Life Summary: Jane Goodall, Chimpanzee Expert

Jane Goodall, born in London, travelled to Africa to visit a friend at age 23 and ended up spending most of her life in the wilderness there studying chimpanzees. This is the story and age-by-age breakdown of how she came to be known as the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees…

1934 – Jane Goodall is born in London, England. Her father is an engineer, her mother is a novelist. Her family moves outside the city to a house with a yard shortly after.

Age 1 – Her father gives her a stuffed chimpanzee after a chimp named Jubilee is born at the London Zoo. Jane names her stuffed chimp Jubilee too.

Age 4 – Jane’s sister, Judy is born, on the same day as her.

Age 5 – Jane’s family is living in France. When World War II breaks out, they return to England. Her father joins the army. Jane moves to her grandmother’s house in Bournemouth with her mother and sister. Jane plays with earthworms and watches chickens lay eggs at the chicken coop in her grandmother’s backyard.

Age 8 – Jane’s mother moves her daughters into their own home in Bournemouth. Jane will spend the rest of her childhood there. She starts a nature club with her sister and 2 friends. The Story of Doctor Dolittle is one of her favourite books.

Age 10 – She decides she wants to live in Africa close to wild animals.

Age 18 – Jane’s parents divorce. She remains in contact with her father but is not close to him. She graduates from high school but there is not enough money for college. She moves to London and becomes a secretary. She finds the work dull and eventually finds another job at a company that makes documentary films.

Age 22 – An old school friend named Clo invites Jane to her family’s farm in Kenya. Jane quits her job to move back home to with her mother in Bournemouth, where the living standards are cheaper, then earns money for her trip to Kenya by working as a waitress.

Age 23 – Jane travels to Mombasa, Kenya by ship, takes a train and a drive and arrives on her friend’s farm just in time for her birthday. She stays on the farm for a few weeks as a guest and at a party is introduced to the fossil hunter and scientist, Louis Leakey, who is a British citizen living in Kenya with his wife. He offers her a job as his secretary at a museum in Nairobi, Kenya and she takes it. Her other job would be to dig for fossils.

Age 26 – Leakey wants to study chimps. He decides Jane would be the right person for the job and sends her to the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania. She lives in a tent in the wild, one hour away from the nearest town, with 1 cook and 2 scouts, and her mother comes to join her for four months. They both contract malaria and are ill for 2 weeks but survive. Once her mother leaves, she starts observing chimps in an area she calls the Peak. The chimps soon get used to her. She names the chimps and soon learns they are not too different from humans. She sends her findings to Leakey who spreads word about what she had learned. The National Geographic Society soon gives her money to stay in Gombe for another year.

Age 29 – National Geographic publishes an article about Jane called ‘My Life Among Wild Chimpanzees’. For that article, Jane invites her sister Judy to Gombe to help her take photos but the photos are not good enough for the magazine. Eventually a young photographer from National Geographic, Hugo van Lawick, goes over instead. They fall in love and the photos are a success. Leakey helps Jane get into Cambridge University and the school allows her to study for an advanced degree after deciding that her work with the chimps counts as a college degree.

Age 30 – Hugo and Jane marry.

Age 31 – Jane completes all the work for her doctorate and gets a PhD in Ethology. She is now Dr. Jane Goodall. She appears in an hour-long program on national TV in the US and becomes famous. The National Geographic Society provides more money for Jane’s work. Buildings are erected and covered with grass to blend with the forest. Graduate students go over to join Jane. The group learns even more about chimps then.

Age 33 – Jane and Hugo have a son. They call him Hugo and nickname him Grub. They move to a house by the lake to keep him safe from the chimps and Jane spends most of her time caring for him while students go into the forests to do the research.

Age 37 – Jane publishes ‘In the Shadow of Man’. It becomes a best seller and is translated into about 50 languages.

Age 40 – Hugo and Jane get a divorce.

Age 41 – A group of armed men kidnap 4 students from the research camp and demand money for their release. The ransom is paid and they are unharmed, but after that, no more students come to live at Gombe with Jane. Trained field staff from Tanzania take over the work. Jane marries Derek Bryceson who works with the government of Tanzania and lives in Dar es Salaam.

Age 43 – The Jane Goodall Institute is founded to continue the study of chimps at Gombe and protect them and other animals.

Age 46 – Derek dies of cancer.

Age 46-85 – Jane receives numerous awards for her work. There are also numerous films and books about her.

Age 57 – 16 African teens and Jane start the Roots & Shoots club for kids who want to learn about animals and how to protect them. They would go on to set up Roots & Shoots clubs in over 120 countries.

Age 60 – Jane begins a program called TACARE to replant stripped forests in Africa and help people living near chimps improve their lives. She also starts ChimpanZoo, touring zoos and labs that worked with chimps to improve the lives of the chimps in those conditions. She starts spending less time in Gombe and more time travelling the world giving talks about the causes she cares about.

Age 66 – Jane publishes ‘Reason for Hope’. Her mother dies. Her former husband, Hugo, dies of cancer.

Age 68 – She is named UN Messenger of Peace.

Age 71-79 – She receives honorary doctorate degrees from universities all over the world.

2020 – Jane is presently 86 years old.

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Photographs: Nick Stepowyj. Compiler: Sy
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