On a quiet Richmond street in the early 1990s, I spotted David Attenborough carrying his grocery shopping home, and asked for an interview.
Because it was for a British Airways in-house magazine, I suggested something slightly different. Rather than natural history, I wanted to talk about travel – the practical business of getting to the world’s most remote places. To my surprise, he kindly agreed. A few days later, I found myself in his sitting room on Richmond Hill, tape recorder running, a cup of tea in hand.
Much of what Sir David describes dates from the earliest years of his broadcast career. By the time I interviewed him in 1992, he was already a household name, with a generation having grown up watching his programmes. In the decades since, he has educated and captivated many millions more. He turns 100 on 8 May – and is, without question, Britain’s most cherished national treasure.
What follows is that conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
Travels with Sir David Attenborough
I talked to Sir David Attenborough at his home on Richmond Hill about his experiences travelling the globe in pursuit of ground-breaking natural history film footage.
Sir David Attenborough is Britain’s best-known natural history filmmaker. His career has spanned many decades, during which he has travelled to some of the world’s most remote regions. He took his first international flight in 1954, before the world was shrunk by jet engines and modern navigational aids. Since then, he has flown in a wide variety of aircraft and rested his weary head in countless hotels.
“Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel. They put me on an aircraft carrier moored to a buoy in the middle of the Firth of Forth, which wasn’t exactly the kind of travel I had in mind! When I came out, I was a very junior ‘irk’ in publishing. I joined the BBC as a trainee. At first, the television service had no money, and it was regarded as a rather raffish arm of the BBC.”
Sir David found the studio format unimaginative and longed to take a camera outside. He recalls them saying, “Sorry old boy, that’s not what television’s about. Television is about what you do in here.” He did, however, eventually succeed, and his first expedition was to Freetown, West Africa, with a team from London Zoo.
“We were sent in an old two-engined Dakota (DC-3), which held twenty or so people. It took three days to get there because we couldn’t fly at night as there were no direction-finders. The first night we stopped at Tangier – which I must say, to a young chap was quite a revelation, especially down at the Casbah! The second night was in Dakar before finally reaching Freetown.”
The return journey proved more memorable.
“I noticed black stains appearing on the wing from the engine. Seeking an excuse to speak to the stewardess, I said, ‘Those black stains out there – are they routine?’
“‘It’s awful,’ she said. ‘We’re going to lose an engine!’ And with that, sparks came out and the thing stopped. She gripped my arm and said, ‘What are we going to do?’ And I said, ‘You’re supposed to be comforting me!’”
“We came into an airport called Blackbushe, where my dear wife Jane was waiting for me. She turned to her companion, the cameraman’s wife, and said, ‘They’re coming in on one engine.’ And she replied, ‘Oh, they always do that for practice.’ So Jane wasn’t in the least bit alarmed when we finally landed.”
Sir David remembers how travel in those pioneering days was rarely straightforward.
Flights to the Far East were done in four or five stages. “Getting to places like Bangkok or Singapore was a hell of a sweat. But when you got there, it really was the back of beyond. The airport was often little more than a series of tin sheds. You felt you were really in the ‘mystic east’.”
Trips to New Guinea could take an age. “You first flew to Australia, then Port Moresby, then Lae, and from there a missionary aircraft the rest of the way. The journey might take a week, but it often took a fortnight to get all our gear through.”
Even routine journeys could take unexpected turns. Sir David flew to Paraguay to collect animals for London Zoo, which were due to arrive in Britain on Christmas Eve. But on his way back, he found himself stranded in Puerto Rico when the airline cancelled the onward flight.
“I asked what I was going to do with all the animals as I had no food for them. They said, ‘That’s your problem’.”
Salvation came in unlikely form.
He discovered – from airline staff – that Puerto Rico was a favourite Christmas haunt of wealthy Texans and New Yorkers. Consequently, incoming flights were full, but outbound ones were often half-empty, and one airline agreed to carry him and his precious cargo. They loaded his crates into the cabin where he could keep an eye on them.
“It was a First Class-only plane – the lushest I’ve ever seen. I told the air hostess I was running out of food. She said, ‘Oh, how awful! But we’ve only got caviar and Californian peaches.’ I said, ‘That’s funny – that’s exactly what armadillos like!’ So that’s what they ate all the way to New York.”
If travel itself was demanding, the experience of flying had its own rituals.
