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June Williams was just four in 1930 when seven acres of land in Cheshire were bought by her father. His name was George Mottershead and he had a dream - to build a "zoo without bars".
Born in 1894, as a boy Mottershead had felt sorry for the caged animals at Bellevue amusement park in Manchester. He returned from fighting in World War One to set up a market garden and florist's shop. The business flourished, especially when he started selling pet birds. He decided to put his private menagerie of animals on display.
The family moved into Oakfield House with a pair of goats and a gibbon, and were soon joined by two bears bought from a wildlife park in Matlock, Derbyshire. But Mottershead's mission was fraught with difficulty from the beginning.
For a start, there was opposition from neighbours who worried about animals escaping.
"We'd hoped to open in Easter but didn't get permission until the summer," June, now 88, recalls. "The money was going out very fast because the mortgage had to be paid and the animals fed."
Undeterred, Mottershead continued to find inventive ways to stock his zoo with exotic creatures.
In those days, animals could be bought and sold in department stores.
"People would buy them as youngsters, and of course they would soon become unmanageable in a house," says June. "So they'd leave them at the zoo - monkeys and different things."
Mottershead's ambitions may have appeared unusual, but he had plenty of supporters who would donate animals as gifts. These included a capybara - a giant South American rodent - from the Duke of Westminster.
"Someone had given it to him as a present. He put it on an island in the Eaton estate, and of course it kept swimming off the island because they're aquatic animals - but nobody had realised it at the time. And so we got it," June says.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29014122
