King of the beasts
Today William campaigns to save wildlife. But newly released photos show his great-great grandfather felt very differently
HOW the royal family’s atti- tude to wildlife has changed in little over a century.
In these remarkable images, King George V almost bursts with pride as he stands over a magnificent Bengal tiger which has just been shot dead on a 1911 hunting trip in Nepal.
Chillingly, it was far from the only victim of his bloody expedition. In just ten days, the King and his party dispatched 39 tigers, 18 rhinoceros and four bears.
Some 104 years later, the House of Windsor – led by George’s greatgreat-grandsons the Duke of Cambridge and his brother Prince Harry – is at the forefront of efforts to protect the animals that their illustrious ancestors enjoyed killing.
The new King George, who reigned from 1910 to 1936, sailed to Bombay in 1911 with his wife Queen Mary, before travelling to Delhi to be crowned Emperor of India.
Afterwards the Maharaja of Nepal took him on a hunting expedition of vast scale and expense, using 645 elephants to transport the royal party through the bush.
Numerous photos show the King surveying rows of dead tigers and bears. In one, he stands with his foot perched on a dead rhino.
It is difficult to think of a more contrasting scene to the images of Prince Harry working with conservationists to save the nearly extinct black rhino in Namibia, Africa, in the summer.
The Prince and his brother William – who are both determined to stop the trade in ivory and rhino horn – take great pride in being leading voices to protect threatened wildlife. For his part, William is patron of the Tusk Trust charity which operates in Africa.
Records from their great-greatgrandfather’s trip would not make comfortable reading for them. They reveal how the King shot one tiger, wounding it badly, before a second tiger was killed by the King with a ‘ snap- shot through the neck as if he had been a rabbit’.
George also killed two rhinos and on a typical day slaughtered between four and five tigers, including one which measured 9ft 6in.
In little over a century the number of tigers in India has dropped from around 100,00 to 2,500. Nepal meanwhile has just 200 left, and only 646 rhinos remain.
The pictures were presented in an album to the King’s equerry, Admiral Sir Colin Keppel, by the Maharaja of Nepal.
Now the 179 pictures, valued at around £2,000, are being sold by Keppel’s family at Bonhams in central London next Tuesday.
Luke Batterham, a specialist at the auction house, said the pictures were of great historic value.
‘It is not surprising there are so few tigers left. But the royals today are setting a different example.’