In 1956, as a part of Wellington Zoo’s 50th anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tions, three female chim­panzees arrived from Lon­don Zoo. This must have been the rea­son that they intro­duced tea par­ties with the chimps after­wards. Like in Lon­don zoo the tea par­ties were very pop­u­lar with the public.

The last tea party was in Feb­ru­ary 1970, four years after Koen­raad Kuiper became Zoo direc­tor. After World War II Kuiper emi­grated to New Zealand because he couldn’t find a suit­able job in the Nether­lands. More remark­ably, his father had been direc­tor of Rot­ter­dam Zoo (Dier­gaarde Bli­j­dorp) before and dur­ing the war. Kuiper senior had been a strong oppo­nent of using zoo ani­mals for enter­tain­ment of the pub­lic. This might have influ­enced the ideas of the son, and together with the new era of zoo devel­op­ment and hus­bandry this led to an end of the chimp tea par­ties. Today, Welling­ton Zoo’s chim­panzees live in a large out­door park and new indoor home, which was com­pleted in 2007.

(Video source: Archives New Zealand — Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga; Ref­er­ence: Pic­to­r­ial Parade 55. National Film Unit, 1956; open access)