42 Monday January 3 2022 | the times
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Jethro
Bawdy Cornish comedian accused of misogyny and racism who was described by his friend Dawn French as gloriously un-PC
One night, while singing in his local pub
in Cornwall, Geoff Rowe ran out of
voice. “I couldn’t sing any more, so I just
told a joke instead,” he recalled. “Funni-
ly, it went down a storm and I’ve never
been allowed to sing since.”
It was the start of a hugely successful
career as a stand-up comedian. Under
the stage name Jethro, Rowe sold more
than four million DVDs and regularly
shifted 250,000 seats a year on his
theatre tours. There were TV shows
and even a Royal Variety Performance,
although most of his material was
hardly family entertainment.
He was often accused of racism, sex-
ism and homophobia; his humour was
either “gloriously un-PC”, as his friend
Dawn French put it, or gratuitously
offensive. A typical show might open
with “I’ve had two unhappy marriages
— my first wife died and this bugger
won’t”.
From there he would head south with
plenty of gags about bodily functions
and large doses of casual misogyny. He
called his patter a “stream of twaddle”
and knew that jokes about genitalia
would always get a laugh. Reviewers of-
ten struggled to find jokes that were fit
to print in newspapers.
His blue humour was honed in boozy
working men’s clubs and at stag parties,
where he went down a storm. Some
wondered how it would transfer to the
more sedate setting of theatre shows,
but he made few concessions. Tickets
for one of his tours were printed with
the words, “Warning: not for the vicar!”
but, by and large, he got away without
censure, aided by a warm Cornish burr,
an old-fashioned rustic look that made
him resemble an extra from Poldark,
and a distinctively bucolic gait, the
result, the way he told it, of an accident
with a cart of mangelwurzels which
landed on top of him.
Jethro enjoyed his celebrity and
owned two Rolls-Royces, one of which
had the number plate JE5TER. He also
owned his own comedy club, bred
racehorses, ran a clay pigeon shoot and
made damson wine on his farm at
Lewdown on the Devon side of the
Cornish border. He described himself as
a total recluse when not on stage,happiest on his farm with his horses, on
whom he tried out new material for his
shows. Jethro and Geoff Rowe were
“two different people”, he insisted. “I
love to make people laugh, but if I get
recognised on the street I get embar-
rassed.”
He is survived by his partner, Jennie,
his two sons, Jesse, a stone wall builder,
and Lanyon, who runs Cornwall Cycle
Tours, and his stepdaughter Sarah.
Geoffrey Rowe was born in St Bury-
an, Cornwall in 1948, the son of farming
parents. His father, Hugh, founded the
St Buryan Male Voice Choir and Jethro
started out as a singer, making his first
stage appearances with the St Just and
District Operatic Society.
Strong and burly, he was a talented
rugby player in his youth and it was
then that he acquired the name Jethro,
after the character Jethro Bodine in the
1960s TV series The Beverly Hillbillies.
On leaving Cape Cornwall School he
became a carpenter’s apprentice. As a
singer in pubs he was a hit with local
audiences. Yet it was not until he made
his first of nine appearances on the DesO’Connor Tonight show in 1990 that he
came to national attention.
The interview went so well that
O’Connor departed from the script to
lengthen it. “The only thing I could
think of clean enough for television was
the train at Camborne,” Jethro recalled.
His “This Train Don’t Stop Camborne
Wednesdays” gag became his best-
known routine, in part because it was
one of the few that could be repeated in
polite society.
On the news of his death Great West-
ern Railway posted a tribute to him on
the platform of Camborne station.
These days trains do stop on a Wednes-
day but with an irony that Jethro would
surely have appreciated, work on the
line meant that in the week of his death
a bus replacement service was in
operation.Jethro, comedian, was born on March 8,- He died of Covid-19 on December
14, 2021, aged 73
Off-stage, Jethro was a recluse,
happiest on his farm with his horses Email: [email protected]Leakey in 1972. He argued that social co-operation boosted human intelligenceCertain episodes of Richard Leakey’s
remarkable career might read like the
memoirs of one of his white African
adventurer forefathers. Whether as
fossil hunter to television star, bestsel-
ling author, expert on human evolution
and politician, he had a talent for whip-
ping up a good public row meant that
whatever he was involved in was news.
Before his 30th birthday his face had
adorned the cover of Time magazine,
and as head of the national parks in
Kenya, he attracted millions of pounds
of western investment for the country’s
conservation programme. When in
1989 he persuaded the Kenyan presi-
dent Daniel arap Moi to set fire to a
stockpile of confiscated ivory, that one
flamboyant gesture, filmed by the
world’s television cameras, gave Kenya
its first positive media coverage in years.
For all his altruism, Leakey could be
brash, arrogant, domineering and self-
centred. He spoke his mind and made
enemies, and through all his personal
setbacks he displayed a skin as leathery
as the elephant hides he tried to protect.
He earned a pittance during his years of
service to the Kenyan government and
lived in a tiny homestead on the rim of
the Rift Valley. Yet he was expert at
collecting wealthy patrons, particularly
doting American women, for his causes.
The grandson of a missionary from
Reading, Richard Erskine Frere Leakey
was born in Kenya in 1944 and regarded
himself as a Kenyan or “white African”.
He was the second son of Louis and
Mary Leakey, pioneers in the study of
the archaeology and palaeontology of
east Africa, who famously took the
black African side during the colonial
period. At school, where he did
not shine, he was taunted as a
“n***er lover” and was once locked in
a cage while the other pupils relieved
themselves on him.
The boy quickly realised that the way
to attract the attention of his work-
aholic parents was to present them with
a bone. This he first did when he was six
after stumbling across the complete jaw
of an extinct species of giant pig on the
shores of Lake Victoria.
