Sheila lived at Belfast Zoo until she was moved to her unusual home in 1941 as the city underwent the so-called Belfast Blitz.

She was one of the lucky ones at the zoo, in the north of the city. Many animals were killed because of public safety fears of an escape during the bombing.

The Ministry of Public Security ordered 23 zoo animals to be killed in case they got free and attacked people, including a tiger, a black bear, a lynx, a hyena, two polar bears and six wolves.

But instead of meeting the same fate, Sheila was walked down the road by keepers to a red-brick house on the Whitewell Road where a woman gave her sanctuary in her back yard for several months until the bombing was over.

Now, as part of the zoo’s 75th anniversary, managers are trying to identify the woman who gave the elephant its wartime sanctuary, known only as “the elephant angel”.

All it has to go on are a couple of grainy black and white photographs of two women sitting on a garden seat watching Sheila drinking out of a tin bucket beside the back door of the house.

Zoo manager Mark Challis said: “The care provided by our mystery lady is unique to zoo history and we would like to make contact with her family and properly document this gap in our past.”

Happily Sheila went on to survive the war, living another 25 years until her death at the zoo in 1966.

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