Jim Corbett
Edward James Corbett was an Anglo-Indian hunter and author. He gained fame through hunting and killing several man-eating tigers and leopards in Northern India, as detailed in his bestselling 1944 memoir Man-Eaters of Kumaon. In his later years, he became an outspoken advocate of the nascent conservation movement.
Born in Naini Tal, Corbett explored and hunted in the jungles of India in childhood. He shot his first man-eater in 1907 and continued to hunt and kill such animals over the next four decades. Animals such as the Champawat Tiger, the Leopard of Rudraprayag, and the Panar Leopard had taken hundreds of victims in the divisions of Kumaon and Garhwal, before their deaths at Corbett's hands. Man-Eaters of Kumaon, which detailed several such hunts, became an international bestseller; it was followed by several other books and was adapted into a 1948 Hollywood film. Corbett increasingly disdained what he saw as the rapacious extermination of India's forests and wildlife, and fervently promoted wildlife photography as an alternative to trophy hunting. He played a major role in the creation of India's first wildlife reserve in 1934; it was renamed Jim Corbett National Park after his death. The Indochinese tiger subspecies received the scientific name Panthera tigris corbetti in his honour.
For many years, Corbett earned a living working for the railway companies, and for twenty-two years supervised the transport of goods across the Ganges at Mokameh Ghat. During the First World War, he recruited a labour corps and commanded them on the Western Front; he also supervised the logistics of the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919. Returning to his home town during the interwar period, he became a prominent local landowner and businessman who also organised hunts for the elite of British India, including the then-Governor-General Lord Linlithgow, who became a close friend. Corbett served as an instructor in jungle survival for troops of the Burma Campaign during the Second World War. Dismayed by the febrile atmosphere surrounding the Indian independence movement, he emigrated to Kenya in 1947, and died in Nyeri eight years later.
Ancestry and early life
The Corbetts descended from several families who had emigrated from the British Isles to the Indian subcontinent over the course of the 19th century. His paternal grandparents Joseph and Harriet Corbett, having eloped together from a monastery and a nunnery in Belfast, had arrived in India on 7 February 1815. They had nine children; the sixth, Christopher William, was born at Meerut in 1822, and followed his father into the Bengal Army, where he served as a medical officer. He married Mary Anne Morrow in December 1845, and they had three children before her early death. Surviving the Indian Mutiny of 1857, he retired from military service and married Mary Jane Doyle, a 22-year-old widow of Anglo-Irish descent, in 1859. She had had four children with Charles James Doyle of Agra, who had been killed in the rebellion.In 1862, Christopher William was appointed the postmaster of Naini Tal, a thriving hill station in northern India which had been untouched by the Mutiny. There, he and Mary Jane had nine children, and additionally raised four children of a deceased sister. As Christopher William's salary was not large enough to support so many people, they supplemented their income through shrewd property investments, which Mary Jane was especially skilled at—she in effect became the first estate agent in Naini Tal, a valuable position in the rapidly-expanding town. Through his social connections and friendship with Henry Ramsay, the commissioner of the Kumaon division, Christopher William was additionally able to acquire a plot of land in the southern plains of Kumaon near Kaladhungi, on which he built a winter residence he named Arundel.
Edward James Corbett, the eighth and penultimate child of Christopher William and Mary Jane, was born on 25 July 1875 in Naini Tal. His early childhood years were privileged, and he was cared for by his mother, his elder sisters, and local servants; from the latter, he picked up the local languages, the basics of Hindu practices and philosophy, and some of their superstitions. However, the family soon suffered two misfortunes: first, a large landslide on 18 September 1880 which killed 151 people additionally ruined several of the Corbett's property investments; and second, Christopher William, who had retired from postmastership in 1878, died on 21 April 1881 after suffering heart problems. Mary Jane built a home on the opposite side of Naini Tal lake to the landslide; named Gurney House, it would be Jim Corbett's home for most of his life.
Corbett spent much of his childhood exploring the jungles around Gurney House; from these explorations, and from willing adults such as his eldest brother Tom and Kunwar Singh, the headman of the nearby village Chandni Chauk, he gained intimate knowledge of the habits of the local wildlife. He also began hunting, first with projectile weapons such as a catapult and a pellet bow, until being gifted an old muzzle-loading shotgun at the age of eight. With these weapons, he grew more skilled at hunting and tracking animals. After surviving a near-fatal bout of pneumonia at the age of six, he began his formal education in Naini Tal at Oak Openings School; there, training with the local cadet company, the ten-year-old Corbett's shooting impressed a group of dignitaries including the future Field Marshal Earl Roberts enough that he was granted a loan of a military-specification Martini-Henry rifle. Not long afterwards, he shot his first big cat—a leopard—with this rifle.
