act in 1973, with the change in UK law limiting the activities of Harrods Pet Kingdom, which closed for good in 2014. It marked the end of exotic, eccentric menageries.
Happily, however, it’s possible to create a wonderful menagerie without resorting to wild-caught animals, to which I hope our own dogs, cats, chickens, sheep, goats, pigs and horses will attest.
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