The kids who grew up with chimps, leopards and a bear

Drinking tea with chimpanzees and taking a pet leopard for a walk was part of everyday life for the Clews family, who had so many animals they opened a zoo at their home.

Almost 40 years after it closed, they take the BBC through their extraordinary collection of family photographs.

Graham Clews points out the corner of his kitchen where a cage for baby chimps once sat.

"This was a complete mad house," he smiles.

Now 75, he still lives in the family house at Grandborough Farm in Warwickshire, where Southam Zoo operated for around 15 years.

He is regularly pestered in the local pub for stories of his wild upbringing surrounded by lions and baboons in the middle of the English countryside.

With tales of leopards relaxing in the living room and monkeys with a penchant for tobacco, the truth is often stranger than the rumours that circulate to this day.

Graham moved to the farm, near Rugby, when he was 18 months old with his father Leslie and animal-loving mum Pauline.

The couple, who later had two more children, started out with a milking herd and pigs. But one Christmas, Pauline started thinking bigger.

She spotted a picture of an air hostess with a baby chimpanzee in a copy of the Daily Mirror.

When her husband asked what she wanted for a present that year, she told him: "I'd love that chimp," Graham recalls.

A few days later a baby chimp arrived, followed by a bear from a touring circus, then a raccoon.

As the private collection snowballed, locals became accustomed to the roars of big cats carrying across the fields.

"Slowly it just got bigger and bigger until it was too big to be private," says Graham.

"You couldn't afford to keep it as just your pets because of the food bills. So we opened it as a zoo."

In 1966 a café was built and the first visitors to the eight-acre site saw a collection of exotic birds, big cats and monkeys.

But a bigger draw was the extraordinary bonds between the animals and their keepers.

In his teens, Graham acquired a pet leopard, Charlie, which wandered freely and slept on the farmhouse sofa.

Its best friend was a penguin named Wobbly Willy.

"As long as you could see one you knew where they were," Graham says.

On one occasion a man delivered a lorry-load of pigs and Graham invited him in for a cup of tea.

"I was talking to him and he went quiet. The leopard's head was on the sofa next to his leg and he couldn't talk.

"I said 'oh just push him over if you want to sit down'."

Cubs and monkeys were reared in the house and Graham's children Tracey and Alan grew up alongside baby chimps.

"They all went in the same pram. And I think they could kind of communicate as babies," says Graham.

At birthday parties, chimps dressed in clothes would hurl jelly and ice cream.

"I think the chimps were more naughty than us," recalls Alan, now 52.

He remembers sharing baths with pet chimp Sparky and pulling cubs in the back of his Tonka truck.

"To us, leopards and lions weren't scary… they'd never given us a reason to be scared of them," he says.

At the heart of it was Pauline, who the animals adored.

Her favourite was Sheba the lion, the first animal to be reared on a bottle.

Graham cannot think of any instances of family members coming to harm, though he does describe a visiting child being bitten by a monkey when a safety notice was ignored.

Strangers were not allowed too close and the cats no longer allowed to roam when the private collection became a zoo.

A newsletter from spring 1972 reveals the family bred leopards, pumas, lions, monkeys, baboons, porcupines and a binturong. But running expenses were never far from their minds.

"Visitors will see three new lions purchased more from the head than the heart but it does mean there are three extra mouths to feed," Leslie and Pauline wrote to visitors.

"So if you enjoyed your visit will you please tell your friends."

The zoo's growing reputation brought in photographers, TV and film crews.

Gary Numan arrived by helicopter one day to film a panther for music video She's Got Claws.

The chimps were also taken to London to make films while Graham's leopard visited cinemas to promote a new Pink Panther release.

Bugsy featured in Mary, Queen of Scots and Mutiny on the Buses and there were adverts for crisps and tea.

Photographers were constantly on hand, chronicling daily life.

"The Queen's photographer, he used to live with us when he wasn't touring," says Graham.

Tales about the zoo abound in Southam. A farm worker is reported to have brought baby bear Boo Boo to a local pub, a rumour Graham confirms.

He remembers an occasion when Bugsy swung from a main power line. "He just dropped to the floor blue - we thought he was dead."

A doctor placed a drop under the chimp's tongue to revive him.

"He came back to life. And if he saw Dr Jennings at the other end of Southam he'd be greeting him all the way, he never forgot him."

After the zoo was sold Graham was asked to help recapture an escaped chimp called Joe, which he eventually achieved with cigarettes and tranquiliser-laced coke while police held back traffic.

"He loved a smoke," he laughs.

Locals also remember the time chimps escaped into the grounds of a school when the family were out, with children barricaded inside for hours.

Two were shot by police before the family could retrieve them.

Leslie died in 1975, when he was 51. A few years later the zoo was sold and Pauline moved to Leominster, where she died of cancer at 54.

"When my grandad died she sort of lost interest a little bit," says Alan.

"They built the zoo together… I think my gran just got disheartened."

The attraction became an exotic cat specialist and eventually closed in 1985. The field was bought and luxury homes built in its place.

Now all the family retains of it are boxes of photographs and newspaper clippings.

Rumours of the time when chimps and wild cats walked the streets of Southam persist, however.

"There's a lot of people say a lot of things and you think - where did you get that?" Alan laughs.

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