The Butterfly Lion

Michael Morpurgo claims in his preface to The Butterfly Lion that he was inspired by historical events and real places, as well as moments from his youth. The opening of the novel is autobiographical, written in first-person and centering on a narrator who is also named Michael Morpurgo, then 10 years old “and away at boarding school in deepest Wiltshire” (7). Indeed, Morpurgo claims that the opening of the novel is based on “the memories of a small boy who tried to run away from a school a long time ago” (6)—himself. Given this framing narrative, the novel’s opening, where Michael claims that nothing he is about to describe is imagined—“I didn’t dream any of it” (7)—takes on new layers of authenticity.

Morpurgo’s stepfather encouraged him to join the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Although he was miserable there, Morpurgo has described his time at Sandhurst as invaluable. Morpurgo also first encountered countrymen of different means while at Sandhurst: “He was mixing with people from very different worlds: the more deprived parts of Glasgow, for example.” (Sale, Jonathan. “My First Job: Michael Morpurgo, Recent Children’s Laureate, Recalls His Days as a Soldier.” Independent, 8 Dec. 2005). This primed Morpurgo to create the character of Bertie Andrews, an orphan with few prospects outside of the military, lured by promise only to find a crushing indifference toward life at the front. Morpurgo found solace at Sandhurst in the poetry of WWI soldiers. Research into their lives led Morpurgo to the story of the animal rescuer, “a soldier of the First World War who rescued some circus animals in France from certain death” (6).

Timbavati, the home of Bertie in the novel, is a real area of South Africa made famous in Chris McBride’s 1977 work The White Lions of Timbavati, an account of discovering a pride of white lions in that South African region. The existence of these animals in this region of Africa clearly informs Bertie’s discovery of The White Prince.

In the novel’s preface, Morpurgo explains that he was inspired by “a book about a pride of white lions discovered by Chris McBride” (6). In The White Lions of Timbavati (1977), McBride tells of three white lions discovered in a South African nature reserve. McBride claims the lions could not survive in the wild owing to their color, and that zoos and breeding programs were their only hope for survival—a highly controversial assertion. According to South African conservation Dale Howarth, “Many African peoples consider the white lion to be the most sacred of all the continent’s animals,” (Taylor, Darren. “Mythical Big Cats at Home in South African Environmental Hotspot. Voice of America.” VOA News, 25 Aug. 2011). Yet through the actions of McBride and others, white lions are often removed from Africa and sent to European zoos, or confined on private game lodges where they are bred to be shot as lucrative hunting trophies. Morpurgo dedicated The Butterfly Lion to animal-rights advocate Virginia McKenna, whom he calls a “champion of lions and all creatures born free” (6) and who co-founded The Born Free Foundation, which relocates rescued former circus and entertainment animals into a private game reserve in South Africa. In The Butterfly Lion, as Bertie’s father threatens to sell the lion to a circus, Bertie attempts to set his lion free as well: “You’ve got to be wild. Don’t come home. Don’t ever come home. They’ll put you behind bars” (47). However, the animal has already been domesticated, and “could never survive on his own in the wild” (55). Just as many white lions from South Africa are shipped to zoos and breeding programs in Europe, the white cub in The Butterfly Lion is sold to a French circus.

Finally, the white lion image carved into the hillside at Millie Andrews’s estate is based on a “white horse carved out of a chalky hillside near Westbury in Wiltshire” (6), which Morpurgo saw from the window of a passing train. The monument still stands and is called the Westbury White Horse, a monument to a military victory by King Alfred sometime in the 17th century. It is one of several carvings that expose chalk in the English countryside; when Michael is asked to keep the lion white at the end of the novel, the voice is telling him to continue weeding and pruning plants on the hillside to keep the chalk exposed.