Rotha looked at my pictures and liked them and he said ‘Well, you can be an assistant here, but I can’t pay you anything because you haven’t got a work permit’. But I of course accepted that and was appointed an assistant to a young man who was engaged on a series of zoo films. So, we set out every morning before eight to the zoo or to Whipsnade. Julian Huxley was then secretary of the Zoological Society, and I always had my still camera — as we called it — with me, and I took pictures as we went along. We had all facilities we needed. We had holes cut into fences to put our lens through, or we could enter cages of animals who... which were not dangerous. And I think I was one of the first who took animal portraits, not just zoological pictures — four legs and the tail — but real kind of animal portraits.
What sort of equipment did you use for that?
I used a single lens reflex camera in those days, two and a quarter square, and did all my own printing. I had a darkroom partition in the flat we had, and by then...no, it wasn’t in ’37, but two years later, I had met my wife to be at my sister’s. I met her in her darkroom, in my sister’s darkroom. She was changing her skirt. So it was a good beginning, and we liked each other almost immediately. She was Hungarian, but had worked in Vienna at the Montessori school and my sister had a Montessori certificate. She went to a course of mont... Maria Montessori in London, where she must have met her future husband, Alexander Tudor-Hart, who was a doctor. He came to Vienna to study with a famous surgeon who had a new methods of treating fractures. Anyway, they got married and lived in London a few years before I got here.
My animal pictures were liked by Julian Huxley and I became very well acquainted with him and his family, who lived above the zoo offices. And sometime I did special photographs for him, like one night in the blitz, he wanted a pheasant photographed who... which every night had two of his... her offspring under her wings, on either side, and I had to spend a night at the zoo and there happened to be a... biologist called Haldane — Professor Haldane — who was a friend of Huxley’s, and he stayed the night there too and he had a theory — he was a statistician — that few accidents happen on the first floor than in the cellar. So we slept on deck chairs in the zoo, on the first floor.
