On the first day it opened, there were no visitors at all. But soon they began to trickle in, encouraged by the menagerie that Mottershead was building. "I never knew my father to turn down an offer of animals," says Williams. "Once he disappeared down to Nottingham and came back with a pair of elephants that he'd got from a travelling circus.We had a hard job making the stables fit for them. It was a running joke in the family - what would Dad come back with next? And where on Earth would we put it?"