"A HUNTER'S STORY - THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CJP IONIDES" BY CJP IONIDES, HARDCOVER, 1965 FIRST EDITION, WH ALLEN, 222 PAGES, NO NAMES, INSCRIPTIONS ETC. IN VERY GOOD CONDITION WITH ROWLAND WARD BOOKSTICKER ON FEP.
Already the subject of two biographies when he decided to set the story straight, C J P Snake Man Ionides was one of those late colonial enigmas that are always a somewhat vicarious thrill to read about. The prep-schooled offspring of a family of merchants and doctors from Hove, East Sussex, he had the sense of entitlement one finds enthralling in historical characters, but naturally infuriating in the modern upper middle class. An awkward young swine, he moved to a Kenya which had parallels to the American wild west. For example, in Dar es Salaam, a character called Dynamite Dan attempts to blow up a bar and Ionides recounts that you could walk into your bank with a pair of elephant tusks and lodge them into your account as you would a cheque.
He kills his first rogue elephant in India while serving in the army, becomes an ivory poacher in the Congo river basin, then has a Pauline conversion to conservation in 1933 and becomes a game warden. He assuages his more atavistic instincts by hunting man-eating lions and child-killing leopards. This is the meat of the book: One man-eater, on finding a man lying drunk outside a hut, merely nipped a chunk out of his behind, rather as you might take a passing bite from an apple and leave the rest. His native game scouts are effectively armed policeman but brutally flogged if they transgress, behaviour which was becoming problematic even at the time. Emphasising an eternal colonial dichotomy, he then extends his heartfelt respect for their tracking skills. He continues to hypocritically hunt rare antelope species as trophies away from his entrusted reserves and spends the war trying to recapture the retreating Italian armys rifles from errant Somalians, already lawless and ungovernable.
Ionides gained fame in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s by reports of him teaching himself snake-handling from scratch. And even serpents go rogue: we hear of single ten-foot Black Mambas chasing goats and killing 11 people. He ends up becoming a full-time snake-catcher, providing specimens for museums and antivenin for hospitals, and still has a formidable and respected reputation today as a self-taught herpetologist. This is the ultimate boys own tale: he never married, saying: My expeditions would be shopping ones The very thought fills me with horror. He forfeits wife, security and culture for his love of wildlife, but its a tough love to say the least.
