From trainee keeper to top job: Dudley Zoo chief retires after 45 years

"My parents thought it was a passing fad and that I would give up on it," says Derek Grove, recalling the time he told them he was quitting his job as a trainee electrical engineer to become a zookeeper.

"And you know, they were wrong."

They certainly were. Next week Derek, now 62, retires from his role as director of Dudley Zoo, 45 years after signing up as a teenage trainee keeper.

"I was a trainee boiler service engineer when I left school, and I came to fix the heating in the hippo enclosure. I saw someone breaking ice on the ape-house moat, and I thought, that'd be a great laugh that would, if all I have got to do is break ice on a moat and I'm paid to do that. That's why I came to work at the zoo."

That novelty quickly wore off. 

"There was nothing more miserable a cold day than breaking ice. But when you're 17 years old, you think that'd be a good laugh that will and that was that was that was purely why I ended up here. I've always loved animals, and I came here as a child - my only real memory is that the giraffe house smelled a lot - but it was just that was the spark, just that one visit and seeing that, and I thought that'd be really good."

But while breaking ice wasn't all it was cracked up to be, he took the role like a duck to water.

"It's a job that you grow into," he says. "It's odd to say, but you become part of a family, and the whole zoo becomes part of you, it does feel like home. You've got the people here, you become close colleagues, and you've got the animals, some of which you have incredibly close relationships."

It was a very different experience from fixing boilers.

"I started working on the carnivore section when I was 17, and you sort of walk into the carnivore kitchen and you've got all the big joints of meat for the lions, and it's all quite a shock," he recalls. He also hand-reared a baby chimpanzee called Josie.

Looking back, which were his favourite animals?

"There was a male chimpanzee, Pepe, and a female elephant, Flossie, both of which I got an incredibly close bond to, and you knew they felt it as well. They really liked having you close to them, and they interacted well with you. And I love that element of it."

The old saying goes that you should never work with children or animals, and it goes without saying that it can sometimes be difficult to predict their behaviour. He recalls a particularly funny photoshoot involving an elephant and a musician.

"There was a band or orchestra playing locally, and they came up for a press shot and someone had their nice fancy trombone and they wanted a picture," he says.

"The cameraman said 'wouldn't it be a good idea to get the elephant to wrap its trunk around the trombone? And the guy was holding the trombone and we did that, and then the elephant just crushed the end of the trombone. The person whose trombone it was took it very, very badly. 

"It was kind of funny, you know that you'd expect an elephant not to just apply a bit of pressure and see what happens."

It hasn't all been fun and frolics. In the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a real question about the future of the zoo. As visitor numbers plummeted, and the zoo struggled to adapt to a changing tourist market, its existence became ever more dependent on council subsidies - and the local authority's patience started to wear thin. A private developer stepped forward with plans to build a garden centre and craft village on part of the site, and the response from the public was mixed to say the very least.

Derek recalls this as a particularly difficult period.

"It was a very tough time," he says.

"We were all aware that the zoo wasn't developing and changing like we wanted it to. We wanted to phase some of the species out because the facilities weren't first class. We wanted to improve some of the facilities, and the money wasn't there to do that. And it's not easy phasing an element out, because you either have to wait until he dies of old age, or you have to find a new home in another zoo. 

"It was very depressing because you weren't sure of the future because of the financial situation, and you weren't sure of the future because you weren't able to adapt. You weren't able to change.

"We weren't able to inwardly invest, we weren't able to make the changes to the animal collection that we knew we needed to," he says.

"That was tough, not only because of the uncertainty over our jobs, but also because it was kind of 'what's the point?' Just being here and surviving isn't enough."

Derek took over the top job 10 years ago, and the zoo's prospects look considerably brighter than they did. He is positive about the future prospects of the once-ailing attraction, and is confident that his successor Matt Lewis, also a long-serving member of staff who has risen through the ranks, is the right person to lead the zoo into an exciting new chapter.

"In the early 1980s, visitor numbers were in the low 200,000s, perhaps a little lower, but over the past decade we've averaged 300,000, apart from the two Covid years," he says.

"But it's got to go further, we've got to continue to improve. We live in a massive conurbation, we've got a zoo, got a castle, got a chairlift, we have got to sell it better than we are today."

He says one of the hardest parts is always meeting the expectations of the visitor.s of the role is 

"The biggest challenge has always been the visitors, living with their expectations," he says. 

"Visitors want massive, open enclosures. They also want to see the animals at the front of the enclosures, where they can get a good view of them, and it's trying to marry those two.

"You get all these comments, people saying 'there's no animals', and you think, well, there is an animal, it's in an enclosure, but you may not be able to see it, and that's because the animal has chosen to be where it wants to be. We don't push the animals to be on show if they if they come and see more people, they do. And that's been the challenge from day one."

Did he win round his parents who thought it was a passing fad? Well actually, his father David joined him some years later, taking up a job driving the land train around the site. His daughter Cerys and wife Lynne also worked at the zoo, and his son Sam is now a senior keeper.

And while Derek may be retiring, it is unlikely to be the last that the zoo sees of him. He will return next month to volunteer for a special event.

"My old form teacher from school told me I would never stick at anything," he recalls. "He came back with a school party, and I reminded him of that."