An Audience with an Elephant (2 page)

In the past month he has been visited by BBC Radio Wales, reporters from the local and national press, Radio Orwell, UPI International Broadcasting and a photographer from a German colour magazine. The Pasha must be used to such attention by now, for with every spring, newspapermen come to a house outside Lowestoft to pick him up and scratch his head and take photographs. They come to see Ali Pasha, the only Turkish prisoner of war still in British hands. The Pasha is a tortoise.

On 6 May 1915 Henry Friston, a 21-year-old seaman, rejoined his battleship, HMS
Implacable
, after ten days in Hell. Hell was just 200 yards long by 8 yards wide, and on British Naval maps was known as X Beach in the Dardanelles, being too small even to have a name. But in May 1915, men died there in their hundreds, and the din — of British Naval bombardment and Turkish machine-guns — did not stop by day or night. Henry Friston, ferrying the wounded, had been under fire for ten days, had not eaten in three and not slept for two nights. But at this point military history stops and common sense falters, for Henry Friston was one of the world’s great hoarders. Somehow, in the midst of all the bombardments on a crowded beach he picked up a tortoise, and, when he left Gallipoli, the tortoise went too, in his haversack.

‘Before us lies an adventure unprecedented in modern war,’ the commanding general, Sir Ian Hamilton, had declared in a force order a fortnight before. And for Ali Pasha, a Turkish tortoise, fully-grown at about at around 30 years old, the unprecedented adventure was just beginning.

He lived for a year in the gun-pit of a battleship on active service, sliding all over the place in rough weather, as Henry Friston recalled later. But how he managed to remain undetected is a complete mystery. The routine on board a battleship was strict, especially a battleship at war, and as Henry’s son Don reflected, ‘Tortoises make messes’. Then it was over, and Henry brought him home to Lowestoft; Ali Pasha was about to become a household god. ‘He was always there,’ said Don Friston, who works for a Lowestoft design group. ‘He had been there 20 years before I was born.’

When Henry married in 1921 the tortoise passed to his mother; when she died in 1951 it came back to Henry again; after his death in 1977 it passed to Don. He has pictures of the tortoise with the generations, Henry ageing visibly in each one but Ali Pasha remaining exactly the same. Don Friston is now 47 and expects the tortoise to outlive him and become the pet of his grandchildren, as yet unborn. Some remote generation might just have the shell, he said, but as long as there were Fristons in Lowestoft there would also be an Ali Pasha.

This is not a story about pets, though the Pasha’s fame has spread and for the last 20 years he has been the only non-canine honorary life member of the Tail-Waggers’ Club of Australia, 70,000 strong. Nor is it about military history. It is about one man’s ability, in the midst of the most extraordinary circumstances he would ever encounter, to go on being himself. In Gallipoli Henry Friston found a tortoise.

‘Dad never threw anything away,’ said Don Friston. He kept everything. When he left school in 1908 to become a gardener (the Fristons were fishermen or gardeners) he kept the certificate of attendance presented to him by his headmaster. When he signed on for the Royal Navy in 1912 he kept the oiled parchment (‘Denomination: Free Methodist; Can Swim: Yes’). Even in the war he kept the bizarre little humorous monthly which the
Implacable’
s crew produced throughout its duration, which, more than any other thing, showed the overwhelming military superiority of the Royal Navy. One item, a spoof of a romantic novel, began: ‘The gown showed off her exquisite figure to advantage. Her lovely face was lit up by a rosy blush and a radiance that is only obtainable by constant use of the very cheapest rouge. . .’.

Henry Friston kept maps and generals’ memoirs and Turkish bullets and shrapnel and a Turkish army spoon. Ali Pasha never stood a chance. ‘It must have been as common as us seeing rabbits,’ said Don Friston, ‘the only difference being that tortoises are easier to catch.’

His father, he said, was an odd sort of bloke. He had been very quiet, fond of gardening and fishing — fond of quiet, really. After he came back from the war he announced his intention of never going on his travels again and there were no family holidays; the only time Henry Friston left Lowestoft was to go to Llandudno for a week’s Home Guard training. The only house he ever owned was a railway carriage.

‘He’d bought this plot of land, intending to build on it, and he had this old railway carriage which he converted.’ Don Friston unrolled a sheet of paper; his father had even kept his plans. ‘But then the 1930s’ slump came and then the war, and when that was over he was refused planning permission because they’d decided to extend the roads.’

Yet this very private man was, in his later years, hardly out of the local paper. There was a photograph of him when he retired as a bus inspector in 1959, and the headline explained it all:
OWNER OF ALI PASHA RETIRES FROM THE BUSES
. ‘It began in the 1950s, I think. Dad has driven a certain route all his life and he’d got to know the reporters, and they’d found out about the tortoise. As far as they were concerned, whenever Ali came out of hibernation, it was the perfect spring story: “It’s here, Ali Pasha is awake.’”

A wider fame came in 1968 when the
News of the World
invited readers to write about unusual war souvenirs. Men had kept bayonets and old packs of cigarettes, but from Lowestoft came a letter from a man saying he had taken a tortoise prisoner.

The Australian papers picked it up because of the Anzac associations with Gallipoli. It did not take long for the Tail-Wagger-in-chief to write from Melbourne, enclosing a badge and certificate of honorary life membership, and marvelling ‘that a soldier amidst all the horror of war thought to care for a creature as unlikely as a tortoise’. Letters poured in from all round the world. ‘Dad used to spend a lot of time with the tortoise. He used to talk to it and tell it what a good old boy it was. After mother died he would spend hours picking dandelions and bindweed for it to eat. Ali Pasha has always been very fond of dandelions.

