The Elephant Not In The Room

Today's mage was taken at Cobtree Manor Park, just outside my home village of Aylesford, which until 1959 was the site of Maidstone Zoo. It is a mural on the outside wall of what used to be the Elephant House.
The last two elephants to live in the zoo were called Gert and Daisy. The elephant in my image is actually a representation of Gert - sadly you can now only see the forehead of Daisy as the bushes in front of the building have now grown to obscure the rest of her!
The journey to first opening Maidstone Zoo really started when Sir Garrard Tyrwhitt Drake (born in 1881) inherited an estate, including three farms, from his father in 1908 and greatly increased his collection of wild animals.
In 1914 he decided to open his animal collection to the public and took out a lease on the Tovil Court Estate just off Tovil Hill in Maidstone which included a magnificent mansion and 16 acres of gardens. Crowds flocked to what was then called Tovil Court Zoological and Pleasure Gardens and it even had it's own light railway. 
It had 250 specimens including lions, leopards, bears, wolves, hyaenas, jackals, monkeys, parrots, ostriches and various reptiles but had to close at the outbreak of the First World War due to loss of the staff to the war effort and the increasing costs. All but 50 of the animals were sold off.
It did not reopen again until 20 years later (1934), as Maidstone Zoo,  when it had then moved to Sir Tyrwhitt Drake's own estate at Cobtree. The exotic collection of animals this time included zebras, llamas, polar bears, bison and the aforementioned elephants Gert and Daisy (I even managed to find footage online - a massive callout to KentOnline - of Sir Garrard feeding some of the animals, including Gert and Daisy, in 1955).
Over the next 25 years it managed to survive a number if catastrophes including a keeper being mauled, a doodlebug hit during World War Two and the escape of several animals including a wolf, a camel, several monkeys and rather frighteningly two lions (one was recovered but the other had to be shot!).
It finally closed on 4th October 1959 not due to waning attendances but the poor health of Sir Garrard, who died 5 years later.