From Swimming to Freedom Over the Iron Curtain to Swimming with Dolphins at the British Seaside: The Incredible Life of Bela Roucka
Who was the typical person of the Cold War? Was it a grave-faced president announcing an imminent nuclear conflict from a grainy black and white TV screen? Was it an irate Soviet hammering his shoe against a table at the United Nations? Or, was the typical person of the Cold War – any war, for that matter – in fact the refugee? As a result of decisions made by those bickering, bellicose politicians, millions of people were forced to flee their home countries during the Cold War, often in great danger for their lives. These were ordinary people forced by international affairs to become extraordinarily daring and brave. After reaching safety, many refugees were keen – understandably – to forget espionage and intrigue and retreat into comfortable, domestic normality in their adopted countries.
Some refugees, however, having sampled a taste of danger and liked it, strove to perpetuate adventure and fearlessness in their everyday lives, seeking out death-defying adrenaline fixes, often to be found in the most unlikely of places… Let’s take a trip to the seaside to meet Bela Roucka, the Czechoslovakian tiger tamer of Marineland, Morecambe.
Opening on 9th June 1964 to much pomp and ceremony, Mr. Roucka’s future employer, Marineland Morecambe, was lauded as Europe’s first Oceanarium, inspired by the performing whale and dolphin parks already popular in the US. According to the attraction’s 1970 guide book, upon entering the building visitors would notice ‘the relative darkness of the aquarium, designed to highlight the shining multi-coloured tanks’ filled with local sea creatures, all gratefully scooped out of the sea by local fishing boats. There was also an indoor alligator compound ‘complete with artificial tropical thunderstorm effects’, also known as an overhead shower attachment fitted into the ceiling.
It was outside, however, that the ‘main stars of Marineland’, the performing dolphins, could be found. These eight ‘fortunate’ animals had been flown to Morecambe from Miami on a special charter flight nicknamed the Noah’s Ark of the Air by the local press. The dolphins can hardly be said to have travelled in luxury on their 15 hour flight, being ‘loaded two to a bed and routinely sponged down as they lay on water-soaked mattresses’.
The dolphins’ new homes were two tanks facing onto the bracing winds of Morecambe Bay. Filled with chilly sea water, the tanks measured a measly 30ft square and were a shockingly shallow 7ft deep, barely big enough for one dolphin to pick his nose in, let alone for eight dolphins to do the ‘number of circus tricks’ they had been trained to do, including playing netball and pulling rafts loaded with children or dogs. Each tank was surrounded by a Berlin-style wall, topped with coils of barbed wires and studded with shards of broken glass, designed to cut the flipper or paw of any animal who tried to escape. Not that they would want to escape, of course; the 1970 guidebook reassured guests that ‘animals love the company of people and accept the limitations of captivity quite well.’
Marineland, with the broken glass- topped wall clearly visible.Although Marineland initially captured the public’s imagination and attracted a quarter of a million visitors in its first twelve months, a mere year had gone by before Marineland found itself financially ruined, washed up like a beached dolphin. Morecambe and Heysham Town Corporation promptly picked up the baton of ownership for themselves and set about wracking their brains for a novel new aquarium attraction to pull in the punters. After much deliberation, the Corporation decided upon… Chimpanzees. It’s not altogether obvious why they felt that chimps were an appropriate addition to Marineland; even the attraction’s guide book admitted they were ‘not quite the thing to expect in an aquarium.’ What was obvious, however, was that such highly intelligent animals would require significantly more sophisticated handling than the Atlantic Cod and Lumpsucker fish in the local species tank.
In their search for a skilled animal trainer, the Corporation looked to the world of the circus, an industry which, at the time, abounded with performing beasts. As luck would have it, the previous year had seen the closure of the Bertram Mills Travelling Circus, leaving dozens of performers out of work. Two of these unemployed artistes were daredevil Czechoslovakian lion tamer, Bela Roucka, and his English figure skater wife, Joy. After accepting job offers from Marineland, the pair hit the road and relocated to Morecambe in July 1965. Despite their sizable incomes – “I’m paid more than most MPs,” Bela informed a nosey journalist in 1962 – the couple decided to forgo buying a house and instead chose to continue living in the caravan which had been their home since their marriage. For Bela, home had to be moveable, able to be picked up and taken along if he and his loved ones ever had to flee in a hurry.
Clearly, he had no intention of letting what had happened to him in 1948 occur again…
The Czech Communist Coup of March 1948 – the event which pushed Bela to flee his home country – has been described as the first flashpoint of the Cold War, when ironclad battle lines were first drawn between East and West. Czechoslovakia had been through the militarial wringer before and during the Second World War, having been sized up for conquest by Adolf Hitler and used as a pawn in return for temporary peace by Neville Chamberlain in 1938. After the war, Czech politicians had aimed to be a ‘multiparty parliamentary government’, headed by the Communist politician Klement Gottwald but not beholden to Soviet rule. Ultimately, Czechoslovakia desired independence. As the Czech economy slumped in 1947, however, and with a general election looming over the horizon, the Soviet government clearly saw that the public would blame the Communist regime for their financial woes, and that they would lose the election miserably. Steps had to be taken if Moscow were to retain its foothold on the East/West border.
It was amidst this dangerously charged environment that Bela Roucka found himself in 1948. He was 21 years old when the Czech Communists began infiltrating the police, threatening arrest or worse upon any who spoke against the increasing tide of propaganda or the Communist party as a whole. Enemies of the regime, including the Catholic clergy, Jews, academics, pro-democracy citizens and farmers began to be arrested, or simply disappeared. One of these unfortunates was Bela Roucka’s father.
