The Last Journey

It was not quite over though. After the final sale had been completed, many of the animals departed from Newcastle to Glasgow along with the Menagerie band for a short residence at Kelvin Hall. The last show was on 16th January, 1932. The next day, the animals began their final journey on seventeen trucks, bound down south to be the nucleus of the collection at the brand newly established Whipsnade Zoo. They arrived in Dunstable early Monday morning on the 18th January, 1932.

On the day the menagerie closed, Hetty Jane Owen was forty-eight years old, and living in Islington. Her daughter Olwen Eldridge was sixteen, and her son Harold, not far off celebrating his twelfth birthday. To what extent, they were aware and taking note of events down in Dunstable cannot be told. But perhaps Hetty’s mother, Maria Rosetta Bradley, aged seventy-two as the menagerie folded, would have known more, and might perhaps have reached into her folder of old family papers to look once more at the story of Peto the elephant, and her George Wombwell junior cuttings. Indeed, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the elephant letter was written out by Maria Rosetta herself, sometime in the 1880s or 90s when George was trying to eke out a living by selling his menagerie stories.