Lyall Watson

Childhood (1939–55)

Born on 12 April 1939, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Watson, born Malcolm Lyall-Watson, was the eldest of three brothers.^[4] His father, Doug Lyall-Watson, was an architect who served abroad during World War II with the British Royal Air Force (RAF).^[5][6] Douglas Lyall-Watson was of Scottish ancestry, although five generations removed from his Scottish roots.^[7] Watson's mother Mary was of Dutch South African heritage, descended from Simon van der Stel, the first Dutch governor of the Cape.^[8]

Watson spent his memorable childhood on his maternal grandparents' ranch in a corner of the Transvaal that borders Mozambique and Swaziland, where his mother Mary helped to run the large farm for her aging parents. His grandmother Ouma, Afrikaans for "old ma", English name Grace, was interviewed by the authorities once for defacing postage stamps; she was accustomed to drawing devil's horns on the portrait of the statesman who instigated apartheid, before posting her letters. Watson was often placed in the care of an elderly Zulu, the son of a tribal chief, who taught the inquisitive boy bush craft, gave him the nickname Mbuzi, meaning "The Goat" because of his delight in sampling and exploring everything, and impressed him with the animistic ideas of African tribal culture.^[6]

When his father returned from the war, Watson was already attending a local school at a neighbouring farm. His father's subsequent, itinerant lifestyle as an architect, and his mother's profession as a radiologist, kept Watson on his grandparents' farm until the age of ten, when he was sent to a boarding school in Cape Town.^[4][9] It was during summer breaks from Rondebosch Boys' High School, spending a month unsupervised with a dozen other boys from his local district on a beach in Plettenberg Bay, in the southeast corner of the Western Cape, that Watson developed his thirst to explore, and learned the independence of thought that stayed with him all his life. Already, at the age of nine, on his grandparents' farm, his grandmother had taken him to the chief of a local tribal community who had been a life-long friend of hers, to be initiated into adulthood with all the other boys of the village. By the time he went to boarding school, he was fluent in Afrikaans, English and Zulu.

Higher education (1955–60)

At Rondebosch Boys' High School Watson's academic progress caused him to jump over a year and consequently he finished his studies a year early, at the age of fifteen. His father allowed him to travel before starting at university, and the fifteen-year-old indulged a growing passion for elephants by visiting the only two areas in the southern Cape still to have them.^[10] At the age of sixteen he began his studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, one of four English language universities in South Africa at the time.

He initially intended to study medicine, and one of his tutors was Raymond Dart, who taught anatomy at the university but had worked extensively gathering fragments of fossil hominids, being the first to describe the genus Australopithecus. Watson volunteered to help sort a large collection of donated fossils for Dart, and the two struck up a friendship that would last until Dart's death in 1988.^[10]

Watson came to realize that his interests lay in zoology and anthropology rather than in medicine, and he completed his BSc degree at the University of the Witwatersrand having taken courses in a wide range of subjects including botany, zoology, geology, geography and even psychology.^[7] He gained his BSc(Hons) in the Department of Zoology at the University of Natal, now the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in 1959, awarded in 1960.^[11]

Doctoral research (1960–1963)

By now Watson had developed a fascination with animal behaviour, and following his graduation at the University of Natal in South Africa he travelled to Germany to offer his services to the renowned ethologist Konrad Lorenz. But the fishes Lorentz set him to study did not satisfy Watson's interest in larger mammals, so he moved to Holland to study anthropology and from there to England and to Oxford, where the Dutch zoologist Niko Tinbergen, now a British citizen, headed a research team studying animal behaviour at Oxford University. Watson was offered a place there as a doctoral student on a project studying black-headed gulls, which did not fill him with much enthusiasm either. One of Tinbergen's former postgraduate students, Desmond Morris, had recently become Curator of Mammals at London Zoo, and it was arranged that Watson should became Morris's first PhD student.^[7][10]

Watson was awarded his PhD in 1964, from Westfield College, University of London, later merged with Queen Mary College to become Queen Mary University of London.^[12] The title of his thesis was 'The ethology of food-hoarding mammals - with special reference to the green acouchi, "Myoprocta pratti"' The green acouchi is a South American rodent found in the Amazon basin.