Sir David admits he finds it difficult to sleep on aircraft and prefers to pass the time reading. His strategy for dealing with talkative passengers is simple: monosyllabic answers and a determined return to his book. He is less interested in the aircraft themselves. “I have colleagues who will look out of the window and say, ‘Oh God! There’s a 4B…’ but it’s lost on me. I can just about tell if it’s got a jet engine or one of those funny things on the front!”
While flights could be unpredictable, accommodation could sometimes be worse.
“I remember coming out of Niger and it so happened that there was a great pilgrimage, so all the hotels were full. We ended up sleeping on the floor in tin huts with bed bugs and fleas. I remember sleeping in places that were infested with rats and waking up with one trundling over my face. Actually, I hate rats!”
The best hotel, he recalls, was Raffles in Singapore. But not all the hotels were quite so luxurious.
“I remember there was a great hotel in Surabaya in East Java called ‘The Orange Hotel’, which was one of those great hotels. We used to get up very early and film. We always asked for fried eggs – about the only thing they did. But they were always cold. So we thought the thing to do was to get up earlier and earlier, but whatever time we got up the fried eggs were cold. Eventually we discovered that they fried the eggs the previous night and stacked them in piles. Not the world’s greatest breakfast!”
Travelling to so many countries means being a target for a variety of exotic illnesses. Despite the risks, Sir David claims not to be particularly prone to illness.
“I remember once I’d been travelling for many days and nights. After the relief of getting home, I woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat – absolutely swimming in it. I thought, ‘This is it, I’ve got malaria. I should’ve been more careful.’
“I lay there for a long time working out what to do, with poor Jane lying fast asleep next to me. I finally clambered out of bed and felt not too bad, actually. I then discovered that in the four months I’d been away, Jane had bought an electric blanket with double controls, and my side was on full. That was a great relief!
“But in my time, I’ve picked up all sorts of things in hotels – fleas, lice, tapeworm.”
Animals, of course, brought their own complications.
“The main problem with hotels was that we used to collect animals – and smuggle them into the rooms. Pythons under the bed, armadillos in the bath, bats on the curtains… and of course everything got out in the night.”
“I remember once in Madagascar I found some marvellous things called pill millipedes which are about the size of a golf ball. For some reason, I found a group of about a hundred and fifty of them – it was the most extraordinary sight. I thought they’d make a wonderful display at London Zoo, so I gathered up about a hundred or so and put them in a sack.
“That night, I had to stay in a hotel. In the middle of the night, they found a hole in the sack and by morning they were all gone. I went out into the corridor and there were pill millipedes everywhere and I had to go dashing around picking the things up. I got into a lot of trouble for that!”
Sometimes, that unpredictability became rather more immediate.
Sir David recalls, “I was flying to East Africa in the old days, and for some reason I felt like hell. I was travelling to meet with Elsa, the famous ‘Born Free’ lioness.
“Joy Adamson, an Austrian Countess who found Elsa, said to me, ‘Oh David, it’s the end of the world. Elsa is dying. She has been attacked by a strange lioness, and she has run away.’
“I tried to calm her, but in the end I thought, ‘Oh well, that’s just tough. I’m not going to worry about it.’ I was absolutely shattered, so I got out a camp-bed and fell asleep. Well, you know what it’s like when you’re really dead tired and the whole of your life blood seems to have just disappeared, and you feel like a sack of wet dough. So, I woke up with this terrible weight on my chest and a frightful smell of halitosis. It was Elsa – and she was sitting on me. I thought I was about to be her breakfast – I didn’t know what to do. And then Joy came around the corner and said, ‘Ah Elsa, meine Liebchen!’ Never mind me, who was about to be her Liebchen’s breakfast! And then this thing got up and went off. It was quite an awakening!”
For all the travel, however, the journey itself was never the point.
“I like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.”
Would he have liked to have been someone like Darwin and come back today?
“Oh yes, I think so. Very few people in the history of biology could have seen as much of the actual things that I have, and the sad thing is that I do so little with it. I’m so busy gobbling it up that I don’t sort of digest it.
“But one of the great things would have been not Darwin, but Captain Cook. On his first and second voyage, he went round the Pacific and went to Tahiti where he saw a new brand of humanity, and a completely new set of animals and plants. That must have been mind-blowing.
“The reverse side of the coin in having this extraordinary ability to go anywhere is that no one anywhere is remote any more. I just caught the end of it in the mid-fifties. When I was right in the middle of Borneo, you thought you were in a different world. There was no radio, no way of communicating – but it was nothing compared to what Cook did. I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.”
Nearly four decades on from that interview, the world he describes has largely disappeared. The curiosity behind it has not. All of us at East Anglia Bylines wish Sir David a very happy 100th birthday.
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