Chapter 9 - David and Carol Hughes

Summary

Biographical

David Hughes was born in Springs in the Transvaal (now Gauteng) in 1937. Like many other filmmakers, he benefited from a childhood close to nature in the Eastern Transvaal (now Mpumulanga). In an important interview in the Chicago Tribune in 1988, interviewer Terry Smith described it:

As a child he spent his holidays in the bush collecting eggs and snakes. But his innate respect for the wild things he sought caused problems.

‘There were times,’ he recalls, ‘when my hand would hover over a nest wanting one of those jewel-like eggs so badly, yet somehow knowing that to rob it was wrong.’

It was his father who unwittingly provided the solution to his moral dilemma when he bought David his first camera, a $20 ‘Ensign Ranger.’ From then on the budding naturalist would capture his discoveries only on film.

Hughes was sent to Michaelhouse, an exclusive boarding school in Natal where he matriculated. Carol Hughes suggests that the tradition in South African boarding schools to let students out for a ‘ramble’ on Sundays suited Hughes: ‘Michaelhouse, situated in the Natal midlands was a great place for David to go off exploring & turning over rocks on weekends, but a drag to have to be back for church Sunday evening’ (E-mail, 2 May 2021).

He then studied Zoology at the University of the Witwatersrand, gaining a PhD in 1964 for a dissertation titled ‘Ecological investigations of the fauna of mountain streams’. His research for this dissertation was in areas near Barberton, in Mpumulanga to which his parents had by then moved. After a postdoctoral year at Queen Mary College in London, Hughes moved for an 18-month stint to the Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Physiology in West Germany, where Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen were based and he became interested in animal behaviour. He was also friendly with a fellow Wits trained South African zoologist, Lyall Watson, well-known author, and travelled on several holidays with him.

Hughes then joined the research and teaching staff at the Rosenstiel School of Marine Science at the University of Miami.