Day 66: Glasgow Zoo (c.1948) - Lion and Cubs
Page count: 40 pages (including several pages of advertisements at the back)
Photographs: c.30 black-and-white photographs
Illustrations/diagrams: N/A
Layout: Introduction to collection, discussing history of the Zoological Society of Glasgow and West Scotland and plans for future, followed by visitor information and discussion of various species held within the collection at the time of publication.
Map: Two maps; map of collection located towards opening of guidebook; map showing location of Glasgow Zoo and surrounding environs on inner rear cover.
Today, I have elected to depart from my usual random-selection of guide books in order to highlight a recently-obtained oddity which presented a rather satisfying mystery to solve; a few weeks ago, I stumbled across a guidebook for Glasgow Zoo on eBay which did not seem to match any mentioned on the master-list of British guide books maintained and updated by the Bartlett Society. Given the fact that this rather suggested that the guidebook in question was somewhat scarce, the lack of any date or provenance on the listing, and my interest in tracking down information pertaining to closed zoological collections, I thought that this was well worth attempting to secure. In the end, I was able to purchase this guidebook for rather less than I expected would be the case; despite some casual competition, the listing did not attract the bidding war that rarities of this sort often incite!
Once the guidebook eventually arrived in the post, I was struck by how fragile and delicate it was; the staples were heavily rusted, and the cover has come away from the main body of the guidebook, all potential indicators of substantial age. Given the fragility of the guidebook, I very carefully started to read through it in the hope of finding any clues relating to when precisely it had been published. Naturally, the first thing that I looked for was any copyright or printing date; unfortunately, although the name and address of the printers who produced this guidebook on behalf of the zoo was indeed located on the title page, no date was visible. However, the title page did provide me with my first major clues; to wit, it stated that the director at the time of publication was S. H. Benson, and a full map of the collection was located opposite. Another potential clue was discovered beyond the introduction to the guide book; after an account of the history of the Glasgow and West Scotland Zoological Society and the construction of the zoo (of which more later), a short section discussed the very recent construction of a tropical house, implicitly the first such structure at the zoo given the statement that the collection was "now in the position to accommodate certain birds and animals which [they] could not keep before". Finally, a section towards the end of the guidebook discussing membership of the zoological society cited all prices in pre-decimalisation currency; this conclusively demonstrated that the guidebook could not have been published any more recently than 1971, when the United Kingdom adopted decimal currency.
Having assembled all of these potential items of evidence along with several scans and photographs from the guidebook, and knowing that my own knowledge of the history of Glasgow Zoo was negligible, I posted my findings on a variety of zoo-related Facebook groups; given the fact that I knew that these groups were frequented by individuals with a keen knowledge of zoo history, and in some cases retired keepers from Glasgow Zoo itself, my hope was that this might cast some light on the issue at hand. I was rather rapidly informed that the collection map provided within this guidebook appeared to depict a Glasgow Zoo which long-predated the career of the retired keepers in question, and that the telephone number and Director cited on the title page also indicated substantial age. Two other significant points were made by members of our own community;
@robmv noted that S. H. Benson served as director of Glasgow Zoo from 1947 to 1966, and that therefore the guidebook could not have been published any more recently than the latter date; having spotted an advertisement for Skerry's College on the above scan of the membership page,
@Maguari pointed out that it stated the college had 70 years of experience, pinning the advertisement down to between 1948 and 1957. Having confirmed that the guidebook must therefore come from the first decade after Glasgow Zoo first opened, I started searching for any additional clues within which I may have overlooked. Inspiration struck when I realised that a list of the Officers and Council-members of the Zoological Society of Glasgow and west Scotland was located on the opening page of the Guidebook, prior to the title page and map; on researching the names mentioned within, I found that Sir Hector McNeill had retired as the Lord Provost of Glasgow in 1949 and that therefore this date represented the upper bound for when the guidebook was originally published.
As previously noted, the guidebook opens with a brief introduction to Glasgow Zoo, discussing both the collection itself and zoos in general, before moving on to a detailed discussion of the formation of the Zoological Society of Glasgow and West Scotland in the 1930s and subsequent efforts by the Society to establish a zoo within the boundaries of the city, culminating in the opening of the collection in 1947. Given the scarcity of detailed information about Glasgow Zoo online, particularly where the earliest days of the collection are concerned, and the substantial detail which this section provides on these matters, I have elected to scan and upload the entirety of this historical discussion; this information will therefore be preserved as a valuable resource for zoo historians going forward.
Beyond here, information is relayed about the future plans of the society for the expansion and development of the zoo; given what little I know of the collection, it is interesting to note that little of what is proposed ever came to pass as far as I am aware! This section is followed by various items of important visitor information, including details of public transport links to the zoo, parking facilities, opening hours, feeding times and the rules and regulations governing visitors.
The main body of the guidebook more or less comprises a range of black-and-white photographs and short passages of text describing various of the mammals and birds displayed at the collection at the time of publication; most of these are discussed at species level with full taxonomic names given, and conveying a surprising amount of information given the relatively brief nature of the text. However, it must be noted that in some cases, the level of precision and detail is rather lower - for instance, the text refers only to "Vultures" and "Amazon Parrots" rather than citing the specific taxa displayed within the collection, although in the former case the accompanying photograph tends to suggest that (at the very least) Eurasian Black Vulture was one of the species in question. It is also worth noting that although the standard of information provided is generally rather good, being remarkably undated, there are a few notable exceptions; the fact that the text lists lions, tigers and leopards within the genus Felis perhaps should have been a giveaway that I was dealing with a guidebook from the 1940s!
The guidebook closes with several pages of advertisements relating to goods and services available in and around Glasgow at the time of publication, followed by a road-map showing the location of Glasgow Zoo in relation to the city centre. I have, of course, already mentioned the advertisement for Skerry's College, a chain of colleges primarily intended to prepare candidates for jobs in the Civil Service and provide career advice, of which one of the first sites was located in Glasgow. This section also contains advertisements for services as widely varied as coach trips, the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society, a number of hotels and restaurants, and even the infamous Irn-Bru; for anyone unfamiliar with the latter product, it is a garishly-orange carbonated soft drink which has been produced in Scotland since 1901. The advert within this guidebook must be one of the very first to carry the new name for the product, it having been re-branded from Iron-Brew in early 1948. On a side-note, it may amuse anyone reading this thread to learn that Irn-Bru was among the stereotypically-British food products which various members of this forum ensured that
@ThylacineAlive encountered on his first visit to the UK in 2016, as
@kiang and myself introduced him to the dubious wonders of the drink whilst we were at Highland Wildlife Park!
This is, then, a rather interesting look at the very earliest days of a zoological collection which has fallen by the wayside; certainly it is a significantly more informative and high-quality item than the 1980s guidebook to Glasgow Zoo of which I have already written! Moreover, given the fragility and rarity of the guidebook - given the fact that the existence of this edition was unknown to the Bartlett Society and everyone I consulted via FB, this may well be one of the only extant copies - it has earned immediate status as one of the most precious and historically-important items in my collection.
given the fact I had to work out what it said in German before being able to translate it through a mixture of my own faltering grasp on the language and Google. I have translated the text from all three guidebooks; the basic summary is that this area was planned to hold exotic species of canid, but at the time of publication primarily held a range of unusual domestic breeds.
