Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2015 | Page 13

INTERVIEW

Monkeying
around!

I

sland magistrate and former RAF officer David
Wood would have had a completely different
life, if he had chosen to go along with his
father’s plans for him.
For his dad was a larger-than-life circus
performer and producer who went by
the name of Gene Detroy – and enjoyed
huge success in the States with his
performing chimpanzee act.
We caught up with David at his home
in Ryde to find out more about his
colourful heritage.
Leafing through old photographs of his
parents makes it clear what a different
world they lived in.
His mum Cynthia was a teenage
usherette at the Hackney Empire when
she met Samuel Wood, the man from the
tightrope act – who would later become
her husband, and David’s father.
Samuel was part of a circus family
hailing from Stockport, Manchester, and
was already making his name, not to
mention good money – his £138 a week
in 1944 was pretty much the equivalent
of today’s footballer’s pay!
He saw little need for school, and never
went to a single class until he was 12 –
and that was only for two years, to learn
the basics of reading and writing.
So it’s no surprise that son David was
hardly encouraged to do well at school,
because his dad simply saw him following
into the ‘family business’ in nightclubs.
As a producer as well as a performer,
Samuel was always on the lookout for
the next big thing – and that was what
led him to explore the idea of working

with animals.
He tried training small Rhesus monkeys
to begin with, and when that proved
futile, he progressed to baboons and
then ultimately, chimpanzees, whose
intelligence made them more amenable
to being trained.

Marquis Chimps
His first chimp was Marquis, who was
successfully trained to roller skate, ride a
bicycle, and then more challengingly, a

high unicycle.
Samuel knew he had hit on a winning
act, and from that point he took on the
name of Gene Detroy and the Marquis
Chimps, working with a group of four
animals.
By the mid-1950s, David became
acutely aware of the difference between
his lifestyle and that of his school friends.
By this time, his dad had been invited
to work in Las Vegas with the act, and
David discovered that while his father
was pulling in £500 a week, his friends’
fathers were earning less than a tenth of
that in their regular jobs.
It was always clear that Samuel
expected him to follow in his footsteps,
and from the age of 15, David was
helping out as a props assistant in the
act - which by then included ice skating

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