![]() ![]() The podcast, Hooked on Freddie, revolves around one particular incident, during which a boatload of people watched Cooper swimming with Freddie in the harbour and reported an incident to the police. ‘To be accused of that was the most damaging thing’ … Alan Cooper in 1991. In a pre-internet age, Cooper and his colleagues used leaflets and telephone boxes, meetings and marches to try to galvanise opposition to these leisure attractions, no doubt to the consternation of their owners, such as Bloom. (He also, apparently, tried to convert the unemployed Amble miners to veganism and enlist their support in the animal rights movement, with little success). When on dry land, Cooper devoted a lot of his energy to protesting over dolphinariums, likening the shows put on at places such as Flamingo Land to a slave trade. Cooper – who had become a vegan in 1982 and was a committed member of the Northern Animal Liberation League – seemed to have a special bond with the bottlenose dolphin, and the two would spend hours together in the water. Perhaps the person who swam most regularly with Freddie was Cooper, a Manchester-born animal rights campaigner. “But it was also an influx of people with a very different culture.” “As Freddie swam into the harbour, it was like he brought in a rainbow,” says Milligan. Suddenly, alongside out-of-work miners and struggling fishermen, the harbour was swarmed with women in bikinis, new age hippies with dolphin tattoos and crystals, southerners who couldn’t understand anybody’s accent and, at one point, a man in a kaftan sitting on the harbour wall playing a didgeridoo for hours. I just had to trust that it wasn’t going to hurt me.”įreddie the dolphin was totally wild, and it is no exaggeration to say that his arrival in Amble temporarily transformed the town. It didn’t really work but you can hear my voice as this huge animal pulls me through the water really fast. “I’d put a condom over the mic to record under the water because that’s how we did it in those days. Or that I was going to explode in this dry suit,” Milligan says. And then suddenly there was this black fin coming towards me.” She started screaming, of course. I was only 22 and there was no health and safety – it was literally just a boat with a ladder in the middle of the North Sea. “I didn’t really want to go in the water, to be honest. Then came the bit that, for anyone who’s seen Jaws (which was almost everyone in 1990), sets alarm bells ringing. ‘As Freddie swam into the harbour, it was like he brought in a rainbow’ … a diver swims with Freddie near Amble in 1991.
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