Island Life Magazine Ltd October/November 2017 | Page 50

Interview
White’s Tree Frog
“It also helped that
I kept four-metre
long Caymans in
the lake, and the
story went round
that I’d kill people,
chop them up and
feed them to the
Caymans.”
in to his pleas and bought him a Boa
Constrictor.
What he didn’t know at that stage
was that the shop in Tooting where he
bought the giant snake would, before
long, become one of his customers.
In fact Graham was aged just 15, and
still at school, when he did his first trade
in live animals.
He had been given a price list for
Kenyan reptile exporter Jonathan
Leakey and resolved to save up £60
so he could buy a small shipment of
creatures.
The shipment of two boxes of snakes
and lizards duly arrived, and within two
days, the enterprising schoolboy had
sold the lot.
“I doubled my money at a stroke” says
Graham, “and, as they say, the rest is
history!”
Hump Nosed Viper from Ceylon, which
resulted in him losing part of a finger
to gangrene, and certainly ended his
guitar-playing days.
Whilst he carried on and did A-levels
at school, he’d already decided that
University was not going to be for him.
He simply finished school and went
full-time, straight into his own, already-
successful business.
Graham steadily built up a bank of
contacts around the world, bringing in
shipments from Europe, Africa, Asia
and South America, in the days when
there were very few restrictions on
animal imports.
He was also building contacts with
the businesses he supplied, and ended
up going into partnership with one pet
shop in Lewisham.
This gave his reptile business a more
visible profile, and led to him attracting
some celebrity pet-buyers during the
1970s, when rock stars would often
enhance their stage image by owning
exotic animals.
For Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog
Doo-Dah Band it was turtles, while The
Who’s bass guitarist John Entwistle
went for tarantula spiders.
By that time, Graham was also
importing birds, and supplied celebrity
photographer David Bailey with
Pionus parrots. Another customer was
Dangerman
It almost wasn’t history though –
because at the age of 16 he was bitten
so severely by a venomous Long-Nosed
Viper from Europe that a priest had to
be called in to deliver the Last Rites.
“I nearly died, my grandmother had an
asthma attack with the shock – but no,
it didn’t put me off” he says.
Having pulled through that near-
miss, he was bitten again three years
later at the age of 19, this time by a
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Leopard Gecko