HEARTBREAK OF THE JUNGLE SAINT WHO LOVED GORILLAS
Dian and her pals
“If ever there was a possibility of escaping the human condition and living imaginatively in another creature’s world, it must be with the gorilla.” – David Attenborough
FORTY years ago this month the woman who knew more about gorillas than anyone on Earth, was macheted to death in her cabin on the edge of a dense forest. Her murder remains a mystery this day … and her new book manuscript about them is missing.
Dian Fossey was buried next to the mountain gorilla she deeply loved in the dense woodlands of Rwanda, where he died defending his family from poachers. They cut off his head that she had cradled so many times and ripped out his hands for trophy ashtrays.
After his killing, Dian, who was the subject of the award-winning 1988 biographical movie Gorillas in the Mist, starring Sigourney Weaver, spent more time on her own in her cabin and rarely communicated with colleagues and friends.
Her drinking and smoking – already heavy – became heavier and she spiralled into a deep depression. Although she was now world famous, the public did not know the truth behind the newspaper headlines.
Dian, a behaviour therapist, who loved animals all her life, went to extraordinary lengths to study mountain gorillas. She learned to communicate with them by never standing taller than them.
“When I approach a group, I approach it knuckle-walking, as gorillas walk, so that I will be at their level,” she said.
Her early research demanded patience. To gain the gorillas’ trust, she had to mimic their behaviour. She told the BBC’s Woman’s Hour in 1984: “I’m an inhibited person, and I felt that the gorillas were inhibited as well.
“So, I imitated their natural, normal behaviour like feeding, munching on celery stalks or scratching myself.” She had to learn her lessons quickly. “I made a mistake chest-beating in the beginning, I hadn’t realised that chest-beating was a sign of alarm.”
Instead, she learned to imitate their belch-like “contentment sounds”. Demonstrating how she would make a noise like a gorilla on the radio, she added: “Wouldn’t it be nice if humans could go through life belch vocalising instead of arguing?”
Diane moved in 1967, aged 35, from America to the mountains of Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, where she set up the Karisoke Research Centre. It was a brave thing to do.
For she suffered from the lung disease emphysema and had a fear of heights, both of which were dangerous for working in thin air on remote mountain slopes. Soon she realised the gorillas there were in danger. Their habitat was shrinking and poachers posed a growing threat.
She went from learning about them to fighting to save them from extinction.
Fleet Street treated Dian as an icon with interviews, pictures and spreads after reporting her work with David Attenborough’s groundbreaking BBC natural history series Life on Earth. And her encounter with a gorilla family has since become one of the most famous sequences in television history.
Attenborough told us: “She is pictured sitting surrounded by these gentle and placid creatures. There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know, we see the world in the same way that they do.”
But the gorilla trail didn’t end well for Dian. For she fell in love for one gorilla in particular – silverback Digit. She first saw him in 1967 when he was just a few years old and formed a bond with him, as he grew, giving him the name Digit because one of his fingers was injured.
But she was away when poachers found Digit’s family and so began the slaughter. Digit was hacked to death trying to save his mate and children. He took five spear wounds in the chest and was torn apart by dogs, fighting to his last breath as 13 poachers watched. His passing changed Dian forever.
At first, she became a drunken recluse but then morphed into a champion of gorillas wherever they were, fighting campaigns and rescuing many. She made enemies. But after Digit, nothing was the same. It affected her personality.
She captured and held Rwandans she suspected of the killing and allegedly beat a poacher’s testicles with stinging nettles as he lay roped to the ground. In a letter to a friend, she wrote, “We stripped him and spread eagled him and lashed the holy blue sweat out of him with nettle stalks and leaves.”
Dina went on the warpath with firecrackers, cheap toys and magic tricks as part of her method to scare the Africans and hold them at bay. She wore face masks and pretended to practice black magic to scare them in the bush. She made more enemies.
On the night of Boxing Day in 1985, she was murdered as she slept in her forest cabin, hacked to death like her dearest Digit. Her killers had cut a hole through the wall of her shack.
Her American research assistant was convicted in absentia, but there is no consensus as to who killed her. And her new manuscript was never found.
She got her last wish and lies buried next to her darling Digit in the forest graveyard she built for her slaughtered gorilla friends.
DID YOU KNOW?
That England did not invent printing with movable type. It originated in China and was later independently developed and refined in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century. But the printing press was first brought to England by merchant and diplomat William Caxton in 1476 after he learned the art of printing in Cologne and Bruges.
He printed the first book in the English language, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, in Bruges. It was a 15th-century courtly romance, he translated into English and details the Greek gods, retelling the legend of Troy, in the background of love and war.
SCONE ME! THEFT OF A THRONE THAT
COULD HAVE BEEN A CARRY ON MOVIE
Stone of Scone in the throne
IT WAS the Dean of Westminster’s darkest hour under his watch; the Abbey’s greatest possession had been stolen — The Stone of Scone.
