Selous was one of five children born in Londons wealthy Regent Park area to his French-Huguenot aristocratic father (F L Slous), the Chairman of the London Stock Exchange.
Despite the obvious early disadvantages and deprivation(!) in his life - his affluent capitalist family of artistically inclined poets, ornithologists and clerics, and successful businessmen failed to hold him back for long as he was early reported, aged ten, by his boarding school teacher - as having been discovered sleeping on the floor beside his bed in preparation to harden-up for his life's ambition to be an African explorer and hunter!
On 15th January 1867, Selous then aged 17 was skating on the frozen Regents Park pond with a crowd of 200 when the ice gave-way. Forty people died by drowning in the freezing water but Selous with many others managed to scramble out over the slabs of broken ice and reach shore.
When he was nineteen he travelled to Matabeleland in Southern Africa where in 1872 he was given permission to hunt game by Lobengula, King of The Ndebele people. - For the next twenty years he shot anything that moved throughout the Transvaal and Congo Basin regions exploring the area now known as Zimbabwe among natives who had not seen a white man before. It seems that his youthful confidence and clear blue eyes gave him a status with the locals that was strengthened by his western weaponry - He is said to have fathered, looked-after, and educated children by three African wives.
"Bestowed with exceptional qualities in a man" (!) - he favoured a small hand cannon, four bore black-powder muzzle loaded musket for killing elephant, that fired a quarter pound bullet using 540g of powder - even using it from horseback (poor bloody horse I say!). Between 1874 and 1876 he used that gun to slay exactly seventy-eight elephants.( - A "four-bore" is just over one inch - 1.052" (26.7mm) bore.) - However, after a double-loading incident - he gave it up as too "upsetting my nerve". - He used a ten bore (.775") muzzle loader for lion - but eventually modernised to use falling-block rifles in .256" Mannlicher and a .450" Nitro Express on bigger game.
This man was a bit of a character!
He returned to Africa in 1893 (having married in England) and fought in the First Matabele War with Robert Baden-Powell while serving as a leader in the Bulaweyo Field Force.
F C Selous joined the Theodore Roosevelt museum collecting and Big Game hunting party from time to time during 1909 - 1910, the two men becoming lifetime friends.
Travelling Inland From MOMBASA.
Aged 64 Captain Selous DSO fought in East Africa during the First World War with the 25th Battalion Royal Fusiliers - The FRONTIERSMEN.
January 4 1917 - fighting a bush-war while outnumbered five to one by German colonial 'Shutztruppen' - while creeping forward he raised his binoculars to spot the enemy - and was killed by two shots from a sniper.
The 44,800 square kilometre Selous Game Reserve in south-eastern Tanzania was named in his honour - but is not much visited as it is home to the Tsetse fly and remains a mostly undisturbed UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The SELOUS SCOUTS operated as an anti-terrorist force in Rhodesia between 1973 and 1980. Their motto "pamwe chete" in the Shona language means "forward together". The Selous Scouts was a mixed race unit that themselves used many 'irregular' tactics in an all-out effort to hold-back the advance of the independence fighters who eventually won, and formed the Nation of Zimbabwe.
Marty K
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