In order to support himself during his studies in London, Watson worked during the evenings in the kitchen of a large London hotel, rising to the grade of souffle chef.^[7] He met his first wife, Vivienne Mawson, when she interviewed him for a BBC Overseas Service radio programme on the activities of South African postgraduate students in London, and they were married in 1961. On the wedding cake was a sculpture of the Loch Ness monster.^[13] Shortly after gaining his doctorate, and given his experience at London Zoo and his association with Desmond Morris, he was offered the job of Director of Johannesburg Zoo in his native South Africa.

Johannesburg Zoo (1964–1965)

It was very soon after completing his PhD in London that Watson was offered the position of Director of the Johannesburg Zoo, an offer he found too good to refuse, despite his distaste for the apartheid system.^[7][14] He served as director there from 1964 to 1965.^[15]. During this time, despite bureaucratic obstacles and financial constraints, he oversaw an expansion of the elephant house, introducing two companions for a long-time resident there, a female elephant named Delilah, as well as a new lion enclosure and a wooded area for the wolves. The 1960s was a time of general improvement at the zoo, introducing larger and more natural enclosures, the development of education and environmental programmes and involvement in local and international breeding programmes.^[16] Following completion of the new lion enclosure, however, as Watson describes in his 1982 BBC radio interview for Desert Island Discs, attempts by the local authorities to impose racial segregation on visitors to the new enclosures caused friction between himself and wider authorities leading to a number of interviews with the police and his ultimate resignation. He left South Africa and went to the Seychelles.^[7]

Tomorrow's World (1966–1967)

By the summer of 1966, Watson was in London again and he joined the production team on the BBC's tech television magazine programme Tomorrow's World, on the same day as its longstanding-co-presenter-to-be, James Burke. Watson, however, was only there for a year before moving on.

Watson's marriage to Vivienne ended in 1966. Around this time he shortened his name to Lyall Watson.

Seychelles and Indonesia (1967–1971 )

Following his departure from the BBC, Watson's life goes off the radar for a while. But there are clues. He tried freelance film-making, shooting underwater archaeology in Greece and Turkey.^[7] He set up a consultancy business specializing in zoo design and nature conservation, which he named BioLogic of London. He was already known in the Seychelles and was later to set up wildlife conservation areas in the region. There is mention of him organizing safari tours in Kenya.^[4] There is a story of him building a wooden house in Mosambique, even melting sand to make glass, but it was abandoned before completion.^[17] Watson confesses in a 1982 BBC radio interview that he needed long periods spent alone.^[7] He was also writing his first book, based on his studies of biology and ethology, called Omnivore: Our Evolution in the Eating Game, published in January 1971.^[18]

In the summer of 1970 Watson worked as an expedition leader and scientist-in-residence for a travel company owned by Lars-Eric Lindblad, on board the MS Lindblad Explorer, leading onshore expeditions and giving lectures onboard.^[19] Lindblad ran a travel company based in the USA offering worldwide adventure holidays to exotic and hitherto unvisited places. He was a keen conservationist and in 1971 was actively seeking new locations for his small new cruise ship the Lindblad Explorer to visit. Watson was recruited by him in the summer of 1971 to scout out locations to visit in the Seychelles and in the islands of Indonesia, as a commercial venture but also to raise awareness of the vulnerability of these places. Watson was approached because: "Not only did he have a vast knowledge of biology, but he had lived for some time in the Seychelles and Indonesia, and knew the islands and islanders well."^[20]

In his Desert Island Discs radio broadcast for the BBC, Watson mentions an MSc in Marine Biology as one of his degrees. Given his gravitation at this time towards the sea, as illustrated by his 1981 textbook Whales of the World, the fruit of ten years study on the Lindblad Explorer and elsewhere, it is possible that one of the years 1967 to 1969 may have been spent studying for this degree.

Supernature and the Lindblad Explorer (1971–1974)

Watson wrote his two most popular books, Supernature and The Romeo Error, between 1971 and 1974.

