Metamorphic Rocks

 

Virginia, Bill, Christian the lion, John and Ace outside the caravan in Surrey

“Christian the Lion” found Travers and McKenna in an advanced case of déjà vu. In 1970, they were shopping for a desk and ventured into the World’s End furniture store on the King’s Road in London. The store managers, the Australian duo John Rendall and Ace Berg, recognized Travers and decided to show him the store’s mascot: a young lion. 

Christian as a cub in London.

Rendall and Berg had purchased the lion from the Harrod’s department store a year earlier and were raising him on their own. But, of course, a furniture store is no place to keep a lion – and the combined salaries of two furniture store managers were barely keeping the animal fed.

George Adamson with Christian - Circa 1973, Photo by GAWPT

Travers and McKenna, who had become highly visible as animal rights activists following the success of “Born Free,” realized that the lion could not be kept as a domestic pet. 

And selling him to a zoo seemed like a cruel idea – zoo design was still fairly primitive in the early 1970s and imprisoning a majestic lion in a stark cage was a ghastly notion. 

Thus, Travers and McKenna decided to reprise their “Born Free” odyssey and called on George Adamson for an unlikely plan: to bring the London lion to Africa and teach him how to be a wild animal at home with nature. (Joy Adamson had separated from her husband in 1970 and, thus, was not a part of this venture.)

John Rendall and Anthony 'Ace' Bourke

https://bigcatrescue.org/christian-the-lion/?amp
http://wildfolio.blogspot.com/2011/05/lion-who-started-it-all.html