The Lord Who Walked A Zebra

By Warren Hamilton Category: Eccentric People 8th August 2026

Oddly, some people get bored and buy a boat. Others buy a zebra. Lord Berners, a posh gent from the first half of the twentieth century, did the latter. He lived at a place called Faringdon House and, instead of the usual spaniel or bored poodle, he kept a full-size zebra wandering the grounds like it was a slightly odd Labrador.

Now, this is not one of those internet exaggerations. Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Baron Berners, really did keep a zebra. He acquired it from a circus. He walked it about, let it forage in the garden, and treated the thing less like a wild animal and more like a decorative accessory the way some people treat garden gnomes. The neighbours must have loved their postman that week.

He was proper eccentric, right? But not the dangerous kind. Berners liked harmless daftness. He dyed his pigeons bright colours, painted bits of his house and gardens in theatrical colours, and wrote music and novels between all this domestic chaos. Imagine turning up for tea and being offered a scone by a bloke who runs around in a dressing gown and has a zebra nuzzling the jam. You'd think you'd had one too many afters, but no: this was just Tuesday.

I remember seeing an old photo once of the estate and thinking: this fella had the energy of someone who refused to do things normally just to see what would happen. It forced people to laugh, or at least to stop and think, which is probably better than a lot of polite lived lives where everyone keeps their boring bits tidy.

Here's the punchline: eccentricity like that is a kind of freedom. For Lord Berners it meant turning a stately home into a patchwork theatre where zebras backstage, pigeons were the chorus, and no one quite explained the cue. I quite like that. Makes the rest of us look like we just got stuck with sensible furniture and a mortgage.