Grandpa Rupert - My Hero

I never met my maternal grandfather, Rupert Fothergill. He died ten years before I was born. But I grew up watching him chase rhinos, nurse baby kudu, hold eight-foot pythons and coax porcupines out of their burrows.

Grandpa Rupert was the head game ranger in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), one of only a handful employed by the government's National Parks and Wildlife Department. In the late 1950s, when the final gaps were closing in the walls of Kariba Dam, he was assigned to lead a team of fifty men on a wildlife rescue operation of the native animals who called the Zambezi Valley home.

Operation Noah lasted five years, and saw over 6000 animals - from anteaters to zebras and everything in between - relocated from the shrinking islands of Lake Kariba to the mainland. The men lived out of bush camps and had only the most rudimentary of equipment - dinghies, ropes, nets, boxes and sacks - to carry out their mammoth task.

Grandpa Rupert owned a 16mm film camera and documented their efforts. For almost half a century, his footage of charging rhinos, drowning monkeys, netted antelope and caged lions sat in boxes in our family home. Mum and Dad used to dig out the four half-hour episodes edited by the Rhodesian Government in the 60s, and project them against a white board at our childhood birthday parties, or invite the neighbours over for screenings in the garage on rainy Sunday afternoons. But the bulk of the raw footage has not been seen for almost fifty years.

As I write this, I'm digitising Reel 9: it shows Grandpa Rupert feeding two orphaned baby elephants powdered milk from a bucket. By the end of the day, all fifteen reels will have been safely transferred to digital video tape, and backed up on a hard drive. The original acetate film will eventually decay, but the amazing images it holds will be preserved forever.

His photo albums are being scanned as well, and hopefully, some day, I'll be able to put all these assets together and tell the full story of Operation Noah and its heroes.

For now, I'll use this blog as a place to give you a taste of a life less ordinary...