In the 1960s Anne Wright was a prominent member of the dwindling circle of British residents in Calcutta who had stayed on after independence. Her father was a senior official in the elite Indian civil service and her husband’s father was the former Calcutta Commissioner of Police. Social life centred on horse racing, polo and numerous society events and balls. Apart from horses, other animals played a prominent role in their home life. The Wrights had a pet lion from Calcutta Zoo, whose mother had bitten off his nose, plus an orphan tiger cub and a leopard that lived in their house until they became too large for comfort.
Yet Wright was changed for ever by her experience in the Bihar Famine in 1967 and subsequently became the most effective advocate for the protection and revival of India’s threatened wildlife, especially the tiger.
Voluntary groups in Calcutta organised by Wright had sent food and assistance to villagers in the worst-affected region of Bihar, where she based herself for several weeks. Because she grew up in the jungles of central India, where her father worked, she was keenly aware of Indian wildlife. She also undertook the creation of water troughs for the wildlife, such as Sambar deer, wild boar, Indian bison, hyenas along with occasional leopards, tigers and numerous birds. It was the plight of these drought-affected animals silently gathering around empty oil drums waiting for the replenishment of their sole water supply that moved her to dedicate herself to the protection of Indian wildlife.
In 1969, she was a founder and trustee in the creation of the Indian branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and quickly focused on the fate of the Indian tiger. Before independence in 1947, the estimated tiger population of India was 40,000 but 20 years later, it had shrunk to about 1,500 owing to trophy hunting, habitat loss and the export of thousands of tiger skins to the rest of Asia.
Wright was a friend of Indira Gandhi, then the prime minister, who was also concerned about the threats to the Indian tigers’ survival. However, it was Wright’s 1970 articles in the Indian press, and later The New York Times, about the size of the illegal export of tiger skins that prompted Gandhi to create the first Tiger Task Force by 1971, of which Wright was the only female founder. In 1973 this became Project Tiger, which, with the help of Wright, created the first nine dedicated tiger reserves in the country. From a combined area of 5,000 square miles, Project Tiger has expanded almost sixfold and now has 53 reserves with an area of more than the size of Sri Lanka plus a combined tiger population of more than 3,000.
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From 1971, when Bob Wright (Obituary May 2, 2005) retired as chairman of the Indian Mining Association, he took over the eccentric Tollygunge Club on the outskirts of Calcutta, which was the social hub of the English and sporting community. His wife ensured that the pack of jackals on the fringes of the club were fed daily, despite some members’ objections. It was not just hyenas and tigers that benefited from her tireless campaigns — she also focused on preserving the rhino in northeast India, the olive ridley sea turtles of Orissa (now Odisha) and the flocks of lesser whistling teals in Calcutta (now Kolkatta).
During her three decades of conservation campaigns, she also owned one of the most successful horse studs in India, which included Gaswar, her champion bay stallion purchased from Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai. In 1982 the Wrights created Kipling Camp, a wildlife resort on the edge of Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh. Since 1989 Kipling Camp has been the residence of Tara the elephant, made famous by Mark Shand (obituary, April 24, 2014), the adventurous brother of the Queen, in his book, Travels on my Elephant.
Nora Anne Layard was born in Liss, Hampshire, in 1929 but sailed for India while only a few months old to join Austen Layard, her father and a civil servant, in central India. The Layard family had a long association with India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and an earlier ancestor was Sir Henry Layard, the excavator of Nimrud and Nineveh in Ancient Mesopotamia. After attending boarding school in England and a finishing school in Switzerland, she returned to India, where she became a lifelong friend of Lady Pamela Hicks, daughter of the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten. She met Robert (Bob) Wright in the late Forties and married him in Calcutta in 1950, where she had two children, Rupert, who became a lawyer and now lives in Britain and Belinda, a prominent wildlife photographer and conservationist who still lives in India.
Bob was a director of Andrew Yule, once one of the largest British conglomerates in pre-independence India, which owned a wide variety of companies involved with mining, cotton, tea planting and shipping. A keen sportsman, he had played rugby for Wasps and England before returning to India, where he captained a rugby team and was president of the Calcutta Polo Club and a steward of the Royal Calcutta Turf Club. A handsome man with a strong likeness to the actor David Niven, he enjoyed being what one Indian newspaper described as the most famous foreigner in Calcutta after Mother Teresa.
Tiger shoots were still common, with Prince Philip shooting a tiger in Rajasthan in 1961 only months before he helped to establish the World Wildlife Fund. Although Anne’s father had to arrange tiger shoots, neither he nor Bob Wright ever shot any themselves. Moreover, she became increasingly alarmed at the size of the export of tiger skins from India and discovered that in 1968 official licences were granted for the export of 500 tiger skins yet in that year, more than 3,000 were actually exported. Her exposé in The Statesman of Calcutta newspaper raised considerable public interest but it was only when the same article was reprinted in The New York Times in 1971 under the headline “Doom awaits Tigers and Leopards unless India acts swiftly” that officialdom took note. There was still no government legislation on the protection of wildlife, so Wright arranged for a visiting polo team from Kenya to bring over a copy of their legislation that they used as a template for the drafting of the Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972, which was also the year that tiger shooting was officially banned in India.
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In 1971 a young Bengali Maoist burst into the Tollygunge Club office and shot dead the managing director. As Bob Wright had just retired from his directorship of Andrew Yule, he decided to take over and ran the club for the next quarter of a century. It became the home of the Wright family as well as open to Indians as full members. Wright expanded her involvement with Indian wildlife and conservation, becoming a member for the next 19 years of the Indian Board of Wildlife.
She also established and chaired the Rhino Foundation and was awarded the Dutch Order of the Golden Ark in 1979 and appointed MBE in 1983 for services to Indian wildlife. She involved herself in local issues such a campaign in the early Eighties to prevent the Taj Group of Hotels from building a high-rise hotel in Calcutta as it would have disrupted the flight path of the thousands of lesser whistling teals that returned regularly to the lake in the neighbouring Alipore Zoo. After an audience with JRD Tata, chairman of the Taj Group, he agreed to make it a garden hotel. Another successful campaign resulted in the Indian army cancelling a dam project in the unspoilt Neora Valley, home of the red panda, which has subsequently become a Unesco World Heritage site.
Wright expanded her stud farm near Delhi, dressing up in a burka for negotiations with the landlord so as not to be taken advantage of as a wealthy foreigner and in 1991 took out Indian citizenship. Her daughter Belinda became more involved in conservation issues with her film work, making several award-winning tiger documentaries and founding and running the Wildlife Protection Society of India.
Bob Wright retired from running the Tollygunge Club in 1997 but continued living there until his death in 2005, after which Anne moved permanently to Delhi. In her 90th year she moved to her beloved Kipling Camp, her home from home.
Anne Wright MBE, conservationist and horse breeder, was born on June 10, 1929. She died on October 4, 2023 aged 94