However, eager to escape his father’s
shadow, he was not initially set on a
career in fossils. Instead, he shunned
further education and went into the
safari business. Before he was 20 he had
set up a fleet of safari vehicles in Kenya
went on to popular presentation of
human history, firstly by collaborating
with Roger Lewin on several books
including Origins (1978) and People of
the Lake (1979). Sales were fuelled by a
long-running argument with another
scientist, the American Donald Johan-
son, discoverer of the “Lucy” skeleton.
In these and later books, such as
Origins Reconsidered (1992), Leakey
argued against the “aggression hypo-
thesis” of human behaviour: the notion
popular in the 1960s that man’s violent
streak begat his improved intellect.
Instead, Leakey argued that the socially
co-operative nature of hunter-gather-
ing was the real impetus behind
improvements in intelligence.
In the late 1970s Leakey was chosen
to present a BBC television series,
broadcast in 1981 with a tie-in book, The
Making of Mankind. Following hard on
the heels of David Attenborough’s
hugely popular Life on Earth series, thisbrought the importance of Darwinism
home to the British public.
During filming Leakey fell ill and
underwent dialysis treatment while
awaiting a kidney transplant from his
estranged brother. Lying in a hospital
bed he wrote his autobiography, One
Life. He recovered, but the illness left its
mark. In place of the wiry athletic
adventurer stood a rounder, slower,
middle-aged man.
The one-time safari organiser was
also becoming increasingly concerned
with conservation. In 1989 he resigned
as director of Kenya’s National
Museums after criticising the govern-
ment’s ineffective efforts to stop
poachers. Moi responded to Leakey’s
outspokenness by appointing him in
the same year to be head of the Kenya
Wildlife Service, in charge of 52
national parks.
Leakey took the job on the condition
that he could take the war to thepoachers, and insisted on a shoot-to-
kill policy for his trackers in the parks.
At first he seemed to be winning,
particularly after he helped to push
through a worldwide ban on ivory
trading. However, in 1993 the Cessna
that Leakey was piloting mysteriously
crashed in the African bush. Although
no one was killed, Leakey had to have
both his legs amputated below the
knee. He was soon flying, driving and
even swimming again.
It was not, however, disability that
finally slowed his crusade, but Leakey’s
thoroughness in cleaning up the Wild-
life Service. Like a scythe he had cut
across the old system of tribal trade-
offs, and his intransigence had made
him enemies in big business. Having
failed to build a real case against him,
his detractors slurred him with the
cheapest accusation to hand: racism.
This was laughable to those who knew
him, but Leakey felt the lack of support
both from his board and from his fair-
weather friend Moi. After his resigna-
tion in 1994, elephant poaching in
Kenya began to climb again, and for-
eign investment to dry up.
Leakey’s stand against the godfathers
of Kenyan politics put him in an exposed
position (some doubted that the aircraft
crash had been just an accident).
Undeterred, in 1995 he co-founded the
opposition Safina party, with the aim of
cleaning up Kenya’s government.
Moi appointed Leakey head of the
civil service in 1999. During his two
years in the post Leakey sacked 25,000
civil servants and secured £250 million
of funds from the International Mone-
tary Fund and the World Bank.
However, his ambitious reforms were
blocked and he was himself sacked in- He moved to America to become
professor of Stony Brook University in
New York but returned to his beloved
Keyna in 2015 to live out his final years.
Leakey divided opinion in the coun-
try of his birth, but many regarded him
as the one unbribable man in the
system and, with his single-minded
ability to lead people and to raise funds,
a person that Kenya sorely needed.
Richard Leakey, palaeontologist,
conservationist and author, was born on
December 19, 1944. He died of
undisclosed causes on January 2, 2022,
aged 77and northern Tanganyika (Tanzania).
Yet Leakey became increasingly inter-
ested in fossils himself. He had
stumbled across his first fossil site in
1963 when, flying between Nairobi and
the Olduvai Gorge (where his parents
had concentrated their searches), he
saw below him some likely outcrops of
sedimentary rock.
At 23 he flew to Washington to ask the
National Geographic Society for a grant
to continue his work. He managed to
talk the committee into giving him a
substantial sum, which his aggrieved
father hoped would be coming to his
own expedition. The committee was
proved right in its decision. Leakey Jr’s
site at Koobi Fora on the shores of Lake
Rudolf (now Lake Turkana), in north-
western Kenya, proved to be a rich pick-
ing ground for hominid relics, some of
them said to be three million years old.
Like his father, Leakey demonstratednot only a sharp eye for the individual
fossil embedded in its rock formation,
but also an instinct for locating promis-
ing sites. Prospecting from his single-
engined Cessna 206, he would spot a
likely area and then send a team in to
set up camp. From 1968 he was leading
international multidisciplinary expedi-
tions to explore the area around Lake
Turkana, and to reconstruct the
environment of earliest mankind.
Richard Leakey was rewarded with
his appointment as director of Kenya’s
National Museums in 1968. He greatly
expanded their operations and used his
flair for public lecturing to American
audiences on his latest discoveries to
secure more funding.
An early brief marriage to Margaret
Cropper, assistant archaeologist to his
mother, ended in divorce. In 1970 he
married Meave Epps, also a palaeontol-
ogist. She survives him as do their two
daughters, Samira, a former banker who
works in development, and Louise, a
palaeontologist and anthropologist. He
is also survived by a daughter from his
first marriage, Anna.
Content now to leave bone-hunting
to his professorial colleagues, LeakeyThe plane he was flying
mysteriously crashed in
the African bush
Richard Leakey
Kenyan fossil hunter and conservationist whose campaigning led to a ban on ivory trading but made him a marked man