‘Every winter he’d put it away ever so carefully, placing layers of sand in a box with hay on top so it could bury itself, and then insulating this with old newspapers and sacking. Then, of course, it would wake up and all the fuss would start again. My father used to find it very funny. As far as he was concerned, all that had happened was that once on a beach he picked up something he liked and brought it home. And there he was, getting older, and the tortoise getting more and more famous.’

From a pile of newspaper cuttings, Don Friston unearthed his father’s obituary. The tortoise, he said wryly, had even managed to get into that.

An Audience with An Elephant

T IS A WINTER
afternoon, and two men are walking slowly across Woolwich Common. They are not alone, and the two are clearly in some awe of the shape that walks between them. This is a Christmas story.

She is the most successful showbiz figure of her generation, and the most controversial. Opposition to her career led three years ago to her enforced retirement, but now, like General MacArthur, she has returned. Within the past month she has opened the Christmas season at Harrods, appeared in the Royal Variety Performance at the Palladium, and last Wednesday, on a wall in the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden, put, between the handprints of Sir John Gielgud and Dame Peggy Ashcroft, her own unmistakable mark. She is sixteen years old. And all this to her has been mere interruptions in the long days during which she must cram 300lbs of food into herself, for she is 8ft 6ins in height and weighs 2½ tons. She is Rani, the last elephant in Gerry Cottle’s circus.

Requests for photographs come by the sack-load, yet there are still places in Britain where she cannot go, for the country she ambles through in her 40-week working year is as politically fragmented as mediaeval Germany. The further Left a council, the more strident is its opposition to performing animals, so when a change of regime occurs Rani returns to the recreation grounds and the commons. The most dramatic single index to local government change, she will be in Battersea Park this Christmas, for the Greater London Council has gone and Wandsworth now rules over the coloured lights. But to further confuse her sense of political geography, she has been there before, hired out to the GLC in the days of its pomp, so that Mr Ken Livingstone could pass like Haroun al-Raschid through Battersea.

For she is not just a circus performer: she is the first and only elephant to be licensed to appear in public under the ‘Dangerous Wild Animals Act’. For £1,000, her daily rate, you can invite her to your wedding, once the appropriate environmental health officer has been contacted and has given his permission after sturdily invoking the Deity a few times. She has appeared at supermarkets, Indian restaurants, once wriggled her way into a village hall, was most recently in
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
, and will be familiar to millions from her endorsement of videos, rice, Turkish delight and cornflakes in TV advertisements. She has, it is claimed, opened more things than the cast of
EastEnders.

‘Once a day, nails,’ said her keeper, Robert Raven, a railwayman’s son from Norfolk. ‘I oil them, for they’d crack otherwise. Twice a week I grease around her eyes. I wash her, brush her down, wait on her hand and foot.’ It is a seven-days-a-week job, from 7.30 in the morning, when she has her bran and maize, with hay, so she can make little sandwiches, to 10.30 at night. He scratched his head, incredulous that it should have come to this, when his ambition once had merely been to join a circus. (‘You have these ideas, when you’re a little boy.’) An elephant’s servant, muttered Mr Raven.

He has been in service for eight years, during which time he has managed to fit in a marriage. ‘The wife’s convinced she’s jealous of her. We went for a walk once, the three of us, and I must have said something for the wife started hitting me and I shouted, “Help.” The next thing we knew, the elephant was rushing towards us. I managed to stop her, but when you’ve seen an elephant running towards you it’s a sight you don’t forget in a hurry. I am very careful now.’ Things are even further complicated by his baby son, who is fascinated by the animal, and whenever he manages to get out of their caravan crawls towards her tent; the elephant is nervous of small things.

The tent is a lean-to, with the flaps down to prevent the draughts to which an elephant is susceptible. Inside this she is chained, mainly on account of her curiosity. Water she associates with a black hosepipe, and with the number of black electric cables lying around the encampment a curious elephant wandering around would be a major hazard. ‘Plus the fact that she’s badly spoiled,’ said Robert Raven. ‘She was very ill once and went to stay with a vet, who let her do anything she wanted on his farm. She made a hole once in a barn wall just to see what was going on, and if she wanted to go into a field she’d just walk through a closed gate. He’d stand there smiling and smoking a cigar.’

The illness was in 1977, when her skin began flaking away, a condition that baffled the vets and was cured only when details were sent to Bombay University. It was suggested that the vegetables and fruit in her diet be increased. ‘We were so worried, and then she recovered,’ said Gerry Cottle. ‘I suppose that made her special.’

Cottle bought her in 1973, a tiny elephant from north-west India who turned up at Stansted with her mahout. He has good reason to remember it, for when he got there he was informed that VAT, which had been introduced a week earlier, applied to elephants. He lost £250,000 in the next two years because circus audiences appeared to agree with the councils that animals were a persecuted minority. When he went back into animals he had a vicar in to bless them and, to cock a snook at authority, added a turkey. The turkey, which does nothing except walk up and down, is called Lucky.

Twice a night, for seven minutes at a time, Rani steps from tub to tub, or walks over people. (‘Being the only animal which can’t jump, an elephant has to be sure-footed. She could walk on an egg.’) She also plays cricket but has refused to play football. ‘And what else would she be doing?’ Robert Raven stroked one huge wrinkled side. ‘Humping timber or walking up and down in a zoo.’