Aidan Hartley Aidan Hartley

Years of living dangerously

The son of a fish-paste factory manager in London’s East End, Alan Root fell in love with ornithology as a Blitz evacuee when he first clapped eyes on the pea-sized egg of a goldcrest, England’s smallest bird. After the war his father got a job manufacturing bully-beef in Kenya, where Root discovered a much richer diversity of birds. While still at school he began recording birdsong and then shot 8mm home movies of the snakes he collected.

Root makes his rise to becoming the world’s greatest wildlife film-maker seem eccentric and easy. A lucky break started him working for Armand Denis, producer of the early TV series On Safari. On a flooded bridge over Uganda’s Ntungwe River a man from Anglia Television interviewed him like this: ‘Would you like the job?’ ‘I’d love it.’ ‘Splendid! Welcome to Survival.’

He knew Joy and George Adamson, the Leakeys, David Attenborough, Bernhard and Michael Grzimek — with whom he made the Oscar-winning film Serengeti Shall Not Die. He and his intense young wife Joan lived for months in the mountains of the Congo and showed Dian Fossey her first gorillas long before she became famous. His encounters were a Who’s Who of almost everyone who mattered in the early evolution of African wildlife films and conservation.

When I was a boy at school in England Root’s films made me deeply homesick for my birthplace in Kenya. But I think his pictures are imprinted on the memory of many children from my generation so profoundly that it’s impossible to think of Africa’s natural world without returning to his famous sequences: the hippos and crocs of the gin-clear Mzima Springs; hornbills nesting in a baobab tree, a cobra spitting at Joan’s glasses, puddle-dwelling killifish, and the interior life of a termite colony in Mysterious Castles of Clay.

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