Shirley McGreal was collecting her luggage from the cargo area at Bangkok airport, ready to begin a new life in Thailand with her husband, John, when she saw a pile of crates, each crammed with baby monkeys. They were packed so tightly that some were upside down, and they stared at her with sullen eyes. Soon they would be shipped abroad, perhaps to become pets or be used for scientific experimentation.
“I later learnt that they were stumptailed macaques,” she said. “The babies looked so helpless and, rightly or wrongly, I thought they were appealing to me for help.” The image lingered in her mind.
Walking the Thai streets she began to notice the abuse of primates everywhere. Baby gibbons were used as props in photoshoots for tourists. Others were sold in street markets.
McGreal adopted four of these broad-shouldered, lanky-limbed creatures from foreigners leaving Thailand, naming them Durga, Brownie, Sapphire and Tong. But she wanted to find a more systemic fix for their exploitation than taking a few into her care, so in 1973 she set up the International Primate Protection League (IPPL) with the help of Dr Ardith Eudey, a primatologist who was in Thailand to study stump-tailed macaques.
The organisation’s first victory came two years later. With the help of 50 Thai students, they monitored the number of animals trafficked out of Bangkok airport. They found that over ten weeks, 100,000 mammals, birds and reptiles passed through its terminals, many in conditions that violated International Air Transport Association standards. In response, Thailand banned the export of primates.
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The following year, the IPPL identified the “Singaporean connection”, by which primates were smuggled illegally from Thailand to Singapore, and then to the West with Singaporean export documents. The Singaporean authorities soon shut it down.
That same year, McGreal discovered that the United States was importing rhesus monkeys from India to test the effects of neutron radiation in the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. “We sent press releases to all Indian newspapers, English and vernacular, describing the experiments and requesting a ban,” she recalled. The Times of India ran an editorial denouncing the experiments, and in November 1977 the Indian government instituted an export ban.
The IPPL’s victories also included a ban on the export of monkeys from Bangladesh, the closure of a US government laboratory that was experimenting on baby gibbons, and preventing the export of seven wild gorillas from Cameroon to American zoos.
McGreal was making herself the antagonist not only of governments, but also of pharmaceutical companies and wildlife traders, who were little more honourable in their treatment of her than in their treatment of the primates.
In 1983, the Journal of Medical Primatology published a letter in which she criticised the pharmaceutical company Immuno for its plan to do hepatitis research on chimpanzees captured in Sierra Leone. Immuno sued the publication, McGreal and Dr Jan Moor-Jankowski, the unpaid editor of the journal. In the deposition, Immuno’s lawyer, Ramond Fersko, asked McGreal whether she had ever acquired the support of government officials by offering them sexual favours. Her lawyer replied “they must really be paying you a lot for this one”. McGreal’s insurance company settled out of court, but she did not retract her criticism of Immuno.
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Perhaps the most dangerous mission McGreal undertook was her campaign to get a prison sentence for the Miami wildlife smuggler Matthew Block. Block was indicted in 1993 for smuggling from Bangkok to Moscow six infant orangutans, four of whom died during the journey. In return for informing on his collaborators, Block was about to avoid a prison sentence when the IPPL barraged the judge with complaints from Jane Goodall, the Duke of Edinburgh and other prominent conservationists. McGreal kept up the pressure on Block even though a price had been put on her head (by Block, she suspected). In a last-minute reversal, the judge sentenced him to 13 months in jail and a $30,000 fine.
Shirley Pollitt was born in Mobberley, Cheshire, in 1934, the daughter of Kate, a housewife, and Allan, a bank manager. She and her twin sister, Jean, resembled each other not only in looks but also in spirit: when they moved to London to study, both became involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. After their father’s death in a car crash in 1955, and their mother’s soon after, they were left to rely on one another. Orphaned, neither of them felt much attachment to Britain.
Shirley studied French and Latin at Royal Holloway & Bedford New College. She then studied a master’s in French at the University of Illinois, and followed that with a doctorate in education at the University of Cincinnati. It was at Illinois that she met her husband, John McGreal, an engineer. They married in 1960 and moved to India, where her curiosity was sparked by the sight of monkeys scrambling the walls of temples. John survives her.
John’s work for the United Nations took them to Thailand in 1973, where they stayed two years before settling in Summerville, South Carolina. There McGreal set up the IPPL’s headquarters, directed its campaigns against primate export, and set up a sanctuary for rescued gibbons.
Gibbons are less sociable than most apes. They generally pair for life, courting with elaborate howling duets. McGreal was conscious that this might annoy the neighbours. Over the years she bought more and more land around the sanctuary, to create a glade where the gibbons could howl in peace. It now houses 36 gibbons. McGreal, who lived in the annexe of the IPPL headquarters, would often end her day by venturing out into the sanctuary to spend time with them.
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Friends were sometimes surprised that a woman of such liberal instincts was so fond of the Deep South. She encouraged people to visit her in April, when the magnolia flowers were out, and every year invited the Plantation Singers, a gospel group, to perform at the IPPL conference, which brought together conservationists from around the world.
When an endangered primate population came to McGreal’s attention, she preferred to channel funding to conservationists already working to protect them, rather than sending her own colleagues. She thought it better to assume that indigenous conservationists did not need white people to tell them how to do their jobs.
Somewhat to the bemusement of their partners, McGreal and her sister, who settled in Canada, spoke to each other several times a day up until Jean’s death in 2009.
McGreal kept up a long correspondence with Prince Philip, about wildlife conservation and much else. When she was appointed OBE for “services to the protection of primates” in 2008 he gave her the extra honour of a 20-minute audience. “I am glad to know that the IPPL continues to flourish” he wrote to her in 2015, “and keeps up the good work of pursuing the crooks, rewarding the righteous and caring for 36 gibbons.”
Shirley McGreal, OBE, conservationist, was born on May 4, 1934. She died of undisclosed causes on November 20, 2021, aged 87