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During World War II, Goodall’s family moved from London to her extended family's home in southern England. There, despite the war, she enjoyed a happy childhood in a fun-loving extended family – an upbringing she credits with giving her the grounding she drew on in later life. One day, 4-year-old Jane crouched in the henhouse, determined to find out firsthand how a chicken lays eggs. When she emerged five hours later, dirty but triumphant, her mother wisely listened instead of scolding her for the panic that had gripped the household in its search for the missing girl. Later young Jane’s dreams of Africa were inspired by the Dr. Doolittle and Tarzan books. She told anyone who would listen that she was going to go to Africa to watch animals.
That dream started to take shape early, when at the age of 23, she boarded an ocean liner to visit a childhood friend who had moved to Africa. There she met the famed paleontologist Louis Leakey, who with his wife, paleontologist Mary Leakey, would later discover some of the world’s most important hominid fossils. Impressed by Goodall’s passion and curiosity about animals, Leakey hired her as his secretary. After long conversations on a field trip to Olduvai Gorge to hunt for fossils, he decided that Goodall had the qualities he had been looking for in a researcher to conduct a long-term study of the social life of chimps. (Leakey's intuition that women would make gifted primatologist proved prescient. He later launched the careers of Dian Fossey as well as Birute Galdikas and others in a field that continues to be dominated by women.)
Potential backers balked at the idea of sending a young English girl – an untrained one, at that – to the potentially dangerous Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanzania. But Leakey insisted, and funding for the work eventually came through. The Tanzanian government agreed, with the stipulation that Goodall take along a chaperone. Who better, she thought, then her mother, Vanne?
A CHIMP NAMED
DAVID GREYBEARD
Young researcher Jane Goodall with David Greybeard in her camp at Gombe
© The Jane Goodall Institute
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