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Christian the lion - Source: ONE News -
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While most Aussies dropping into Harrods would be content with a souvenir shopping bag, Anthony "Ace" Bourke and John Rendall bought a lion.
Not a fluffy toy but a four-month-old, 14kg male lion cub, hand-reared in a zoo in Devon, England.
In 1969 the world-famous Knightsbridge department store had a zoo section that sold wild animals (a right taken away from it with the passing of endangered species laws in 1973).
The purchase was to change the university graduates' lives and, eventually, become a global phenomenon.
"The shock was the first thing - the absolutely extraordinary concept that in a department store you could buy a lion cub," said Bourke, who hailed from the NSW city of Newcastle.
"But he was so irresistible and the idea (of owning him) became irresistible."
"The concept was so off the wall," said Rendall, who grew up in Bathurst. "That between the Siamese kittens and the old English sheepdogs that there were these two lion cubs."
The staff had named the cub Marcus, making a joke about Christians and lions in Roman times, but Bourke dubbed him Christian, continuing the joke.
"He was so gorgeous. He was totally charismatic. Everyone fell under his spell," Bourke said.
The second lion cub was Christian's sister, who Rendall described as "scratchy and spitty and difficult ... we weren't tempted by her".
The pair convinced Harrods they were suitable, having to attend an interview with Harrods buyer Roy Hazle.
They spent almost all of their money, 250 guineas, or about $NZ8,700 in today's money, and had to set aside 30 British pounds a week to feed Christian.
"He was expensive to buy, expensive to keep, but Harrods did sell us a lion of absolute quality," Rendall said.
But where do you bring up a lion in the middle of London?
They advertised in The Times: "Lion cub, two young men seek suitable garden/roof, flat/house London."
While they received many calls from newspapers, Bourke and Rendall got no offers of accommodation.
The pair lived in fashionable King's Road, Chelsea, above an antique furniture shop, called Sophisticat.
They persuaded the shop's owners that "the business really needed a lion cub living on the premises, particularly as the shop was called Sophisticat.
They decided Christian, who they knew they could only keep for six to 12 months before he became unmanageable, would live in the basement.
Nearby was a garden owned by the Moravian Church, where Christian played.
London in the early 1970s was mecca for the weird and wonderful, the home of David Bowie, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
They discovered that nearby lived a puma named Margot, as well as tigers and gorillas.
Christian soon settled in to Sophisticat.
Bourke and Rendall installed a heater and blanket for him to sleep on and Christian had a lion-sized kitty litter tray.
"After two days of indiscriminate puddles and messes, which we followed each time with a smack, and then carrying him to the tray, the problem was solved. He quickly learned his name and `no'," they wrote in their newly updated book, A Lion Called Christian (Random House).
Christian was fed baby foods such as Farex and milk, as well as raw meat and egg and bone meal.
An antique store presented a unique jungle of legs.
Christian would ease himself behind a piece of furniture so it appeared as if Bourke and Rendall were hiding from him, then he'd charge and leap at them.
"We developed a habit of glancing nervously over our shoulders," Rendall said.
One day Bill Travers and his wife Virginia McKenna, the actors from the film Born Free, based on the story of George and Joy Adamson, came into the store to buy a desk.
By now Christian was eight months old and growing bored of his surroundings, as well as now being capable of inflicting serious damage.
Travers was won over by Christian and wrote to George Adamson telling him about the fifth-generation English lion and asking whether he would take him and rehabilitate him in Kenya.
Adamson agreed, much to the relief of Bourke and Rendall, who believed sending Christian to a zoo would have been a "betrayal of faith".
They sold Christian to Born Free director James Hill and Christian moved to temporary accommodation at Leith Hill near Dorking, but was regularly visited by Bourke and Rendall.
Hill went on to make two films with the cub, The Lion at World's End and Christian the Lion.
At Leith Hill, in preparation for Christian's move to Africa, they hung a sack filled with straw from a tree which he was encouraged to attack.
Added to his diet was raw meat, dried meat, carrots and cow's liver, or, for a treat, the head or stomach of a cow.
"His presence at Leith Hill had not been publicised, and the local butcher, mystified by our meat orders, asked: `What on earth are you two feeding, a crocodile?'" the pair wrote.
In August 1970 Christian left England for Kenya.
Bourke and Rendall were reunited with Christian in 1971, an event that has now been seen by more than 60 million people in one of the world's most popular YouTube video clips.
But despite the captioning on the YouTube clip, they were not warned that Christian would not recognise them.
"George was confident we would get a great reception, and we did," Rendall said.
Christian disappeared from the Kora area, where he was looked after by Adamson, in 1973 and never seen again.
Kora was gazetted a national park in October 1973 in what Adamson himself said was a monument to "the cheerful, mischievous and courteous young lion from London".
Since that time the number of lions in Africa has dwindled by two-thirds and Kora has degenerated since the murder of Adamson in 1989.
But the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust, of which Rendall is a trustee, is working to re-establish it.
Bourke, a Sydney-based art curator, and Rendall, who divides his time between London and Sydney, plan to go back to Kenya this year to help with the restoration of Kora.
Rendall said he hoped to use the renewed interest in Christian to raise awareness of the plight of lions and their relevance to the local and global ecosystem.
"If the lion, the ultimate predator, is healthy, then it means everything else is in place, there are enough herbivores, there's enough grass for them, it means the water is pure and unpolluted, but it also means there is enough for the human beings who live around these parts," he said.
"If you lose the lion you are going to have too many indigenous herbivores, they are going to overgraze, therefore there's going to be not enough for the domestic cattle ... you start getting soil erosion, the imploding of wells and rivers being polluted and so it all goes wrong.
"The whole thing is interconnected."
Watch the
video of Christian the lion
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