Although Corbett soon became proficient as a young hunter, as a student, first at Oak Openings and then at the Diocesian Boys' School, he was fairly average. He wanted to become an engineer, but that required further education and money which the family did not have, as Tom had now married and was supporting his own family. Jim also knew that it would be his responsibility to look after his mother and two sisters in later years. In turn they, especially his one-year older sister Maggie, were quite devoted to him. Leaving home at the age of seventeen, he took his first job as a temporary fuel inspector in Bihar, with a salary of one hundred rupees per month.
Work career and First World War
Corbett spent the two years of his contract near Bakhtiarpur, in charge of a sizeable labour force which collected timber to be used as locomotive fuel. The gruelling work was slightly eased by the rapport he, unlike most of European descent, could build with his men. In cutting down up to of forest per day, he gained an appreciation for the then-unknown sciences of ecology and conservation. At the end of his contract, Corbett's honesty in not keeping excess profits for himself impressed a senior railway agent and earned him a job at the Samastipur office, where he worked for a year on various jobs. He was then appointed, in 1895, to the contract of transporting goods across the Ganges at Mokameh Ghat: by structuring his workforce efficiently and forming strong friendships with his subordinates, Corbett managed to clear the preexisting backlog, to the surprise of his superiors. He would remain in control of shipping goods at Mokhameh Ghat for the following twenty-two years.His life at Mokameh Ghat was regular and peaceful. Living in a bungalow with three servants, only rarely seeing other Europeans, he began to become an active member of the local community, building a small school; the initial number of twenty students rapidly expanded to over three hundred, and the local government was compelled to take over the institution's running. Within a few years, Corbett was promoted to oversee the passenger steamers as well as the cargo shipping. This promotion gave him a large increase in salary, much of which he remitted to his family in Naini Tal, as well as access to the high-ranking travellers who often crossed the Ganges, such as Indian royalty and Chandra Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana, the Prime Minister of Nepal. He also trained new arrivals from Britain whom the railways had recruited there.
At Mokameh Ghat, Corbett had come to view himself as more Indian than any other identity, but he retained his patriotism for Britain. He attempted to enlist when the Second Boer War broke out, but the railway authorities refused to release him from his contract, believing he was too valuable in his position at Mokameh Ghat. When the First World War broke out 1914, Corbett travelled to Calcutta to enlist but was rejected as too old at 38. However, as the war of attrition dragged on, the authorities began to recruit more heavily from India and he was commissioned as a captain in 1917, to the displeasure of his superiors. Ordered to raise a labour corps, he easily recruited five thousand men in Kumaon, where he was greatly esteemed because of his hunting of man-eaters; he took a tenth of these as a personal unit, named the 70th Kumaon Company. They set sail from Bombay in late summer 1917.
Landing in Southampton, Corbett and his men were soon transferred to the Western Front, where they were posted to numerous positions including La Chapellette near Péronne. In the difficult conditions, Corbett sought to protect his men and keep their morale high. In addition to being in an unfamiliar land and climate, the Indian troops, often scorned by their British counterparts, faced difficulties like not being able to eat tinned beef stew or pork, both staples of British trench warfare. Corbett conducted himself well. After a visit to La Chapellette in January 1918, Lord Ampthill, who was in charge of the foreign labour corps, noted that Corbett struck him as "competent and resourceful", having introduced a novel way of heating the troop accommodation and having built, to Ampthill's astonishment, a "substantial brick building" containing a bathroom and drying room, both heated by an incinerator. At the conclusion of the war in 1918, only one of the five hundred men in the company had died. Corbett, now promoted to the rank of Major, explored London for a day before departing from Tilbury, visiting the pyramids of Giza on his way back home to India.
While negotiating with the railways on how he would rejoin their workforce, Corbett was unexpectedly called up again by the army for the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919. In late April or early May, he was sent to Peshawar, where he likely was in charge of the supply lines before the Battle of Thal, in which he may have seen action. He was subsequently involved in subduing tribes in Zhob district and Waziristan.