Jeanne Wayre - obituary - Telegraph In 1976 the Wayres established their first reserve at Earsham, on the banks of the river Waveney on the Suffolk-Norfolk border. They went on to found four more reserves, attracting nearly 100,000 visitors a year. The first three otters bred in captivity were released in 1983 on to the river Blackwater in Suffolk, and by 1996 the trust had released a total of 130 animals on rivers in Suffolk, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Rutland, Hampshire, Dorset, Bedfordshire, Essex, Wiltshire and Cambridgeshire, and on the Upper Thames. They also supplied otters to conservation programmes in France and the Netherlands. Indeed, their breeding programme was so successful that it sparked an otter baby boom in the wild, putting the species on the road to recovery and obviating the need for a captive breeding programme. In 2006 the Otter Trust closed its sanctuaries. A recent report on the 3,000 otter sites surveyed in the 1970s found otters at more than half. There are now believed to be more than 12,000 otters in Britain - about a half to two-thirds of levels seen in the 1950s. In 1979 one of the Wayres" otters, Spade, played the starring role in David Cobham's film adaptation of Henry Williamson's novel, Tarka the Otter. Jeanne Wayre and the film's animal handler, Pete Talbot, hand-reared the baby animal so that it would "imprint" on Talbot, allowing him to handle the otter while filming in the open countryside. The daughter of a teacher, Jeanne Helen Perkins was born on October 24 1927 at Hessle, near Hull, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. From Malet Lambert School, Hull, she won a state scholarship to Leeds University, where she took a First in English at the age of 19. She worked as a lecturer in English and linguistics at a polytechnic for foreign students, then taught at a Leeds school and eventually became a lecturer in English at Leeds University. At the age of 38 she was appointed headmistress of Garforth Comprehensive School, one of the first comprehensives in Yorkshire. In 1949 she had married Peter Franklin, but the marriage was dissolved in 1971. In 1973 she married Philip Wayre. As well as her work with the Otter Trust, Jeanne Wayre raised money for the RNLI and served as chairman of the south regional Norfolk Naturalists" Trust. She is survived by her husband and by two daughters of her first marriage. A son of her first marriage died in 2007. Jeanne Wayre, born October 24 1927, died December 5 2013