Frederick Courteney Selous, DSO (; 31 December 1851 – 4 January 1917) 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 (original spelling) (1802–1892), was Chairman of the London Stock Exchange, and his mother, Ann Holgate Sherborn (1827–1913), was a published poet. One of his uncles was a painter, Henry Courtney Selous. Frederick had three sisters (Florence (born 1850), Annie Berryman (born 1853), and Sybil Jane (born 1862)), and one brother (Edmund Selous (1857–1934)) who became a famous ornithologist. Frederick's love for the outdoors and wildlife was shared only by his brother, although as adults, in contrast to Frederick's fame as a big-game hunter, Edmund would fervently oppose the killing of animals for sport or scientific collection. All of the family members were artistically inclined, as well as being successful in business.The Life of Frederick Courtenay Selous, D.S.O., by J. G. Millais, pub. Longman, Greens & Co., London 1919, pp. 12 (Note: the book title misspells Selous's middle name.)
At 42, Selous settled in Worplesdon near Guildford in Surrey, and married 20-year-old Marie Catherine Gladys Maddy (born 1874), daughter of clergyman Canon Henry William Maddy. They had three sons: Frederick Hatherley Bruce Selous (1898–1918), Harold Sherborn Selous (1899-1954), and Bertrand Selous, who was born prematurely on 6 July 1915"Births" in The Times, Monday, 12 July 1915; pg. 1; Issue 40904; col A 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: The Life of Frederick Courtenay Selous, D.S.O., J. G. Millais, pub. Longman, Greens & Co., London 1919, pp. 13
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.The Life of Frederick Courtenay Selous, D.S.O., J. G. Millais, pub. Longman, Greens & Co., London 1919, pp. 45
He was educated at Bruce Castle School, Tottenham,Joseph Comyns Carr, Some eminent Victorians: personal recollections in the world of art and letters (Duckworth & Co., 1908), p. 4 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 travelled from the Cape of Good Hope to Matabeleland, which he reached early in 1872, and where (according to his own account) he was granted permission by Lobengula, King of the Ndebele, to shoot game anywhere in his dominions.The Life of Frederick Courtenay Selous, D.S.O., J. G. Millais, pub. Longman, Greens & Co., London 1919
From then until 1890, Selous hunted and explored over the little-known regions north of the Transvaal and south of the Congo Basin (with a few brief intervals spent in Britain), 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 Manicaland, 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 deliberate 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.The outline of the foundations of his house there can be viewed on Google Earth at map reference , approximately 5 m north of the track perched 80 feet above 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 (1896). 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 (64), 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 (Frontiersmen) 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 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.(Memorials of Rugbeians who fell in the Great War, Volume VI)
His private collection of trophies was given by his widow to the British 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 romanticised 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. Catalogue of the Selous Collection of Big Game in the British Museum (Natural History), J. G. Dollman, London, 1921, preface page
Selous journeyed in pursuit of big game to Europe (Bavaria, Germany in 1870, Transylvania, then Hungary but now Romania in 1899, Mull Island in 1894, Sardinia in 1902, Norway in 1907), Asia (Turkey, Persia, Caucasus in 1894–95, 1897, 1907), North America (Wyoming, Rocky Mountains in 1897 and 1898, Eastern Canada in 1900–1901, 1905, Alaska and Yukon in 1904, 1905) 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.Catalogue of the Selous Collection of Big Game in the British Museum (Natural History), J. G. Dollman, London, 1921, pp. 1-2
On 2 May 1902, Selous was elected Associate Member of the Boone and Crockett Club, a wildlife conservation organisation 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 organise 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.Callum McKenzie, The British Big-Game Hunting Tradition, Masculinity and Fraternalism with Reference to ‘The Shikar Club’ (University of Strathclyde)
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-barrelled musket firing a bullet with as much as of black powder, one of the largest hunting calibres 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.