GLASGOW ZOO: The Great Correspondence of 1939

Letters and articles from the Glasgow Herald, compiled and edited by Roger Edwards, Special Projects Officer, Glasgow Zoopark

The Zoological Society of Glasgow and West of Scotland would like to place on record its thanks to The Herald newspaper for permission to reproduce articles from paper in the following correspondence.

INITIAL COMMENTS:

No-one could have anticipated the long correspondence which was to be sparked off by an article published in The Glasgow Herald on Friday, December 30, 1938. The article outlined a proposal to found a zoological park in Glasgow. Over the next few weeks no fewer than thirty-one letters on the rights and wrongs of zoos appeared in the paper.

The Zoological Society of Glasgow had been founded in December, 1936. Among those who attended the inaugural meeting of the charity was Sydney H. Benson, a journalist and photographer and very much the driving force behind the project, who later became the first Director of the Zoo. Professor L.A.L. King was another of the founder members. The principal objective of the Society was to establish a zoological park within the city of Glasgow.

The first site proposed for the zoo was Bellahouston Park. When this plan came to nothing various other estates were investigated including the Garscube Estate on the Bearsden road. The Society eventually selected the Calderpark Estate, Broomhouse, at that time a couple of miles outwith the city boundary (subsequent boundary changes have incorporated the estate into the city).

The correspondence which follows came to light when early newspaper reports of the Zoological Society were being transcribed from the microfilm copies of The Glasgow Herald held in the Glasgow Room of the Mitchell Library. Without the resources of Glasgow's great reference library this research would not have been possible. The correspondence was discovered purely by accident, the contents of Letters to the Editor not being included in the published index of The Herald.

In places, especially round the edges of pages, the microfilm is severely scratched and unreadable. This presents a particular problem with Arabic numerals, but some words and punctuation are also indecipherable. Unfortunately, it proved impossible to gain access to the bound copies of the original newspapers to check unclear sections of text.

Initials and noms-de-plume were frequently used in The Glasgow Herald's correspondence at that time. We cannot now determine whether S.H. Benson actually knew the identity of any of the anonymous writers.

I have included a few other extracts from The Herald which relate to the correspondence. The anticipation of war casts a great shadow on Glasgow at the time and there is much coverage in the papers of contingency arrangements. Perhaps rather surprisingly in such circumstances, proposals for a Channel Tunnel are several times aired.

See Proposal of Zoo at Calderpark