Frederick Selous
Frederick Courteney Selous, DSO was a British explorer, army officer, professional hunter, and conservationist, famous for his exploits in Southeast Africa. His real-life adventures inspired Sir Henry Rider Haggard to create the fictional character Allan Quatermain. Selous was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Cecil Rhodes and Frederick Russell Burnham. He was pre-eminent within a group of big game hunters that included Abel Chapman and Arthur Henry Neumann. He was the older brother of the ornithologist and writer Edmund Selous.
Early life and exploration
Frederick Courteney Selous was born on 31 December 1851 at Regent's Park, London, as one of the five children of an upper middle class family, the third-generation descendant of a Huguenot immigrant. His father, Frederick Lokes Slous , was Chairman of the London Stock Exchange, and his mother, Ann Holgate Sherborn, was a published poet. One of his uncles was a painter, Henry Courtney Selous. Frederick had three sisters, Annie Berryman, and Sybil Jane ), and one brother who became a famous ornithologist. Frederick's love for the outdoors and wildlife was shared only by his brother; however, all of the family members were artistically inclined, as well as being successful in business.At 42, Selous settled in Worplesdon near Guildford in Surrey, and married 20-year-old Marie Catherine Gladys Maddy, daughter of clergyman Canon Henry William Maddy. They had three sons: Frederick Hatherley Bruce Selous, Harold Sherborn Selous, and Bertrand Selous, who was born prematurely on 6 July 1915 and died five days later.
Youth
From a young age, Selous was drawn by stories of explorers and their adventures. Furthermore, while in school, he started establishing a personal collection of various bird eggs and studying natural history. One account is related by his schoolmaster at Northamptonshire when Selous was 10 years old:On 15 January 1867, 15-year-old Selous was one of the survivors of the Regent's Park skating disaster, when the ice covering the local lake broke with around 200 skaters on it, leaving 40 dead by drowning and freezing. He escaped by crawling on broken ice slabs to the shore.
He was educated at Bruce Castle School, Tottenham, then at Rugby. His parents hoped that he would become a doctor, and in 1868, he went to Switzerland to study medicine. However, his love for natural history led him to study the ways of wild animals in their native habitat. His imagination was strongly fuelled by the literature of African exploration and hunting, Dr. David Livingstone, and William Charles Baldwin in particular. He moved to Prussia, where he learned German and began collecting butterflies.
African exploration
Going to South Africa when he was 19, he traveled from the Cape of Good Hope to Matabeleland, which he reached early in 1872, and where he was granted permission by Lobengula, King of the Ndebele, to shoot game anywhere in his dominions.From then until 1890, Selous hunted and explored over the little-known regions north of the Transvaal and south of the Congo Basin, shooting African elephants and collecting specimens of all kinds for museums and private collections. His travels added greatly to the knowledge of the country now known as Zimbabwe. He made valuable ethnological investigations, and throughout his wanderings—often among people who had never previously seen a white man—he maintained cordial relations with the chiefs and tribes, winning their confidence and esteem, notably so in the case of Lobengula.
In 1890, Selous entered the service of the British South Africa Company, at the request of magnate Cecil Rhodes, acting as a guide to the pioneer expedition to Mashonaland. Over of road were constructed through a country of forest, mountain, and swamp. He then went east to Manica, concluding arrangements that brought the country there under British control. Coming to England in December 1892, he was awarded the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in recognition of his extensive explorations and surveys, of which he gave a summary in a journal article entitled "Twenty Years in Zambesia".
Military career
Rhodesia and First World War
Selous returned to Africa to take part in the First Matabele War of 1893 and was wounded during the advance on Bulawayo. It was during this advance that he first met fellow scout Frederick Russell Burnham, who had only just arrived in Africa and who continued on with the small scouting party to Bulawayo and observed the self-destruction of the Ndebele settlement as ordered by Lobengula.Selous returned to England, and married Marie Maddy in 1894. In 1896 he returned to Africa with his wife and settled on a landed property in Essexvale, Matabeleland, overlooking the Ncema River. When the Second Matabele War broke out, Selous took a prominent part in the fighting which followed, serving as a leader in the Bulawayo Field Force, and published an account of the campaign entitled Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia. It was during this time that he met and fought alongside Robert Baden-Powell, who was then a Major and newly appointed to the British Army headquarters staff in Matabeleland.
