Plaque honours town's forgotten zoo

"It really blows people away when they find out that such a small town had its own little zoo at one point in the early 1900s."

Rob Lane is the great-great-grandson of John Marshall, an entrepreneur who operated a zoo in Ripley, Derbyshire, between 1908 and 1915.

The town council said the zoo, once home to monkeys, lemurs and a bear named Little Roosevelt, was Marshall's "brainchild". It closed when the outbreak of World War One made it "impossible" to get food for the animals.

Rob said from what he could tell, his great-great-grandfather "kind of transformed Ripley", and brought shops as well as a working men's hostel to the town.

"But then the zoo is the thing which blows people's minds really. They're like, 'There's a zoo in Ripley?'," he added.

According to Ripley and District Heritage Trust, the zoo contained an aviary, a monkey house and a museum with waxworks.

Rob praised his ancestor's "entrepreneurial spirit", with Marshall working as a watchmaker before running a jeweller's and iron monger's in Oxford Street.

"Then he just had this idea to, 'let's do something really cool', and opened a zoo," he said.

"It was a fairly small-scale zoo but just to have the idea to do something like that around that time. We're right in the middle of the UK.

"A lot of people would have never had a chance to see something like that.

"I don't think it ever made that much money but you see some photographs of it and places packed with kids on the rooftops."

The town council said the three-storey zoo also contained birds, reptiles, exotic fish, a sea lion, raccoons, and the bear.

"I think there was a story going around at one point that the bear escaped one time and Jack Marshall, who ran the pub, had to wrestle the bear back in.

"Obviously way before my time, but stories like that are pretty cool to hear," Rob said.

Marshall also opened a cinema in the town in 1913, according to the heritage trust.

The hippodrome showed silent films, sometimes accompanied by an orchestra.

A second hippodrome was built at the back of the first and opened in 1921 after Marshall acquired more land in 1919.

In 1926, the balcony was boarded off and became the Elite Dance Hall, the trust said, and there were also Turkish baths on site.

James Wagland, 47, manager of The Little Roosevelt bar in Ripley, said he "didn't know a thing" about the history of the site when he was first interested in taking on the building.

However, he said when he was researching whether someone else had taken the site, he discovered the history of the building as an "unusual zoo".

"It made naming the pub a lot easier after we had done a bit of research and found out that there was a bear here, and its name was Little Roosevelt.

"It just made perfect sense to call the pub that," he said.

Ripley Town Council said it had funded a blue commemorative plaque to be displayed on the site of the former Marshall's Zoo, in Oxford Street, where the Little Roosevelt now stands.

This was unveiled on 4 July at a ceremony attended by members of Marshall's family.

Hannah Curzon, town clerk for Ripley Town Council, said she was "delighted" the former zoo would have a "permanent dedication" in the town, which had a "fantastic local history" with "a lot to be proud of".

"Ripley Town Council are pleased to have funded this commemorative plaque to mark this site of historical interest, and as a thank you to the late John Marshall, and the Marshall family for their contributions to our town," she added.

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