Author, painter, aristocrat, crack shot, ardent wildfowler, racing driver, Scots Guard and social renegade, Gavin Maxwell was first and foremost a naturalist. He bore the scars, quite literally: a ring-tailed lemur once severed his tibial artery (that's an artery of the leg, Des).
Throughout his life, the author of "Ring of Bright Water" was surrounded by animals. He had many pets, including a springer spaniel called Jonnie, a cocker called Judy, Giddy the pony, a heron, a blind vole, an owl called Andrew, Jackie the jackdaw, five Greylag geese, a wildcat kitten, a water rail, a herring gull, a hedgehog, Mary the cockerel, a Slovakian gull and a goat called Alftruda.
He also, of course, had several otters – Chahala, Mijbil, Mossy, Monday, Tibby, Edal and Teko. Indeed, his “thraldom to otters” made them all famous.
Born in 1914, his father having been killed three months before in one of the first offensives of the First World War, Maxwell was brought up by his mother and maiden aunts. One of his aunts ran the world’s largest Chinchilla rabbit fur farm and another, Aunt Moo (Muriel), was a zoologist who fostered his “deep preoccupation with lesser animals”.
Maxwell described himself as “as sensitive as a hermit crab without a shell.” For Maxwell, “splendour could not be splendid were it not desolate too.” And said that “the love of animals as well as human beings only increases your suffering.” He quickly learned that otters are partial to human earlobes.
In 1945, Maxwell bought the Hebridean island of Soay to open a basking shark fishery. This resulted in his first book, "Harpoon at a Venture". But he is remembered chiefly for the "Ring of Bright Water" trilogy, a series of memoirs that charted his life from 1956 when he returned to Scotland with an otter.
Maxwell wrote his classic books in a quiet Highland cottage at Sandaig (called Camusfearna in the books in a bid to keep the location secret) back on the mainland (London proved unsuitable after he was photographed walking an otter on a lead down the King’s Road). Nevertheless, he continued to have live eels delivered for his otters from London.
Maxwell’s final home was the six-acre ‘White Island’ Eilean Bàn which lies between Kyle of Lochalsh and the Isle of Skye, and since 1995 it has acted as a stepping stone for the Skye Bridge.
The island looks out to Castle Moil, built for a Norwegian princess who married into the Mackinnon clan. The princess was nicknamed ‘Saucy’ Mary, supposedly because she used to charge a toll from ships passing through the straits and bare her breasts as a thank you.
Maxwell converted two lighthouse keepers’ cottages on the island into a space known as the Long Room and planned a zoo and an eider duck colony. He donated geese to Sir Peter Scott’s Slimbridge Wildlife Centre and the property was eventually saved as a community resource by the Born Free Foundation, whose founders Virginia McKenna and husband, Bill Travers had starred in the 1969 "Ring of Bright Water" film.
The Long Room is now a museum to Maxwell’s life and interesting artefacts include the hand-written first page of "Ring of Bright Water", named after a line from a poem by Maxwell’s close friend Kathleen Raine.
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He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water
Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea, He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter Broadcast on the swift river. KATHLEEN RAINE. From "The Marriage Of Psyche" |
Maxwell’s works are an ode to Scotland and there are few places that left as much of an impression on him as Sandaig Bay, the isolated spot where he raised his beloved otters. When he lifted a seashell to his ear, Maxwell didn’t hear the sea, he heard the waterfall at Camusfearna.
