How Animals Asia’s Jill Robinson changed Chinese notions of animal welfare, and the bear that started everything
When I first started working in China there were no words in the Chinese language for ‘animal welfare’, Jill Robinson says, and now there are. There was only one animal welfare group in China and now there are well over 200
Missing mum: My dad was a British Royal Air Force squadron leader and I was born in an RAF camp in Newark, Nottingham, in 1958. My youngster sister, Anne, was born a year later. When she was just a couple of months old, our mother died of septicaemia. My dad was heartbroken. He said two things about her: she was the best woman in the world and she died screaming in agony.
When I was about two years old, Anne and I went to live with an auntie and uncle in Enfield, Middlesex. We had a wonderful life with them. When I was nine, our dad took us back. He’d left the RAF, moved to Enfield, and got a job as a bank clerk. It was another big change.
We’d had a close relationship with our auntie and dad wasn’t tactile. He dressed us in appalling orange and lime-green drip-dry crimplene. But he had amazing values and raised my sister and I to be kind, ethical and tenacious. Anne and I became very independent – and very naughty – together. It brought us very close.
Cool cat: I’ve always loved animals. I’d be pulling on my walking reins to touch a cat or a dog. I badgered my dad to get a pet and, when I was 12, we got a cat called Aze. It would meet us at the end of the road after school and walk us home. When I was 15, Aze disappeared. Dad was devastated; it reminded him of mum’s sudden death.
At school, I loved singing and was in a choir. We’d go to the BBC and sing on a couple of [radio] programmes – Time and Tune and Singing Together. My music teacher helped me get a job as a secretary at the BBC. I spent five years there, working for current affairs programmes, then moved to Thames Television. I did a few research jobs for a programme called Good Afternoon and enjoyed the buzz.