The Adventurer and the Curator: Frederick Selous and John Guy Dollman
Matthew Roe (University of Oxford)
For the students of Rugby School, the British Empire would have appeared more tangible than ever before on the 29th May 1897. They listened, enraptured, to the stories of Frederick Selous, an Old Rugbeian whose career as a hunter and adventurer in the African continent had propelled him to celebrity status in Britain. Along the front of the stage, the preserved heads and skins of six lions were displayed, the trophies of this bloody career.[1] These same heads and skins would later be displayed in the Natural History Museum, London, providing a similar experience of close contact with empire for the thousands of school children and members of the public who visited the exhibitions.[2] For, though the British Empire was a fact of life for the people of Britain, very few would ever visit or have close contact with the colonies. Rather, they experienced empire as it was represented to them in newspaper articles, propaganda pieces, novels, travel literature, and museums. This often centred around the natural world: stories of adventurers in unfamiliar environments and habitats, quelling dangerous beasts which were then triumphantly displayed in museums. Their understanding of empire was, as a result, romanticised and exoticised, shorn of any understanding of the peoples of empire whose lands and livelihoods had been irreversibly changed by the arrival of colonists. This article focuses on two primary ways in which British people experienced empire: through literature, especially stories of adventure, and museums, exhibitions of the artefacts and natural history of empire. These are explored through two case studies: the connected careers of Frederick Selous, hunter and adventurer, and John Guy Dollman, zoologist and curator.
Frederick Selous
Image Credit: Vanity Fair (from Rugby School archives)
Frederick Selous, born 1851, was educated at Rugby School between 1864 and 1868.[3] During this time, he was renowned as a rulebreaker, frequently leaving school to go birdwatching or egg-stealing.[4] He was heavily involved with the school’s Natural History Society, an eclectic society which provided an opportunity for boys to engage in meteorology, archaeology, geology, zoology, entomology and more. He retained a close connection with Rugby subsequently, remaining a corresponding member of the Natural History Society for the rest of his life, returning to lecture for the school on three occasions, and staying involved with the Old Rugbeians society, by whom he was presented with an award in 1895.[5] He became renowned after leaving the school for his career in Africa. The interest in natural history which he had cultivated while at Rugby was applied to the big game of southern Africa, and he became a noted hunter and specimen collector in the 1870s and 1880s. Later he became a guide for elite hunting parties, notably leading Theodore Roosevelt on a tour of East Africa in 1909. But he was most widely known for his books, which proved popular with the British public. In 1881 he wrote A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa, followed by Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa in 1893 and Sunshine and storm in Rhodesia in 1896. He gained a reputation as a ‘Mighty Nimrod’, a title which was reflected in his visit to Rugby in 1897 when the headmaster encouraged the school to leave Selous in no doubt of his alma mater’s ‘very healthy and hearty enthusiasm for the prowess of the great Nimrods of the modern world’.[6] His books had a significant role in shaping the image of the gentlemanly hunter of the British Empire, who hunted out for sporting prowess, rather than any material gain, and showed courage in the face of danger. Selous’ portrayal of his life and exploits went on to directly influence the character of Alan Quartermain in the popular novel King Solomon’s Mines, bringing this gentleman adventurer image to a much wider audience.[7] Through both his own writings, and the writings of those he influenced, his life became a means for people in Britain to experience an empire that they would never themselves visit.
Frederick Selous and animal skins
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
However, the picture of empire and his own life that Selous painted obscured the true reality. He failed to acknowledge the essential help that he had received from Africans in hunting and, especially, mapping of the areas he travelled through, for which he received the Royal Geographical Society Gold Medal in 1892. The darker side of his ‘mighty Nimrod’ image is also seen in his involvement with the British South Africa Company, with whom he fought against the Matabele tribe in 1893. He participated in atrocities against Africans, notably in 1896 when he shot unarmed and fleeing Ndebele soldiers.[8] His crucial role in the formation of the settler-state Rhodesia was noted by Cecil Rhodes, who lauded Selous as ‘the man above all others to whom we owe Rhodesia to the British Crown.’[9] His name was later appropriated for the ‘Selous Scouts’, a notorious Rhodesian military unit who specialised in guerilla and bush warfare, and who were implicated in the unlawful killing of African civilians. While Selous’ writing made empire real for many people who would never visit Britain’s colonies, he presented a romanticised view of empire which focused on adventure, derring-do, and the exploits of gentleman administrators and hunters encountering exotic animals. One would be forgiven for having the impression that it was little different from Selous’ schoolboy adventures, only with higher stakes – an impression he encouraged at Rugby, introducing his tales by saying ‘he thought that the sort of life he led at Rugby, always wandering about birds’ nesting and investigating points of natural history, gave him a sort of fitness for the life that he had since lived in the interior of Africa’.[10] His writings ignored the ‘dirtier’ aspects of imperial exploits, and obscured the role of the native peoples he came into contact with, who when they did appear were portrayed as primitive and savages. This was the image of empire which served as the only experience of empire for many of his readers.
Frederick Selous at war
Image credit: Fusilier Museum London
While Selous presented empire for the British public from the periphery, museums and exhibitions brought the empire to the metropole. John Guy Dollman, born in 1886, lived a generation later than Selous but in many ways followed a parallel career. He was educated at St Paul’s School, London, where he was heavily involved with the Field Club and helped to curate the school museum, which displayed birds and insects captured by the boys as well as big game specimens sent by former students.[11] He left the school in 1905 for St John’s College, Cambridge, and in 1906 (during his undergraduate degree) was appointed Assistant in Zoology at the British Museum’s Natural History Division.[12] He became a specialist in big game, and in 1921 catalogued Frederick Selous’ collection of big game specimens which had been presented to the museum after his death, a picture of the interface between the periphery and metropole of empire. In 1932, Dollman organised the pioneering ‘Big Game Animals of Empire’ exhibition, which for the first time organised the animals geographically rather than by zoological classification, and ‘proved to be extremely popular with visitors’.[13] This focus on popular appeal was indicative of the museum’s didactic purpose during this period, with exhibitions intended to serve as a place for public education. Through exhibitions like Dollman’s, visitors could see the scale and diversity of empire, and this served to construct a manufactured idea of Africa: the empire was recreated in museums as ‘exhibitions literally captured these potentially dangerous subjects and reproduced them in a ‘safe’, contained and yet accessible and supposedly open environment.’[14] But, as with Selous’ writing, visitors to museums were only experiencing a presentation of empire, which obscured the harsh and brutal realities of imperial ventures and ignored the role and agency of Africans themselves.
Portrait of John Dollman
Image credit: Imperial War Museums