“My father was taken away one day and I never saw him again,” Bela told a reporter. “The rest of my family was broken up during the coup.” We don’t know why the Roucka family was at odds with Communist ideologies, be it for religious, ethical or political reasons, but it’s clear that Bela felt himself in enough danger to flee the country, irrespective of the perils that involved. The Communist controlled State Security police estimated that about 8,614 people felt the same way in 1948.
For prospective refugees, the ultimate question was how they were going to escape. Many fled on foot, sometimes paying a border guard who was willing to look the other way. Some hid in the boots of cars. Several used planes, and brazenly zoomed out of the country. Whichever method was chosen, most refugees chose to head to Southwest Bavaria, part of the American occupied zone of Germany. Once safely there, they would have reported to the Bavarian Border Police and been officially registered as a refugee. For Bela Roucka, who spoke German, escaping to Germany was ideal. An accomplished swimmer – a skill which no doubt came in handy in his future career as a dolphin trainer – Bela chose to swim to freedom.
“I swam the river Elbe with my clothes on my head,” he later said, adding that the border police “wouldn’t believe [him], so [he] had to show them how it was done.” Aside from how he undertook this incredible swim, what is more amazing is that Bela managed to cross the Elbe at all. The 1,094km long river, which is two miles wide and 55ft deep at it’s widest point, is a treacherous deathtrap, complete with rapids and whirlpools in many places. Furthermore, the river acted as the border between East and West Germany, and accordingly was flanked on both sides by heavy security and doubtless many caches of particularly nasty guns. A fleet of patrol boats also monitored the waters.
Once he’d emerged from the water – sopping wet, exhausted and relieved – to find himself at last in West Germany, Bela may have stopped to ponder where he’d found the courage and inspiration to make such a dangerous journey. Perhaps he’d drawn strength from the knowledge that he wasn’t the first daredevil in his family to have made a courageous flight for freedom. Interviews with Bela found him frequently referring to his two air ace cousins, who had covertly escaped Czechoslovakia to Poland in 1938 following the Nazi annexation of their country. They had then joined the RAF and avenged their people by bravely blitzing the enemy from the skies. Both cousins were killed in action, (Karel Jan Vykoukal is honoured on panel 66 of the Runnymede RAF memorial monument), but in their short lives these two courageous men left an indelible impression on the young Bela.If he hadn’t been an animal trainer, he later said, he’d have been a fighter pilot or an explorer. It can be argued, then, that his escape from Czechoslovakia, while unimaginably dangerous and arduous, was still for Bela an exciting fulfillment of a yearning for adventure, a step closer to being as brave as his idolised cousins.
Reaching safety wasn’t reason enough for Bela to settle down to a life of peace and normality, however. He was a man who liked to ‘live his life on the edge of a precipice’, his wife Joy later said of him, adding that danger was part of his being. As fate would have it, after making his way to France to begin a new life, Bela encountered a fellow Czech refugee, who was working with a circus as a lion tamer. Recognising a kindred spirit, this man took Bela under his wing and taught him the tricks of the tiger training trade. These amazing – and arguably downright stupid – tricks included the Kiss of Death, in which a tiger would take a piece of meat from its trainers mouth. Having dodged the jaws of death while escaping Communism, the Kiss of Death must have seemed like a walk in the park for Bela. Even an accident involving a puma which nearly saw him lose an ear was met with laid-back nonchalance: “It was a silly mistake. I was at fault, not the puma.”
For Bela, it was important to have compassion for the animals under his care and to understand their wild instincts. A ‘calm, personable young man’ gifted with ‘great virtues of patience’, he knew – and frequently reminded his audiences – that although animals could be trained to act a certain way, they could never fully be tamed and subdued. Did the wild and adventurous Bela identify with his captive animals, having himself been subject to attempted taming by Communist oppression? It’s likely. The mid-century circus industry may have imprisoned wild animals, but its human staff enjoyed what can only be described as a utopian ideal of freedom, understanding and international cooperation. As a 1963 article on the Bertram Mills Circus in the Lewisham Borough News observed:
‘The circus staff embraces many nationalities and the circus world as a whole is truly international. Performers hail from all European countries, as well as from Asia, Africa and Australia. They perform all over the world irrespective of their nationalities, language being no barrier. These facts produce in circus folk a greater understanding and compassion for others. Surely this must serve to prove that the search for world peace is not insoluble. If the world lived like circus folk, there would be no wars.’
Bela continued to work at Morecambe’s Marineland until at least 1971; the last mention of him employed there can be found in a newspaper article of that year. Throughout his tenure he continued to demonstrate kindness and empathy towards the animals under his care, on one occasion dashing into Marineland during a fire to retrieve unconscious creatures and on another nursing a sick chimpanzee in a miniature bed set up beside his own. After 1971, it appears that the Rouckas departed Marineland, together with their beloved chimpanzees, who were re-homed to other (and bigger) zoos. Times were changing, and forcing animals to perform for entertainment was no longer acceptable. Could it be that Bela, an escapee of oppression himself, could no longer condone the subjugation of others for profit and power?
Marineland’s death knell chimed in 1989. The attraction admitted it was on the brink of closure after the tragic death of a pregnant dolphin named Lady. Only one dolphin remained: Lady’s mate Rocky, who was now glassy-eyed and depressed in solitary confinement. The month was November 1989; that same month, the Berlin Wall fell, freeing millions of people oppressed by Communism. Two years later, Marineland’s walls met the same fate, being torn down after years of protest and petitions by the public.
But what of Rocky, the lonely dolphin? After a huge campaign, he was relocated to the Turks and Caicos Islands and within days was seen swimming with a pod of wild dolphins. Rocky swam to freedom, just like Bela Roucka.
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