HAVE a think: how many of your old classmates have ended up being featured on Desert Island Discs?
And . . . if you could go back in time, would you have put money on them being featured on the classic Radio 4 show?
OK, I guess if you went to the old Dynevor School in Swansea you might have had a decent punt on Rowan Williams fulfilling his destiny and being featured on the show as Archbishop of Canterbury.
But most of us will have looked around and wondered where our fellow students would end up.
It was something of a privilege (hard won through the old 11-plus exam, by the way) to attend the old Queen Elizabeth Grammar School for Boys in Carmarthen.
The Queen Elizabeth, for those of you who don’t know the history, refers to Queen Elizabeth the First, rather than the Second. The clue is in the fact the school was founded in 1576.
If you are a fan of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, you will get an idea of what sort of a school it was – as close as you can get to a ‘public school’ as it is possible to get in west Wales.
Many of my contemporaries went on to achieve great things in life, defying the expectations of both school pals and teachers.
Professor Carl Jones is one of those people – a chap who was known by the nickname ‘Birdman’ during his time at ‘The Gram’.
The nickname stuck and pretty well sums up what Carl, now 70, has achieved in life.
Most of his school pals had him marked down as something of an eccentric and Carl acknowledges in his Desert Island Discs chat that his dad may have despaired that he would ever be a success in the world.
But, if ever there was an example of how people find the thing they love and make a career out of it, then Carl is one of the best illustrations – a winner of the prestigious Indianapolis Prize, the world’s leading award for animal conservation.
There’s some real gems in the Desert Island Discs show – including a lovely tale of how Carl’s family featured in Under Milk Wood, the classic Dylan Thomas play for voices.
One of Carl’s memories also took me back in time to ‘The Gram’ and the old Victorian headmaster’s house in the middle of the school campus.
Carl told Desert Island Discs host Laurene Laverne about the day he ventured into the garden belonging to the then headmaster, Benjamin Howells –
“One day, I was between lessons and clambering around in the rhododendron bushes looking for baby jackdaws that had fallen out from beneath the roof to rescue them . . . and he caught me!
“He came up to me and said, ‘Jones, what do you think you’re doing?’ I said, ‘Sir, I’m looking for baby jackdaws’.
“He said, ‘You’re doing what? What do you want to do that for?’
“I said, ‘Well, one day I want to travel around the world and save endangered birds, so I want to know how to rear birds in captivity.
“He looked at me and said, ‘Jones, to be a biologist and to travel around the world, you’ve either got to be intelligent or wealthy . . . and you’re neither!’”
Thankfully, that didn’t put Carl off his mission to help endangered species.
Carl left ‘The Gram’ to do his BSc at the North East London Polytechnic.
In 1978, Carl began his master’s degree at the University of Wales in Swansea. Initially studying developmental strategies in owls, the opportunity to run the conservation project in Mauritius saw him change the title of his research to “Studies on the Biology of the Critically Endangered Birds of Mauritius”. After completing his MSc, he completed a PhD, also at Swansea.
Today, Carl is best described as a conservation biologist.
He is best known for saving the Mauritius kestrel from extinction.
He is the scientific director of Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, chief scientist at Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and an honorary professor in ecology and conservation biology at the University of East Anglia.
In his schooldays, Carl had something of a mini zoo in his back garden, rearing rescued common kestrels, owls and hawks.
When Carl landed in Mauritius in 1979 there were only two known breeding pairs of Mauritius kestrel left in the wild.
By the time he left, in 1999, he’d established a captive breeding programme. Today, hundreds of Mauritius kestrels fly over the islands where he spent decades pioneering his, sometimes controversial, methods.
Significantly, the Mauritius kestrel is now the national bird of Mauritius.
Carl is also responsible for saving from extinction three species of reptiles, a fruit bat and several plants.
He was appointed an MBE for his work in 2004 and, in 2016, he won the prestigious Indianapolis Prize.
Today, Carl lives in mid Wales with his wife and two children and assorted animals – including two Andean condors called Carlos and Baby.
By any benchmark, Carl has had an amazing life dedicated to his passion – but who would have guessed it back in those old days at ‘The Gram’ in Carmarthen?
If you want to listen to the whole interview between Lauren Laverne and Professor Carl Jones, then go to the BBC Sounds webpage and look for Desert Island Discs. Trust me, it will be the best way to spend an idle hour this week.
Leave a Reply