The World War II story was painted by artist Carel Weight.
On a recent trip to Manchester, I came across a four-panel oil painting entitled Escape of the Zebra from the Zoo during an Air Raid. It tells the story of a zebra’s escape from London Zoo, and its subsequent safe return, in the chaos of a German bombing raid on the night of 26/27 September 1940, in the early weeks of the Blitz.
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It was painted in 1941 by Carel Victor Morlais Weight and is in the collection of Manchester Art Gallery. This is the second time I have been inspired to write about one of this gallery’s paintings of a London scene (see also my 2024 post 'Work' by Ford Madox Brown, a painting to rival a Dickens novel).
Starting top left and finishing bottom right, the four panels of Carel Weight’s Escape of the Zebra from the Zoo tell the zebra's story that night after the Zebra House received a direct hit. Each painting is small, all four fitting into an area 22cm by 35cm, but what the brushwork sometimes lacks in finesse it more than makes up for in colour and a visceral sense of drama.
At the centre of the first panel, we see the startled zebra in the ruins of its pen, surrounded by small fires. Behind the animal, the Mappin Terraces (the zoo’s artificial mountains) are silhouetted in black against a burning night sky. The damaged Zebra House is visible on the left.
Panel two shows the zebra galloping for its life, its large shadow cast against a white structure by the dazzling light of the flames of hell rising from the Regent’s Canal, which runs through part of the Zoo. A zookeeper looks on from the bridge.
In panel three, the zebra is fleeing along a street in nearby Camden Town, pursued by two men in helmets, possibly ARP wardens. A third man is struggling to keep pace (a zookeeper, perhaps) as he rounds the corner of a red brick building, while a fourth figure stands enigmatically outside a pub. The scorching night sky continues to blaze.
The details of the street in this panel show that Carel Weight chose to create a kind of composite of Camden, rather than a fully accurate one.
The yellow-tinted building towards the left of the picture closely resembles the Dublin Castle, a well known pub on Parkway. On closer examination of the painting, its name can indeed be made out on the front of the building. However, although the glowing red brick building next to it resembles the real life neighbouring building, the artist has placed on it the name ‘Leverton & Sons’, funeral directors* whose head office is actually in Eversholt Street, around half a mile away. Moreover, there is no street leading into Parkway at the point shown in the painting.
The artistic choices in the composition add to the sense of confusion and disorientation, heightened further by the shadowy nature of the humans in the scene (I also assume that, by depicting both a pub and an undertakers, Carel Weight was seeking to include the fullest range of human experience).
The final panel sees the zebra surrounded by people in an enclosed area. The cage in the foreground on the right indicates that this area is back in the zoo. The zebra appears a little calmer now, as does the artist’s choice of colours for this scene, which looks to be set in the daytime the following morning.
The artist has included incidental details such as a black cat skipping across the yard, a man in uniform heading for the Gents and a sign pointing to an air raid shelter. This may refer to the East Tunnel, which passes under the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park and was among the structures in the zoo that were used as shelters.
The bomb that hit the zebra house on the night of 26/27 September 1940 caused significant structural damage, but did not kill or injure a single one of its occupants, apart from scratches. A roof beam fell between two zebras without harming them.
The raid also damaged the Rodent House, the Civet House, the gardener’s office and plant sheds and the North Gate. A wild ass and her foal also escaped, but, amazingly, none of the zoo's animals were injured that night.
Julian Huxley, London Zoo Director at the time, later wrote that five explosive bombs hit the grounds during that raid, each one exploding closer to his shelter. He put on his tin hat and went out to find the restaurant was on fire and that the water main had been destroyed. He led firemen to the Sea Lion Pool, the only available water source, which they almost emptied before controlling the flames.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, on 3 September 1939, London Zoo was closed on the orders of the government. Some of its most valuable animals were moved to Wipsnade, while its venomous creatures were killed to avoid the risk they would pose if they escaped during air raids.
However, the zoo reopened 12 days later and remained open for the duration of the war, apart from for one week after the discovery of an unexploded bomb that had been dropped in the raid of September 1940.
The wartime ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ spirit was abundantly evident at the zoo, as it was across London. A report in The Times late in 1940 drew the parallels:
“The Zoo is in fact a microcosm of London. Hitler’s bombs cause a certain amount of damage to it, and a considerable amount of inconvenience; but they have not destroyed the morale or the routine of its inhabitants, animal or human, and it continues to function with a very respectable degree of efficiency.”
*Camden-based funeral directors Leverton & Sons has been run by the same family since 1789. Among those whose funerals it has arranged are Sir Henry Royce (of Rolls-Royce), George Orwell, Kenneth Williams, Michael Foot and Margaret Thatcher. The firm was appointed undertakers to the Royal Household in 1991, since when it has arranged the funerals of Diana, Princess of Wales, the Queen Mother, Prince Philip and Elizabeth II.
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks, please click here.
Lovely blog article J.