t St James’s, Piccadilly last Tuesday, I attended a crowded memorial service for one of the most remarkable men I have ever met. When he died last November in his native South Africa, Dr Ian Player, although less well-known to the outside world than his golfer brother Gary, was hailed as “the greatest conservationist” his country had ever produced.

After serving, aged 17, in the South African armoured division, which led the advance on Florence in 1944, he went on to run some of South Africa’s top wildlife reserves. These included Umfolozi in Zululand, where he pioneered the “translocation” of the endangered white rhino, which have multiplied in number from 600 to 20,000 in reserves and zoos across the world. Repeatedly he led campaigns to prevent the destruction by mining companies of the wonderful St Lucia reserve on the Indian Ocean, famous for its fish eagles.

Under apartheid, Player’s close working friendship with Magqubu Ntombela, a visionary Zulu who knew Africa’s wildlife more intimately than anyone, became legendary.

But above all, Player was inspired by the psychology of Carl Jung to found the international “wilderness movement”, promoting the spiritual value of experiencing the earth’s remaining wild places to our desensitised modern world.

For three weeks in 1991, thanks to our mutual friend Laurens van der Post, I had the extraordinary good fortune to be introduced by Ian to South Africa, starting with Umfolozi, St Lucia and the Drakensberg, continuing with the Transvaal and on down to the Cape. We stayed with that incomparable storyteller, the late David Rattray, who hourby-hour recreated on the spot that astonishing day in 1879 that began with 800 Welshmen lying dead beneath the lion-mountain of Isandlwana and ended with 11 men winning the VC for defending Rorke’s Drift. We sat with the aged Magqubu in his kraal, where I was given a stick he had carved, which is my most prized material possession.

Seeing Africa through the eyes of such a man was an unforgettable privilege. I shall always remember how, after he met me at Durban airport, we drove through mile after mile of monotonously alien sugar cane, until we finally stopped by a bush-lined river, to be greeted by a deafening wall of birdsong: at last we were in Africa.

By a brilliant touch, last week’s service in the heart of London began and ended with a recording of that same birdsong. It was a fitting farewell to a man whose vision and achievements have left an indelible mark on the world.