The ‘almost human’ gorilla who drank tea and went to school
John Daniel was no ordinary gorilla. For starters, he was called John Daniel. And he had his own bedroom, drank tea and cider, and could purportedly do his own washing up.
The extraordinary tale of the village that adopted its very own gorilla a century ago is told in a new local history book by a Gloucestershire historian.
Margaret Groom, an archivist at the Uley Society, unearthed a collection of photographs of John, which have been published in her book about the village’s history.
The book recounts how villagers in Uley adopted the lowland gorilla after he was captured in Gabon by French soldiers who shot his parents. In 1917, he was spotted for sale in a London department store by Uley resident Maj Rupert Penny, who paid £300 (about £20,000 in today’s money), and named him John Daniel.
Penny’s sister, Alyce Cunningham, raised John as a human boy in the village and used to send John on regular walks with the children of Uley junior school, according to Groom.
Groom told the Gloucestershire Live site: “Until recently, we had people that remembered him walking around the village with the children. He used to go into gardens and eat the roses.
“The children used to push him around in a wheelbarrow. He knew which house was good for cider, and would often go to that house to draw a mug of cider.
“He was also fascinated by the village cobbler, and would watch him repairing shoes. He had his own bedroom, he could use the light switch and toilet, he made his own bed and helped with the washing up.”
Cunningham would also take him to her London home in Sloane Street, where he would attend her dinner parties, drinking cups of tea in the afternoon, Groom said.
But the story of John Daniel has an unhappy ending. “When he grew to full size, Miss Cunningham couldn’t look after him any more,” said Groom. “She sold him to an American for a thousand guineas, believing that he would be sent to a home in Florida.”
Instead, he fell into the hands of Barnum and Bailey circus and was also displayed in the zoo at Madison Square Garden in New York, where his health deteriorated and it was believed he was pining for his former “mother”. Cunningham, alerted by the zoo, set sail immediately, but John Daniel died of pneumonia before she arrived.
His body was given to the American Museum of Natural History for preservation and went on display in the New York museum in 1922, where he remains.
John Daniel is to be the subject of art exhibitions to be held this year at Prema Arts Centre in Uley.
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