The cruise ship MS Lindblad Explorer first arrived at Mahé in the Seychelles on 19 April 1970 and for the next two years "carried out twenty-four cruises between Mombassa [Kenya] and the Seychelles, with the naturalists on board emphasizing the need for protection of the locations we visited." ^[20] Having voyaged with her in 1970, Watson was recruited in 1971 to help in survey work to scout out suitable locations for the ship to visit in the Seychelles and in Indonesia.^[20][19]

This was following a sojourn in Greece. He arrived in the port of Kamares, on the Greek island of Siphnos, on 21 May 1971, wearing white trousers and carrying a canvas sea bag; he was there for a long-planned rendezvous at the Temple of Athenian Zeus on the midsummer solstice (21 June 1971).^[21] As it happened, the lady didn't show up. But the hippies he befriended, returning from their journeys to the east, prompted him to write a book exploring the interface between science and the paranormal that became Supernature. It took him three months to write. Failing to find a publisher for it, he eventually left it in London before travelling to the Philippines, intending to research spirit healers there,^[22] but perhaps also scouting for Lindblad, who was looking at this time to sail the Lindblad Explorer from Fiji to the Philippines, as well as to New Guinea.^[20] He spent over six months in the Philippines.^[22]

It is not exactly certain when this trip to the Philippines was, but in 1972, Watson was researching possible ports of call on the river Amazon with Lindblad, while the Explorer was in Norway undergoing repairs after a grounding in the Antarctic. She was due to sail for the Arctic in August, then for a cruise along the Amazon with passengers in the autumn before her next Antarctic foray in the southern summer. Watson subsequently served as expedition leader and naturalist on the autumn voyage along the Amazon during October and November, a round trip along this river totaling well over four thousand miles.

In December 1972, photographs record a family reunion with his parents.^[23] In 1973, he was again scouting Indonesia for interesting ports of call for the Explorer, and in particular the Asmat region of West Irian, on the island of New Guinea. The summer of 1973 marked the Explorer's first voyage from Bali to New Guinea, and Watson was onboard as expedition leader and naturalist.^[24] He entertained the young people onboard by demonstrating the kinds of faces that monkeys make to show emotions like fear, anger and happiness.^[19]

Watson returned to London in the autumn of 1973 to find that his book Supernature, written over two years earlier, had at last found a publisher. In November he used his connections with the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) to introduce Uri Geller to a British audience, and on 23 November 1973 Watson appeared with Geller on "The Dimbleby Talk-In" for the BBC, alongside host David Dimbleby and Professor John Taylor of King's College, London.^[25][26] Watson remained convinced of Geller's spoon-bending and telekinetic powers until at least 1976, where he discusses Geller's powers in his book Gifts of Unknown Things.^[27] Doubt has subsequently been cast upon Geller's talents being anything more than stage magic.^[28]

Watson was soon to spend nine months marooned in the Banda Sea before returning to London to discover that Supernature had sold tens of thousands of copies and was being translated into many languages. His second book, The Romeo Error, published in 1974, complemented Supernature by being an exploration of biological death, using an eclectic mix of biology and the paranormal in the same way that Supernature had been an exploration of biological life in the same vein and from the same standpoint. Given its publication in 1974, it is likely that The Romeo Error was written and submitted to publishers before his prolonged stay on the Indonesian island that he chose to call Nus Tarian when he wrote about this experience in his book Gifts of Unknown Things.

Gifts and Whales (1974–1981)

1974. Publication of The Romeo Error.^[29]

1976. Publication of Gifts of Unknown Things.

Nine months on Nus Tarion, shipwrecked from a native dhow, possibly while scouting for Lindblad. Lindblad Explorer cruises to Indonesia continued successfully for years, continually finding new places to visit, sometimes "on islands whose inhabitants had never seen a large ship or a doctor before".^[20]

During this period Watson continued to work as an expedition leader to various locales, and he was the Seychelles commissioner for the International Whaling Commission in the late 1970s.

Japan, Ireland and the Amazon (1981–2008)

From at least 1989 until his death in 2008, Watson's permanent residence, if such a thing is possible for such a nomadic traveller, was a cottage in Ballydehob, County Cork, in the Republic of Ireland. But he also spent a lot of time on his oceangoing, converted trawler Amazon, as well as taking trips to South Africa and to Australia.^[30]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Watson presented Channel 4's coverage of sumo tournaments.^[31]