As a child growing up on the outskirts of war-ravaged London, my friend Peter Mundy, who has died aged 81, would scramble across the rubble, scavenging anything of interest and imagining himself as a great vulture soaring over the vast African plains. His childhood fantasy led him to Africa in the early 1970s, and that is where I met him, in 1976. Over the following decades I watched him become one of Africa’s leading conservationists and a world expert on African vultures.
Peter was born in Chard, Somerset, to Winifred (nee Blondel), a nurse, and her husband, Alfred, an import-export manager at the Ford plant in Dagenham. Pete grew up in Romford in Essex, where he acquired the broad cockney accent that never left him and amplified his irreverent sense of humour. After attending Royal Liberty grammar school, in 1960 he went to Worcester College, Oxford, to read zoology. He opted, instead, to read the complete works of Dostoevsky and learn the saxophone. Inevitably he was rusticated, and afterwards spent several years playing with various R&B bands, ending up with Screaming Lord Sutch.
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