Heavy drinker: Jumbo at London Zoo, circa 1890. Photograph: Getty ImagesThe first joke in this delightful book is the title. Unauthorised? Sutherland does not mean that there is a Jumbo literary estate that might wish to sanitise his revelations. Rather, he acknowledges that others, including Paul Chambers in recent years, have written Jumbo's story. His book is "a kind of fantasia" (Disney's Fantasia featured pink elephants) – "Call it elephantasia". It may be a fruit of Sutherland's early years in Colchester, where, the tourist brochures claim, the conquering Roman emperor Claudius rode in triumph on an elephant, and where Jumbo gave his name to the town's water tower.
Many will have heard the word "Jumbo" without any knowledge of Sutherland's subject, and might consider it to be an unoriginal moniker, like Fido for a dog. But of course Jumbo (c1861-1885) was the first animal or thing to be so called, and gave his name to such items as jumbo burgers and jumbo jets, just as the 12th Lord Derby is immortalised in horse races, matches between local football teams and demolition derbies. Why Jumbo was so called is not clear. Sutherland is inclined to discount the Wikipedia assertion that a zookeeper coined the name from merging the Swahili words "jambo" ("hello") and "jumbe" (chief), going instead with the OED citation of "Slang, Jumbo, a clumsy or unwieldy fellow." Another, less pleasing theory – though not advanced by Sutherland – might be that Jumbo's keepers were thinking of Sambo, already in use as a generic name for someone of African origin.
Jumbo was born in what is now Eritrea. He was captured by a group of Hamran Arabs, and probably witnessed their murder of his mother – one of many cruelties he was to endure. Exported, he ended up at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, before being bought, in a job lot with a pair of anteaters, by London Zoo. He delighted zoo-goers by doing tricks with a bowler hat and accepting buns and pennies from outstretched hands; adults and children, including royal princes and princesses, rode him. After 17 years there was national consternation when Jumbo emigrated to the US to join the travelling circus of PT Barnum.
Elephants are not naturally amiable. Sutherland details the torments that Jumbo underwent each night and that ensured his daytime placidity, and he describes the grisly ends that so many elephant entertainers suffered. Jumbo's predecessor Chunee – about whose behaviour Byron was so impressed that he wrote, "I wish he was my butler" – was sentenced to death for killing his handler, survived an initial blast of 152 musket balls, and was eventually quelled by sabres mounted on long poles. A female elephant named "Murderous Mary", in Tennessee at the end of the 19th century, endured the cruel and unusual punishment of death by hanging. At least Jumbo died relatively quickly, after being run over by a locomotive. Barnum continued to make money from him, exhibiting the skeleton and stuffed frame.
This is the first book this spring from the prolific Sutherland, Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London; the second, How to be Well Read may be less surprising. But Jumbo is clearly a work of personal significance, and written with zest. Author and subject even have drinking in common: Sutherland is a (dry) alcoholic, and Jumbo was reliant on booze to stay calm. You will learn lots of amusing facts – elephants can hold two gallons of water in their trunks, which contain half a million taste receptors. And, like Sutherland, you will be dismayed by how we first abused elephants, and then threatened their survival.
