George Adamson - Life

Life

George Alexander Graham Adamson was born 3 February 1906 in Etawah, India (then British India). Educated at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, England, he first visited Kenya in 1924. After a series of jobs, which included time as a gold prospector, goat trader, and professional safari hunter, he joined Kenya’s game department in 1938 and was Senior Game Warden of the Northern Frontier District. Six years later, he married Joy. It was in 1956 that he raised the lioness cub, Elsa, who became the subject of the 1966 feature film Born Free.

Adamson retired as a game warden in 1961 and devoted himself to his many lions. In 1970, he moved to the Kora National Reserve in northern Kenya to continue the rehabilitation of captive or orphaned big cats for eventual reintroduction into the wild. George and Joy separated in 1970, but continued to spend Christmas holidays together until she was murdered on 3 January 1980.

Read more about this topic:  George Adamson

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.
    Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)

    All my life long I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man’s work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me. I cannot forget, for injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others.
    Amelia E. Barr (1831–1919)

    Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
    Annie Dillard (b. 1945)