For the past 60 years Jane Goodall has been an inveterate traveller. She spent years living in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania observing chimpanzees. More recently she has spent 300 days each year on the road on behalf of her Jane Goodall Institute, flying between lecture halls around the world to deliver her conservationist message.
However, for more than a year the 87-year-old has been grounded. “I was actually in the car on the way to the airport to go to an event in Brussels when I was told to stop and go home because I was giving a talk in the United Nations building and it was closed. That was the last time I attempted to travel anywhere, except to get vaccinated,” Goodall says.
Unwilling to return to Tanzania (“They’ve handled the crisis very badly, the president denied there was such a thing as coronavirus, now we think he died of it”), instead she is holed up in the Bournemouth attic bedroom of the house she grew up in, which she shares with her sister, her niece — who cooks her vegan meals — and her great-nephews.
There are ecological benefits to stopping flying. “But I just miss all of my friends. I have friends in almost every country in the world,” she says wistfully.
Still, Goodall has kept on campaigning on Skype and Zoom. “I’ve visited 45 countries in the past year; yesterday I was in China and Turkey,” she says with her immaculate pre-war enunciation. “But it’s exhausting — twice as much so as travelling; there’s so much staring at screens, my voice gets tired, my eyes get tired. The worst thing is doing lectures. If you’re in a big auditorium people laugh or cry, but when you put exactly the same energy into giving a lecture to a little green camera light on top of your laptop and there’s no feedback whatsoever that’s very hard.”
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In December she launched a hugely popular podcast, The Jane Goodall Hopecast. The name was chosen because “you need to hope that what you do is going to make a difference. Without hope, then you fall into apathy and do nothing. In three episodes the Hopecast has gone up to the top 10 per cent of podcasts in the world — it’s uploaded 1,500 times every day,” she tells me proudly.
It features Goodall in conversation with “changemakers”, often environmentalists but also the BBC’s John Simpson and the like. “I was so cross because I wanted to interview him but he ended up interviewing me,’’ she says. In the upcoming episode she talks to Craig Foster, the director of the Netflix hit My Octopus Teacher about his cephalopod friend. “I get to speak to all these completely amazing people, so as well as sharing their message I’m learning too. It’s a win-win.”
She records the podcasts in her attic room, surrounded by the Tarzan and Dr Doolittle books that once inspired her to go to Africa, as well as photographs of her beloved childhood mutt Rusty — whom she credits with having had a helping hand in fostering her career as the world’s leading expert on chimpanzees.
“Rusty was very special,” Goodall says. “I was confronted at Cambridge [where she did a PhD on animal behaviour, despite having no degree] with professors saying chimps didn’t have minds or emotions but I’d spent so long with my dog, though it could have been a guinea pig, I just knew animals have personalities.”
Goodall is an icon not only to environmentalists but to feminists, yet she doesn’t consider herself that way, she says. “I connect the word feminist with the early, strident suffragettes. They needed to be that way but to me being female was always to my advantage.”
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Her arrival in Gombe in 1960 attracted worldwide excitement, mainly focused on her English rose looks and flattering shorts. “Young, Blonde and Beautiful . . . And a Scientific Whiz!” and “Comely Miss Spends Her Time Eying Apes” were typical headlines. “The scientific community was saying, ‘She’s only got where she’s got because she’s got nice legs.’ If a woman heard that now she’d go ballistic but I thought, ‘Well, if it was my legs that got me where I wanted to be then good.’ ”
In the early years of her career many snide comments were also made about the fact that Goodall travelled accompanied by her mother, a novelist. “People said, ‘She can’t go anywhere without Mummy,’ but the British [authorities] said I could only go if someone accompanied me and Mum volunteered.”
Yet, again, being female worked to their advantage. “Tanzania was on the brink of independence, African men were still resentful of white men but I was a young girl on my own with my mother and they just wanted to help.”
“[The anthropologist Louis] Leakey wanted a woman, he felt that maybe we’d be more patient out in the field. Men were the breadwinners, they had to quickly get the PhD and the big job and I didn’t care about any of that, I just wanted to be with chimpanzees.”
Before leaving for first Kenya, then Tanzania, a well-connected uncle insisted that Goodall became a debutante. “I was in the last lot to be presented in Buckingham Palace. A couple asked what job I wanted and I said, ‘I’m saving up to go to Africa to live with animals.’ They withdrew from me as if I was a pariah. Everyone always laughed at me for saying that, but Mum always said, ‘If you want to do it, you’ll just have to work hard, take advantage of any opportunities and you’ll find a way.’ She was an incredible woman.”
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Although marriage was never her goal, Goodall has had two husbands; the first, whom she married in 1964, Baron Hugo van Lawick, was the National Geographic photographer sent to document her work. They divorced a decade later. “We stayed friendly, our paths just drifted apart,’ Goodall says. “He couldn’t stay in Gombe and I couldn’t leave.”
The next year she married Derek Bryceson, the director of Tanzania’s national parks. “Five years after we married he died of cancer, it was terrible,” she says softly. “But I didn’t want to marry again. I had a lot of friends, my life was complete, I didn’t need a husband.”
She and Van Lawick had a son, “Grub”, who lives in Africa, as do her three grandchildren. Two work for Goodall’s youth programme Roots & Shoots, which operates in about 100 countries. “I signed up Pakistan last week,” she says.
Even down a phone line, it’s easy to see how Goodall charms leaders and influencers alike. The actor Leonardo DiCaprio is “a good friend”, she says, but she’s more dismissive of reports that she’s close to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (Prince Harry interviewed Goodall for the edition of British Vogue that his wife, Meghan, guest-edited).
“Everyone goes on about how I’m Harry’s wonderful friend, blah, blah, blah. I did think he was wonderful but I’ve only met him twice! I met Meghan once and said about six words to her,” Goodall says.
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After a long day on Zoom and Skype, she always has a nightly cup of whisky. “I made a little pact with Mum we would always raise a glass at 7pm wherever I was and every night I raise my glass to her, up there in the cloud.”
Jane Goodall’s perfect weekend
Pilates or personal trainer?
Neither
TV dinner or eat at the table?
Both: I like to watch something like Poirot, something mindless after a hard day
Cumbria or the Caribbean?
I haven’t had a holiday since I first went to Kenya in 1957
Novel or TV adaptation?
I like Poirot audiobooks — I go to sleep listening to them
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What is your signature dish?
I don’t cook
What have you missed most during the pandemic?
Being able to meet friends around the world. I know such incredible people in almost every country
How many unread emails are there in your inbox?
8,360. I deleted two years’ worth recently, otherwise there’d be far more
I couldn’t get through the weekend without . . .
My week never ends. I never know if it’s a weekend or not. The only way I can tell is I get fewer emails on a Sunday
Hopecast is available to download from podcast providers