Early on Christmas morning, 1950, he woke up to discover that the priceless and iconic Stone of Destiny as it was also called — the ancient throne of the Scottish kings — was stolen.
Since the 1066 Coronation of William the Conqueror, Westminster Abbey had served as a venue for royal occasions and the focal point was a wooden Coronation throne, which English kings and queens had sat on.
But it had a 330lb red sandstone block at its base, stolen over 600 years before from Scone, near Perth by Edward 1, Longshanks, the English king who executed William (Braveheart) Wallace. It measured 26in by 16in by 11in, weighed 336lb and a Latin cross was its only decoration. Now it was gone.
Fleet Street joined the hunt for the precious relic with the Express headline declaring: ‘Scottish border closed in hunt for Stone of Destiny’ and the Serpentine was dredged twice as fears grew it may have been dumped in the water. Worse, it had been sold abroad. The Yard, it seemed, were looking for serious criminals. It was the first time the border had been closed for 400 years.
But nothing could be further from the truth, and the raid was like something out of a Carry On film of the time.
The outraged Dean of Westminster, Alan Don, made a solemn appeal on BBC radio over the “senseless crime” and vowed: “I will go to the ends of the Earth to fetch it back.”
I pick up the story late one December night when four students in their early 20s from Glasgow University, Ian Hamilton, Gavin Vernon, Kay Matheson and Alan Stuart, drove to London in two Ford Anglia cars, full of hope, fear and Scottish patriotism in their hearts.
It took them 18 hours, plenty of time to change their minds about their daring plan to snatch back the hallowed Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey. For they were members of the Scottish Covenant Association, a group that supported home rule for Scotland.
Nationalism was growing at this time, and Westminster was struggling with calls for home rule. Now a patriotic heist was being funded by Glasgow businessman, Robert Gray, also a councillor.
After a brief cup of tea at a Lyons Corner House the intrepid gang decided not to go back home and tromped off to the Abbey. Later that day, one of them, Hamilton, hid under a trolley in a side room as the Abbey doors closed. But he was easily caught by a nightwatchman, briefly questioned, and let go in the belief his story, that he was locked in by accident, was true.
The following day, Christmas Eve, they learned some information on the watchmen’s shifts. In the middle of that night, the three male students clambered over a works yard and into Poet’s Corner, reaching the Chapel containing the tomb of Edward 1 and his chair with The Stone. Matheson stayed with the waiting parked cars.
They pulled down the barrier and tugged on the Stone, but they couldn’t hold it and it crashed to the floor, smashing in two.
Using a coat, they dragged the larger piece down the high altar steps, then Hamilton took the smaller piece to one of the cars waiting outside with Kay Matheson in it. But just as he dropped it into the car boot, a policeman appeared. So, he got hold of his pretty accomplice and started to kiss and cuddle her in the Ford.
The policeman knocked on the window, and they explained that they were lovers with nowhere to go on Christmas Eve. The officer, far from suspicious, removed his helmet, lit a cigarette, offered them one and joked amiably about life, love and Christmas, then let them go.
They couldn’t believe their luck. Once he was out of sight, Hamilton calmly walked back to the Abbey and dragged the larger stone back to the car. But there were more setbacks. Driving back to Scotland the suspension of the car carrying the large stone began to give way, so they had to stop off in Rugby and bury the stone in a field.
A fortnight later, Hamilton and some friends recovered the two pieces of the Stone they had hidden and brought them to Glasgow. They hired a stonemason to mend it and he placed a brass rod, containing a piece of paper, inside the throne. What was written on the paper remains unknown to this day.
In April 1951, the police received a message, and the Stone was found on the site of the High Altar at Arbroath Abbey, where in 1320, the assertion of Scottish nationhood was made in a declaration. The Stone was returned to Westminster in February the following year.
The authorities decided not to prosecute the gang as the potential for the event to become politicised was too great.
The Stone of Scone was officially returned to Scotland in 1996 specifically on St Andrew’s Day, November 30, as a gesture of reconciliation by the British government, and is now on permanent display in Perth Museum.
DID YOU KNOW?
That the sex blockbuster book of the 1960s Lady Chatterley’s Lover sold out of the 200,000 copies printed the first morning after it was cleared of obscenity charges in its UK trial. Author D.H. Lawrence told the Press that he got his inspiration from climbing mulberry trees in the nude, finding that the feeling of the rough bark against his skin helped him think.
The book was based on the real-life affair between Lady Ottoline Morrell, a friend of Lawrence, and a stonemason named Lionel “Tiger” Gomme, who carved stone plinths for her garden plants.
Which reminds me of a great line in a Philip Larkin poem …
“Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.”
TERRY MANNERS
29 December 2025
