The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London. Christopher Skaife
I wasn’t the best.
This was 1981. If you switched on the TV it was all the Yorkshire Ripper this, and the Hunger Strikers that, and the Brixton and Toxteth riots, and the National Front were marching, and Enoch Powell was sounding off about a race war, and AIDS was becoming a global crisis, and unemployment figures were skyrocketing. Thatcher was in power. The IRA were bombing and killing soldiers and civilians. It was what you might call a bit of a difficult period in British history.
And there we were, at the beginning of a new decade, boys and girls about to leave school and ready for some adventures of our own.
My parents were getting concerned. I was drinking, smoking, going to parties, sneaking out to sleep up in the hills, getting into fights with other gangs. What was to be done with me?
And then one day an Army Careers Adviser visited the school. It happened to be one of the days I was actually attending classes.
Like many kids back then I had spent a lot of my childhood re-enacting the Second World War, playing with toy soldiers, staging fights and battles with my mates, the Allies versus the Nazis, all that sort of thing, reading the old 1970s war comics, The Victor and Warlord and Battle. There was Dad’s Army on TV, of course, as well as Kojak and The Six Million Dollar Man, and Kung Fu and Planet of the Apes – it was all goodies and baddies and tough guys and fighting. So when the Army Careers Adviser gave us his talk and handed out his leaflets about joining the army – a life full of adventure, a life of goodies and baddies and tough guys and fighting – I thought it seemed like a pretty good idea. I took the leaflets home and talked to my parents, who probably thought, well, if it’s not that, he’s going to end up in jail.
I went with Mum to the old Army Careers Information Office in Dover, which was just a little red-brick hut really, tucked away at the base of the cliffs, by the eastern dock and the ferry terminal, and there was this portly old recruiting sergeant sitting in there and you could see he was bored out of his mind, and all you had to do was a basic literacy and numeracy test and then sign on the dotted line and take the Queen’s shilling and you were in, more or less. So I did.
It was the best decision I ever made.
Off I went to Deepcut Barracks to do a fitness test, interviews, a general-knowledge test. I was asked if I wanted to learn a trade, because my test results were that good. I may have been a messer, but I wasn’t stupid. I could have trained as an engineer, or even a veterinary nurse. I could have learned a proper trade, but by that time the Falklands War had started and I just wanted to learn to fire a gun and be a soldier and get on with it. So I chose to go in as a good old-fashioned regular soldier. I left school, my parents took me to Dover Priory train station, I waved goodbye to them, and I joined the army as a boy soldier, the Junior Infantry Battalion at Bassingbourn, on 18 June 1982, which as it turned out was just a few days after British forces had recaptured Stanley from the Argentinians, and the Falklands War was over. I was sixteen and a half. That was the beginning of almost twenty-five years in the military – a full-service career which took me all over the world and eventually to the Tower of London and into the lives of my friends, the ravens.
I’m very lucky to have had two careers: as a soldier and now as a Yeoman Warder. As a soldier I saw the best and worst of what humans are capable of. As the Ravenmaster I’ve been granted a privileged insight into the lives and behaviour of some of the world’s most extraordinary non-human creatures. One of the things I’ve learned from the ravens is that they’re surprisingly like us: they are versatile, adaptable, omnivorous, they are capable of great cruelty and great kindness, and on the whole they manage to get along with one another. In learning about the ravens, I have discovered a lot about what it means to be a human: I’ve learned to listen, to observe, and to be still. The ravens have been my teachers and I have been their pupil.
There’s a photograph of me as a young boy on a school trip to London. Trafalgar Square. We’d come up from Kent on the train for the day. It was a real treat – London Town! I’m kneeling, wearing flared trousers and sporting a bowl-cut hairstyle – this was the 1970s, after all – and I am concentrating on feeding the pigeons. You can see from the photo that I am completely and utterly absorbed. You can see the expression on my face, me thinking, what are those birds about?
That fascination is with me still. My hope is that in reading this book you too will become fascinated.
The author in Trafalgar Square, on a 1970s school trip to London. (Courtesy of the author)
3
I am, as far as I’m aware, only the sixth Ravenmaster ever to have been appointed at the Tower. Before that, caring for the ravens was part of the job of the Yeoman Quartermaster. Like a lot of our great traditions in Great Britain, the role and indeed the title of Ravenmaster is in fact a recent invention. The story goes that when Henry Johns was appointed Yeoman Quartermaster just after World War II, some of the old Yeoman Warders used to joke that he was raving mad – so keen was he on caring for the birds – and so he affectionately became known as the Raving Master instead of the Quartermaster. It wasn’t until John Wilmington took over from Henry Johns in 1968 that the more sane-sounding title of Raven Master became official, and not until some years later – doubtless due to some clerical error in a back office somewhere – that the Raven Master became known as the Ravenmaster.*
I lead a team of Yeoman Warders here at the Tower who assist me in caring for the birds. They are known as the Ravenmaster’s assistants. I call us Team Raven. Together we are responsible for looking after the ravens 365 days a year. There’s never a day when there’s not a Yeoman Warder on duty responsible for the ravens. They are possibly the most cared-for – and certainly the best-loved – birds in the world.
There are a few simple rules about caring for the Tower ravens that have been passed down to me over the years by my illustrious predecessors, and which I in turn like to pass on to my assistants. The theory goes that if you follow these rules you’ll remain safe around the ravens, and they’ll remain safe around you.
DO NOT hurry the ravens.
DO NOT attempt to change the pecking order.
DO NOT try to cut corners.
DO remain calm at all times.
DO allow the ravens to follow the same routine every day.
DO prepare for chaos if you break any of the above rules.
It goes without saying that I have failed to observe these rules many times – and that the job of Ravenmaster is in fact rather more challenging and complex than following a few basic rules.
As Ravenmaster you have to be able to think on your feet. Over the years I’ve had to deal with bird-on-bird attacks, bird-on-human attacks, human-on-bird attacks, stolen goods, snatched food, biohazard concerns, security problems, disease, death, and tragedy. On a daily basis my job involves dealing with children, tour guides, VIPs, journalists, amateur historians, professional historians, bird-lovers, and all the other assorted visitors to the Tower. By my calculation, in the height of the summer, when our visitor numbers are at their peak, I am photographed about three or four hundred times a day, every day: I reckon the ravens and I have probably featured in someone’s family album in every country in the world. For the love of ravens I’ve nearly drowned, I’ve very nearly fallen off tall buildings, and many’s the time I’ve had to risk my reputation and stick my neck out to try to do what I think’s best for the birds. And it’s not as if they’re exactly grateful. They are not my pets. They do not do tricks. They do not ride unicycles. They do not speak Latin. They don’t necessarily do what I tell them to do – which can be more than a little embarrassing. There was the time one of our ravens