The late primatologist’s vision and conviction transformed our understanding of chimpanzees and our responsibility to the planet.
When Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall entered the world in London on 3 April 1934, her family could scarcely have imagined the scale of her eventual influence. Yet even in childhood she revealed a precocious fascination with the animal kingdom. At the age of four she vanished for hours, prompting a frantic household search, only to be discovered sitting quietly in a henhouse, intent on witnessing the moment a hen laid an egg. The episode foreshadowed a lifetime of persistence and a scientist’s instinct to observe rather than intrude.
A year later her father presented her with an unusual toy: a plush chimpanzee named Jubilee, commemorating a real infant chimp at London Zoo. Far from alarming the little girl, Jubilee became her constant companion and a totem of the world she longed to enter. Books like Doctor Dolittle and Tarzan of the Apes nourished that imagination, the latter inspiring her oft-repeated line that “Tarzan married the wrong Jane.” These early influences sowed the seeds of a vision that would one day remake primatology.
Her path to Africa began modestly. After school, she trained as a secretary, but an invitation to visit a family friend in Kenya altered everything. In 1957 she sailed to Mombasa, where chance and determination led her to the office of Louis Leakey. The renowned palaeoanthropologist saw in the young Englishwoman precisely what he sought: keen observation, dogged patience, and a mind uncluttered by academic orthodoxy. Leakey arranged for her to begin fieldwork at Gombe Stream in what is now Tanzania.
First Look at Jane – National Geographic; video courtesy National Geographic
Local authorities, however, were unwilling to permit a young European woman to camp alone in the bush. Goodall’s mother, Vanne, gamely agreed to accompany her daughter, acting as chaperone and camp manager during those precarious early months. That hidden maternal presence, often omitted from the story, was in fact crucial to the genesis of one of the twentieth century’s landmark research projects.
What followed is the stuff of legend. From 1960 onward, Goodall documented the complex societies of chimpanzees with a sensitivity and intimacy no one had achieved before. She recorded tool-making, cooperative hunting, and elaborate hierarchies, overturning prevailing dogma that humans alone shaped tools and culture. Rather than assigning the chimpanzees numbers as is current in research, she also insisted on naming the chimpanzees – there were for example David Greybeard, Flo, and Fifi. At Cambridge, where she pursued an unprecedented doctorate without having completed a first degree, this anthropomorphic practice was derided as unscientific. Yet her refusal to reduce living beings to ciphers transformed behavioural science, and critics ultimately recognized its value.
“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
Yet the idyll she was documenting would soon reveal a darker side in the 1970s, when her field notes chronicled a prolonged inter-group conflict, now known as the Gombe Chimpanzee War. Once imagined as gentle creatures, the chimpanzees revealed themselves capable of calculated violence. Goodall later admitted how deeply the brutality disturbed her, forcing her to acknowledge kinship with humanity in its darker aspects as well as its nobler ones.
Her personal life wove itself into the Gombe years. She married the Dutch photographer Hugo van Lawick in 1964, and their son, Hugo, nicknamed “Grub”, spent his childhood in the research camp, an upbringing as unconventional as it was precarious. After her first marriage ended, she wed Derek Bryceson, director of Tanzania’s national parks. His death from cancer in 1980 left her widowed but more determined than ever to channel her energies into conservation.
In the years following his death, Goodall shifted from field scientist to global advocate. In 1977 she had already founded the Jane Goodall Institute, and in 1991 she launched Roots & Shoots with a dozen Tanzanian students, a grassroots programme that has since spread to more than sixty countries. Her message expanded from primatology to planetary stewardship, urging young people to see themselves as actors in environmental renewal.
Throughout, she carried with her a small plush chimpanzee named Mr H, a gift from a blind American magician, Gary Haun. To her it symbolised resilience and hope, and it accompanied her to more than sixty nations, a quiet echo of Jubilee from her childhood.
Despite the public honours bestowed on her – Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003, United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2002, Templeton Prize laureate in 2021 – her private base remained strikingly modest. Between tours she returned to her childhood home in Bournemouth, where she shared a house with her sister Judy, a domestic anchor to balance her unrelenting travel schedule of up to 300 days a year.
Her advocacy increasingly embraced spiritual themes. She described the forests of Gombe as “cathedrals,” spoke of an ineffable presence in the natural world, and urged audiences to cultivate hope not as sentiment but as duty. She often said she felt herself a “prisoner of hope,” compelled to carry on speaking for animals and the environment no matter the personal exhaustion.
That sense of vocation never waned. Aged 91, she was still on an international lecture tour in the USA when her life drew to a close on 1 October, 2025. The timing could not have been more characteristic: she left the world as she had lived in it, mid-stride, never withdrawing, never yielding her platform.
The contours of her scientific achievement are familiar: the discovery of tool use, the recognition of chimpanzee societies as complex, the demolition of the barrier humans once erected between themselves and other primates. Yet the fuller story lies in the interplay of hidden influences and overlooked details: a mother’s quiet courage, a pair of stuffed chimpanzees that bracketed a career, the emotional toll of observing violence, and a modest English childhood home that remained her anchor.
Jane Goodall’s life was a triumph of science but also a narrative of persistence, imagination, and faith: faith in animals, in young people, and in the capacity of hope to carry one stubborn, determined woman across the span of nine decades, from a henhouse in Bournemouth to the forests of Gombe, and finally to the world stage.
“I do have hope. Nature is enormously resilient, humans are vastly intelligent, the energy and enthusiasm that can be kindled among young people seems without limit, and the human spirit is indomitable. But if we want life, we will have to stop depending on someone else to save the world. It is up to us — you and me, all of us. Myself, I have placed my faith in the children.”
All photos as credited; lead image by Michael Neugebauer – Jane Goodall med chimpansen Freud fra Gombe; licenced under CC0 1.0 Universal
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