Pentland Hick
Edwin Pentland Hick (born 21 July 1919) is a British entrepreneur, author, publisher, and veteran of World War II. Hick is best known for founding the Flamingo Land Theme Park and Zoo in North Yorkshire
Hick served with the Eighth Army as a sergeant in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1939 to 1945.
After World War II, he left the army and returned to his hometown of Scarborough, North Yorkshire, where he was given shares in the failing Aberdeen Walk Picture House when his father, a solicitor, was able to arrange for a client to grant a mortgage for it.
He renamed the cinema "The Gaiety" and turned it around financially. He built the business into Pentland Hick Cinemas, a chain of seven cinemas including the Wyke Star.
The Aberdeen Picture House is now a furniture store, with the original name still visible in stone relief along the front.
During the 1950s, Hick was also writing - Samuel French published two of his one-act plays, The Singing Maid, and The Emperor Godiva.
He was friends with Harry Corbett and contributed scripting and promotion to Sooty. He brought Harry and Sooty to the stage in his show FAMILY FUN in Christmas matinees at the Adelphi Theatre in London, and holiday season matinees at the Floral Hall in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.
In 1959 Hick sold the cinema chain and bought a bankrupt country club on 9 acres (36,000 m2) of land in the Ryedale district and named it the Yorkshire Zoological Gardens. He originally rented animals until receipts allowed him to buy more. The park housed not only pink flamingos, but the UK's first captive bottlenose dolphins in 1963 and later a whale. One of the dolphins was named Sooty after Corbett's creation.
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