Zoo Looking For “Elephant Angelâ€
Updated : Mar 24, 2009
Belfast Zoo today launched a bid to identify a woman who looked after one of its elephants in her backyard to save it from German bombs during the Second World War.
The baby elephant, Sheila, was moved out of the zoo because of fears that it would be targeted by bombers during the Belfast Blitz of 1941.
Sheila was one of the lucky ones at the zoo, built on the hills in the north of the city as The Ministry of Public Security at the time ordered 23 animals to be killed in case they got free after bomb damage and attacked people. Lucky Sheila, however, was walked down the road by keepers to a red-brick house on the Whitewell Road where a woman gave her sanctuary in her backyard for several months until the bombing was over.
The woman has never been identified and the zoo knows her only as 'the elephant angel'. But as it celebrates its 75th birthday zoo bosses are seeking to identify the elephant angel. Zoo manager Mark Challis said: "The care provided by our mystery lady is unique to zoo history and we would like to make contact with her family and properly document this gap in our past."
The zoo has several black and white photographs of two women sitting on a garden seat watching Sheila drinking out of a tin bucket beside the back door of the house. Sheila was returned to the zoo once the war was over and lived for another quarter of a century, dying of a skin complaint in 1966.
VeryHappyPig says how cool would it be to have an elephant living in your back garden!!
