Jane Goodall had a way with crowds. Decades of dealing with raucous primates left her fearless of mass gatherings. It was a gift she demonstrated vividly at The Observer in 2012, when she was awarded the paper’s annual ethical award for her work on environmental and social justice.
Staff crammed into the office of the paper’s then editor, John Mulholland, to meet her. How did she communicate with chimpanzees, we asked? Goodall responded in the manner of a matron primate, sat John on her lap, patted his head, and hooted in soothing chimp tones in his ears while searching for nits in his scalp. It was the first recorded, public delousing of an editor in Fleet Street history – and a typical Jane Goodall performance.
I encountered Goodall many times in my role as science editor of The Observer and invariably found her company uplifting and invigorating – although she was an unlikely scientific pioneer. She had no academic training and grew up in postwar Bournemouth, where women were expected to be wives and little else. However, she burned with two bright passions: a love of animals and a love of Africa. “I got the first from the Dr Dolittle books and the second from Tarzan novels,” she told me.
Revolutionary science has rarely had such unlikely origins, though fortune also played a role in her remarkable career. After joining a friend who went to work in Kenya, Goodall met Louis Leakey, the renowned paleoanthropologist who was seeking someone to study chimpanzees in the wild and thought Jane would be ideal because she had “a mind uncluttered by theory”. He was also obsessed with the hazel-eyed blonde and, although married with three children, bombarded Goodall with protestations of love. “I hugely admired him and he had my whole future in his hands,” Goodall admitted. “On the other hand, I thought: ‘No thanks.’”
On 14 July 1960, Jane arrived in Gombe national park, Tanzania – accompanied by her mother, whose presence had been dictated by local authorities who insisted the young naturalist have a chaperone. Then began the search for chimps to study, with little initial luck. “As soon as a chimp saw me, it would run away,” she recalled.
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Eventually, Goodall was accepted by Gombe’s primates and within months she had made one of the 20th century’s most important scientific observations. She watched a large male chimp lean over a termite nest, take a twig, bend it, strip it of leaves and push it into the nest. Then he began to spoon termites into his mouth.
A creature, other than a human, had been caught in the act not just of using a tool but of making one. “I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was ‘man the toolmaker’, yet I had just watched a chimp toolmaker in action,” Goodall told me. “I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.”
Leakey was equally ecstatic. “Now we must redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as humans,” he argued when hearing of Goodall’s discovery. Thus Goodall earned a remarkable epithet: the woman who redefined man.
Goodall continued with her remarkable intellectual transition, describing chimpanzees as creatures with unique personalities, while giving them names – David Greybeard, Flo, Fifi – and revealed how politics and war can carve up chimp societies just as bloodily as they can do for humans. Her stress on the individuality and emotional behaviour of her subjects initially appalled the impersonal, behaviourist attitudes of naturalists of the mid-20th century. Slowly they were won over and in 2021 Goodall was awarded the Templeton prize, which is given to those who explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place within it.
At the award’s presentation, Goodall was asked what was her proudest achievement. She replied: “The fact that, thanks to chimpanzees, science gradually came around to understanding that we are part of and not separate from the rest of the animal kingdom.”
Appreciation of this point is now recognised by the global celebration of World Chimpanzee Day on 14 July, the date that Goodall arrived at Gombe in 1960 and began her historic work. Sixty-five years later, the project is now the longest-running field study of any non-human animal, while the Jane Goodall Institute is creating sanctuaries for chimpanzee orphans who have lost their parents to bushmeat hunters.
In researching this tribute, I found a note she had left me inside one of her books. “For Robin, Together we can change the world,” she wrote. “For the sake of the children we must. And for the animals. Thank you for helping to spread awareness. Jane Goodall.” To say I was moved would be an understatement. She was an inspiration.
Photograph by Getty Images