Philip Wayre

Philip Wayre was born on May 26 1921 and educated at Sherborne School (The Green). He first visited Norfolk when he was 17 and, following service in the Royal Navy in the Second World War, during which he rose to the rank of Lieutenant, he returned to the county to try his hand at farming. After working for a farmer at Mileham, near Dereham, in 1949 he bought his own farm in the village — 400 acres of mixed arable. “I ran it for three or four years until I ran out of money,” he recalled in an interview. “I wasn’t a successful farmer, I wasn’t a good farmer… I didn’t actually go bankrupt but I got fairly close and it was pointed out to me in fairly frank terms by Barclays that I should give it up.” In 1954 he bought a smaller, 50-acre, farm at Great Witchingham and started rearing turkeys. Wayre had always been interested in wild animals, some of which he tamed and kept as pets. From the late 1950s, after the launch of Anglia Television, he got a five minute slot on the station’s midday show showing his animals, work which led on to making programmes about natural history, including Wind in the Reeds (Anglia, Survival, 1962); A Wind on the Heath (Anglia, Survival 1966); Pheasants to Formosa (BBC, Traveller’s Tales, 1967); and Twilight of the Tiger (BBC World About Us, 1970).