During the First World War, after initially being rejected on account of his age, Selous rejoined the British Army as a subaltern and saw active service in the fighting against German colonial forces in the East Africa Campaign. On 23 August 1915, he was promoted to captain in the uniquely-composed 25th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, and on 26 September 1916 was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, the citation reading:
Death and legacy
On 4 January 1917, Selous was fighting in the bush war on the banks of the Rufiji River against German colonial Schutztruppen, which outnumbered his troops five to one. That morning, he was creeping forward in combat during a minor engagement in which he raised his head and binoculars to locate the enemy. He was shot in the head by a German sniper and was killed instantly.Upon getting the news, former US President Theodore Roosevelt, his close friend, wrote:
He was buried under a tamarind tree near the place of his death, at Chokawali on the Rufiji River, in today's Selous Game Reserve, Tanzania, in a modest, flat stone grave with a simple bronze plaque reading: "CAPTAIN F.C. SELOUS D.S.O., 25TH ROYAL FUSILIERS, KILLED IN ACTION 4.1.17." Exactly a year later, on 4 January 1918, his son, Captain Frederick Hatherley Bruce MC, who was a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, was killed in a flight over Menin Road, Belgium.
His private collection of trophies was given by his widow to the Natural History Museum, where in June 1920 a national memorial to him was unveiled, a bronze half-figure by William Colton. A Selous Scholarship was also founded at his old school, Rugby.
Hunter, naturalist and conservationist
Hunting icon
Selous is remembered for his powerful ties, such as those with Theodore Roosevelt and Cecil Rhodes, as well as for his military achievements and the books that he left behind. However, he is best remembered as one of the world's most revered hunters, as he pursued big-game hunting in his southern African homelands and in wildernesses worldwide.Accounts of his youth are filled with stories of trespassing, poaching, and brawling, almost all within romanticized and humorous portrayals, but one in particular from 1870 stands out as more serious. In Wiesbaden, Prussia, he knocked unconscious a Prussian game warden who tackled him while he was stealing buzzard eggs for his collection, and he had to leave the country at once to avoid imprisonment. Then, he moved to Austria, and in Salzburg, he went big game hunting for the first time in the nearby Alps, where he shot two chamois.
On 4 September 1871, at the age of 19, he left England with £400 in his pocket and was determined to earn his living as a professional elephant hunter. By the age of 25, he was known across South Africa as one of the most successful ivory hunters of the day.
Selous journeyed in pursuit of big game to Europe, Asia, North America and the "dark continent" in a territory that extends from today's South Africa and Namibia all the way up into central Sudan where he collected specimens of virtually every medium and large African mammal species.
On 2 May 1902, Selous was elected Associate Member of the Boone and Crockett Club, a wildlife conservation organization founded by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell in 1887.
In 1909–1910, Selous accompanied American ex-president Roosevelt in his famous African safari. Contrary to popular belief, Selous did not lead Roosevelt's 1909 expedition to British East Africa, the Congo, and Egypt. While Selous was a member of this expedition from time to time and helped organize the safari's logistics, the excursion was in fact led by R. J. Cunninghame. Roosevelt wrote of Selous:
In 1909, Selous co-founded the Shikar Club, a big-game hunters' association, with two other British Army Captains, Charles Edward Radclyffe and P. B. Vanderbyl, and regularly met at the Savoy Hotel in London. The association's president was The 5th Earl of Lonsdale; another founding member included the artist, explorer, and Selous biographer John Guille Millais.
In 1910, he represented Britain at the Congress of Field Sports in Vienna.
He was a rifleman icon and a valued expert in firearms. Early in his hunting career, in the mid-1870s, Selous favored a four bore black powder muzzleloader for killing an elephant, a short-barreled musket firing a bullet with as much as of black powder, one of the largest hunting calibers fabricated. Between 1874 and 1876 he killed seventy-eight elephants with that gun, but eventually, there was a double loading incident together with other recoil problems from it, and he finally gave it up as too "upsetting my nerve". He used a ten-bore muzzleloader to hunt lions.
After black powder muzzleloader firearms became obsolete, he adopted a breech-loading 10 bore as shown in "A Hunters Wanderings in Africa" and by 1880 he was using his favorite, black powder breech-loading rifle a.461 No 1 Gibbs / Metford / Farquharson single shot later he was approached by both Birmingham and London gunmakers in hopes of his endorsement, with Holland and Holland providing two Holland and Woodward patent single-shot rifles in the two calibers: a 303 and a 375 2 1/2" and later a.425 Westley Richards bolt-action rifle. There are quotes as to how Selous was not a crack shot, but a rather ordinary marksman, yet most agree that was just another personal statement of modesty from Selous himself. Regardless, he remains an iconic rifleman figure and, following in the tradition of others, the German gunmaker Blaser and the Italian gunmaker Perugini Visini chose to name their top line safari rifles the Selous after him.