IT is a picture of simpler, more innocent times.

A young Bournemouth woman arrives at a game reserve in Africa, accompanied by her mother.

The pair share an ex-army tent with no built-in groundsheet and are plagued with snakes and spiders.

The young woman sets off to study the local chimpanzees.

She wears plimsolls and carries a notebook, pen, a pair of second-hand binoculars and a sheet of polythene in case of rain.

If she is thirsty, she drinks from streams.

At first she is not allowed to roam the mountains and forests on her own.

For the first few months, the chimpanzees run away from her.

That is how Jane Goodall describes the start of her groundbreaking work in what is now the Gombe National Park in Tanzania in a moving letter to her grandchildren and godchildren, and her sister Judy’s grandchildren.

It was written during last month’s celebrations in Gombe to mark the 50th anniversary of her arrival in what was then a little-known game reserve in the British Protectorate of Tanganyika and is now the base for a thriving research centre attracting students from all over the world.

Jane’s observations, which included the discoveries that chimpanzees use tools and hunt in groups to kill smaller monkeys, led to worldwide recognition, lifetime involvement in wildlife and conservation, countless awards, honorary degrees and a DBE – Dame of the British Empire – from the Queen.

Although Jane, now 76, spends 300 days of the year on the road, her mother Vanne’s old home near Durley Chine provides a refuge and chance to catch up with Judy, her daughter Pip and grandchildren Alex, 10, and Nickolai, nine, who all live there.

Jane’s 15-year-old granddaughter Angel has also been visiting from Tanzania.

“I’m here for a few days a year.

“It’s been eaten into this year – I had to speak at the Organisation of African Unity in Kampala, and I have to go off to Berlin for the European premiere of Jane’s Journey, a documentary for cinema,” she explained.

She admitted that she had been thinking about the legacy of her work for the last 10 years.

“With the 50th anniversary, there have been lots of memories of my mother.

“She was there for four whole months, braving the spiders and snakes.”

After Jane left Uplands School in Parkstone at the age of 18, it was Vanne who suggested she should go to secretarial school.

“My ambition was to go to Africa and live with animals in the wild.

“I couldn’t afford university and I couldn’t get a scholarship without a foreign language. I tried but failed miserably.”

At 22, she was working as an assistant in a film studio when a friend invited her to visit the family farm in Kenya.

She saved up the money by working as a waitress.

In Kenya, she met the renowned archaeologist and paleontologist Louis Leakey, who asked her to study a group of wild chimpanzees – he hoped to shed light on our evolutionary past.

He later enrolled her at Cambridge University, and she became one of the few people accepted for a PhD without a first degree.

These days Jane tries to live in such a way as to minimise her impact on the environment.

She does not eat meat or fish, avoids dairy foods, and her travels are carbon neutralised by tree planting.

At the Bournemouth house, her family grow their own vegetables, keep hens and are switching over to solar power.